James' World 2

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Out there in the Universe, size definitely matters. An evolved red giant star, our Sun, and a white dwarf can all have the same mass, but the size difference between these three classes of objects is tremendous. While there might be some quantum effects that play a role for objects that are very small — in their energy, position, lifetime, etc. — there are some properties that remain the same regardless of any uncertainties. Objects that are stable, both microscopically and macroscopically, are described by measurable properties such as mass, volume, electric charge, and spin/angular momentum.

But “size” is a bit of a tricky one, particularly if your object is extremely small. The most extreme objects in terms of density are black holes, but for them, size isn’t necessarily a well-defined property. After all, if all the mass and energy that goes into making a black hole inevitably collapses to a central singularity, then what does the concept of “size” even mean? As it turns out, there’s actually more than one definition for a black hole’s size, and they all have their uses. From the outside in, let’s take a look at what a black hole’s size can tell us.

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Instead of an empty, blank, three-dimensional grid, putting a mass down causes what would have been ‘straight’ lines to instead become curved by a specific amount. The curvature of space beyond a certain distance, outside of a large mass, remains unchanged even as you vary the volume the interior mass occupies. (Credit: Christopher Vitale of Networkologies and the Pratt Institute)

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Mercury, Venus, and Mars are all uni-plate planets, and may always have been. Here’s what’s known about why Earth, uniquely, has plate tectonics.

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This map of Earth shows, in black, the more than 300,000 earthquake epicenters identified from 1964-present. The earthquake locations clearly trace out a number of “lines” on the map, which correspond to a number of boundaries between tectonic plates here on our planet. (Credit: A. El-Aziz Khairy Ebd el-aal, Egyptian National Seismological Network, 2011)

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If you found the last three years exhausting to the point of feeling emotionally tapped out, you are not alone. Millions of people had mental health issues before Covid-19 arrived on the world stage in 2020, but the pandemic exacerbated these problems and brought new mental health challenges to the fore for many more. But there is a silver lining: The stigma around talking about one’s mental health is lessening. And people are increasingly asking for support.

More often than not, people know what will help their mental health, but struggle with how to do it, Fallon Goodman, an assistant professor of psychology at George Washington University, explains to Inverse.

For some, traditional mental health services like therapy and support groups are helpful. But there are other lower-lift, overlooked, and accessible actions you can take that can boost your well-being now, enabling you to take that first step along your mental health journey or support yourself through more specialized treatment.

This is where habit-building comes into play, Goodman says. The more we commit to daily habits built around small actions, the more likely we are to see the payoffs, she says.

“You can’t exactly buy happiness, but you can build it,” says Goodman.

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The more we commit to daily habits for small actions, the more likely we are to see the payoffs.

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“The body and mind work together, so it is not unusual for grief to be experienced physically,” said Nicole Raines, a licensed marriage and family therapist based in Los Angeles. “Stress hormones may be released during the grief process, and these have an impact on our body.”

People who suffer a misfortune — whether it’s the death of a loved one or some other loss — will feel grief in different ways, so its physical expressions can vary from person to person as well.

“Grieving impacts the entire mind-body system for most people,” said Becky Stuempfig, a Southern California-based therapist who specializes in grief. “Some people experience a wide array of physical symptoms … while others only experience one or two.”

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In February, a 23-year-old Tanzanian fisherman suddenly fell ill, having just returned from a busy trading outpost in the middle of Lake Victoria. Back at home in Bukoba, a district in northwestern Tanzania, he was hit by bouts of vomiting and diarrhea. He developed a fever and began bleeding from his body openings. On March 1, he died.

His family and community conducted a routine burial—not knowing this gathering would be the beginning of a deadly outbreak. Soon, some of those present began to fall ill. On March 16, Tanzania’s chief medical officer announced that an unknown, “possibly contagious” illness had been detected and deployed a rapid response team to Bukoba. Finally, five days later, PCR testing at Tanzania’s National Public Health Laboratory revealed the cause: Marburg virus.

This wasn’t the first appearance of Marburg this year. On February 13, Equatorial Guinea reported its first-ever outbreak. A deadly virus, spreading in new places on opposite sides of the continent at the same time, is a big warning. It shows not just the ever-present threat of viruses spilling over from nature into humans, but that, yet again, the world isn’t prepared to deal with these dangers. 

Marburg shares plenty of characteristics with Ebola—the viruses are part of the same family. Like Ebola, it causes viral hemorrhagic fever, resulting in dangerous internal bleeding and organ damage. In some outbreaks, up to 90 percent of cases have been fatal; at the time of writing, five of the people in Tanzania’s eight confirmed cases have died. Symptoms take anywhere from a few days to three weeks to develop, and the virus can spread through human contact, particularly via body fluids of an infected person or corpse. Fruit-eating bats of the Rousettus family are the virus’s suspected host.

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Photograph: Science Source

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On March 20, the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network released its annual World Happiness Report, which rates well-being in countries around the world. For the sixth year in a row, Finland was ranked at the very top.

But Finns themselves say the ranking points to a more complex reality.

“I wouldn’t say that I consider us very happy,” said Nina Hansen, 58, a high school English teacher from Kokkola, a midsize city on Finland’s west coast. “I’m a little suspicious of that word, actually.”

Ms. Hansen was one of more than a dozen Finns we spoke to — including a Zimbabwean immigrant, a folk metal violinist, a former Olympian and a retired dairy farmer — about what, supposedly, makes Finland so happy. Our subjects ranged in age from 13 to 88 and represented a variety of genders, sexual orientations, ethnic backgrounds, and professions. They came from Kokkola as well as the capital, Helsinki; Turku, a city on the southwestern coast; and three villages in southern, eastern, and western Finland.

While people praised Finland’s strong social safety net and spoke glowingly of the psychological benefits of nature and the personal joys of sports or music, they also talked about guilt, anxiety, and loneliness. Rather than “happy,” they were more likely to characterize Finns as “quite gloomy,” “a little moody” or not given to unnecessary smiling.

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When Dr. Thomas J. Harbin published his seminal work Beyond Anger: A Guide for Men in 2000, it was a simpler time. Sort of. Anger, especially among men, was a widespread problem, but it was hardly so communicable as it is today. Now, anger travels like a virus, transmitted from the individual to the masses with the tap of a touchscreen. As he writes in the prologue to a new edition of Beyond Anger, the social media age has proven “perversely liberating” for angry men.

“They don’t have to deal with the consequences of angry diatribes and don’t have to fear retribution,” he writes. “They can say whatever they want to whoever they want and get away with it. They can rant and rave, call people names, make false statements about people, start or contribute to rumors, and sometimes ruin lives — and forget all about it when they walk away from the screen.” This behavior, he concludes, is nothing short of cowardly.

A clinical psychiatrist practicing in North Carolina, Dr. Harbin has spent decades working with angry men and their families, teaching them to come to terms with and control their anger. In that time, he’s come to a robust, nuanced understanding of anger, where it comes from, how it works, and how people can deal with it. We spoke to Dr. Harbin about what he’s learned, why anger is so present today, and what men can do to manage theirs.

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To make sense of difficult science, Michael Kofi Esson often turns to art.

When he’s struggling to understand the immune system or a rare disease, music, and poetry serve as an anchor.

“It helps calm me down and actively choose what to focus on,” says Esson, a second-year student at the Medical College of Wisconsin.

Esson, who was born in Ghana, also thinks his brain is better at absorbing all that science because of the years he spent playing the trumpet and studying Afrobeat musicians like Fela Kuti.

“There has to be some kind of greater connectivity that [art] imparts on the brain,” Esson says.

That idea — that art has a measurable effect on the brain and its structure — has support from a growing number of scientific studies.

“Creativity is making new connections, new synapses,” says Ivy Ross, who is vice president of hardware design at Google and co-author of the New York Times bestseller Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us.

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Microplastics are everywhere. They’re in our water, our soil, and even in our own bodies, and researchers are still unsure how they are affecting our health. Making things worse, the microscopic waste is also incredibly difficult to get rid of. Recently, though, scientists have come up with a novel solution from a surprising source — sound.

A team of researchers has developed a new method of cleaning microplastics from water using high-pitched sound waves. Unlike previous ultrasound filtering techniques, their method can theoretically remove both large and small microplastic particles using a unique two-step process, effectively making plastic-tainted water safe to drink. The results were presented today at a meeting of the American Chemical Society.

Microplastics are defined as any plastic debris smaller than 5 millimeters across. They usually come from larger pieces of trash, such as water bottles, styrofoam cups, or even acrylic paints, as they break down in the environment. For years, nobody paid much attention to these teeny-tiny pieces of plastic. But in 2004, a landmark study by marine ecologist Richard Thompson documented their presence across 17 different beaches. Since then, they’ve turned up everywhere researchers have looked for them: in soil, in the oceans, and even in our bodies. “[Scientists] have found microplastics in human blood samples,” says Menake Piyasena, an analytical chemist at New Mexico Tech and co-author of the study. “So this is going to be a huge impact in the future.”

Scientists don’t yet have a clear picture of what all that plastic means for human health, but it probably isn’t great. Microplastics have been linked to everything from inflammation to fertility issues to cancer, though the jury is still out on how the tiny polymer shards might cause these conditions. But this means that since 2019, microplastics have been considered an area of concern (and a potential public health emergency) by the World Health Organization.

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The future of water purification sounds great.

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