James' World 2

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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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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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Shea German-Tanner, 22, a social worker in Fort Wayne, Ind., says she feels she can’t save money because she is always living paycheck to paycheck.Credit…Maddie McGarvey for The New York Times

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Borealopelta markmitchelli found its way back into the sunlight in 2017, millions of years after it had died. This armored dinosaur is so magnificently preserved that we can see what it looked like in life. Almost the entire animal—the skin, the armor that coats its skin, the spikes along its side, most of its body and feet, even its face—survived fossilization. It is, according to Dr. Donald Henderson, curator of dinosaurs at the Royal Tyrrell Museum, a one-in-a-billion find.

Beyond its remarkable preservation, this dinosaur is an important key to understanding aspects of Early Cretaceous ecology, and it shows how this species may have lived within its environment. Since its remains were discovered, scientists have studied its anatomy, its armor, and even what it ate in its last days, uncovering new and unexpected insight into an animal that went extinct approximately 100 million years ago.

Down by the sea

Borealopelta is a nodosaur, a type of four-legged ankylosaur with a straight tail rather than a tail club. Its finding in 2011 in an ancient marine environment was a surprise, as the animal was terrestrial.

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Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology

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In many places, cash is no longer king. While you still can manage to live a cash-only lifestyle if you want to, few of us do. Some of us don’t even carry cash at all, relying on our phones and credit cards, tapping and swiping at stores, and using apps like Venmo or Cash App for personal transactions that would once have involved passing a wad of crumpled bills to someone.

Even when we talk about the necessity of an emergency fund, we’re talking about money in a bank account, not cash stuffed under a mattress. Money in a bank will earn interest, be insured against robbery, and will be accessible in some way no matter where you are.

But cash can still be useful. And in an emergency, cash can even be necessary. That’s why you should definitely keep a modest amount of cash at home. But how much?

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Photo: Shutterstock (Shutterstock)

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