James' World 2

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At the far end of the periodic table is a realm where nothing is quite as it should be. The elements here, starting at atomic number 104 (rutherfordium), have never been found in nature. In fact, they’d emphatically prefer not to exist. Their nuclei, bursting with protons and neutrons, tear themselves apart via fission or radioactive decay within instants of their creation.

These are the superheavy elements: after rutherfordium come dubnium, seaborgium, bohrium, and other oddities, all the way up to the heaviest element ever created, oganesson, element 118. Humans have only ever made vanishingly small amounts of these elements. As of 2020, 18 years after the first successful creation of oganesson in a laboratory, scientists had reported making a total of five atoms of it. Even if they could make much more, it would never be the kind of stuff you could hold in your hand—oganesson is so radioactive that it would be less matter, more heat.

Using ultrafast, atom-at-a-time methods, researchers are starting to explore this unmapped region of the periodic table and finding it as fantastical as any medieval cartographer’s imaginings. Here at the uncharted coastline of chemistry, atoms have a host of weird properties, from pumpkin-shaped nuclei to electrons bound so tightly to the nucleus they’re subject to the rules of relativity, not unlike objects orbiting a black hole.

Their properties may reveal more about the primordial elements created in massive astrophysical phenomena such as supernovae and neutron star mergers. But more than that, studying this strange matter may help scientists understand the more typical matter that occurs naturally all around us. As researchers get better at pinning these atoms down and measuring them, they’re pushing the boundaries of the way we organize matter in the first place.

“The periodic table is something fundamental,” says Witold Nazarewicz, a theoretical nuclear physicist and chief scientist at the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams at Michigan State University. “What are the limits of this concept? What are the limits of atomic physics? Where is the end of chemistry?”

Affixed to the wall in a concrete-block corridor known as Cave 1 in Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), just steps from one of the few instruments in the world that can create superheavy atoms, is a poster-size printout of a table that organizes elements by nuclide, meaning based on the number of protons and neutrons in the nucleus. This graph shows all the known information about the nuclear structure and decay of the elements, as well as of their isotopes—variations on elements with the same number of protons in the nucleus but different numbers of neutrons.

It’s a living document. There’s a typo in the title, and there are tears along the poster’s edges where duct tape holds it to the wall. It’s been marked up with notations in Sharpie, added after the poster was printed in 2006. These notations are the atomic physics version of seafarers penciling in new islands as they sail, but in this case, the islands are isotopes of elements so heavy they can be seen only in particle accelerators like the one here. In a field where it can take a week to make just one atom of what you want, a record of progress is essential.

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Quarternative

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Few outdoor accessories are more important than the grill you choose for you summertime cookouts. It was already time to retire your old grill when that rust hole appeared and a family of mice moved in three years ago, so don’t put it off any longer. If you’ve already weighed the benefits of an electric grill, but you haven’t been able to shake the siren’s call of the classic charcoal grill, you’re in the right place. Considering this, my argument for why charcoal still can be a great choice, and how to choose a good grill.

Charcoal gives food that classic summertime flavor you associate with the activity of grilling. Any morsel cooked over charcoal’s radiant heat is blessed with a smoky flavor unmatched by any other outdoor cooking device (barring a smoker, but that’s a different world altogether). With the right mindset, it also can be a lot of fun, from the moment you pack the chimney to when you close down the vents—and those glowing embers will always inspire s’mores.

I feel like a big time grill master whenever I cook with charcoal, probably because it takes a bit of work and know-how to successfully get one going versus a propane gas grill that lights with a click, or an electric grill that activates with a flip of the switch. But it’s also something a beginner can handle. (They say that each time you get those charcoal briquettes glowing, your ego grows three sizes.)

Is a charcoal grill right for you?

When considering which type of grill to buy, think about your priorities. Do you need it to be portable? What size do you think is best? Do you just want something that lights the first time, or are you okay with some trial and error? Consider charcoal’s advantages: 

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University presidents and administrators can learn a lot from the student demonstrations that closed out this academic year.

Some lessons could be simply expedient. Most acutely: don’t get the chair of your philosophy department (in this case, me) arrested. That’s especially true when a video of her, looking like a model of respectability while being hauled off, might in the space of two days get 22 million views and become a serious public relations headache.

Another pragmatic lesson might be to clear encampments peacefully but quickly, since tents seriously interfere with commencement. More ambitiously, a president might try to negotiate with the demonstrators while simultaneously appeasing the governing board so as not to get fired.

Such lessons in expediency boil down to keeping their job while facing wrath from all sides, including Congress. To make matters worse, doing all this involves negotiating millennia of religious strife that overflows to this day, while somehow maintaining their reputation against charges of antisemitism or “complicity in genocide.”

As that arrested philosophy department chair, I’d like to propose a more visionary lesson: If university presidents want to be on the right side of history, they should study how democracy works and the role that universities play in aiding democratic processes. They should see their job as foremost to educate their students to become engaged members of society—with the side benefit of furthering the democratic process itself. They should avoid doing anything that slows down or reverses democracy.

Other lessons for aspiring visionary leaders: When appropriate, engage with the demonstrators. Treat them like budding civic actors, not enemies. If protests are peaceful, let them proceed. Consider going to REI and getting a tent to camp out with the students. Listen to those involved. If the discourse and chants strike you and your board or alumni as offensive, bring in some experts on constructive dialogue. Arrange for some deliberative forums.

But whatever you do, do not do what my university did on the morning of April 25, 2024. Do not bring in outside police forces armed with pepper spray, rubber bullets, and Tasers to violently and brutally dismantle a peaceful protest, all in a matter of minutes. Do not arrest bystanders like me and other professors and students who were calling for the police to stop and refusing to step away. Please don’t do any of that.

As a professor of political philosophy who has researched and written extensively on political deliberation and public life, the main lesson I’d like to impart is that this past season of protests is part of a larger political and democratic process. Such a season is not aberrant. Protests have a long and venerated history, and they are central to a well-functioning democracy. My book Fear of Breakdown: Politics and Psychoanalysis identifies protesting as one of several democratic practices central to even the most minimally functioning democracy. Protesting is a process of naming and framing issues, setting the agenda for more deliberative bodies to take up.

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Hmmmmm… Oldie but goodie!

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We get it — there are a million and one legitimate reasons not to have sex tonight, tomorrow, or the day after that. But there are plenty of couples out there who are doing the deed five, six, seven, or more times a week. We recently asked married HuffPost readers who have sex every night (barring things like sickness, business trips, or other extenuating circumstances, of course) how it has improved their lives and relationships. Below are 13 good reasons to get it on with your spouse on a near daily basis.

1. It provides some much-needed couple time.
“My husband and I have sex every night because it’s a moment in the day that is just about the two of us. We are parents to a toddler, so when we lay him down for bed each night, we can then spend the rest of the night expressing how we feel about each other physically. Having sex allows us to be passionate, to show affection, and we enjoy pleasing each other.” – Christie M. of Arkansas; married 3 years

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The peppered moth is an iconic example of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. For centuries, peppered moths (Biston betularia) were common in the forests around Manchester, England, and elsewhere. With their light-­colored wings, peppered moths were camouflaged from predators against the light-­gray bark of the trees they rested on during the day. By the early 19th century, however, soot from the industrial revolution had forged a new evolutionary environment, one that favored dark-­colored moths, which matched the soot-­covered trees better than their lighter peers. In the 1950s and 1960s evolutionary biologists found that in industrial areas, 80 percent of the moths were dark-­colored, and the dark moths had a 2:1 survival advantage over light-­colored moths in those areas. Today, in our age of molecular genetics, we know the mutation that probably produced the dark-­colored moths occurred around 1819 and was the result of “jumping genes”—bits of DNA that change position in a genome and may create a mutation in the process.

The darkening of the peppered moth is also an example of anthropogenic evolution: evolutionary change caused by alterations humans make to the environment. In recent years, scientists have identified many more cases of human-­mediated evolutionary change. The full scope and effects of anthropogenic evolution are only now coming into focus. But already we have ascertained that humans are shaping the evolutionary trajectories of animals across the globe, from insects to whales. As a result of our influence, key aspects of animal behavior are changing, including where they live, where they breed, what they eat, whom they fight, and whom they help. We are remodeling more than just the environments species live in. We’re altering the species themselves as they evolve in response to our impact on their surroundings.

One consequence of this change is that we are creating mismatches between animals and the settings in which they evolved. Creatures once well equipped to meet the challenges of their environment suddenly face a world in which their fine-­tuned behavioral adaptations are no longer adaptive at all. In some species, natural selection is recalibrating behavior so that individuals are better suited to their new circumstances. The question is whether it will be able to do so fast enough to keep pace with human transformation of the planet we all share.

For long stretches of evolutionary time, natural selection has favored a tight link between ambient temperature and the start of the breeding season for many animals, including birds. Hormones associated with reproduction kick into gear when the weather warms; birds court, construct nests and bring food home to deposit into the mouths of their waiting young. For Tree Swallows (Tachycineta bicolor), the spring thaw is the trigger that sets that reproductive cascade into motion. But that trigger is now being pulled too early. Largely as a result of increased carbon dioxide emission, the average spring temperature for Tree Swallows living in northern New York increased about 1.9 degrees Celsius between 1972 and 2015, and the spring thaw is starting earlier. Over that same period, Tree Swallows started breeding 13 days earlier. The environmental cue the birds use to time breeding has become mismatched with their altered conditions.

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The gap between income and home prices is locking out buyers in counties across the country. But how would today’s high prices affect you?

The affordability gap for homebuyers is near a 10-year high, a new NBC News analysis found, as high prices, interest rates, and low supply have eaten into people’s purchasing power. 

A common rule of thumb is that a home is affordable if monthly home payments on a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage don’t exceed 30% of your pretax income.

But affordability isn’t the same everywhere, and the money you have now could buy a lot more home somewhere else.

See where you could afford a median-priced home with this interactive map. Adjust the slider to your income level and the map will show the counties where the estimated monthly payment would stay below 30%. 

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A home for sale in King County, Wash., where the median home sale price is nearly $900,000, the second-highest in the state.David Ryder / Bloomberg via Getty Images file

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As a human being, every time I see a new jaw-droppingly gorgeous astronomical image, I’m staggered by the beauty of the cosmos.

But as an astronomer who’s been observing the universe his whole life, when I see these images, I’m amazed at how far we’ve come in that time, technologically speaking, and how much easier they are to make than they used to be. It’s true that the very best pictures still require large observatories on the ground or in space, but even holding your smartphone to the eyepiece of a consumer-grade telescope can yield images that only a few decades ago would have been the envy of all the world’s astronomers.

And remarkably, this awesome power to casually capture breathtaking celestial snapshots—or selfies, for that matter—with a camera that fits in your pocket traces back, in part, to the work of astronomers using giant telescopes on the ground and in space. Both share a common legacy. Astronomers, it turns out, were among the first to develop and realize the power of digital cameras. Next time you upload a snapshot to social media, don’t forget to thank us. And you’re welcome!

I’m old enough to have used film cameras when I was young. In high school, I bought a fancy camera and snapped roll after roll of astrophotography through my telescope. It was difficult, expensive, and time-consuming, but a lot of fun—despite my mom’s complaints about the noxious smells of photographic chemicals coming from my makeshift darkroom where I developed the film.

Professional astronomers used similar techniques back then, but instead of flexible plastic film, they preferred glass plates with light-sensitive material sprayed onto one side. These were loaded into complex (and heavy!) metal boxes that were mounted to the back ends of telescopes and exposed to the target. Once the observations were complete, chemicals were applied to develop the plates and create the photo. The big advantage of this was stability—many archives today still house thousands of plates dating back well more than a century. These priceless troves of data from the past can’t be replicated—but they can’t be erased or corrupted with an errant keystroke, either, like so much of today’s digital images.

But the process of analog astrophotography is arduous, and slow. The tiny, light-reactive grains of chemicals that produce the picture are not terribly sensitive, so exposures take many hours. Even then, seeing faint objects is difficult. Getting quantitative science from them is a pain as well because measuring the brightness of an object recorded this way is arduous and not as precise as one could hope. But for a long time this was the best astronomers—or anyone else—could get, so these drawbacks were tolerable.

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While I was looking for a gift for a child’s birthday, a math book fell into my hands. I am always fascinated when authors write about abstract scientific topics for children, whether it’s on Albert Einstein’s theories, the life of Marie Curie, technology, or space travel. But this particular book was different. It’s all about prime numbers—specifically twin primes. Danish author Jan Egesborg has endeavored to introduce children to one of the most stubborn open problems in number theory, which even the brightest minds have repeatedly failed to solve over the past 100-plus years: the twin prime conjecture.

As is so often the case in mathematics, the conjecture falls into the category of those that are easy to understand but devilishly hard to prove. Twin primes are two prime numbers that have a distance of two on the number line; that is, they are directly consecutive if you ignore even numbers. Examples include 3 and 5, 5 and 7, and 17 and 19. You can find a lot of twin primes among small numbers, but the farther up the number line you go, the rarer they become.

That’s no surprise, given that prime numbers are increasingly rare among large numbers. Nevertheless, people have known since ancient times that infinite prime numbers exist, and the prime number twin conjecture states that there are an infinite number of prime number twins, as well. That would mean that no matter how large the values considered, there will always be prime numbers in direct succession among the odd numbers.

Admittedly, translating these concepts for kids is not easy (which is why I have so much respect for Egesborg and his children’s book). Prime numbers (2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13,…) are like the fundamental particles of the natural numbers. They are only divisible by 1 and themselves. All other natural numbers can be broken down into their prime divisors, which makes prime numbers the basic building blocks of the mathematical world.

A Proof from Antiquity

Mathematics has an unlimited number of prime number building blocks. Euclid proved this more than 2,000 years ago with a simple thought experiment. Suppose there were only a finite number of prime numbers, the largest being p. In this case, all prime numbers up to p could be multiplied together.

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