James' World 2

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In February, a 23-year-old Tanzanian fisherman suddenly fell ill, having just returned from a busy trading outpost in the middle of Lake Victoria. Back at home in Bukoba, a district in northwestern Tanzania, he was hit by bouts of vomiting and diarrhea. He developed a fever and began bleeding from his body openings. On March 1, he died.

His family and community conducted a routine burial—not knowing this gathering would be the beginning of a deadly outbreak. Soon, some of those present began to fall ill. On March 16, Tanzania’s chief medical officer announced that an unknown, “possibly contagious” illness had been detected and deployed a rapid response team to Bukoba. Finally, five days later, PCR testing at Tanzania’s National Public Health Laboratory revealed the cause: Marburg virus.

This wasn’t the first appearance of Marburg this year. On February 13, Equatorial Guinea reported its first-ever outbreak. A deadly virus, spreading in new places on opposite sides of the continent at the same time, is a big warning. It shows not just the ever-present threat of viruses spilling over from nature into humans, but that, yet again, the world isn’t prepared to deal with these dangers. 

Marburg shares plenty of characteristics with Ebola—the viruses are part of the same family. Like Ebola, it causes viral hemorrhagic fever, resulting in dangerous internal bleeding and organ damage. In some outbreaks, up to 90 percent of cases have been fatal; at the time of writing, five of the people in Tanzania’s eight confirmed cases have died. Symptoms take anywhere from a few days to three weeks to develop, and the virus can spread through human contact, particularly via body fluids of an infected person or corpse. Fruit-eating bats of the Rousettus family are the virus’s suspected host.

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Photograph: Science Source

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On March 20, the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network released its annual World Happiness Report, which rates well-being in countries around the world. For the sixth year in a row, Finland was ranked at the very top.

But Finns themselves say the ranking points to a more complex reality.

“I wouldn’t say that I consider us very happy,” said Nina Hansen, 58, a high school English teacher from Kokkola, a midsize city on Finland’s west coast. “I’m a little suspicious of that word, actually.”

Ms. Hansen was one of more than a dozen Finns we spoke to — including a Zimbabwean immigrant, a folk metal violinist, a former Olympian and a retired dairy farmer — about what, supposedly, makes Finland so happy. Our subjects ranged in age from 13 to 88 and represented a variety of genders, sexual orientations, ethnic backgrounds, and professions. They came from Kokkola as well as the capital, Helsinki; Turku, a city on the southwestern coast; and three villages in southern, eastern, and western Finland.

While people praised Finland’s strong social safety net and spoke glowingly of the psychological benefits of nature and the personal joys of sports or music, they also talked about guilt, anxiety, and loneliness. Rather than “happy,” they were more likely to characterize Finns as “quite gloomy,” “a little moody” or not given to unnecessary smiling.

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When Dr. Thomas J. Harbin published his seminal work Beyond Anger: A Guide for Men in 2000, it was a simpler time. Sort of. Anger, especially among men, was a widespread problem, but it was hardly so communicable as it is today. Now, anger travels like a virus, transmitted from the individual to the masses with the tap of a touchscreen. As he writes in the prologue to a new edition of Beyond Anger, the social media age has proven “perversely liberating” for angry men.

“They don’t have to deal with the consequences of angry diatribes and don’t have to fear retribution,” he writes. “They can say whatever they want to whoever they want and get away with it. They can rant and rave, call people names, make false statements about people, start or contribute to rumors, and sometimes ruin lives — and forget all about it when they walk away from the screen.” This behavior, he concludes, is nothing short of cowardly.

A clinical psychiatrist practicing in North Carolina, Dr. Harbin has spent decades working with angry men and their families, teaching them to come to terms with and control their anger. In that time, he’s come to a robust, nuanced understanding of anger, where it comes from, how it works, and how people can deal with it. We spoke to Dr. Harbin about what he’s learned, why anger is so present today, and what men can do to manage theirs.

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To make sense of difficult science, Michael Kofi Esson often turns to art.

When he’s struggling to understand the immune system or a rare disease, music, and poetry serve as an anchor.

“It helps calm me down and actively choose what to focus on,” says Esson, a second-year student at the Medical College of Wisconsin.

Esson, who was born in Ghana, also thinks his brain is better at absorbing all that science because of the years he spent playing the trumpet and studying Afrobeat musicians like Fela Kuti.

“There has to be some kind of greater connectivity that [art] imparts on the brain,” Esson says.

That idea — that art has a measurable effect on the brain and its structure — has support from a growing number of scientific studies.

“Creativity is making new connections, new synapses,” says Ivy Ross, who is vice president of hardware design at Google and co-author of the New York Times bestseller Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us.

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Microplastics are everywhere. They’re in our water, our soil, and even in our own bodies, and researchers are still unsure how they are affecting our health. Making things worse, the microscopic waste is also incredibly difficult to get rid of. Recently, though, scientists have come up with a novel solution from a surprising source — sound.

A team of researchers has developed a new method of cleaning microplastics from water using high-pitched sound waves. Unlike previous ultrasound filtering techniques, their method can theoretically remove both large and small microplastic particles using a unique two-step process, effectively making plastic-tainted water safe to drink. The results were presented today at a meeting of the American Chemical Society.

Microplastics are defined as any plastic debris smaller than 5 millimeters across. They usually come from larger pieces of trash, such as water bottles, styrofoam cups, or even acrylic paints, as they break down in the environment. For years, nobody paid much attention to these teeny-tiny pieces of plastic. But in 2004, a landmark study by marine ecologist Richard Thompson documented their presence across 17 different beaches. Since then, they’ve turned up everywhere researchers have looked for them: in soil, in the oceans, and even in our bodies. “[Scientists] have found microplastics in human blood samples,” says Menake Piyasena, an analytical chemist at New Mexico Tech and co-author of the study. “So this is going to be a huge impact in the future.”

Scientists don’t yet have a clear picture of what all that plastic means for human health, but it probably isn’t great. Microplastics have been linked to everything from inflammation to fertility issues to cancer, though the jury is still out on how the tiny polymer shards might cause these conditions. But this means that since 2019, microplastics have been considered an area of concern (and a potential public health emergency) by the World Health Organization.

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The future of water purification sounds great.

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One of his daughters, Princess Latifa, has now made headlines after secret videos recorded by her in captivity have been obtained and released by the BBC’s Panorama. Latifa made the videos while being held under her father’s orders in Dubai in a barred villa.

Sheikh Mohammed was born in 1949 at his family home in Shindagha, near Dubai Creek. He was the third of the four sons of Sheikh Rashid Al Maktoum, who ruled Dubai for 32 years from 1958.

After finishing secondary school in 1965, Sheikh Mohammed moved to the UK to study English at a language school in Cambridge. The young sheikh later attended a six-month training court at the British Army’s Mons Officer Cadet School in Aldershot, Hampshire.

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Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum is the 71-year-old billionaire ruler of Dubai and vice-president of the United Arab Emirates.

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For scientists studying the health of a city and its inhabitants, their most powerful tool may just be the honeybee.

That’s because when honeybees go foraging, they collect more than just pollen and nectar. As they navigate through their environment, microorganisms and other tiny particles can also cling to the bees’ fuzzy little bodies, which the pollinators then shed as they enter their hives.

And since pollinators tend to forage within a mile radius of their hives in urban areas, there’s valuable information about a city or even a neighborhood in the honey they produce, on their bodies, and in the debris that lies at the bottom of hives. 

“Honeybees will gather a vast number of microbes day to day, far beyond things they are seeking out. They’ve been optimized by evolution to do everything that the swabs do,” said Kevin Slavin, a professor at MIT Media Lab, during a press briefing on a new report in the journal Environmental Microbiome. The new research aims to establish a feasible method for collaborating with beekeepers and their colonies of honeybees for the purpose of studying the microbiome of cities.

A microbiome is the unseen communities of microbes, fungi, viruses, and bacteria that live inside and around us, playing key roles in the functioning and health of the urban environment and the human population, as well as plants and animals. Previous research has linked exposure to a diverse microbiome to better health outcomes.

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Honeybees pick up tiny particles as they navigate around plants, animals and other objects in their environment.  Photographer: Claudio Cavalensi/500px Prime

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For around 20 years, astronomers have struggled to find an ancient group of stars mixed in with the gas, dust, and newer stars of our galaxy’s bulge. These “fossil” stars preceded the Milky Way and should have been discernible by their distinctive chemistry and orbits. Yet until recently, only a small number of them had ever been found.

Now, a determined effort using data-intensive machine learning has unearthed a trove of them, bringing into focus their features and fates. The methods used in their discovery have enabled scientists to update their understanding of the Milky Way’s formation and of disk galaxies in general.

Competing Theories

Astronomers believe that the Milky Way was preceded by something called a proto-galaxy—a violent, chaotic place containing young stars with wild orbits. Its origin story starts out credibly enough. After the Big Bang, dark matter coalesced in our region of space. The dark matter attracted ordinary matter. The first waves of stars then arose, but how these stars got there was anyone’s guess.

“People didn’t have a really good idea of what the proto-galaxy looked like,” said Vedant Chandra, an astrophysicist at Harvard University and one of the lead authors on a recent paper detailing the ancient star discoveries.

By the 2000s, scientists had settled on two formation theories. Either the proto-galaxy gave birth to the Milky Way’s first stars internally, as gas coalesced into stars, or it cannibalized other galaxies, ripping out stars and siphoning off dark matter. To settle the question, astronomers would need to isolate the Milky Way’s earliest star population. Studies identified candidate stars, but if the internal-nursery theory was correct, a much larger fossil population lay undiscovered.

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There once was a cosmic seed that sprouted the Milky Way galaxy. Astronomers have discovered its last surviving remnants.

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