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With the help of an expert weaver, archaeologists have unraveled the design secrets behind the world’s oldest pants. The 3,000-year-old wool trousers belonged to a man buried between 1000 and 1200 BCE in Western China. To make them, ancient weavers combined four different techniques to create a garment specially engineered for fighting on horseback, with flexibility in some places and sturdiness in others.

The softer side of materials science

Most of us don’t think much about pants these days, except to lament having to put them on in the morning. But trousers were actually a technological breakthrough. Mounted herders and warriors needed their leg coverings to be flexible enough to let the wearer swing a leg across a horse without ripping the fabric or feeling constricted. At the same time, they needed some added reinforcement at crucial areas like the knees. It became, to some extent, a materials-science problem. Where do you want something elastic, and where do you want something strong? And how do you make fabric that will accomplish both?

For the makers of the world’s oldest pants, produced in China around 3,000 years ago, the answer was apparently to use different weaving techniques to produce fabric with specific properties in certain areas, despite weaving the whole garment out of the same spun wool fiber.

The world’s oldest-known pants were part of the burial outfit of a warrior now called Turfan Man. He wore the woven wool pants with a poncho that belted around the waist, ankle-high boots, and a wool headband adorned with seashells and bronze discs. The pants’ basic design is strikingly similar to the pants most of us wear today, but closer inspection reveals the level of engineering that went into designing them.

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Photo by Wagner et al. 2022

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For years, Emily Ury traversed North Carolina’s coastal roads, studying patches of skeletal trees slain by rising seas that scientists call “ghost forests.” Killed by intruding saltwater along the Atlantic Coast, they are previews of the dire fate other forests face worldwide.

Ury knew that ghost forests were expanding in the region, but only when she began looking down from above using Google Earth did she realize how extensive they were.

“I found so many dead forests,” says Ury, an ecologist at Duke University and co-author of a paper on the rapid deforestation of the North Carolina coast published in 2021 in the journal Ecological Applications. “They were everywhere.”

As the ocean intrudes and saltwater rises, it kills trees and creates these ghost forests—bare trunks, and stumps, ashen tombstones marking a once-thriving coastal ecosystem. In North Carolina, pine, red maple, sweet gum, and bald cypress forests are being replaced by salt marsh. Eventually, that salt marsh will be replaced by open water, a shift that leads to significant and complex costs to the environment and the local economy. The loss of forests will reduce carbon storage, further fueling climate change, and the agriculture industry and timber interests will suffer as saltwater moves inland.

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A ghost forest in Montana. (Getty Images)

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Flies are annoying, especially on warm weekends spent outdoors. They land on us and our food, they buzz in our ears, and some of them bite. Mosquitos are a kind of fly, and they transmit some of the world’s deadliest pathogens. But consider for a minute that you may not really know flies. Or rather, the flies you likely do know — the houseflies, the mosquitos, the gnats — are just a tiny, tiny fraction of an enormous group of insects that is, on the whole, quite wonderful. It also supports our very existence.

No, a fly didn’t write this. Flies do, however, have advocates among humans, and recently, one got to me.

Last fall, I met Emily Hartop, a scientist who studies flies, at a natural history museum in Berlin. A lifelong bug lover, Hartop told me the world is home to hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of fly species. And they fill pretty much every ecological role imaginable. Flies are superb pollinators, shrewd parasites, and exceptional janitors — they literally clean up our shit.

Flies are also anatomical marvels, Hartop said. In addition to a pair of wings, they have special balancing organs called halteres that function like gyroscopes, allowing flies to turn sharp corners, hover, and land upside down. “They’re called flies for a reason,” Hartop said. “They are amazing aerial acrobats.”

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Extreme heat can be dangerous if you’re not prepared. If you don’t live in an area that is ordinarily hot, you might not have air conditioning, so getting your home ready for a heat wave is important to avoid heat-related illness. Here are 5 things you should do to get ready if your area has a blast of hot air on the way.

Insulate your windows and doors

You might be used to wrapping your windows in plastic to keep in heat during the winter, but insulation matters in summer too. To make sure that you’re taking in as little heat from outdoors as possible, you should cover your windows with light-colored drapes, reflective film or insulation, reflective window treatments, or DIY window reflectors.

To make reflectors yourself, you can purchase (or reuse) the shiny type of cold bags that come with a food or grocery delivery. Cut them to fit your window, and hold in place with painter’s tape. If you’re in a pinch, this type of insulation, especially in the sunniest windows, can help keep the temperature down in your home.

Also, check the weatherstripping on windows and doors and replace any that has gotten damaged weatherstripping. If you have older windows, you can also try using a wintertime window insulation kit to seal your windows temporarily (though keep in mind this will bar you from opening them to create a cross breeze overnight or in the mornings, when the air is cooler).

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Photo: Ed Connor (Shutterstock)

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As an Avianca flight approached Kennedy International Airport in New York, a serving cart collision began a legal saga, prompting the question: Is artificial intelligence so smart? Credit…Nicolas Economou/NurPhoto, via Getty Images

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No matter who you are, where you are, or how quickly you’re moving, the laws of physics will appear exactly the same to you as they will to any other observer in the Universe. This concept — that the laws of physics don’t change as you move from one location to another or one moment to the next — is known as the principle of relativity, and it goes all the way back not to Einstein, but even farther: to at least the time of Galileo. If you exert a force on an object, it will accelerate (i.e., change its momentum), and the amount of its acceleration is directly related to the force on the object divided by its mass. In terms of an equation, this is Newton’s famous F = ma: force equals mass times acceleration.

But when we discovered particles that moved close to the speed of light, suddenly a contradiction emerged. If you exert too large of a force on a small mass, and forces cause acceleration, then it should be possible to accelerate a massive object to reach or even exceed the speed of light! This isn’t possible, of course, and it was Einstein’s relativity that gave us a way out. It was commonly explained by what we call “relativistic mass,” or the notion that as you got closer to the speed of light, the mass of an object increased, so the same force would cause a smaller acceleration, preventing you from ever reaching the speed of light. But is this “relativistic mass” interpretation correct? Only kind of. Here’s the science of why.

The first thing it’s vital to understand is that the principle of relativity, no matter how quickly you’re moving or where you’re located, is still always true: the laws of physics really are the same for everyone, regardless of where you’re located or when you’re making that measurement. The thing that Einstein knew (that both Newton and Galileo had no way of knowing) was this: the speed of light in a vacuum must be exactly the same for everyone. This is a tremendous realization that runs counter to our intuition about the world.

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Credit: Jahobr/Nevadawest of Wikimedia Commons/  This moving, zipping star field appears to depict an ultra-relativistic motion through space, extremely close to the speed of light. Under the laws of relativity, you neither reach nor exceed the speed of light if you’re made of matter. You might be able to approach it if you had a large-enough amount of an efficient-enough fuel, but you still need to obey the rules of relativity

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As someone with more than 50 years of experience in both industry and academia who also happens to be a person with autism, managers in charge of DEI at major corporations often invite me to give lectures. These companies range from steel, pharmaceuticals, computers, and consumer products to cattle and livestock handling, transportation, and social media. I always get asked the same basic question from management: What do they need to do to make their workforce more inclusive?

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Illustration by Lalalimola

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Proverbs 18:21

Amplified Bible

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Not long ago, I was preparing to interview Tom Hanks at Symphony Space, a theater on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, for an audience of seven hundred-plus people at The New Yorker Live. Hanks had just published a novel called “The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece,” and he was hitting the road for a while. Symphony Space was the first stop on the tour. Someone from Knopf, his publisher, let me know that I would embarrass Hanks if, in my introduction, I went through the litany of movies he has starred in since the early eighties. In fact, if I had, that would have been the whole evening. The list is long and shimmery. Hanks is that rare thing, a real movie star who has sustained a four-decades-and-counting career. It’s not just that he has won two Oscars in a row (for “Philadelphia” and “Forrest Gump”) or made box-office hits including “Splash,” “Saving Private Ryan,” and Steven Spielberg’s most enjoyable film, “Catch Me If You Can.” He’s also capable of taking on a predictable vehicle, such as the recent feature “A Man Called Otto,” and pumping some life into it while attracting a sizable audience.

What surprised me is the degree to which Hanks, particularly in front of a live crowd, in no way resembles Jimmy Stewart, the laconic Hollywood icon to whom he’s most often, and most lazily, compared. When we met beforehand, then onstage for an hour and a half, and, finally, over a long dinner at a local Greek restaurant, Hanks was about as laconic as Muhammad Ali. Or a hand grenade. He is funny, sarcastic, self-knowing, and a tireless raconteur, particularly about his day job. In our interview, he sometimes answered questions as he might in a more private setting than Symphony Space; far more often, he took some element of the question as a cue for a prolonged, well-polished anecdote, performed at the edge of his seat. Hanks’s novel is all over the place at times, undisciplined and overstuffed, but it contains extended passages and set pieces describing how movies are made that are entirely worth the ticket.

As an editor, I’ve always been frustrated by the degree to which the gatekeepers of the Entertainment Industrial Complex, as Hanks calls it, bar reporters from watching how a film gets made, limiting inquisitive journalists to a few distant glimpses of the process and then a concocted interchange on the official press junkets. And so I began our conversation at Symphony Space, which was recorded for The New Yorker Radio Hour and is published here in edited form, with my parochial complaint and a discussion of how Hanks sees things from inside.

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Photograph by Lloyd Bishop / NBC / Getty 

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