James' World 2

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[Source photo: Solovyova/iStock]

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A wooden spoon gliding over cast iron. Barely tall enough to see over the stove, Lamar Cornett watched his mother, a cook, make his favorite dish of scrambled eggs.

That first cooking lesson launched a lifelong journey in food. Cornett has spent over 20 years in Kentucky restaurants, doing every job short of being the owner. The work is grueling and tense but rewarding and rowdy, and so fast-paced that the pandemic shutdown was like lightning on a cloudy day.

“It was almost like there was this unplanned, unorganized general strike,” Cornett said.

In those rare quiet moments, millions of restaurant workers like Cornett found themselves thinking about the realities of their work. Breaks barely long enough to use the restroom or smoke a cigarette. Meals inhaled on the go. Hostile bosses, crazy schedules, and paltry, stagnant pay.

To top it off: rude customers, whose abuses restaurant staff are often obligated to tolerate. And lately, testy diners have only gotten more impatient as they emerge from the pandemic shutdowns.

Cornett, off work for a few weeks, realized he received enough money through unemployment benefits to start saving — for the first time. He wondered if the work he loves would ever entail a job that came with health insurance or paid leave.

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With eight separate, flexible plates of shell held together by a skirt of muscle called a girdle, chitons look a bit like armored pebbles, ready for battle. The marine mollusks aren’t actually suited for action. They spend most of their time stuck in place, suctioned to rocks in the intertidal zone. While they’re clinging, their radula, a sort of tongue barbed with scores of sharp “teeth,” scrapes algae and other food from the surface. For chitons, that’s about as exciting as it gets.

They might seem simple, uncomplicated, even boring, but Lauren Sumner-Rooney, an evolutionary biologist at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, thinks that reputation is a little unfair. “Even things that we’ve considered very, very simple,” she says, “may have a lot more going on.”

Sumner-Rooney roots for underdogs. She’s fascinated, for instance, by Astyanax mexicanus, a cave-dwelling tetra fish that evolved without eyes, and cave salamanders, whose ghostly pallor and gangly limbs are adapted to a lightless life. Her work focuses on brain structure in poorly understood animals such as chitons or tusk shells, which use tentacle-like organs called captacula to assist in gathering food.

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Do chitons have brains? What is a brain, anyway? Photo credit: Dilettantiquity / CC by 2.0.

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The scene is a familiar one: an urban park, with young couples picnicking, dog owners playing fetch, parents chatting while their children scamper around. Marie – a young child – becomes entranced by a new wonder of her world – maybe a springtime butterfly, maybe another child throwing an impressive fit. Eventually, looking away from her intense focus, she realizes that the world has shifted around her and that her parents are no longer in sight. Interest and elation morph into concern and fear, as she holds back her tears and begins to search. Just around the corner, she finds her father, who scoops her up, and, as quick as her fear started, it dissipates; her world is complete and safe again.

From the moment we are born, we are hardwired to seek attachment to others. Throughout our lives, relationships that involve attachment serve as sources of emotional security, joy, and companionship, while at other times, pain and grief. Compared with those of other animals, human relationships are staggeringly multifaceted. Yet despite this, what lies at the core of our relationships is an elaboration of a phenomenon whose roots across the species spectrum are wide and deep. As we wend our way through life’s course – from infancy to adolescence to adulthood to loss – attachment holds a strong grip on our lives, shifting to accommodate our changing needs. While the roots of this phenomenon tell us much about who we are, they tell us just as much about mysteries that remain unanswered in evolution, psychology, neuroscience, and more.

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Photo by Jianan Yu/Reuters

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Photo: Courtesy Jody D’Arcy

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Are you an ecosystem? Your mouth, skin, and gut are home to whole communities of microscopic organisms, whose influence on your body ranges from digesting your food to training your immune system and, possibly, impacting your mood and behavior. What are these tiny tenants, and how do they change the way we think about human health, disease, and even identity?

The human body is made up of trillions of cells—well, trillions of human cells. Around the beginning of the 21st century, scientists learned that in fact, the human body contains many trillions more microbial cells—possibly three times as many. This is the microbiome: the collection of microorganisms (bacteria, fungi, and other microbes) living in and on the human body. It is an especially curious discovery—it has been with us, evolving, interacting, and helping to determine our fate as organisms, since before the emergence of the human species itself. And while scientists have known about the existence of some microorganisms on and in the human body since the discovery of E. coli, the magnitude, and importance of the microbiome has only recently begun to come to light.

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It’s a good time to look up. One of the year’s most spectacular skywatching shows, the annual Perseid meteor shower, is back to light up the night sky.

The Perseid meteor shower peaks in mid-August, when up to 100 meteors can be seen per hour, but the celestial event will be active beginning Wednesday, which means shooting stars may be visible on clear nights starting this week. The Perseids are considered “the best meteor shower of the year,” according to NASA.

In the Northern Hemisphere, the best way to view the Perseids is to head out in the predawn hours, though some meteors may be visible earlier, from 10 p.m. onward, according to NASA. Meteor showers are best viewed from places that are away from city lights, as light pollution can drown out the shooting stars.

The Perseid meteor shower is called that because the shooting stars appear to stream from a point in the sky where the constellation of Perseus is located. While the constellation is not the source of the meteors, it can help skywatchers figure out where to look.

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A meteor streaks across the sky above Mount Fuji in Fujinomiya in Shizuoka prefecture in Japan during the annual Perseid meteor shower Aug. 13. Yasushi Kanno / The Yomiuri Shimbun via AP file

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