James' World 2

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A friend in Brooklyn DMed me on Sunday: “Skies here in Brooklyn have been milky and the air a pale haze for days from Canadian smoke plumes.”

“I hope it doesn’t go to orange,’ I wrote back. “That’s when things really start feeling weird—otherworldly.”

“So far no orange,” he wrote. “I’ve only seen photos of that.”

Yesterday, he wrote again: “Orange skies today.”

Welcome to our weird new world. Out west, orange skies have become a feature of fire season from L.A. to Anchorage. Over the past few years, most west coast cities have earned the title: worst urban air quality in the world, beating out the usual suspects in Asia. Now it’s New York’s turn, and Boston’s, and New Haven’s. We feel your pain, and we dread that smell. This particulate-laden smoke is truly unhealthy; it gets in your eyes and nose, but what is most damaging is what it does to your head: your home, the world you thought you knew, is no longer quite the same. You feel a new precarity, and a creeping fear: what if it doesn’t go away?

There is a theme running through the weather-related disasters now traumatizing communities around the globe in all seasons, and it is the theme of dissonance. It’s not just our infrastructure that’s built for a different time, it’s our mindset. Whether it’s the depth of the snow, the volume of the rainfall, or the speed of the flames, when it comes to extreme weather, our heads are still in the 20th century.

There is actually a name for this phenomenon: the Lucretius Problem. Lucretius (Titus Lucretius Carus) was a Roman poet and philosopher who identified this cognitive disconnect more than 2000 years ago. Nassim Taleb, author of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, paraphrases Lucretius this way: “The fool believes the tallest mountain in the world will be equal to the tallest he has observed.” In essence, the Lucretius Problem is rooted in the difficulty humans have imagining and assimilating things outside their own personal experience.

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All of the organisms we can see around us—the plants, animals, and fungi—are eukaryotes composed of complex cells. Their cells have many internal structures enclosed in membranes, which keep things like energy production separated from genetic material, and so on. Even the single-celled organisms on this branch of the tree of life often have membrane-covered structures that they move and rearrange for feeding.

Some of that membrane flexibility comes courtesy of steroids. In multicellular eukaryotes, steroids perform various functions; among other things, they’re used as signaling molecules, like estrogen and testosterone. But all eukaryotes insert various steroids into their membranes, increasing their fluidity and altering their curvature. So the evolution of an elaborate steroid metabolism may have been critical to enabling complex life.

Now, researchers have traced the origin of eukaryotic steroids almost a billion years further back in time. The results suggest that many branches of the eukaryotic family tree once made early versions of steroids. But our branch evolved the ability to produce more elaborate ones—which may have helped us outcompete our relatives.

A confused timeline

To some extent, the new work involves testing an idea proposed decades ago by the biochemist Konrad Bloch. Bloch won a Nobel Prize for figuring out the biochemical pathways that allow cells to produce steroids from simpler precursors. In 1994, Bloch suggested that the chemical intermediates on the pathways he identified were, at some point in our evolutionary paths, the end products. Cells would make these less complex steroids, which played critical roles in their survival; over time, however, our branch evolved enzymes that further modified them in ways that were advantageous.

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All steroids past and present share the complex ringed structure, but differ in terms of the atoms attached to those rings.

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Tom Hanks speaks About the Tulsa Massacre! Sound on!

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Tulsa

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1. What is REM sleep behavior disorder?

Every night, you go through four to five sleep cycles. Each cycle, lasting about 90 to 110 minutes, has four stages. That fourth stage is REM sleep.

REM sleep only comprises 20% to 25% of total sleep, but its proportion increases throughout the night. During REM sleep, your brain rhythms are similar to when you are awake, your muscles lose tone so you are unable to move, and your eyes, while closed, move quickly. This stage is often accompanied by muscle twitches and fluctuations in your respiratory rate and blood pressure.

But someone with REM sleep behavior disorder will act out their dreams. For reasons that are poorly understood, the dream content is usually violent – patients report being chased, or defending themselves, and as they sleep they shout, moan, scream, kick, punch, and thrash about.

Injuries often result from these incidents; patients may fall from bed or accidentally harm a partner. Some 60% of patients and 20% of bed partners of people with this disorder sustain an injury during sleep.

Appropriate testing, including a sleep study, are needed to determine if a patient has REM sleep behavior disorder, as opposed to another disorder, such as obstructive sleep apnea. This is a disorder in which breathing is interrupted during sleep.

REM sleep behavior disorder can occur at any age, but symptoms usually start with people in their 40s and 50s. For those younger than 40, antidepressants are the most common cause of REM sleep behavior disorder; in these younger patients, it affects biological males and females about equally, but past age 50, it’s more common in biological males.

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Past age 50, men are much more likely to have REM sleep behavior disorder than women. Jose Luis Pelaez/Stone via Getty Images

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In the gym, on medical and wellness websites, and on social media, the phrase “boost your metabolism” gets thrown around a lot. Supplement marketers promise pills to make it happen, health mavens pinky swear their diet routine will rev the rate, and probably most of us, starting around our 30s, think that aging has reduced the efficiency of our metabolic engine.

And almost none of that is true.

There isn’t a method to boost metabolism “in a way that’s durable or real,” says Herman Pontzer, an evolutionary anthropologist at the Global Health Institute at Duke University. He says most things people promise will boost metabolism fall into two categories. “There are things that are dangerous and illegal and things that are BS, and you should probably avoid both of them,” Pontzer says.

Basal, or resting, metabolic rate refers to work performed by cells when we are doing nothing. It’s the baseline hum of being alive as cells keep blood circulating and lungs functioning. Formally, it’s the calories per minute used for these housekeeping duties. That adds up to about 50 to 70 percent of the total you burn through each day, depending on age, says Samuel Urlacher, an anthropologist, and human evolutionary biologist at Baylor University in Waco, Tex.

Most popular interest in basal metabolism centers around ways to kick it up a notch and increase our energy use while doing absolutely nothing, with the prospect of losing weight in the process.

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Credit: Luis Alvarez/Getty Images

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They have confirmed that the Moon is edging away at a rate of 1.5 inches (3.8cm) every year. And as it does so, our days are getting ever so slightly longer.

“It’s all about tides,” says David Waltham, a professor of geophysics at Royal Holloway, University of London, who studies the relationship between the Moon and the Earth. “The tidal drag on the Earth slows its rotation down and the Moon gains that energy as angular momentum.”

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(Image credit: Nicolas Economou/Getty Images)

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Imagine waking up on a tropical island.

You’re surrounded by palm trees, you hear singing birds and waves crashing into the coastal rocks. The island is small and with no permanent inhabitants; it is just you, some fellow tourists, a few hospitality staff, and the monkeys with their loud morning cries. If you find yourself on the Salvation Islands, off the coast of the city of Kourou, French Guiana, then you are a stone’s throw away from an active spaceport. And a rocket launch might be imminent.

I began to explore these islands a few weeks after first arriving in South America a few months ago. I made my way to Kourou to gather research on the social and cultural impacts of the space industry on local communities. My work is part of the ARIES project, a team of ethnographers who are investigating the impact of outer space on people around the globe and searching for missing narratives among communities woven into the global space industry.

For my research, I am particularly interested in how this European spaceport found its way to South American soil, and what it means for the surrounding communities. Fellow ARIES project member Peter Timko also published some of his research on Supercluster, taking a look at the culture around Norton Space Props in Hollywood and its impact on the space industry.

In my first weeks here, I’ve spent most of my time learning French, wandering around, and working in the archives of the Guiana Space Center. If you followed the anxiety-driven but successful Christmas morning launch of the James Webb Space Telescope in 2021, then you are somewhat familiar with the mysterious spaceport in French Guiana. The massive space observatory was launched by the European Space Agency (ESA) on the Ariane 5 rocket.

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The European spaceport near Kourou, French Guiana, is an important launch site for rockets. Adèle Roncey

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