James' World 2

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Shivin Devgon just couldn’t shake that sluggish feeling. Toward the end of 2021, the San Diego software engineer thought his health was on the right track. He exercised regularly and was able to perform well at work. Still, he lacked energy, and his mood always felt off.

“I would feel tired a lot of the time,” Devgon told GQ. “I wouldn’t feel happy. I would just feel kind of dead.”

While Devgon was wondering what was wrong, he started reading about the increasingly prominent theory that toxins in pesticides and plastics are throwing off men’s endocrine systems—and he started to wonder about his own testosterone levels.

The hormone is responsible for regulating the male sex drive and maintaining a host of other critical functions: generating red blood cells, distributing body fat, preserving bone density, increasing muscle mass, and making sperm. A lack of testosterone—low T, for short—can impair those functions, and a simple blood test is all that’s needed to diagnose it. Generally, according to the American Urological Association, low T refers to men with levels below 300 nanograms per deciliter of blood.

Devgon’s test found that his overall level was 421 ng/dL—higher than the AUA’s number, but well below normal levels for a guy in his 20s. Wanting a boost, he began taking the testosterone-enhancing drug enclomiphene in December 2021, and now Devgon says his total level has more than doubled. His mood has improved, and he’s also noticed other changes.

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Illustration by GQ; Photographs by Getty Images

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[Photo: Ralf Hiemisch/Getty Images]

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Even in the Southern Hemisphere’s summer, shards of sea ice surround the aptly named Danger Islands off the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. The 10 scientists and graduate students who sailed for the rocky archipelago in December 2015 didn’t know if they’d reach their destination, let alone accomplish their mission.

But the clouds and the ice parted, and the small, nimble expedition ship M/V Hans Hansson finally anchored off the coast of one of the seven islands. The biologists, zoologists, and robotics engineers rode an inflatable boat from the ship to land, looking for Adélie penguins.

Penguinologists frequently travel to Antarctica to check on the location and health of penguin populations and discover new penguin colonies — with the ultimate goal of understanding how the Southern Ocean is changing.

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Global Warming

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Mysterious mounds in the southwest corner of the Amazon Basin were once the site of ancient urban settlements, scientists have discovered. Using a remote-sensing technology to map the terrain from the air, they found that, starting about 1,500 years ago, ancient Amazonians built and lived in densely populated centers, featuring 22-meter-tall earthen pyramids, that were encircled by kilometers of elevated roadways.

The complexity of these settlements is “mind-blowing”, says team member Heiko Prümers, an archaeologist at the German Archaeological Institute headquartered in Berlin.

“This is the first clear evidence that there were urban societies in this part of the Amazon Basin,” says Jonas Gregorio de Souza, an archaeologist at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, Spain. The study adds to a growing body of research indicating that the Amazon — long thought to have been pristine wilderness before the arrival of Europeans — was home to advanced societies well before that. The discovery was published on 25 May in Nature.

A shift in thinking

Humans have lived in the Amazon Basin — a vast river-drainage system roughly the size of the continental United States — for around 10,000 years. Researchers thought that before the arrival of Europeans in the sixteenth century, all Amazonians lived in small, nomadic tribes that had little impact on the world around them. And although early European visitors described a landscape filled with towns and villages, later explorers were unable to find these sites.

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Researchers uncovered ancient urban centers on forested mounds in the Bolivian Amazon Basin. Credit: Roland Seitre/Nature Picture Library

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