James' World 2

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For scientists studying the health of a city and its inhabitants, their most powerful tool may just be the honeybee.

That’s because when honeybees go foraging, they collect more than just pollen and nectar. As they navigate through their environment, microorganisms and other tiny particles can also cling to the bees’ fuzzy little bodies, which the pollinators then shed as they enter their hives.

And since pollinators tend to forage within a mile radius of their hives in urban areas, there’s valuable information about a city or even a neighborhood in the honey they produce, on their bodies, and in the debris that lies at the bottom of hives. 

“Honeybees will gather a vast number of microbes day to day, far beyond things they are seeking out. They’ve been optimized by evolution to do everything that the swabs do,” said Kevin Slavin, a professor at MIT Media Lab, during a press briefing on a new report in the journal Environmental Microbiome. The new research aims to establish a feasible method for collaborating with beekeepers and their colonies of honeybees for the purpose of studying the microbiome of cities.

A microbiome is the unseen communities of microbes, fungi, viruses, and bacteria that live inside and around us, playing key roles in the functioning and health of the urban environment and the human population, as well as plants and animals. Previous research has linked exposure to a diverse microbiome to better health outcomes.

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Honeybees pick up tiny particles as they navigate around plants, animals and other objects in their environment.  Photographer: Claudio Cavalensi/500px Prime

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For around 20 years, astronomers have struggled to find an ancient group of stars mixed in with the gas, dust, and newer stars of our galaxy’s bulge. These “fossil” stars preceded the Milky Way and should have been discernible by their distinctive chemistry and orbits. Yet until recently, only a small number of them had ever been found.

Now, a determined effort using data-intensive machine learning has unearthed a trove of them, bringing into focus their features and fates. The methods used in their discovery have enabled scientists to update their understanding of the Milky Way’s formation and of disk galaxies in general.

Competing Theories

Astronomers believe that the Milky Way was preceded by something called a proto-galaxy—a violent, chaotic place containing young stars with wild orbits. Its origin story starts out credibly enough. After the Big Bang, dark matter coalesced in our region of space. The dark matter attracted ordinary matter. The first waves of stars then arose, but how these stars got there was anyone’s guess.

“People didn’t have a really good idea of what the proto-galaxy looked like,” said Vedant Chandra, an astrophysicist at Harvard University and one of the lead authors on a recent paper detailing the ancient star discoveries.

By the 2000s, scientists had settled on two formation theories. Either the proto-galaxy gave birth to the Milky Way’s first stars internally, as gas coalesced into stars, or it cannibalized other galaxies, ripping out stars and siphoning off dark matter. To settle the question, astronomers would need to isolate the Milky Way’s earliest star population. Studies identified candidate stars, but if the internal-nursery theory was correct, a much larger fossil population lay undiscovered.

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There once was a cosmic seed that sprouted the Milky Way galaxy. Astronomers have discovered its last surviving remnants.

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The Motion Picture Association (MPA) recently released their annual THEME report for 2021. The report tracks the theatrical and in-home entertainment industry domestically as well as globally and includes trending data from several video industries. For the report, the MPA relied on various data sources.

With studios and movie theaters reopening around the world, the global and U.S. entertainment market rebounded from 2020. With studios reopening in 2021, the number of movies in production grew substantially, although, with the lingering impact from the pandemic, movie attendance remained at less than half of 2019. The number of television programs reached record highs as “peak TV” continues unabated and movie production rebounded. Digital continues to be the fastest-growing segment and a significant revenue driver in the home entertainment market, as viewers and content continue to migrate to streaming platforms. Here are some of the highlights.

Total Entertainment U.S.: For 2021 the entertainment (home and mobile) market, consisting of digital and physical (discs) and theatrical, totaled $36.8 billion in the U.S., a year-over-year increase of 14% and a figure even surpassing the record $36.1 billion in 2019. At $29.5 billion, digital accounted for 80% of all dollars with a year-over-year increase of 19%. Digital has been the fastest-growing sector, since 2014 revenue has nearly doubled twice (from $7.6 billion). Theatrical accounted for 12% and physical the remaining 8%.

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Sony Pictures’ “Spider-Man: No Way Home” was the highest-grossing film since Avengers: Endgame in … [+]  Getty Images

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Imagine walking into a party where you know almost no one (pathetic) — a party at which I, a stranger to you (probably), have arrived well before you (sorry). Should this occur in real life, it is inevitable that shortly after your entrance, as you are tentatively probing the scene in search of safe ingress into social traffic, I will yank you, abruptly, into the middle of a conversation. I will turn to you and start talking as if you’d been involved in the discussion for an hour. I will lob questions at you that are tailored so that any answer you give can be right. Soon, you will forget I dragged you into this interaction; your easy popularity will seem, in retrospect, inevitable. You will most likely feel at least vaguely friendly toward me, because I so clearly want to be your friend. And the whole time I am doing this — because, despite your rewritten recollections, I am the one doing all of this — I will be thinking: Oh, my God, I’m doing it again. I hate this. I hate this. Why can’t I stop doing this to people?

Of all my bad habits, it is the ruthless desire to befriend that exerts the strongest pull on my behavior. Not that I want more friends — God, no. If anything, I’d love to drop about 80 percent of the ones I have, so I could stop remembering their birthdays. But because I can’t quit — because constantly pulling strangers into my orbit is what stabilizes my bearing in the universe — I have determined to double down. And so, in January, I booked a package vacation to Morocco through a company whose stated aim — beyond offering package vacations — is to help people in their 30s and 40s make new friends.

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Rosie Marks for The New York Times

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When Nisar Ahmad Wani succeeded in carrying out the world’s first camel cloning in 2009, it was hailed as a great achievement. Today, Wani is scientific director at the Reproductive Biotechnology Centre, in Dubai, and the practice is so popular that cloning has become his nine-to-five job.

Wani and his team research and develop new cloning techniques and maintain cell banks, allowing them to make copies of animals including buffalo and sheep. But the center’s focus is on cloning camels.

Each year, it produces dozens of cloned dromedary camel calves. Among the most popular are copies of camel “beauty queens,” with the right combination of drooping lips and long necks.

Replicating beauties

Camel beauty pageants are popular in the Gulf states and prize money runs into the tens of millions of dollars at some events. Owners have been disqualified in the past for using banned techniques such as injecting camels with silicone and fillers and inflating body parts using rubber bands to enhance their appearance. But as far as these competitions are concerned, cloned camels are perfectly legitimate.

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In my 20s, I had a friend who was brilliant, charming, Ivy-educated, and rich, heir to a family fortune. I’ll call him Gallagher. He could do anything he wanted. He experimented, dabbling in neuroscience, law, philosophy, and other fields. But he was so critical, so picky, that he never settled on a career. Nothing was good enough for him. He never found love for the same reason. He also disparaged his friends’ choices, so much so that he alienated us. He ended up bitter and alone. At least that’s my guess. I haven’t spoken to Gallagher in decades.

There is such a thing as being too picky, especially when it comes to things like work, love, and nourishment (even the pickiest eater has to eat something). That’s the lesson I gleaned from Gallagher. But when it comes to answers to big mysteries, most of us aren’t picky enough. We settle on answers for bad reasons, for example, because our parents, priests, or professors believe it. We think we need to believe something, but actually, we don’t. We can, and should, decide that no answers are good enough. We should be agnostics.

Some people confuse agnosticism (not knowing) with apathy (not caring). Take Francis Collins, a geneticist who directs the National Institutes of Health. He is a devout Christian, who believes that Jesus performed miracles, died for our sins, and rose from the dead. In his 2006 bestseller The Language of God, Collins calls agnosticism a “cop-out.” When I interviewed him, I told him I am an agnostic and objected to “cop-out.”

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Scientists have a firm grasp on the purpose of certain automatic physical functions, like blinking, breathing, or digestion. When it comes to sleep, however, researchers still aren’t clear on why exactly your body needs to shut off every night. Details aside, one thing’s for sure: When you don’t sleep, your body revolts.

The effects of acute sleep deprivation—which is more akin to pulling an all-nighter than to getting just a few hours of sleep every night for weeks at a time (that’s chronic sleep deprivation)—generally kick in after 16 to 18 hours of being awake and get progressively worse with each proceeding hour. Your mind, heart, endocrine system, and immune system are all affected, malfunctioning in ways both subtle and severe.

The consequences of chronic sleep deprivation are far worse than one sleepless night. But the decision to pull an all-nighter just once can leave some serious damage in its wake.

Mind

When it comes to the effects of acute sleep deprivation, “It’s really all about the brain,” says Steven Feinsilver, director of sleep medicine at Lenox Hill Hospital and a leading sleep researcher. The first signal that your body is overtired will be a sluggish mind. Your reaction time will begin lagging around hour 18; after a full night without sleep, it will nearly triple—which, for context, is about the same as being legally drunk. Your ability to form memories will start deteriorating, and after a while, your capacity to create any new memories at all will shut off entirely.

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Photo: Bill Butcher

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