James' World 2

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Most creatures sleep, but until now, REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, the phase of sleep in which dreams occur, was thought to be exclusive to vertebrates. Octopuses appear to be the first invertebrates to show they are also capable of this

When it comes to neural function, studies have found these cephalopods are more like us than we think (pun somewhat intended). Having no spine hasn’t stopped them from evolving a complex nervous system. A 2022 study found that parts of their brains, the frontal and vertical lobes, work much like the hippocampus and limbic lobe in humans and other vertebrates. The hippocampus is critical to learning and memory, while the limbic lobe controls complex emotional reactions, such as the fight-or-flight response that is triggered by stress or fear.

Now it seems that octopuses have even more in common with us. In studying their sleep behavior, a team of researchers at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology observed both periods of quiet sleep, or NREM sleep (also known as slow wave sleep), and bursts of neural activity, during which the animals’ eyes and tentacles twitched while their skin changed color. Neural activities like these, which are similar to the waking state, only happen during REM sleep. Because they can transition between NREM and REM sleep, octopuses are the only known invertebrates that have two phases of sleep.

“If the functions ascribed to two-stage sleep are truly general, then one may expect to find neural and behavioral correlates of two-stage sleep widely among animals showing complex cognitive abilities,” the research team, led by neuroethologist Sam Reiter of the University of Okinawa, wrote in a recent study.

You awake?

To pursue this study, Reiter’s team needed to check that the octopuses were, in fact, asleep. They waited until the animals appeared asleep. When their eight-legged subjects were lying flat on the bottoms of the tanks, the team stimulated them to see if there would be a delayed reaction. The octopuses’ reaction to this stimulation was much slower than when they were awake. When the team was positive that the animals were asleep, they began observations.

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Imagen Rafael Cosme Daza

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It’s not just kids, of course. My colleague has just come down with covid-19. The onset of symptoms was rapid, and she described it as “like being hit by a freight train.” “How very retro of you,” another colleague commented. Another replied: “This is still a thing?”

As a health reporter who has been covering covid since the early days, I am still asked this question on a fairly regular basis. So this week let’s take a look at exactly where we stand with covid.

It’s worth pointing out that there are still some big, unanswered questions when it comes to covid-19. For a start, we still don’t really know where this particular coronavirus came from. Most scientists believe it must have jumped from an animal host to humans at a market in Wuhan, China. But some maintain that it could have leaked from a lab. My colleague Antonio Regalado has explored the question in his five-part podcast series, Curious Coincidence.

What we do know is that covid-19 spread all around the world in 2020. On January 9 of that year, Chinese authorities determined that a mysterious cluster of pneumonia-like illnesses was caused by a novel coronavirus. The first death was reported days later. Since then, almost 7 million more deaths have been confirmed. The true figure is thought to be higher.

Lockdowns and the use of face masks helped slow the spread of the disease. But even “zero-covid” policies that aimed to keep the virus out of entire countries couldn’t stem the spread. To date, there have been over 767 million confirmed cases.

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But I believe there’s a bug — a set of cognitive biases — in people’s brains that causes them to perceive a fall from grace even when it hasn’t happened. I and my colleague Daniel Gilbert at Harvard have found evidence for that bug, which we recently published in the journal Nature. While previous researchers have theorized about why people might believe things have gotten worse, we are the first to investigate this belief all over the world, to test its veracity, and to explain where it comes from.

We first collected 235 surveys with over 574,000 responses total and found that, overwhelmingly, people believe that humans are less kind, honest, ethical, and moral today than they were in the past. People have believed in this moral decline at least since pollsters started asking about it in 1949, they believe it in every single country that has ever been surveyed (59 and counting), they believe that it’s been happening their whole lives and they believe it’s still happening today. Respondents of all sorts — young and old, liberal and conservative, white and Black — consistently agreed: The golden age of human kindness is long gone.

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They found that subjects who’d ridden the bikes had markedly better scores on tests of their prefrontal cortex function than those who’d spent the hour watching an episode of 24 instead. The prefrontal cortex is the part of the brain that handles reasoning, problem-solving, learning, memory, communication skills, and other tasks that are essential for most business leaders. By testing over time, the researchers found that this improved function lasted at least half an hour, and up to two hours. 

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There was a time when we didn’t question whether fruit was good for us when we more or less took “eat your fruits and veggies” to heart. Today, some people are worried that fruit is too high in carbs, sugar, and calories. One of my patients wouldn’t eat any fruit other than blueberries because she had bought into the myth — again, promoted by fad diets — that blueberries are the only “safe” fruit to eat because they are “low glycemic” (in other words, they don’t cause your blood sugar to spike). Here’s the kicker: She didn’t even like blueberries.

Berries are the only fruit allowed on the pegan diet, the subtext being that other fruit is a ticket to high blood sugar, but this is a fairly liberal stance compared with other fad diets du jour. For example, many followers of the keto diet and the trending carnivore diet (a.k.a. the “zero carb” diet) call fruit toxic because of its sugar. Now, that’s what I consider disordered eating.

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Isaac Newton was baffled. He was already famous for discovering how gravity holds the universe together and for using that knowledge to predict the movements of celestial bodies, such as the moon’s path around the Earth. Now, by taking the sun’s gravitational tugs into account, he sought to improve his lunar predictions. Instead, it made them worse.

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Emiliano Ponzi

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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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Astronomers have found an extra-low hum rumbling through the universe.

The discovery, announced today, shows that extra-large ripples in space-time are constantly squashing and changing the shape of space. These gravitational waves are cousins to the echoes from black hole collisions first picked up by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) experiment in 2015. But whereas LIGO’s waves might vibrate a few hundred times a second, it might take years or decades for a single one of these gravitational waves to pass by at the speed of light.

The finding has opened a wholly new window on the universe, one that promises to reveal previously hidden phenomena such as the cosmic whirling of black holes that have the mass of billions of suns, or possibly even more exotic (and still hypothetical) celestial specters.

“It’s beautiful,” said Chiara Caprini, a theoretical physicist at the University of Geneva and CERN in Switzerland who was not directly involved in the work. “A new era in the observation of the universe has opened up.”

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The 100-meter Green Bank Telescope has precisely measured the timing of dozens of pulsars over the course of 15 years.

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The deadliest animal in the world is smaller than a pencil eraser and weighs around two-thousandths of a gram — less than the weight of a single raindrop. Every year, it kills an estimated 700,000 people by partaking in what scientists grimly call a “blood meal.”

It’s the mosquito — and, increasingly, it’s on the move.

These global shifts, which will only accelerate as the planet warms, have sparked concern that the diseases mosquitoes carry will exact an even higher toll in the months and years to come.

In June alone, five cases of locally transmitted malaria were discovered in Texas and Florida: the first cases acquired in the United States in two decades. These cases, experts say, are unlikely to have a connection to warming temperatures — conditions in Florida and Texas are already suitable for malaria-carrying mosquitoes. But as urban heat islands expand and temperatures rise, mosquito-borne diseases are expected to travel outside of their typical regions.

“Climate change allows the creeping edge of mosquito ranges to expand,” said Sadie Ryan, a professor of medical geography at the University of Florida.

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Barrington Sanders, a Miami-Dade mosquito control inspector, sprays a pesticide to kill adult mosquitoes Thursday in Miami. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

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