James' World 2

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A long-tailed lizard dances in and out of the gaps in the asbestos sheet ceiling of Gunja and Chand Singh’s new house in Tughlakabad village, a neighborhood in the Indian capital.

It is about 3pm, and the couple is sitting in their bedroom sipping tea their younger son, Arjun, has just made.

Gunja and Chand, among India’s four million waste pickers, moved into their bare-brick home in October and are house-proud.

It took them 15 years of back-breaking work and sacrifices to save enough money to buy a plot of land in March 2022. To construct the house and pull themselves and their two school-going teenage sons out of the nearby slum where they lived for 12 years, they took a loan from the man who sold them the plot.

They kept their old shanty — their old home — and the adjoining godown, a storage area with three walls and a plastic and bamboo roof, both a short walking distance from their new house. This godown is where Chand separates paper, cardboard, plastic, and other waste material that he and the workers he hires collect from neighborhoods to sell to recyclers.

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Gunja and Chand are waste pickers who, despite being able to buy a plot of land in recent years, are now struggling due to rising living costs and debt [Suparna Sharma/Al Jazeera]

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You can probably think of at least one building you have visited that felt as though it reached inside you, affected you deeply, and perhaps changed the way that you thought about the world. For me, my first visit to St Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City when I was in my 30s had this impact. The sheer size of its interior knocked the wind out of me, though the details were just as significant. Every surface seemed covered with exquisitely detailed art – material evidence of the immense human effort over many centuries that had produced this setting. As I surveyed my surroundings with tottering knees, I realized how far the effects of architecture could go beyond utilitarian functions like keeping us out of the rain.

But it doesn’t take a massive cathedral to ignite interest in the human response to buildings. You might have experienced similar feelings in many different kinds of settings. Small churches, college courtyards, commercial headquarters (think of the main office of a major bank) can all evoke a response. Even everyday architectural spaces can connect with our feelings. Think of when you last walked into someone’s home for the first time and experienced an ephemeral sense of its atmosphere. Architects have written entire books about these feelings.

The observation that ‘we shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us’, attributed to Winston Churchill, may be threadbare but it is nevertheless profoundly true. The buildings we inhabit help to make us who we are. Yet, in the run of our everyday experiences, it’s easy to become desensitized to their influences. Buildings can seem at times like little more than the containers of human experience, but they are so much more than that. Architecture can function as a vessel of emotion and thought. It can influence the way you feel about yourself and others. As any great art can change who you are, so can a building. It is the art that you live, work and play inside. If you are willing to spend the time to curiously explore buildings both from the inside and the outside, you will be rewarded with a greater sense of the power of place and, with mastery, a more refined ability to use your settings to control your own experience.

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Heidelberger Platz U-Bahn, Berlin. Photo by Odd Andersen/AFP/Getty

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Science fiction writers love wormholes because they make the impossible possible, linking otherwise unreachable places together. Enter one, and it’ll spit you back out in another locale—typically one that’s convenient for the plot. And no matter how unlikely these exotic black hole relatives are to exist in reality, they tend to fascinate physicists for exactly the same reason. Not long ago, some of those physicists took the time to ponder what such a cosmic shortcut might look like in real life, and even make a case that there could be one at the center of our galaxy.

The most surefire way to confirm a wormhole’s existence would be to directly prod a black hole and see if it’s hiding a bridge to elsewhere, but humanity may never have that opportunity. Even so, researchers could rule out some of the most obvious scenarios from Earth. If the monster black hole residing in the churning center of the Milky Way, for instance, is more door than dead end, astronomers could tease out the presence of something on the other side. Black hole researchers have tracked the orbits of stars, such as one called S2, circling this galactic drain for years. Should those stars be feeling the tug from distant doppelgängers beyond the black hole, they’d perform a very particular dance for anybody watching, according to a recent calculation.

“If astronomers just measure the orbit of S2 with higher precision so that we can narrow it down [and notice such a dance],” says Dejan Stojkovic, a theoretical physicist at the University at Buffalo who helped calculate the result, “that’s it. That’s huge.”

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Rome’s Pantheon stands defiant 2,000 years after it was built, its marble floors sheltered under the world’s largest unreinforced concrete dome. For decades, researchers have probed samples from Roman concrete structures—tombs, breakwaters, aqueducts, and wharves—to find out why these ancient buildings endure when modern concrete may crumble after only a few decades.

In a recent study, scientists have got closer to the answer—and their findings could reverberate long into the future. Not only is Roman concrete exponentially more durable than modern concrete, but it can also repair itself. Creating a modern equivalent that lasts longer than existing materials could reduce climate emissions and become a key component of resilient infrastructure, like seawalls. Currently, concrete is second only to water as the world’s most consumed material, and making it accounts for about 7 percent of global emissions. 

“We are dealing with extremely complex material,” says Admir Masic, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who led this new research on Roman concrete. “To kind of reverse-engineer or understand the original way these civilizations made this material is just a nightmare.” 

Until now, efforts to explain the longevity of Roman concrete have pointed to its use of volcanic tephra—the fragments of rock emitted in an eruption—mined in the Naples area and shipped to construction sites throughout the sprawling Roman empire. But Masic and his MIT colleagues, along with researchers from Harvard and laboratories in Italy and Switzerland, suggest another reason: heat. Using a number of different scanning techniques, they examined a sample from a city wall in Privernum, a 2,000-year-old archaeological site near Rome, focusing on millimeter-scale white chunks running through the sample, called lime clasts. These are not found in modern concrete.

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Photograph: Getty Images

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A clutch of massive stars takes center stage in this mosaic image of the Tarantula Nebula, captured with JWST’s Near Infrared Camera. They are surrounded by and will help sculpt, clouds of gas and dust—the raw material for yet more stars.NASA, ESA, CSA, STSCI, Webb Ero Production Team

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Photograph: NASA/JAXA/Hinode

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If you’re like most people, you’ve been affected by stress-related sleep problems at some point or another, lying awake at night filled with anxiety about your career and the future. You may feel exhausted during the day but wired at night, desperate to shut off your racing mind so you can finally rest.

It may be hard to believe, but your brain wants (and knows how) to sleep well. You simply need to reset your relationship with sleep, so that instead of it feeling like a battle or a chore, it becomes the easy and enjoyable experience it should be.

That’s where Dr. Jade Wu comes in. As a board-certified behavioral sleep medicine specialist, she’s on a mission to help the 25 million Americans who struggle to fall asleep or stay asleep find rest at last. In her new book, Hello Sleep: The Science and Art of Overcoming Insomnia Without Medications, she offers insights based in the latest sleep science, providing a step-by-step roadmap to better sleep whether you’ve had insomnia for three months or three decades.

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Young woman sleeping peacefully on her bed at home  Getty

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