James' World 2

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Steak knives, scissors, writing desks, and power tools: If you bring any of these things up around someone and they cringe, they either have a bizarre story to tell or they’re just left-handed, and, like 15 percent of the population, live in a world that’s not designed for them.

But handedness goes deeper than how you like to hold a pen. A dive into the genetics of handedness reveals that southpaws have quite a few other things in common, as well. But before that, it’s important to understand where handedness comes from.

Where Does Handedness Come From?

It used to be thought that lefties came to be as a result of a mother being stressed during pregnancy, but a more scientifically valid explanation has traced handedness to specific genes. Geneticists debated for years over whether the genes responsible for handedness were spread throughout our DNA or whether it was just one gene; there seemed to be no clear pattern.

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Your desk is made up of individual, distinct atoms, but from far away its surface appears smooth. This simple idea is at the core of all our models of the physical world. We can describe what’s happening overall without getting bogged down in the complicated interactions between every atom and electron.

So when a new theoretical state of matter was discovered whose microscopic features stubbornly persist at all scales, many physicists refused to believe in its existence.

“When I first heard about fractons, I said there’s no way this could be true because it completely defies my prejudice of how systems behave,” said Nathan Seiberg, a theoretical physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. “But I was wrong. I realized I had been living in denial.”

The theoretical possibility of fractons surprised physicists in 2011. Recently, these strange states of matter have been leading physicists toward new theoretical frameworks that could help them tackle some of the grittiest problems in fundamental physics.

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This simulation shows how a fracton-filled material would be expected to scatter a beam of neutrons. H. Yan et al., Physical Review Letters

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We trekked through the Bolivian Amazon, drenched in sweat. Draped head to toe in bug repellent gear, we stayed just ahead of the clouds of mosquitoes as we sidestepped roots, vines, and giant ants. My local research assistant Dino Nate, my partner Kelly Rosinger and I were following Julio, one of my Tsimane’ friends and our guide on this day. Tsimane’ are a group of forager-horticulturalists who live in this hot, humid region. Just behind us, Julio’s three-year-old son floated happily through the jungle, unfazed by the heat and insects despite his lack of protective clothing, putting my perspiration-soaked efforts to shame.

We stopped in front of what looked like a small tree but turned out to be a large vine. Julio told us Tsimane’ use it when they are in the old-growth forest and need water. He began whacking at the vine from all sides with his machete, sending chips of bark flying with each stroke. Within two minutes he had cut off a meter-long section. Water started to pour out of it. He held it over his mouth, drinking from it for a few seconds to quench his thirst, then offered it to me. I put my water bottle under the vine and collected a cup. It tasted pretty good: light, a little chalky, almost carbonated.

As part of my field research, I was asking Julio and other Tsimane’ people how they obtain the drinking water they need in different places—in their homes, in the fields, on the river, or in the forest. He told me only two types of vines are used for water; the rest don’t work or make you sick. But when he pointed to those other vines, I could hardly tell a difference. The vines are a hidden source of water. Julio’s observations raise a fundamental question of human adaptation: How did our evolutionary history shape the strategies we use to meet our water needs, particularly in environments without ready access to clean water?

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Credit: I AM A PHOTOGRAPHER AND AN ARTIST Getty Images

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They look like mirrors: 32 rectangles neatly arranged in eight rows on the rooftop of a supermarket called Grocery Outlet in Stockton, California. Shimmering beneath a bright sky, at first glance they could be solar panels, but the job of this rig is quite different. It keeps the store from overheating.

Tilted toward the sun, the panels absorb almost none of the warmth beating down on them; they even launch some into space, improving the performance of the systems that keep things inside cold. The feat relies on a phenomenon called radiative cooling: Everything on Earth emits heat in the form of invisible infrared rays that rise skyward. At night, in the absence of mercury-raising daylight, this can chill something enough to produce ice. When your car’s windshield frosts over, even if the thermometer hasn’t dipped below freezing? That’s radiative cooling in action.

To Aaswath Raman, who was a key mind behind Grocery Outlet’s shiny tiles, that effect seemed like an opportunity. “Your skin, your roof, the ground, all of them are cooling by sending their heat up to the sky,” he says.

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Courtesy SkyCool Systems

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More and more people are tossing out the harsh chemicals from their daily cleaning routine and instead of turning to natural products, such as baking soda and vinegar, to remove grime, disinfect surfaces, and leave spaces shiny and clean, according to Reader’s Digest. So why are these household items such effective cleaning agents? The answer is pretty basic — baking soda and vinegar lie on opposite ends of the pH scale.

“When you are cleaning using baking soda or vinegar, you are actually doing very complicated manipulations of molecules,” said May Nyman, a professor in the department of chemistry at Oregon State University.

Baking soda is the common name for sodium bicarbonate (NaHCO3). Most people probably associate it with cooking, because it makes your cakes and breads big and puffy. Vinegar is a dilute solution of acetic acid (HC2H3O2), produced by bacteria during fermentation.

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Cleaning with baking soda can be an effective way to cut out harsh chemicals from your home. (Image credit: Credit: BSIP/UIG via Getty Images)

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In the last 260 million years, dinosaurs came and went, Pangea split into the continents and islands we see today, and humans have quickly and irreversibly changed the world we live in.

But through all of that, it seems Earth has been keeping time. A new study of ancient geological events suggests that our planet has a slow, steady ‘heartbeat’ of geological activity every 27 million years or so.

This pulse of clustered geological events – including volcanic activity, mass extinctions, plate reorganizations, and sea level rises – is incredibly slow, a 27.5-million-year cycle of catastrophic ebbs and flows. But luckily for us, the research team notes we have another 20 million years before the next ‘pulse’.

“Many geologists believe that geological events are random over time,” said Michael Rampino, a New York University geologist and the study’s lead author.

“But our study provides statistical evidence for a common cycle, suggesting that these geologic events are correlated and not random.”

The team conducted new analysis on the ages of 89 well-understood geological events from the past 260 million years.

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(NASA/Joshua Stevens)

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In upcoming research, scientists will attempt to show the universe has consciousness. Yes, really. No matter the outcome, we’ll soon learn more about what it means to be conscious—and which objects around us might have a mind of their own. What will that mean for how we treat objects and the world around us? Buckle in, because things are about to get weird.

What Is Consciousness?

The basic definition of consciousness intentionally leaves a lot of questions unanswered. It’s “the normal mental condition of the waking state of humans, characterized by the experience of perceptions, thoughts, feelings, awareness of the external world, and often in humans (but not necessarily in other animals) self-awareness,” according to the Oxford Dictionary of Psychology.

Scientists simply don’t have one unified theory of what consciousness is. We also don’t know where it comes from, or what it’s made of.

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The universe bets on disorder. Imagine, for example, dropping a thimbleful of red dye into a swimming pool. All of those dye molecules are going to slowly spread throughout the water. Physicists quantify this tendency to spread by counting the number of possible ways the dye molecules can be arranged. There’s one possible state where the molecules are crowded into the thimble. There’s another where, say, the molecules settle in a tidy clump at the pool’s bottom. But there are uncountable billions of permutations where the molecules spread out in different ways throughout the water. If the universe chooses from all the possible states at random, you can bet that it’s going to end up with one of the vast set of disordered possibilities.

Seen in this way, the inexorable rise in entropy, or disorder, as quantified by the second law of thermodynamics, takes on an almost mathematical certainty. So of course physicists are constantly trying to break it.

One almost did. A thought experiment devised by the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell in 1867 stumped scientists for 115 years. And even after a solution was found, physicists have continued to use “Maxwell’s demon” to push the laws of the universe to their limits.

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