James' World 2

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Active people tend to overthink what food is doing for their body—Is keto good for endurance? What’s the perfect post-training macro spread? Butter or no butter in my coffee?—but underthink what it’s doing for their mind. Yet you’ve probably noticed that what you eat impacts what’s going on upstairs. We’ve all devoured a cheat meal and afterward felt off, not just physically but also mentally and emotionally. And new research suggests that the connection between diet and mental well-being is a little more nuanced than scientists once thought.

Earlier studies suggest what you might expect: eating junk isn’t great for your brain. People who consume plenty of fruit, vegetables, and fish seem to be less at risk of depression compared to those who favor fatty meats, processed carbs, and sweets. But emerging research shows that even among healthy diets, some might be better for mental health than others. In a recent review published in Molecular Psychology, researchers analyzed 41 studies that sought to quantify the impact of various diets on clinical depression. The analysis accounted for a variety of eating plans including the Mediterranean diet, the DASH diet, and the Healthy Eating Index.

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Imagine getting into a futuristic, purple, 3D-printed capsule. You lie down comfortably inside it. Then, an intercom system asks you some very simple, ice-breaker questions: “Who are you?” “Where are you?” “Do you know what happens if you press this button?” Once you’ve answered the questions, you are free to press the big, red button featured prominently to your right. Ten minutes later, you will not be in space—as you might be imagining—but safely on the ground. Technically speaking, you will not be at all.

Instead, this capsules transports you to death. Exit International, a Winnellie, Australia-based nonprofit, designed the so-called Sarco (short for sarcophagus) suicide pods. The company advocates for the legalization of both voluntary euthanasia (where a person’s life is finalized at their own request to relieve pain and suffering) and assisted suicide (suicide committed with the aid of another person, usually a physician). Its suicide pods recently got the legal green light from Switzerland’s medical review board.

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Exit International

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The dry room at Solid Power’s Louisville, Colorado, facility is abrasively bright, and yet the low, encompassing hum of the fans and chillers is oddly soothing. It’s here in the humidity- and contaminant-free production area where Solid Power produced their first full-size solid-state lithium-metal battery cells. The cells, a shining silver contrast to their surroundings, were a moonshot.

The technology, in theory, sounded too good to be true: a 10x jump in power (or 10x drop in size) from traditional lithium-ion cells. Solid Power was aiming for more modest gains in its first prototypes, but could still see an 80 percent improvement in the near future. Then on August 7, 2021, three engineers donned protective Tyvek “bunny suits,” entered the dry room, and drew voltage from the largest prototype lithium-metal battery to date.

Josh Buettner-Garrett, Solid Power’s chief technology officer, monitored from his office. He felt confident, but a little apprehensive: “We knew we could make something that looked like a battery cell, but there was still a chance we’d have a brick.”The lithium-ion battery that Solid Power hopes to make obsolete is already a modern marvel that earned its key researchers a Nobel Prize. And the preceding lithium-iodine cells of the 1970s lasted years longer than existing alkaline-based AA, AAA, or D batteries, thanks to the material’s unmatched energy density. They were, for example, an immediate boon for pacemaker patients, who could now rely on a battery for 10 years instead of two. But lithium’s greatest impact on batteries came with the rechargeable lithium-ion batteries in the 1990s for portable electronics and electric cars.

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Courtesy Solid Power

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The tree of life just got another major branch. Researchers recently found a certain rare and mysterious microbe called a hemimastigote in a clump of Nova Scotian soil. Their subsequent analysis of its DNA revealed that it was neither animal, plant, fungus nor any recognized type of protozoan — that it in fact fell far outside any of the known large categories for classifying complex forms of life (eukaryotes). Instead, this flagella-waving oddball stands as the first member of its own “supra-kingdom” group, which probably peeled away from the other big branches of life at least a billion years ago.

“It’s the sort of result you hope to see once in a career,” said Alastair Simpson, a microbiologist at Dalhousie University who led the study.

Impressive as this finding about hemimastigotes is on its own, what matters more is that it’s just the latest (and most profound) of a quietly and steadily growing number of major taxonomic additions. Researchers keep uncovering not just new species or classes but entirely new kingdoms of life — raising questions about how they have stayed hidden for so long and how close we are to finding them all.

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Photo by dra_schwartz / Getty Images.

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Nobody understands quantum mechanics,” Richard Feynman famously said. Long after Max Planck’s discovery in 1900 that energy comes in separate packets or quanta, quantum physics remains enigmatic. It is vastly different from how things work at bigger scales, where objects from baseballs to automobiles follow Newton’s laws of mechanics and gravitation, consistent with our own bodily experiences. But at the quantum level, an electron is a particle and a wave, and light is a wave and a particle (wave-particle duality); an electron in an atom takes on only certain energies (energy quantization); electrons or photons can instantaneously affect each other over arbitrary distances (entanglement and teleportation); a quantum object exists in different states until it is measured (superposition, or popularly, Schrödinger’s cat); and a real physical force emerges from the apparent nothingness of vacuum (the Casimir effect).

For a theory that nobody understands, quantum physics has changed human society in remarkable ways. It lies behind the digital technology of integrated circuit chips, and the new technology of light-emitting diodes moving us toward a greener world. Scientists are now excited by one of the more elusive notions in quantum physics, the idea of ephemeral “virtual” photons, which could make possible non-invasive medical methods to diagnose the heart and brain. These connections illustrate the flow of ideas from scientific abstraction to useful application. But there is also a counter flow, where pragmatic requirements generate deep insight. The universal laws of thermodynamics have roots in efforts by 19th-century French engineer Sadi Carnot to make the leading technology of the time, the steam engine, more efficient. Similarly, the growth of quantum technology leads to deeper knowledge of quantum. The interplay between pure theory, and its outcomes in the everyday world, is a continuing feature of science as it develops. In quantum physics, this interaction traces back to one of its founders, Danish physicist Niels Bohr

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Quantum Theory

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