James' World 2

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How can we live a good life? It’s a question psychologist Dacher Keltner has spent much of his professional career trying to answer. In his latest book, Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life, he argues that an appreciation of the world — whether through experiencing the natural beauty of Yosemite National Park or simply being with a friend — not only benefits us mentally and emotionally but is a crucial part of our physiological health. A big part of well-being, he says, comes from what primatologist Jane Goodall calls “being amazed at things outside yourself.” And his studies show this is a skill we can cultivate.

A professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, Keltner has authored more than two hundred research papers examining emotion, neuroscience, aesthetics, morality, and decision-making. His other books — including The Power Paradox, The Compassionate Instinct, and Born to Be Good — offer a science-based, optimistic view of human behavior and culture. Pushing back against philosopher Thomas Hobbes’s description of life as “nasty, brutish, and short,” Keltner believes evolution has given Homo sapiens emotions like gratitude, joy, amusement, and compassion because they help us survive and build cooperative, ethical societies.

Although he spends a lot of time designing experiments in his laboratory, Keltner’s work often takes him outside of academia. He was the scientific adviser for the Pixar animated feature Inside Out, which personifies the emotions of an eleven-year-old girl experiencing a disruptive move with her family. He has also consulted extensively for Google, Apple, and Pinterest.

Born in Jalisco, Mexico, Keltner was raised in California by parents who were part of the counterculture: his father was an artist; his mother, a literature professor. He received his BA in psychology and sociology from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and his PhD from Stanford. He did postdoctoral work with pioneering psychologist Paul Ekman, and in 1996 he joined the faculty at UC Berkeley, where he directs the Greater Good Science Center.

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Nadya Pajarillo

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Alongside humans, leafcutter ants form some of nature’s vastest, most sophisticated societies — a single mature colony can contain as many ants as there are people on Earth, living with a great deal more social harmony and consonance of purpose than we do.

They are also one of our planet’s most dazzling testaments to evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis’s insistence that “we abide in a symbiotic world”: For 50 million years, leafcutter ants have been practicing a form of agriculture in their mutualist relationship with a fungus they cultivate as a food source, growing it in fungus gardens and feeding it plant matter, which the fungus converts into nutrients the ants can feed on in turn.

In fact, leafcutter ants evolved their sharp mandibles and deft prehensile legs precisely in order to cut and manipulate leaf fragments, which they then carry to their fungal garden. A single ant can carry twenty times its bodyweight — the equivalent of me carrying three grand pianos. In less than a day, a colony can clear entire trees. Emblems of emergence, they do all this as complexity theory incarnate, not a single individual aware of the big-picture goal of the labor.

In her mesmerizing film Antworks, artist Catherine Chalmers captures the strange beauty of this communal consciousness as a leafcutter ant colony dismantles a kaleidoscopic plant in the jungles of Costa Rica, then carries the fragments — “tiny Abstract Expressionist paintings” she calls them — to their secret garden.

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In June, astronomers reported a disappointing discovery: The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) failed to find a thick atmosphere around the rocky planet TRAPPIST-1 C, an exoplanet in one of the most tantalizing planetary systems in the search for alien life.

The finding follows similar news regarding neighboring planet TRAPPIST-1 B, another planet in the TRAPPIST-1 system. Its dim, red star hosts seven rocky worlds, a few of which are in the habitable zone—at a distance from their star at which liquid water could exist on their surfaces and otherworldly life might thrive.

What it would take to detect that life, if it exists, isn’t a new question. But thanks to the JWST, it’s finally becoming a practical one. In the next few years, the telescope could glimpse the atmospheres of several promising planets orbiting distant stars. Hidden away in the chemistry of those atmospheres may be the first hints of life beyond our solar system. This presents a sticky problem: What qualifies as a true chemical signature of life?

“You’re trying to take very little information about a planet and make a conclusion that is potentially quite profound—changing our view of the whole universe,” says planetary scientist Joshua Krissansen-Totton of the University of Washington.

To detect such a biosignature, scientists must find clever ways to work with the limited information they can glean by observing exoplanets.

Chemicals in context

Even the most powerful telescopes, including the JWST, almost never “see” exoplanets—by and large, astronomers know these distant worlds only by the flickering of their stars.

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The James Webb Space Telescope will help scientists look for signs on life on other planets. Adapted from NASA / JPL-Caltech / R. Hurt, T. Pyle (IPAC)

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My interest in capitalism began with an observation. I worked as an economics reporter for six years, from 2013 to 2019, for some of the biggest radio shows in the US. In that time, I never once used the word “capitalism” on air.

Then, in the summer of 2017, during a zeitgeisty taping of The Nod podcast, a panel discussion turned to the economic message embedded in Jay-Z’s new record, 4:44. Vinson Cunningham, a writer for the New Yorker, asserted that “capitalism is not the answer for Black people.”

It hit me: Economics reporters like myself weren’t talking about capitalism. Everyone else was. I reported this observation to skeptical econ-colleagues, who chalked it up to youthful nonsense — but I spent years thinking about what had happened and why.

Now, years later, some of those thoughts have crystallized in a new Today, Explained series, “Blame Capitalism.” In the four-part series, which is airing on Fridays in September, we talk to economists, thinkers, and regular Americans about what happened to change our attitudes about our economic system. Why did we lose faith? Can we get it back? And should we try?

The best way to understand capitalism is to live it. We have no choice. The second best way to understand it is to read about it. Below are five new-ish books, and one very old one, that I read while reporting the series.

You can listen to “Blame Capitalism” and Today, Explained on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts.

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A first edition of Scottish economist and philosopher Adam Smith’s book The Wealth Of Nations is displayed at the Dutch House of Representatives library in The Hague on May 31, 2018. Bart Maat/AFP via Getty Images

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Eva Redamonti

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On May 17, 1986, the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum unleashed its flying reptile at Andrews Air Force Base. Known as Q.N. to the engineers and experts who created the flyer, the model was a half-size replica of the immense pterosaur Quetzalcoatlus northropi that had just been discovered a decade before. Technically called an ornithopter, because it was meant to be birdlike in the way it flew, Q.N. was a mock-up with an 18-foot wingspan. “We had to go through the evolutionary cycle in our development, just like nature did. But we were going about a million years a week,” project leader Paul MacCready told the Los Angeles Times earlier that year. Q.N. had chewed through $700,000 in funding and staggered through a series of crashes before the flapping aircraft was finally ready to fly.

More than 300,000 people gathered at the air base, ready to see a pterosaur—or something pterosaur-like—take to the air for the first time in 66 million years. The reptile-like flying machine had done just fine out in the arid desert of Death Valley, where it was filmed for the IMAX movie On the Wing, so a tour around Andrews seemed simple enough. But crowds may have left the event wondering how such animals could have taken to the air in the first place. Soon after being released from a tow line used to get Q.N. into the air, the mechanical pterosaur began to spin and turn so sharply that the faux-reptile’s neck snapped, and it crashed, headless, to the ground.

Despite Q.N.’s public embarrassment, however, the ornithopter’s inspiration has lived on. In the early 1990s, when Q.N. was still in storage at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, curator Russell Lee made the case that the pterosaur should be accessioned into the collection as an important part of aviation history. “A lot of thought and effort went into developing this thing,” Lee says, adding Q.N. was a state-of-the-art aircraft despite its failure. And now, the spirit of Q.N. lives on as experts are going back to these ancient creatures to find new ways to fly, from aircraft with pterosaur-like crests to pterosaur-inspired spacecraft exploring the nooks and crannies of Mars.

Despite the family resemblance, pterosaurs were not dinosaurs. Rather, they were close evolutionary cousins of the dinosaurs that shared many of the same biological hallmarks. A hot-blooded metabolism, bodies covered in multicolored feathers, and lightweight bones assisted the rise of the pterosaurs at the same time that dinosaurs were beginning to stalk around on land around 243 million years ago. But what makes pterosaurs immediately distinctive are their wings.

The wing of a pterosaur was much more like a bat’s than a bird’s. Pterosaurs all shared extremely elongated fourth fingers—the equivalent of your ring fingers—that could be longer than the entire rest of their bodies. These hyper-elongated digits supported thin membranes that connected to the reptile’s sides and legs, sometimes with some accessory membranes attached between the legs and hips. Even though pterosaurs also had feathers on their heads, necks, and torsos, they relied on these leathery wings to get aloft. But how they used their membrane-based wings stumped paleontologists for nearly two centuries.

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An artist’s illustration of Quetzalcoatlus flying De Agostini via Getty Images

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The long evolutionary journey that created modern humans began with a single step—or more accurately—with the ability to walk on two legs. One of our earliest-known ancestors, Sahelanthropus, began the slow transition from ape-like movement some six million years ago, but Homo sapiens wouldn’t show up for more than five million years. During that long interim, a menagerie of different human species lived, evolved, and died out, intermingling and sometimes interbreeding along the way. As time went on, their bodies changed, as did their brains and their ability to think, as seen in their tools and technologies.

To understand how Homo sapiens eventually evolved from these older lineages of hominins, the group including modern humans and our closest extinct relatives and ancestors, scientists are unearthing ancient bones and stone tools, digging into our genes, and recreating the changing environments that helped shape our ancestors’ world and guide their evolution.

These lines of evidence increasingly indicate that H. sapiens originated in Africa, although not necessarily in a single time and place. Instead, it seems diverse groups of human ancestors lived in habitable regions around Africa, evolving physically and culturally in relative isolation, until climate-driven changes to African landscapes spurred them to intermittently mix and swap everything from genes to tool techniques. Eventually, this process gave rise to the unique genetic makeup of modern humans.

“East Africa was a setting in foment—one conducive to migrations across Africa during the period when Homo sapiens arose,” says Rick Potts, director of the Smithsonian’s Human Origins Program. “It seems to have been an ideal setting for the mixing of genes from migrating populations widely spread across the continent. The implication is that the human genome arose in Africa. Everyone is African, and yet not from any one part of Africa.”

New discoveries are always adding key waypoints to the chart of our human journey. This timeline of Homo sapiens features some of the best evidence documenting how we evolved.

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Homo sapien skulls on display at the Hubei Provincial Museum, China. (Public domain/Wikimedia Commons)

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In the constellation Aquarius, invisible to the naked eye, lies a star that might change history. Home to seven mysterious planets—each around the size of our own Earth—the TRAPPIST-1 system is regarded by some as the crown jewel of astronomy’s efforts to find life in the Milky Way. With not one, but three worlds orbiting in the so-called habitable zone, where water can flow and life can thrive, TRAPPIST-1 is one of humanity’s best and brightest opportunities to chase the discovery of a lifetime.

More than science is at stake: what we find—or don’t—on these worlds will shape science forever.

What sets TRAPPIST-1 apart is its striking commonality. At the heart of this system is a small, dim star called a red dwarf. Ranging between 8 percent and 57 percent of the mass of our own sun, red dwarfs quietly make up a remarkable 73 percent of all stars in the galaxy, and are suspected to harbor at least three planets per star. Naturally, this has piqued the curiosity of those who study life in the cosmos—astrobiologists. Could alien life thrive around these small red suns?

The possibility tantalizes the philosopher, but even more so the astronomer: planets around red dwarfs are easier to find than around any other type of star. In fact, the TRAPPIST-1 system was discovered in 2016 with a telescope only two feet across. Because the star is small even by red dwarf standards, its Earth-sized planets stand out easily; when they cross, or transit, the star, they block roughly half a percent of its total light output. For comparison, the Earth only blocks 0.01 percent of our much larger sun’s light when it passes in front of it. In terms of detectability, red dwarfs seem to be the clear winner, and out of 445 red dwarf systems (I asked Jessie Christensen, the scientist who maintains the NASA Exoplanet Archive, what the latest count was), TRAPPIST-1 is one of the brightest that transits, making it a favorite target for astrobiology.

But red dwarfs have a dark side. They are not simply smaller, redder versions of our own well-behaved sun; they are turbulent, active sources of extreme radiation. While Earth experiences violent solar outbursts called coronal mass ejections (CMEs) roughly once every 25 years, a planet that orbits TRAPPIST-1 experiences them weekly. And the bigger the host star, the more powerful the CME. If a planet does not have a strong magnetic field to protect it, a CME can strip away its atmosphere until it is a barren, uninhabitable rock.

In addition, red dwarfs are born hot, and cool over time. This means that a planet may have its water inventory boiled away before it gets the chance to settle into the habitable zone, or that a planet may begin its life habitable before freezing over. Finally, red dwarf planets live very close to their star, and when two things in space orbit close together, one will eventually come to face the other—the way the same side of the moon is always facing the Earth. In the case of TRAPPIST-1’s planets, this means that one hemisphere may experience eternal daytime, and the other, eternal night: perhaps unideal conditions for life to evolve.

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This illustration shows the seven Earth-size planets of TRAPPIST-1, an exoplanet system about 40 light-years away, based on data current as of February 2018. The image shows the planets’ relative sizes, but does not represent their orbits to scale. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt, T. Pyle (IPAC)

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In a neat little neighborhood in Venice, Calif., there’s a block of squat, similar homes, filled with mortals spending their finite days on the planet eating pizza with friends, blowing out candles on birthday cakes, and binging late-night television. Halfway down the street, there’s a cavernous black modern box. This is where Bryan Johnson is working on what he calls “the most significant revolution in the history of Homo sapiens.” 

Johnson, 46, is a centimillionaire tech entrepreneur who has spent most of the last three years in pursuit of a singular goal: don’t die. During that time, he’s spent more than $4 million developing a life-extension system called Blueprint, in which he outsources every decision involving his body to a team of doctors, who use data to develop a strict health regimen to reduce what Johnson calls his “biological age.” That system includes downing 111 pills every day, wearing a baseball cap that shoots red light into his scalp, collecting his own stool samples, and sleeping with a tiny jet pack attached to his penis to monitor his nighttime erections. Johnson thinks of any act that accelerates aging—like eating a cookie, or getting less than eight hours of sleep—as an “act of violence.” 

Johnson is not the only ultra-rich middle-aged man trying to vanquish the ravages of time. Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel were both early investors in Unity Biotechnology, a company devoted to developing therapeutics to slow or reverse diseases associated with aging. Elite athletes employ therapies to keep their bodies young, from hyperbaric and cryotherapy chambers to  “recovery sleepwear.” But Johnson’s quest is not just about staying rested or maintaining muscle tone. It’s about turning his whole body over to an anti-aging algorithm. He believes death is optional. He plans never to do it. 

Outsourcing the management of his body means defeating what Johnson calls his “rascal mind”—the part of us that wants to eat ice cream after dinner, or have sex at 1 a.m., or drink beer with friends. The goal is to get his 46-year-old organs to look and act like 18-year-old organs. Johnson says the data compiled by his doctors suggests that Blueprint has so far given him the bones of a 30-year-old, and the heart of a 37-year-old. The experiment has “proven a competent system is better at managing me than a human can,” Johnson says, a breakthrough that he says is “reframing what it means to be human.” He describes his intense diet and exercise regime as falling somewhere between the Italian Renaissance and the invention of calculus in the pantheon of human achievement. Michelangelo had the Sistine Chapel; Johnson has his special green juice. 

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