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Conventional wisdom has it that only children are smarter and less sociable. Parents, freed from the shackles of constantly settling sibling disputes, devote more time and money to the singleton, exposing them to a greater variety of higher-level activities (there’s a term for what happens when you spread that time and money over more kids: resource dilution). Conversely, since those only children never have to share a toy, a bedroom, or a parent’s attention, it is assumed they miss out on that critical life skill of forever-having-to-get-along.

But are their actual brains different?

Jiang Qiu, a professor of psychology at Southwest University in Chongqing, China, and director of the Key Laboratory of Cognition and Personality in the ministry of education, led a team of Chinese researchers that sought to answer this question with more than 250 college-aged Chinese students. They used standard tests of intelligence, creativity, and personality type to measure their creativity, IQ, and agreeableness. They also studied their brains, to see if growing up as an only child affects the structure of them. It did.

On the behavioral tests, only children displayed no differences in terms of IQ, but higher levels of flexibility—one measure of creativity—and lower levels of agreeableness than kids with siblings.

The brain scans then confirmed these findings, showing significant differences between only children and non-only children in the brain regions associated with flexibility, imagination, and planning (supramarginal gyrus) and with agreeableness and emotional regulation (medial prefrontal cortex). The scans also revealed differences in the parahippocampal gyrus, which helps manage emotional and mood regulation.

The study concluded that the family size we choose, or end up with, affects not only the environment in which children grow up, but also the architecture of their brains. The research was published in Brain Imaging and Behavior.

The idea that only children are somehow deficient was started 125 years ago by Granville Stanley Hall, a leader in the child-study movement, writes Lauren Sandler, author of One and Only: The Freedom of Having an Only Child, and the Joys of Being One. Having worked on the 1896 study “Of Peculiar and Exceptional Children,” Hall cast only children as “oddballs” as “permanent misfits,” descriptions that have stuck over the years with remarkable persistence. “Being an only child is a disease in itself,” he claimed.

There is ample evidence suggesting the stereotypes of the “lonely only” are wrong. Toni Falbo, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Texas at Austin and research methodologist Denise Polit undertook a meta-study looking at only children and intelligence and personality. They found that only children, along with firstborns and people who have only one sibling, score higher IQ marks and achieve more, but aren’t markedly different personality-wise (context matters: an only child in an unhappy household may be disagreeable; so might a child with five siblings in a poor family).

Jiang and his co-authors hypothesized a few reasons for their findings. Creativity —defined as having original ideas that have value—is strongly influenced by everything from family structure and parental views, to interactions and expectations (one older study showed that children were more likely to excel if they had a mother whose abilities matched her expectations). Parents of only children may interact more with their children, and seek out more opportunities to extend their children’s creativity. A parent might also have higher expectations of an only child, or they might give the child more independence, and some studies have shown that independence fosters creativity.

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Creative genius or budding misanthrope? Photo by Reuters/Navesh Chitrakar.

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There is a glaring gap in our knowledge of the physical world: none of our well-­established theories describe gravity’s quantum nature. Yet physicists expect that this quantum nature is essential for explaining extreme situations such as the very early universe and the deep interior of black holes. The need to understand it is called the problem of “quantum gravity.”

The established classical concept of gravity is Einstein’s general theory of relativity. This spectacularly successful theory has correctly predicted phenomena from the bending of light and the orbit of Mercury to black holes and gravitational waves. It teaches us that the geometry of space and time—spacetime—is determined by gravity. So when we talk about the quantum behavior of gravity, we’re really talking about the quantum behavior of spacetime.

We don’t currently have an established theory of quantum gravity, but we do have some tentative theories. Among them, loop quantum gravity (which one of us, Rovelli, helped to develop) and string theory are two leading contenders. The former predicts that the fabric of spacetime is woven from a network of tiny loops, whereas the latter posits that particles are fundamentally vibrating strings.

Testing these theories is difficult because we can’t study the early universe or black hole interiors in a laboratory. Physicists have mostly assumed that experiments that could directly tell us something about quantum gravity require technology that is many years away.

This situation might be changing. Recent developments suggest it may be possible to perform laboratory experiments that will reveal something about the quantum behavior of gravity. This potential is extremely exciting, and it has raised real enthusiasm among theoretical and experimental physicists, who are actively trying to develop the means to carry out the investigations. The proposed experiments could test the predictions of quantum gravity theories and provide support for the assumptions they’re based on.

The experiments all involve events happening at low energies, where the predictions of strings, loops, and the like agree, so they aren’t going to tell us which specific theory of quantum gravity is correct. Still, ­experimental evidence that gravity is actually quantized would be groundbreaking.

We already have plenty of observations about gravity’s effects on the quantum behavior of matter. Albert Einstein’s theory works fine in these situations, from stellar dynamics, to the cosmological formation of galaxy clusters, all the way to laboratory experiments on the effect of Earth’s gravity on quantum systems. But in all these scenarios, gravity itself behaves in a way that is consistent with classical physics; its quantum features are irrelevant. What’s much more difficult is to observe phenomena in which we expect gravity to behave quantum mechanically.

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Mark Ross

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From our earliest days, guys are overcome with urges that cause others to raise an eyebrow or shake their heads. As babies and toddlers, we instinctively and mindlessly twiddle our boy parts. When adolescence sets in, we impulsively jump up to smack every door jam we pass under. And when we reach fatherhood, something deep inside us yearns to throw our babies in the air playfully.

The paternal urge to toss babies is an outlier, as it runs antithetical to most parenting practices. Babies are securely buckled in car seats at the beginning of each road trip, even those just a couple of blocks in length, to pick up older siblings from school. They are gently cradled like footballs and strapped into chest carriers to keep them safe wherever we move about the house.

And yet, so many fathers at some point in time look their baby square in the eye, flash a big grin, employ their best baby babble voice, and gently give their baby a toss before making the catch and then asking some version of “Wasn’t that fun?”

The most generous reading of this routine is that it’s related to the paternal longing for rough-and-tumble play that kids grow to love. It’s the precursor to family wrestling matches in the living room and seemingly unending requests for dads to launch their kids across the swimming pool.

“When I was looking forward to becoming a dad, one of the things I was most excited about was playing with my kids and making them laugh,” shared Jacob, a father of three young kids who admitted to tossing at least one of his babies without incident. “But babies aren’t interactive at first, and occasionally, I’d give my kid a little toss out of this desire to have a fun connective moment.”

I actually don’t think I ever did a baby toss when my wife wasn’t in the room … So yeah, part of it was knowing that my wife would freak out…

But the adrenaline rush of the baby toss must inform our understanding of where this urge originates. Alex, whose son just turned 3, remembers the warm wave of excitement that came over him on the couple of occasions he gently tossed his son in the air.

“I wasn’t getting wild and crazy with the tosses. But I think so many aspects of life slowed down in the year after my son was born that the toss felt like a needed quick hit of stimulus,” he says.

There’s also an ornery side to the baby toss for many dads. They know it will garner a reaction from others — especially partners and spouses — making the practice a bid for connection. But, and this is the age-old question when dads attempt to deploy humor, is something truly funny if you’re the only one laughing?

“I actually don’t think I ever did a baby toss when my wife wasn’t in the room,”

Alex recalls. “So yeah, part of it was knowing that my wife would freak out a little bit, and we’d have an interaction that, in hindsight, I probably viewed as funnier and much more playful than she did. Having an audience also probably upped the adrenaline factor.”To be clear, the dirty looks, gasps, and even full-on freak-outs from worried parties are justified, especially concerning babies. Not only are guys notorious for overestimating their athletic prowess — in this case, their surehandedness under pressure — but babies are fragile. Perhaps one of the reasons the baby toss feels exciting is because, on a deep instinctual level, we know it’s dangerous.

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Voting in local elections is critical for ensuring the best possible representation in the laws and actions that affect your daily life. But once your ballot is cast, getting involved in a local project allows you to flex your strengths for the betterment of society. Using your voice at public hearings or organizing neighbors can be invigorating and informative, and the actions you take on behalf of your town or city can deeply tie you to your community in a way that few other actions can.

Take environmental issues, for instance. Recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings have weakened the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to fight pollution and to use the best available science in enacting regulations. The situation makes it seem like efforts to fight climate change are hopeless. Even the most stubborn optimists—people who fight against apathy and encourage others to do the same—would be forgiven for wanting to tune out.

But depending on where you live, opportunities for involvement might be vast. Many cities already have made commitments to reduce greenhouse gases, but smaller, rural municipalities may not. One place to begin, if your town doesn’t have a plan, is with the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy, which provides municipalities of any size with tools and guidance to help limit climate change.

If your town already has a climate committee dedicated to setting goals and systems for tracking progress, reach out to see how you can help. There may be a local advocacy group you can join or, if time is an issue, support. If nothing like that exists, attend a town board meeting and ask your elected officials about their plans for developing resilience and adaptation strategies. Check for grants at the county, state and even federal level that can be applied to a local project. Town officials aren’t necessarily stonewalling progress—they might be genuinely overwhelmed or unfamiliar with possible resources, and you can help bridge that gap. This work will give you clarity into the specific challenges of your community, which is often how people end up running for a board seat themselves.

Local environmental projects rooted in science will be trickier to find in areas where the phrase “climate change” is synonymous with “liberal agenda.” You may even be in a place, such as Florida, where the state government is openly adverse to climate mitigation. But these obstacles give you a chance to get creative. If you live in a hilly area that has experienced repeated economic losses from river flooding, for example, speak out about how trees and shrubs are excellent forms of erosion control and should be protected as critical infrastructure. Look at meeting agendas to see what development projects are being proposed—and then organize your neighbors to fight extractive ones that will harm the environment while leaving your community more vulnerable.

Use the weight of your professional background to be powerfully persuasive: Civil engineers can poke holes in developers’ plans, landscape architects can encourage native planting, wildlife biologists can explain why a certain habitat that might look unimportant plays a critical role for an endangered species, and attorneys can point out the disingenuous use of environmental laws that block climate-­friendly policies such as congestion pricing and high-density housing. Medical professionals can speak to the harmful effects of pollution and excessive heat on health, and people who work in communications can write press releases and keep their communities informed on social media.

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Five hundred years ago, writing in The Prince, Nicolo Machiavelli offered advice to leaders trying to grow their power. “It would serve [the Prince] to appear pious, faithful, humane, true, religious, and even to be so,” he wrote, “but only if he is willing, should it become necessary, to act in the opposite manner.”

In other words, don’t hold on tightly to your values, because no one else will either.

Centuries later, that passage still perfectly encapsulates a cynical world view. Cynics believe that human beings are fundamentally self-interested. This also means that interactions between people are at their core a ruthless, Darwinian struggle for survival, where the path to success requires stepping past, over, or on the people around you.

Many of us follow this bleak logic. More than half of parents believe that to succeed, their children should think of the world as harsh and dangerous. According to the legendary management professor Sumantra Goshal, MBA students are taught that “companies must compete not only with their competitors but also with their suppliers, employees, and regulators.” In Silicon Valley, where I work, brilliant but toxic leaders such as Steve Jobs are celebrated and — too often — emulated.

Following Machiavelli’s advice, cynics sacrifice relationships and principle to win. Instead, research demonstrates they lose. A wave of new behavioral science has found that, over the course of one’s career, cynical thinking stands in the way of success. Parents might think their kids will thrive if they see the world as competitive, but people with that mindset earn less money and report lower satisfaction at work.

Other research follows people over time, testing their cynicism at one point and following up years later to measure professional outcomes. The news here is clearer, and even worse for cynics. Over a decade-long span, their salary grows at barely a third the rate of non-cynics, and they are less likely to be elevated to leadership positions.

Why? Compared to their more trusting counterparts, cynics report a greater hunger for power and pursue it in different ways. Confident that others will take advantage of them if given the chance, they go on the offensive, manipulating others first. Machiavelli would be proud. He urges leaders to dominate others, preferring to be feared than loved. Researchdoes find that dominant actions, such as intimidating coworkers and kissing up to higher-ups, tend to build people’s power in the workplace. But so do communal actions, such as sharing generously with colleagues. Research on disagreeable people who share cynics’ competitive streak finds that they use only dominant strategies to get ahead. This leaves them isolated and eventually puts a ceiling on their success.

Put simply, cynics are playing the wrong game. Success is not a winner-take-all battle royale. People most often win by building trusting connections and alliances. And even if an individual manages to shove their way to the top, their team often pays the price. Psychologists recently analyzed levels of narcissism in NBA players’ tweets and found that teams with higher levels of narcissism won fewer games. Why? To compete at the highest level, teammates must first stop trying to outdo each other. If they hog the ball, narcissistic players cost their teams a cooperativeadvantage. As the NBA champion Bill Bradley put it, “the success of the group assures the success of the individual, but not the other way around.”

Cynicism can bleed workplaces of creativity, openness, and morale, and the bottom line. The good news is that cynicism is not a life sentence. Researchsuggests that barely a quarter of it is genetic, meaning that the social environment significantly shapes our willingness to give and earn trust. Through the right habits, cynics can build new mindsets and lean into connection.

As a research psychologist and author, I’ve studied the science of cynicism for years. I also work with organizations and leaders to help them fight cynicism and bring the cooperative advantage to their teams. Here are a few places to begin.

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We cover Mars mission updates, a new brain implant that shows promise for Parkinson’s, the latest on the mpox outbreak, and more in this week’s new roundup.

Happy Monday, listeners! Let’s kick off the week by catching up on the latest science news. For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman.

Last week, NASA’s Perseverance rover started a slow but steady slog. The bot landed in Jezero Crater when it first arrived on Mars back in February 2021. Now it’s busting out—but very slowly and cautiously. NASA says it will take Perseverance months to ascend the rough terrain of the crater’s western rim. The hope is that Perseverance will persevere (sorry) long enough to study a couple sites at the top of the crater.

Speaking of Mars, the Red Planet has really been popping off lately. Earlier this month, a study suggested that Mars might be hiding an ocean’s worth of water deep below its surface. Data from NASA’s late Insight lander revealed seismic signals of liquid water some six to 12 miles beneath the planet’s crust. Then, just a couple of weeks ago, a study showed that rock samples taken by Perseverance contained sulfates. That indicates they probably used to sit in salty water. And back in May, NASA’s tried-and-true Curiosity rover drove over and cracked open a rock that turned out to be packed with pure sulfur. Scientists can’t actually explain how sulfur would have formed in that area, which means there must be something about its past that they don’t know yet.

Now, let’s get into some health news. Last Monday, a study in Nature Medicine described an implant that acts like a pacemaker for the brain. The device builds on the idea of using deep-brain stimulation to treat Parkinson’s, and that generally works by delivering a constant electrical current. Instead, this new treatment uses algorithms to track symptoms, and it delivers brain stimulation only as needed. In a study of four people with Parkinson’s, the researchers said that the tech reduced each person’s most bothersome motor symptom by half when compared with conventional deep-brain stimulation.

Now onto weight-loss drugs. Now, most of the headlines about weight-loss drugs hype a growing number of proposed benefits, but a study out last week argues that doctors should be on the lookout for a troubling side effect. Researchers say that a statistical analysis flagged that people taking semaglutide, which is sold under the brand name Ozempic for diabetes and Wegovy for weight loss, have a higher chance of reporting suicidal thoughts than folks taking other kinds of medication. This was especially true for people who were also taking antidepressants. Now, this is, of course, a preliminary finding that doesn’t prove causation. But some experts say it’s smart to be cautious—especially if you start experiencing new feelings of depression after starting this medication. And honestly, that’s true for any medication and any new signs of depression. 

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Anaissa Ruiz Tejada/Scientific American

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I’m a full-time freelancer, which means I spend my days writing articles from my house. But once upon a time, I commuted to an office every day where I was bombarded with meetings, assignments, Slack channels, and project check-ins.

I like to give each task my full undivided attention, so when something ripped my focus away—like a Slack DM or a coworker walking by—I felt like I got major attention whiplash. I’d lose my flow, and it’d take me a few minutes to get back in it. For a long time, I felt like something was wrong with me because I couldn’t flip between tasks like some of my coworkers, who seemed gifted at doing multiple things at once. But I’ve since learned I’m not a freak (at least not in this way) and that human brains aren’t built for multitasking.

In fact, your brain can only really handle one thing at a time, so when you go through your inbox during a team meeting, you’re not really effectively doing both of these things at the same time. Instead, “your attention is switching—and if your attention is on email then you’re not paying attention to the Zoom meeting,” says Gloria Mark, PhD, Chancellor’s Professor of Informatics at UC Irvine and author of Attention Span and the Substack The Future of Attention. As a result, you’re not accomplishing as much as you think you are (and, most likely, even less than you could be if you were zeroed in on one thing).

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When it came time for Itzy Morales Pantoja to start her Ph.D. in cellular and molecular medicine, she chose a laboratory that used stem cells—not only animals—for its research. Morales Pantoja had just spent two years studying multiple sclerosis in mouse models. As an undergraduate, she’d been responsible for ­giving the animals painful injections to induce the disease and then observing as they lost their ability to move. She did her best to treat the mice gently, but she knew they were ­suffering. “As soon as I got close to them, they’d start peeing—a sign of stress,” she says. “They knew what was coming.”

Even though the mouse work was emotionally “very, very difficult,” Morales Pantoja remained committed to her research out of a desire to help her sister, who has multiple sclerosis. Three years after the project wrapped up, however, Morales Pantoja was crushed to find that none of her results would be of any direct help to people like her sister. An antioxidant she’d tested seemed promising in mice, but in human samples it was ineffective.

This was a disappointment but not a surprise. Around 90 percent of novel drugs that work in animal models fail in human clinical trials—an attrition rate that contributes to a $2.3-billion average price tag for every new drug that comes to market.

Today Morales Pantoja is a postdoctoral fellow at the Johns Hopkins Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing, where she is helping to develop lab-grown models of the human brain. The goal is to advance scientific understanding of neurodegeneration while moving the field beyond what some researchers see as an antiquated reliance on animal models.

Millions of rodents, dogs, monkeys, rabbits, birds, cats, fish, and other animals are used every year for research purposes worldwide. Exact numbers are hard to come by, but advocacy group Cruelty Free International estimated that 192 million animals were used in 2015. Most of this work occurs in four broad domains: cosmetics and personal products, chemical toxicity testing, drug development, and drug-discovery research.

Animal-based studies have contributed to important findings and lifesaving medical advancements. The COVID vaccines, for instance, were developed in animals, including mice and nonhuman primates. Animal models have also been critical in advancing AIDS drugs and in developing treatments for leukemia and other cancers, among many other uses.

But animal studies often fall short of producing useful results. They may weed out possibly effective drugs or miss toxicity in humans. They have failed to deliver breakthroughs in certain fields of medicine, including neurological conditions. A 2014 study estimated that candidate therapies for Alzheimer’s disease developed in animal models have failed in clinical trials about 99.6 percent of the time. “As questions about human biology and variability get more complex, we are bumping up against the limits of animal models,” says Paul Locke, an environmental health scientist and attorney at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “The thing you run into with animals—and there’s no way to get around this—is that animal biology is just too different from human biology.” Other species are no longer providing the insights about human biology—including at the cellular and subcellular levels—that scientists today need to achieve innovation.

A growing, multidisciplinary community of researchers around the world is investigating alternatives to animal models. Some are motivated by concerns about animal welfare, but for many, sparing the lives of millions of creatures is just an added bonus. They are driven primarily to create technologies and methods that will approximate human biology and variability better than animals do.

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If you’re looking to land a six-figure job or are asking yourself what jobs are in demand, look no further. FlexJobs analyzed its job database from February 1, 2024, through July 30, 2024, to find the most in-demand, fully remote jobs that offer high salaries. The list below features jobs that offer $100,000-plus annual salaries, according to Payscale.

Fully Remote Jobs With $100K+ Salaries

Are you looking to make a high salary, but not sure where to start? These in-demand jobs are a great launching point for your job search.

1. Senior Customer Success Manager

Median salary: $101,184

Senior customer success managers oversee the relationships between a brand and its clients, ensuring satisfaction, retention, and growth. These professionals work closely with sales and support teams to provide strategic solutions, address client needs, and help clients meet their goals with the company’s products or services.

2. Account Director

Median salary: $104,053

Account directors develop and execute strategies to meet clients’ business objectives, ensuring client satisfaction while driving revenue growth. This role often involves coordinating internal teams to manage key client accounts and deliver high-quality services.

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Source Photos: Artem Podrez/Pexels and Mackenzie Marco/Unsplash]

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When doctors ask Sara Gehrig to describe her pain, she often says it is indescribable. Stabbing, burning, aching—those words frequently fail to depict sensations that have persisted for so long they are now a part of her, like her bones and skin. “My pain is like an extra limb that comes along with me every day.”

Gehrig, a former yoga instructor and personal trainer who lives in Wisconsin, is 44 years old. At the age of 17, she discovered she had spinal stenosis, a narrowing of the spinal cord that puts pressure on the nerves there. She experienced bursts of excruciating pain in her back and buttocks and running down her legs. That pain has spread over the years, despite attempts to fend it off with physical therapy, anti-inflammatory injections, and multiple surgeries. Over-the-counter medications such as ibuprofen (Advil) provide little relief. And she is allergic to the most potent painkillers—prescription opioids—which can induce violent vomiting.

Today her agony typically hovers at a 7 out of 10 on the standard numerical scale used to rate pain, where 0 is no pain and 10 is the most severe imaginable. Occasionally her pain flares to a 9 or 10. At one point, before her doctor convinced her to take antidepressants, Gehrig struggled with thoughts of suicide. “For many with chronic pain, it’s always in their back pocket,” she says. “It’s not that we want to die. We want the pain to go away.”

Gehrig says she would be willing to try another type of painkiller, but only if she knew it was safe. She keeps up with the latest research, so she was interested to hear earlier this year that Vertex Pharmaceuticals was testing a new drug that works differently than opioids and other pain medications.

That drug, a pill called VX-548, blocks pain signals before they can reach the brain. It gums up sodium channels in peripheral nerve cells, and obstructed channels make it hard for those cells to transmit pain sensations. Because the drug acts only on the peripheral nerves, it does not carry the potential for addiction associated with opioids—oxycodone (OxyContin) and similar drugs exert their effects on the brain and spinal cord and thus can trigger the brain’s reward centers and an addiction cycle.

In January Vertex announced promising results of clinical trials of VX-548, which it is calling suzetrigine, showing that it dampened acute pain levels by about one half on that 0-to-10 scale. The company is applying for U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval for the drug this year.

Other pain drugs that target sodium channels are now being developed, some by firms motivated by Vertex’s success. Navega Therapeutics, led by biomedical engineer Ana Moreno, is even using molecular-editing tools such as CRISPR to suppress genes involved in chronic pain. “We are definitely hopeful that we can replace opioids, and that’s the goal here,” she says.

One in five U.S. adults—51.6 million people as of 2021—is living with chronic pain. New cases arise more often than other common conditions, such as diabetes, depression, and high blood pressure. Yet pain treatments have not kept pace with the need. There are over-the-counter pills such as aspirin, acet­aminophen (Tylenol), and nonsteroidal anti-inflammatories (NSAIDs) such as Advil. And there are opioids. The glaring inadequacy of existing medications to alleviate human suffering has fueled the ongoing opioid epidemic, which has led to more than 730,000 overdose deaths since its start.

.Samantha Mash

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