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It all started with a bang. During an unimaginably brief fraction of a second, the embryonic universe ballooned in size with unimaginable swiftness. In a flash, dimples of imperfection stretched into cosmic scars and locked in the universe we experience today, a milieu filled with galaxies, stars, planets, and humans. 

The circumstantial evidence for this origin story, known as inflation, is overwhelming. It has inspired a generation of cosmologists to write papers, teach classes, and publish textbooks about the sundry ways inflation could have played out. And yet, a smoking gun remains elusive: Ancient ripples in spacetime should have left a particular imprint on the sky, but searches have repeatedly come up short. 

A group of astronomers known as the BICEP/Keck collaboration leads the hunt for these “primordial gravitational waves.” In 2021 the researchers released their latest results, the culmination of years of painstaking labor in one of the harshest places on Earth. Once more, they found no sign of their quarry. If an inflating universe reverberated with gravitational waves—as most cosmologists still fully expect it did— it must have done so in a rather subtle way. 

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Fingerprints of reverberations from the first moment could be hiding in the universe’s oldest light, but astronomers haven’t found them yet. ESA and the Planck Collaboration

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Heaven knows what seeming nonsense may not tomorrow be demonstrated truth.” 

This is how the great mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead expressed his frustration with the onslaught of weirdness coming from the emerging quantum physics. He wrote this in 1925, just as things were getting truly strange. At the time, light had been shown to be both particle and wave, and Niels Bohr had introduced a strange model of the atom that showed how electrons were stuck in their orbits. They could only jump from one orbit to another by either emitting photons to go to a lower orbit or absorbing them to go to a higher orbit. Photons, for their part, were particles of light that Einstein conjectured to exist in 1905. Electrons and light danced to a very unique tune. 

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Credit: Mopic / Adobe Stock

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The latest political cartoons

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Provided by Tribune Content Agency Editorial

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If you are parenting your way through the first part of the 21st century in America, you may regularly tap into an always humming and sometimes throbbing collective anxiety. There’s political anxiety about anti-democratic forces, insurrectionists, losing civil rights, and a future of more ugly and divisive politics. There’s economic anxiety about child care, health care, inequality, and the ballooning costs of college and student debt. And there is our anxiety about physical safety — we’re emerging from a public health disaster that’s killed over 1 million Americans and we must face our country’s other ongoing sicknesses, like racism, anti-Semitism, and gun violence.

There’s no country on Earth without its problems, but perhaps what continues to fuel our collective American parental anxiety is a general feeling that nothing is changing — and that our country is not headed in a better direction for our kids’ future. There is a unique horror to how we’ve normalized some of America’s woes. “When you’re reading the news [of the latest mass shooting] and then you have Facebook ads targeted to you for bulletproof backpacks, it is just really too much,” says Dana Publicover, an American mom of two now living in Germany. “You see that this country’s doing absolutely nothing to stop these things. Other countries have tried and succeeded.”

Beyond anecdotal chatter, it appears more and more Americans are ready to make a big change: They are ready to move abroad. InternationalLiving.com, a resource hub for people interested in moving abroad, reports that during the period between June 2020 and May 2021, it experienced a surge in traffic to content relating to leaving the United States — a 158% growth over the previous 12 months. They cite the build-up to the U.S. elections, the Capitol riot, and general unrest as driving factors. After the official Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, traffic ballooned 4,000% over the previous week, with pages about moving and LGBTQ-friendly lists getting the most attention, as people began to question if same-sex marriage would be the next right to go.

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Leaving

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People love to hate on pigeons for the way they foul up parked cars or flock to food scraps on the sidewalk. But with more than 300 species of wild pigeon found on Earth—many of them stunning—it’s past time the lowly pigeon gets its coo.

“Pigeons are biological marvels,” says Rosemary Mosco, author of A Pocket Guide to Pigeon Watching. 

“They make milk for their young. They can take off almost vertically. They see colors we can’t, hear sounds we can’t, and find their way across hundreds of miles using mechanisms we don’t fully understand,” she says. “They’re the world’s most overlooked birds.”

Interestingly, there’s no scientific difference between pigeons and the much more beloved doves. Both birds are members of the Columbidae family, and while the term ‘pigeon’ tends to be applied to larger species and ‘dove’ to smaller ones, Mosco notes in her illustrated field guide that there is actually no scientific or evolutionary distinction to either group. 

What’s more, the ubiquitous pigeon found in cities worldwide descends from a bird known as the rock dove, which people long ago domesticated. (Read how pigeons first landed in cities.)

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A green imperial pigeon, Ducula aenea, flaps its wings at Kamla Nehru Zoological Garden in ​Ahmedabad, India.

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Exploring the ‘dark side’ may be a psychological need that’s met when the scare is actually over.

Virtually everyone knows what it’s like to feel really scared: A pounding heartbeat. Faster breathing. Nervous perspiration. Butterflies in the stomach.

But whether that fright is caused by watching a nail-biting horror movie, listening to a spine-chilling story, or prowling through a dark-as-night haunted house on Halloween, some people actually revel in feeling frightened. They thrive on the latest Friday the 13th movie or Stephen King novel. They relish roller coasters, perhaps even sky diving. They crave having the bejesus scared right out of them.

Of course, for the mere mortals among us who feel that we’re liable to lose our lunch after just a glimpse of a slasher movie, it may seem unimaginable that others actually enjoy panic-button experiences. But experts believe that it’s not uncommon for individuals to push the envelope, seeing how much fear they can tolerate, and ultimately feeling a sense of satisfaction when they’re able to endure the anxiety.

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Thrills Thrills Thrills

Yea!

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“It’s like having superpowers for a very brief time,” says Margaret King, Ph.D., director of the Center for Cultural Studies & Analysis in Philadelphia.The rush starts in the amygdala, a bundle of neurons at the base of the brain responsible for assessing the unknown. In a thrill-seeking situation—which almost always poses some kind of risk, whether perceived or real—the amygdala registers that risk, then releases a combination of dopamine, adrenaline, endorphins, and other chemicals in order to protect the body against it. How much of each is released depends on the perceived level of risk. At the peak, every bodily function, chemical brain reaction, and sensory input is hyper-focused on the experience.

Every person’s brain assesses unknown situations differently: Those with thinner sections of gray matter, for example, tend to perceive less of a threat and therefore seek greater thrills. No matter what type of thrill a person is seeking, the reaction triggers an increase in testosterone. Vision narrows. Adrenaline shoots into the body, which increases heart rate. With the heart beating faster, we get more oxygen. The body redirects oxygen to the brain as fast as it can. The feeling often lasts less than 60 seconds, and the immediate aftermath is another flood of mood-boosting chemicals. This is what leads thrill-seekers to chase the process again and again.

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