James' World 2

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Researchers hope brain implants will one day help people who have lost the ability to speak to get their voice back—and maybe even to sing. Now, for the first time, scientists have demonstrated that the brain’s electrical activity can be decoded and used to reconstruct music.

A new study analyzed data from 29 people who were already being monitored for epileptic seizures using postage-stamp-size arrays of electrodes that were placed directly on the surface of their brain. As the participants listened to Pink Floyd’s 1979 song “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1,” the electrodes captured the electrical activity of several brain regions attuned to musical elements such as tone, rhythm, harmony, and lyrics. Employing machine learning, the researchers reconstructed garbled but distinctive audio of what the participants were hearing. The study results were published on Tuesday in PLOS Biology.

Neuroscientists have worked for decades to decode what people are seeing, hearing, or thinking from brain activity alone. In 2012 a team that included the new study’s senior author—cognitive neuroscientist Robert Knight of the University of California, Berkeley—became the first to successfully reconstruct audio recordings of words participants heard while wearing implanted electrodes. Others have since used similar techniques to reproduce recently viewed or imagined pictures from participants’ brain scans, including human faces and landscape photographs. But the recent PLOS Biology paper by Knight and his colleagues is the first to suggest that scientists can eavesdrop on the brain to synthesize music.

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Pink Floyd performs on stage at Earl’s Court in London during The Wall Tour on August 6, 1980. Researchers re-created the band’s song “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1” from listeners’ brain activity. Credit: Rob Verhorst/Redferns/Getty Images

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Aging isn’t something that only happens to old people. We’re all aging, all the time, as long as we’re alive. Most of us just don’t spend much time thinking about aging unless we’re blowing out birthday candles or reaching specific milestones. Otherwise, it doesn’t typically come up.

Today, aging is a broadening spectrum, according to David Cravit, co-author of SuperAging: Getting Older Without Getting Old. He believes that long-accepted benchmarks — buy a house by 30, gain that promotion by 40, retire and stop working by 65 — no longer apply.

Human beings are living longer and healthier than at any other time in history. Despite a drop in life expectancy during the pandemic, the human lifespan has steadily increased. The number of people living to age 100 nearly doubled over the last two decades. By 2050, there are projected to be more than 3.7 million centenarians worldwide.

As a new longevity becomes the norm, there are fewer time constraints on opportunities. You could break track and field records at 102, run for president at 82, pose in a swimsuit on a magazine cover at 81, or embrace #grandmacore in your 20s.

“The clock keeps ticking, but the spectrum gets pushed further and further, and the end gets compressed,” Cravit says. “It happens later, and it’s shorter. And until it happens, you’re still productive and learning and growing and contributing.”

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Shondaland Staff

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Need to know

You are getting into your car one morning, about to embark on a long drive, and you hear on the radio that there’s heavy traffic along your route. Suddenly, you’re preoccupied by the thought that you are going to get into a terrible car crash.

At work, you’re about to give a presentation to your colleagues. As they quiet down, and you prepare to speak, thoughts about how you’re likely to go completely blank, fumble, or stutter – and how awful that would feel – start to bubble up in your head.

After a week in which your significant other has been keeping to themselves more than usual, paying you little attention, you start to think: Is there something wrong with our relationship? Our relationship must be ending… This is a disaster… In this situation, as in the others, the negative thoughts might be accompanied by physical sensations such as sweating, a racing heartbeat, feeling light-headed and dizzy, or feeling a pit in the stomach.

What do these scenarios have in common? They all illustrate a widespread way of thinking that we can call ‘thinking the worst’. These are just a few possible examples; there are countless other situations in which this sort of thinking could appear. Can you recognize it in some of your own, real-life experiences? We all engage in thinking the worst now and then, especially when going through a particularly stressful time.

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Illustration by Natsumi Chikayasu

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Last month, the American Chemistry Council, a petrochemical industry trade group, sent out a newsletter highlighting a major new report on what it presented as a promising solution to the plastic pollution crisis: using “recycled” plastic in construction materials. At first blush, it might seem like a pretty good idea — shred discarded plastic into tiny pieces, and you can reprocess it into everything from roads and bridges to railroad ties. Many test projects have been completed in recent years, with proponents touting them as a convenient way to divert plastic waste from landfills while also making infrastructure lighter, more rot-resistant, or, ostensibly, more durable.

“As our nation sets about rebuilding our infrastructure and restoring our resilience, plastic will play an outsized role,” the American Chemistry Council, or ACC, a petrochemical industry trade group, says on one of its websites.

But independent experts tell a much more complicated story, suggesting that most applications involving plastic waste in infrastructure are not ready for prime time. In recent years, several reports and literature reviews have highlighted the unknown health and environmental impacts of repurposing plastic into construction materials. They’ve also warned that post-consumer plastic isn’t desirable for use in many types of infrastructure — and that diverting plastic into construction is unlikely to make much of a dent in the massive tide of plastic waste that the developed world produces. To the contrary, adding used plastic to construction materials could even incentivize more plastic production.  

Take a closer look at the 407-page National Academies of Sciences report the ACC highlighted in its newsletter, for example, and you’ll find that it said there has been virtually “no significant research” in the United States to back claims about the benefits of using plastic in roads. Other construction applications face “high material and installation costs,” as well as “uncertainties about long-term performance and environmental impact.”

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Workers lay down asphalt infused with plastic waste on a roadway in Turin, Italy. Stefano Guidi / Getty Images

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A rare super blue moon will shine in the sky as August wraps up.

The month already featured a supermoon as it began, but the second full supermoon of the month — which will appear on Aug. 30 — will also be a blue moon. A blue moon is not actually blue in color; the term signifies a second full moon within a single month.

August’s first full moon rose on Aug. 1 and was the second of four consecutive supermoons. On average, supermoons are about 16% brighter than an average moon. They also appear bigger than the average full moon. According to NASA, it’s similar to the size difference between a quarter and a nickel. The phenomenon occurs when the moon’s orbit is closest to Earth at the same time the moon is full.

The Aug. 30 supermoon will appear to be even closer than the full moon at the beginning of the month. The last of the four consecutive supermoons this year will be the Sept. 28 “Harvest Moon.”

Those who miss out on the blue moon will have quite a wait before the next one. While around 25% of full moons are supermoons, just 3% of full moons are blue moons, according to NASA. The next blue moon after the one on Aug. 30 will be in May 2026. Astronomy fans will be in for a special treat come 2037, which will feature super blue moons in January and March.

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The silhouette of treetops on a hill seen in front of the moon

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When you first bought your first house, it probably seemed enormous, especially if you were moving from a tiny apartment. But inevitably, the longer you own it (and start filling it with stuff, pets, and children), the smaller it seems.

What’s to be done? Buy a larger home? Sure, but that’s going to be expensive, especially right now. Get a storage unit? Now your stuff is 20 minutes away, and you have a new monthly bill to pay. Add an addition to your existing house? Also, expensive—but it doesn’t have to be. While adding a whole new room or wing to your house might be the ideal solution to your space needs, if you don’t have the cash for such a project, there are lower-cost options you could consider.

Finishing an existing unfinished space

The first option to consider is finishing the spaces that already exist. Unfinished areas like basements don’t count as livable space in your house, so finishing them adds value and space to your home.

If you have a garage, that’s going to be the cheapest space to finish. Garages are often already attached to the main level of the house, have a door connection to the rest of the space, and are probably wired up with electricity at the least. The average cost of converting a garage is around $15,000, though it can go a lot higher if you need to add plumbing for a bathroom or if your garage is very large (or if you’re trying to convert one portion of a 3-car garage and keeping the rest for a car). The main downside is the loss of covered parking, but this is a cheap way to gain square footage.

Unfinished attics and basements are also obvious targets for finishing, with the cost to finish a basement averaging about $23,000 and the cost of finishing an attic averaging $25,000.

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Photo: Sue Smith (Shutterstock)

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We’re supposed to do things routinely for our health, like brushing our teeth, showering, and exercising.

And there are basic hygiene tasks to maintain or boost your financial health, too — actions you can take annually to make sure you’re on track to meet your goals.

Think of this routine as a quick checkup for your finances. Life Kit has more suggestions for handling your finances, but here are five good habits to get into every year –– no appointment necessary.

Look to the future

Ask yourself where you want to be three, five, or ten years from now. Brent Weiss, a certified financial planner at Facet, asks his clients this question when helping them devise their financial goals. And then he asks: “What has to happen in your life for you to look back and say, ‘That was a wildly successful period of my life?’ But here’s the trick. You can’t mention money.”

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While the impulse may be rooted in shyness or social anxiety, people who fail to read the room rarely suffer from passivity. They don’t enter as much as barge in. Subtle and restrained are not calling cards.

“They gotta make a splash,” says Laura Dudley, associate clinical professor of applied psychology at Northeastern University.

Confidence isn’t the problem. The issue is the inability to adjust. Think about if you’re home alone. You know that you can act a certain way, i.e., wear no pants. If company is there, you know enough to put on clothes. It’s about understanding context, and with a party, event, meeting or playground conversation, it means seeing and hearing what’s spoken and unspoken.

Properly reading a room requires a willingness to watch and bend to the situation, all of which can feel initially foreign. But it all falls into the possible-to-do category.

Reading a room begins with raising your awareness. If you were recently at a barbecue and reviewing the events, and think, That conversation went sideways fast. Was it me? — that’s enough self-reflection to lead to change. But if you cling to the attitude of, I am how I am: Deal — you’ll never be able to read the room because every interaction is about you, when it’s pretty much the opposite.

“Every relationship is a negotiation,” says Darrin J. Griffin, associate professor, chair of the communication studies department at University of Alabama, and co-author of Lying and Deception. “It needs concession. To win, it’s gotta be a win-win.”

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