James' World 2

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Maybe you’re talking with your spouse. Or friend. Or brother. Or colleague. Whoever it is, you know that no matter how carefully you say something, the words won’t get through. They’re just so damn defensive.

You want to scream stuff like, “It’s not a personal attack!” or “I’m just trying to have a conversation!” Mostly, you want to ask, “Can you just stop being so defensive?”

Here’s the thing: No, they probably can’t. It’s right there in the word. They’re defending. “It implies there’s a threat,” says Ellen Hendriksen, clinical psychologist and author of How to Be Yourself. It could be you, but just as likely your words are triggering something deep-seated.

Once their fears are ignited, all focus is danger related. It’s hard for the defensive person to get out of that mode. And saying something like, “Don’t get so defensive,” is about as effective as saying “Relax” to someone panicking.

So what can you do when talking to someone who always gets defensive? Turn up your empathy and turn down your assumptions, because you’re most likely going into the interaction hot. You’re bracing for that person to feel threatened and that ends up threatening you.

“Then we have two reptilian brains talking to each other,” says Laura Silberstein-Tirch, licensed psychologist and author of How to Be Nice to Yourself. That means both of you are down to three options: fight, flight or freeze. “It’s a limited repertoire.”

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Everything in the Universe has gravity – and feels it too. Yet this most common of all fundamental forces is also the one that presents the biggest challenges to physicists.

Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity has been remarkably successful in describing the gravity of stars and planets, but it doesn’t seem to apply perfectly on all scales.

General relativity has passed many years of observational tests, from Eddington’s measurement of the deflection of starlight by the Sun in 1919 to the recent detection of gravitational waves.

However, gaps in our understanding start to appear when we try to apply it to extremely small distances, where the laws of quantum mechanics operate, or when we try to describe the entire universe.

Our new study, published in Nature Astronomy, has now tested Einstein’s theory on the largest of scales.

We believe our approach may one day help resolve some of the biggest mysteries in cosmology, and the results hint that the theory of general relativity may need to be tweaked on this scale.

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People put a lot of pressure on themselves to be productive. Whether it’s our work or nonwork lives, it’s easy to feel like we have to be getting things done. And when we get behind, anxiety, stress, and burnout may come calling. This is especially true in November and December as we work overtime to reach benchmarks and goals before the end of the year.

Productivity is more than just finishing a to-do list. It’s a mindset. The more mentally poised we are for taking care of tasks, the more we achieve and the less stress we feel. To get started, use these eight tips to help transform your frame of mind and boost your output.

And did you know that how you eat and how you think can have a big impact on your health, happiness, and productivity? Check out these seven foods that make you happy and six thought exercises that can improve your mental health.

8 tips that can help boost your productivity

Many think that psychology is only for treating mental health issues, but it also has a lot to say about how we handle the little details of our everyday lives. Here are eight productivity tips you can use to change your perspective and get more done. (see article)

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An intense jet of energy in space appears to be traveling seven times faster than the speed of light—a feat that is considered physically impossible in our universe. Though this rapid pace is only an optical illusion, according to a new study, it still represents a blast of energy shooting towards us at very nearly the speed of light. 

The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) has captured incredible views of the jet—which was ignited by an unprecedented collision between two hyperdense objects, called neutron stars—that led to one of the most important breakthroughs in astronomical history at the time it was discovered in 2017.

While the jet did not actually break the cosmic speed limit, it raced right up to the edge of this impassable threshold, reaching at least 99.97 percent of the speed of light, which translates to about 670 million miles per hour. Scientists led by Kunal Mooley, an astrophysicist at the California Institute of Technology, used Hubble and other telescopes to clock the jet’s “superluminal motion,” meaning the trippy illusion of faster-than-light speed, in a study published on Wednesday in Nature. 

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Image: Concept art of the neutron star merger and jet. Image: Elizabeth Wheatley (STScI)

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On a frigid March morning in 2022, a friend and I were visiting the Mojave National Preserve in California’s San Bernardino County. Joshua trees, normally crooked and whimsical with spiky green leaves, were instead blanched white and charred, limbs swinging in 25-mile-per-hour winds. Creosote bushes, blackbrush, and yucca — all of which were once shelter or food for jackrabbits, night lizards and ground squirrels — had also been scorched. In August 2020, the Dome Fire burned more than a million Joshua trees alone, leaving skeletal remains of what had been a dense woodland.

We were there to help replant Joshua trees. To the south rose Cima Dome, the gentle granite hill for which the fire was named. Gradually shifting landscapes are characteristic of the Mojave Desert, where hard-packed dirt gives way to low-lying springs and sandy washes. These shifts are difficult to see unless you look closely, but since living here, the desert has taught me the art of perception: how to slow down and actually see what’s in front of you.

I grew up in a suburb just outside San Diego County, 90 minutes from the Mojave Desert. But my parents preferred taking our family to the Pacific Coast and the redwoods up north — California’s canonical landscapes. If we entered the Mojave, it was usually just to pass through. As a result, I thought deserts were flat and barren. Official definitions confirmed my ideas. The United States Geological Survey defines American deserts as “areas of the country which receive less than 10 inches (250 millimeters) of annual precipitation.”

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John Francis Peters for The New York Times

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A new kind of black hole analog could tell us a thing or two about an elusive radiation theoretically emitted by the real thing.

Using a chain of atoms in single file to simulate the event horizon of a black hole, a team of physicists has observed the equivalent of what we call Hawking radiation – particles born from disturbances in the quantum fluctuations caused by the black hole’s break in spacetime.

This, they say, could help resolve the tension between two currently irreconcilable frameworks for describing the Universe: the general theory of relativity, which describes the behavior of gravity as a continuous field known as spacetime; and quantum mechanics, which describes the behavior of discrete particles using the mathematics of probability.

For a unified theory of quantum gravity that can be applied universally, these two immiscible theories need to find a way to somehow get along.

This is where black holes come into the picture – possibly the weirdest, most extreme objects in the Universe. These massive objects are so incredibly dense that, within a certain distance of the black hole’s center of mass, no velocity in the Universe is sufficient for escape. Not even light speed.

That distance, varying depending on the mass of the black hole, is called the event horizon. Once an object crosses its boundary we can only imagine what happens, since nothing returns with vital information on its fate. But in 1974, Stephen Hawking proposed that interruptions to quantum fluctuations caused by the event horizon result in a type of radiation very similar to thermal radiation.

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Simulation of a warped and spinning black hole. (Yukterez/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0)

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