Mercury is the fastest planet in the solar system, racing around the Sun once every 88 Earth days. That is its year. Its day, counted the way we count ours, from one sunrise to the next, is far longer. According to NASA, “one Mercury solar day (one full day-night cycle) equals 176 Earth days,” which is just over two complete Mercury years.

Read that again, because it inverts the usual relationship between a day and a year. On Earth a year holds 365 days. On Mercury a single day holds two years. The Sun would rise, the planet would circle the Sun twice, and only then would the Sun rise again over the same patch of ground.

A day measured two ways

The strangeness comes from the difference between spinning and orbiting, two motions we rarely have to separate because Earth keeps them tidy. A “day” can mean two things. One is how long the planet takes to turn once on its axis against the background stars. The other is how long the Sun takes to return to the same spot in the sky, which depends on the spin and the orbit working together.

Mercury, NASA notes, “spins slowly on its axis and completes one rotation every 59 Earth days.” That is its turn against the stars. But while it turns, it is also sprinting around the Sun every 88 days, and the two motions combine. By the time a given spot on Mercury faces the Sun again, the planet has moved a long way along its orbit, and the spin has to catch up. The net result, the Mercury facts page reports, is a sunrise-to-sunrise day of 176 Earth days.

So Mercury has a short year and a long day, and both statements are true at once because they measure different things. The 88-day figure is the orbit. The 176-day figure is the Sun’s round trip across Mercury’s sky.

The spin that radar caught

For most of the twentieth century, astronomers assumed Mercury kept one face permanently toward the Sun, the way the Moon keeps one face toward Earth. That assumption was wrong, and it took bouncing radio waves off the planet to prove it. In 1965, Gordon Pettengill and Rolf Dyce used the giant Arecibo radio dish in Puerto Rico to make a radar determination of the rotation of Mercury, and found the planet turning once every 59 days, not once per orbit.

The number was a surprise, and an Italian astronomer, Giuseppe Colombo, spotted what it meant. Fifty-nine is almost exactly two-thirds of 88. Mercury was not locked one-to-one with the Sun. It was locked three-to-two: the planet turns three times on its axis for every two trips around the Sun. Astronomers call this a 3:2 spin-orbit resonance, a stable rhythm set up by the Sun’s gravity tugging on a planet whose orbit is unusually stretched.

That resonance is the machinery behind the headline. Three spins per two orbits is the same fact, viewed from the axis instead of the sky, that produces a solar day of two Mercury years.

A sun that rises, stops, and turns back

The resonance does something even stranger to the view from the ground. Mercury’s orbit is, in NASA’s words, “highly eccentric,” a stretched egg rather than a circle, and near its closest approach the planet moves so fast that its orbital motion briefly outruns its spin. For an observer on the surface, NASA describes the consequence directly: “the morning Sun appears to rise briefly, set, and rise again from some parts of the planet’s surface.” The same thing happens in reverse at sunset elsewhere.

The Sun, in other words, does not simply track across Mercury’s sky. In certain places it climbs, halts, slides backward, then resumes, all within a single 176-day day. The long day is not just long. In places it doubles back on itself.

None of this is driven by anything exotic. It is the plain geometry of a fast, lopsided orbit combined with a slow spin held in a two-thirds rhythm, observed and measured rather than inferred.

What a long day does to the ground

A day measured in months is not just a curiosity of the calendar. It shapes the surface. Each patch of Mercury is turned toward the Sun for weeks at a stretch, then away for weeks more. With almost no atmosphere to move heat around or hold it overnight, the temperature swings are enormous. NASA gives daytime highs that “can reach highs of 800°F (430°C)” and nighttime lows that “can dip as low as -290°F (-180°C)” on the same world.

That gap, more than 600 degrees Celsius between noon and the dead of night, is a direct consequence of the slow spin and the missing air. A faster day would even things out, the way Earth’s 24-hour turn keeps our nights from collapsing to those extremes. Mercury’s long day leaves each hemisphere baking or freezing for a punishing stretch before relief comes.

What this does and does not prove

The claim is precise, and the precision matters. “Day” here means the solar day, sunrise to sunrise, which NASA gives as 176 Earth days. Mercury’s rotation against the stars, the sidereal day, is the shorter 59 days. Anyone comparing Mercury’s “day” to its “year” has to say which day they mean. The headline fact, the one longer than two years, is the solar day, and that is the figure NASA states.

“Just over two years” is also exact rather than rounded for effect. Two Mercury years would be 176 Earth days against an 88-day orbit, and NASA’s own phrasing is “just over two years on Mercury.” The relationship is not a tidy coincidence forced into a round number. It is the direct arithmetic of the 3:2 resonance, and it comes out a hair above two because the orbit is 87.97 days, not a flat 88.

What the fact does not show is anything mystical about Mercury. The planet is not frozen with one face to the Sun, as older texts claimed, and it is not tumbling randomly. It sits in one of the most stable, best-measured rhythms in the solar system, first pinned down by radar sixty years ago and confirmed many times since. The wonder is in the geometry, not in any gap in the science.

A clock that keeps its own time

It helps to drop the Earth habit of treating a day as the small unit and a year as the large one. On Mercury the two have swapped scale. The year is the quick beat, 88 days, gone before a single sunrise can repeat. The day is the long one, 176 days, two years wide, with the Sun occasionally pausing and stepping backward across the sky in the middle of it.

Stand on that surface, if anything could, and the ordinary words would mislead you. You would wait through two full years for the morning to come around again.

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If you sat down to eat with a 95-year-old Sardinian shepherd, an 87-year-old Ikarian widow, a 92-year-old Okinawan farmer, and a 100-year-old Costa Rican grandmother all on the same day, the meals would look completely different from one another. The Sardinian would serve you a hearty fava-bean and barley soup. The Ikarian would offer black-eyed peas cooked with wild greens and lemon. The Okinawan would set out a small bowl of miso, made from fermented soybeans, with a side of tofu. The Costa Rican would put down gallo pinto — black beans and rice cooked together over wood fire — at every meal of the day. Four meals, four cultures, four wildly different traditions of cooking and seasoning. One ingredient running through all of them. According to a 2016 peer-reviewed review of the Blue Zones research by Dan Buettner and Sam Skemp in the American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine, beans are the single most consistent dietary feature across every documented longevity-hotspot population on Earth.

The popular Blue Zones literature, drawing on Buettner’s two decades of fieldwork with National Geographic and the National Institute on Aging, estimates that residents of the five longevity hotspots eat approximately one cup of beans per day on average — roughly four to five times the bean consumption of the typical Western adult, whose intake averages closer to a tablespoon or two per day, often hidden inside processed foods rather than featured at the centre of a meal. The specific bean varies by region: black beans dominate in Nicoya, fava beans and chickpeas anchor the Sardinian diet, black-eyed peas and lentils run through Ikarian cooking, soybeans (eaten as tofu, miso, edamame, and natto) are central in Okinawa, and the Seventh-day Adventists of Loma Linda eat substantial quantities of pinto, kidney, white, and black beans as part of their predominantly plant-based diet. The cultural traditions developed independently across thousands of years on four continents. The convergence on beans is striking precisely because it does not appear to be the result of any cross-cultural influence.

What the peer-reviewed evidence shows

The most rigorous peer-reviewed test of the bean-longevity connection was published in 2004 in the Asia Pacific Journal of Clinical Nutrition. According to the paper by Irene Darmadi-Blackberry and colleagues at Monash University in Australia, the research team followed approximately 785 adults aged 70 and older across five different ethnic populations — Greek, Swedish, Japanese, Anglo-Celtic Australian, and a Japanese-Australian sample — for seven years. The participants kept detailed dietary records throughout the study period, and the researchers tracked mortality outcomes against a wide range of dietary and lifestyle variables. The hypothesis was that the Mediterranean dietary pattern, as a whole, would predict survival across all populations. The hypothesis turned out to be partially correct, but the most striking single finding was about one specific component of the diet.

Of all the food groups studied, legume consumption was the strongest single predictor of survival across all five ethnic groups. The effect was substantial and statistically robust: for every additional 20 grams of legumes consumed daily, the risk of death over the seven-year follow-up period decreased by approximately 7 to 8 percent. Twenty grams is, by household measures, roughly two tablespoons of cooked beans — a small portion by any standard. The relationship held across ethnic groups, across baseline health status, across smoking status, and across the other dietary variables the researchers controlled for. Beans were not just associated with longevity in one culture; they were associated with longevity in every culture the team examined.

Why beans might work

The biological mechanisms underlying the legume-longevity connection are now reasonably well-characterised. Beans are unusual among foods in combining several properties that are independently associated with good health outcomes. They are high in plant protein, which provides the amino acids the body needs without the saturated fat and inflammatory compounds that come with most animal protein sources. They are extremely high in soluble fibre, which reduces LDL cholesterol, stabilises blood glucose, and feeds the gut microbiome. They are low in calories per gram, which promotes satiety and weight stability. They are rich in resistant starch, which behaves more like fibre than like sugar in the digestive system. They are high in folate, magnesium, potassium, iron, and zinc, all of which are commonly under-consumed in Western diets.

The combination produces measurable effects on the specific physiological markers that predict longevity. Regular bean consumption is associated with lower blood pressure, lower LDL cholesterol, lower fasting glucose, lower insulin resistance, lower inflammatory markers, and better gut microbial diversity. Each of these individual effects is modest, but the combination of effects across multiple body systems is what gives beans their unusual longevity profile. According to a 2026 Future of Nutrition and Longevity Institute review of Blue Zones research, the populations with the highest bean consumption tend to show the lowest rates of cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, certain cancers, and overall chronic-disease burden — the same diseases that account for the majority of preventable deaths in Western countries.

The methodological caveat

Intellectual honesty requires noting that the broader Blue Zones framework within which the bean finding is most commonly discussed has been challenged in recent years. According to the University College London press release on the 2024 Ig Nobel Prize in Demography, the demographer Saul Justin Newman has argued that many of the alleged supercentenarian populations of the Blue Zones, including Sardinia, Okinawa, and Nicoya, are partly artifacts of poor birth registration and clerical errors rather than evidence of biological longevity. The implications for the broader Blue Zones research programme are still being debated.

What Newman’s critique does not undermine is the Darmadi-Blackberry 2004 finding itself. That study used directly-measured dietary intake and directly-tracked mortality outcomes over seven years, with no reliance on age claims from supercentenarian populations. The legume-mortality association in that paper does not depend on whether anyone in Sardinia really did reach 110 years of age. It depends on whether ordinary 70-year-olds in five different countries lived measurably longer if they ate more beans. The answer, according to the data, was yes — by a margin that compounds substantially over years of consistent intake. The bean finding is, in this sense, one of the most methodologically robust components of the broader Blue Zones literature, holding up even when other parts of the framework face legitimate scientific challenge.

What this means for ordinary eating

The practical translation of the legume research into modern dietary practice is straightforward in principle and surprisingly difficult in practice. A cup of cooked beans contains roughly 200 calories, 15 grams of plant protein, 15 grams of dietary fibre (more than half the daily recommended intake), and substantial amounts of folate, iron, magnesium, and potassium. Replacing a daily serving of meat with a daily serving of beans produces measurable improvements in cardiovascular and metabolic markers within weeks. Doing this consistently across decades, the Darmadi-Blackberry data suggest, produces measurable improvements in life expectancy. The intervention is simple, the food is inexpensive, the cooking is well within the capability of any home kitchen, and the side effects are minimal.

The difficulty is that the modern Western food environment provides essentially no built-in support for routine bean consumption. Beans require either advance planning (soaking dried beans overnight) or some additional cost (purchasing pre-cooked canned beans). Most restaurant menus do not feature them as main courses. Most processed foods do not include them in any meaningful quantity. The Blue Zones populations consume beans daily because their built food environments have evolved around bean-based dishes — gallo pinto in Costa Rica, minestrone in Sardinia, fasolada in Greece, miso soup in Okinawa — that make eating beans the easy default rather than the effortful exception. Reproducing the longevity effect in modern urban contexts requires deliberately reconstructing what Blue Zone populations get for free from the surrounding culture. The data suggest the effort is worth it. The mechanism is well-understood. The food is cheap, widely available, and has been part of the human diet for at least 10,000 years. The only obstacle, in most cases, is the gap between knowing that beans are the most reliable longevity food on Earth and actually putting some into a bowl tonight.

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An ideas that a lot of people have is that well-being declines on a fairly straight line. Health fades, friends are lost, the body slows — and the mood is assumed to follow downward with all of it.

However, a large survey of Americans found something stranger: plotted against age, life satisfaction does not slope downward but bends into a U.

A note before going further: we are writers reading research, not psychologists or clinicians. The work below is observational and cross-sectional, measuring patterns across a population at one moment, not tracking individuals as they age. Population averages are not predictions about any one reader’s life.

The study and what it actually measured

The shape comes from a 2010 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, “A Snapshot of the Age Distribution of Psychological Well-Being in the United States,” by Arthur Stone, Joseph Schwartz, Joan Broderick and Angus Deaton. It drew on a 2008 telephone survey of 340,847 Americans, making it one of the larger datasets brought to the question.

The researchers separated two things people often lump together. One was global well-being, a single life evaluation rated from 0 to 10. The other was hedonic well-being, the texture of the previous day: happiness, but also stress, worry, anger and sadness. The global measure traced the U, high in youth, sinking toward a low point around age 50, then climbing again.

The day-to-day feelings did not move in lockstep, though. Stress and anger fell steadily from young adulthood onward. Worry stayed roughly flat until the early 50s and then dropped away. The curve is really several curves, and they do not all bend at the same place.

Why midlife is where the curve bends down

The low point near 50 is the part of the finding that surprises almost no one who is near it. What is striking is how consistent the dip is. When the economist David Blanchflower re-examined well-being and age across 145 countries, the midlife trough appeared in both developing and wealthy nations, with a nadir near age 50. It seems, the American result was not a local quirk.

Anyone who has watched a midlife stretch arrive as a pile-up of obligations, ageing parents, demanding work, the gap between early hopes and current reality, has felt the territory the curve is describing. The study does not explain the dip so much as locate it.

But what’s more interesting than the dip itself is what the curve does after it.

The late-life recovery that surprises almost everyone

From 50 onwards, well-being recovers. Stone has described the trajectory plainly, saying that “what we found was that in our 20s, we’re at a moderate level of life satisfaction, then it drops down to the lowest levels in our early 50s, and then it starts shooting up through age 80.” He is careful about the exact shape, noting that because the rise overshoots the youthful starting point, “so, it’s not exactly a U, but a slanted backwards J.”

The upturn is contested. The happiness researcher Sonja Lyubomirsky, reacting to the result, called it “that’s really surprising that people in their 80s are happier than in their 70s and 60s. That’s almost shocking, and not consistent with everything I’ve seen.”  Her scepticism is a useful counterweight: one large survey can show a shape without settling why it appears, or whether it holds for everyone.

Perhaps the leading explanation for the rise belongs to the psychologist Laura Carstensen. Her socioemotional selectivity theory proposes that as people sense their time horizons shortening, they shift away from chasing new experiences and toward emotionally meaningful goals and present-moment satisfaction.

Asked why no obvious factor explained the drop in stress, Stone said the team “took variables that we thought might explain the U-shape and drop in stress, and it turns out we couldn’t explain it.” No confounder they tested explained it away. That is not the same as knowing what causes it.

What the U-shape does and does not explain

The survey was cross-sectional, a single snapshot comparing people of different ages at one moment, not the same people followed across their lives. That distinction matters. The 80-year-olds who looked content may differ from today’s 50-year-olds for reasons of generation rather than age. 

What the finding does establish is that the simple story, well-being eroding in a straight line with the body, does not match the data. Stone has put it plainly: “as you get older, things in terms of your mood look better and better.”

The mechanism remains open. If the late-life upturn is real and not an artefact of who happened to be answering the phone in 2008, it points to something about how people adjust as the runway shortens, narrowing attention toward what they already have. The curve shows the adjustment happening. Whether it is age, circumstance, or the particular cohort that lived long enough to be surveyed remains unsettled.

If midlife or later life feels heavy in a way that does not lift, a qualified clinician is the right place to turn — a GP, a psychologist, or a service such as the Samaritans (UK) or the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline (US). A population curve says nothing about any individual’s experience.

The post A survey of over 300,000 Americans found that well-being doesn’t simply fade with age — it bends into a U, high in youth, sinking to a low around 50, then quietly climbing back up into old age, against what many expect appeared first on Space Daily.

The site is called Huseby Klev. It sits on the island of Orust on the western coast of Sweden, about an hour’s drive north of Gothenburg. Approximately ten thousand years ago, when sea levels were higher and the coastline ran further inland, Huseby Klev was a coastal fishing camp at the end of a narrow fjord. The people who lived there were hunter-gatherers, part of the first wave of human populations to settle Scandinavia after the retreat of the Weichsel ice sheet. They were also, by the available evidence, regular chewers of birch bark pitch.

Birch bark pitch is the tar-like black resin produced by heating birch bark in low-oxygen conditions. It hardens at room temperature and becomes pliable when warmed in the mouth, which is what made it useful as glue for the production of stone tools, weapons, and hafted implements. The chewing was likely the practical step in the manufacturing process. The hunter-gatherers of Huseby Klev produced birch tar, chewed it to soften it, used the softened mass as adhesive, and discarded the lumps that were no longer needed.

The discarded lumps preserved more than the chewers could have imagined.

The site and what was found

Huseby Klev was excavated in the early 1990s by a team of Swedish archaeologists. The site preserved a remarkable density of organic material, including human bones, animal bones, fish bones, wooden tools, lithic tools, and approximately ninety separate pieces of masticated birch bark pitch. The exceptional preservation was caused by a layer of marine clay that had sealed the site shortly after it was abandoned, creating what the archaeological team described as a geological time capsule. The clay kept the organic material wet, anaerobic, and protected from the bacterial decomposition that would have destroyed it within decades at most other Mesolithic sites in Europe.

The pitch pieces were of particular interest to the excavators because many of them carried clearly visible tooth marks. Six of the pieces were cast in plaster for forensic analysis. The osteological work on the casts indicated that all six pieces had been chewed by people younger than twenty years of age. Three of the chewers had been children between five and eleven years old. Three had been teenagers. Both male and female adolescents were among the chewers.

In the 1990s, the analytical technology that could recover and sequence ancient DNA from non-bone material did not yet exist. The chewed pitch pieces were carefully stored under the guardianship of the Swedish archaeologist Bengt Nordqvist, with the understanding that future generations of scientists might find uses for them that the excavators could not predict. The wait was approximately thirty years.

What the 2019 study found

In May 2019, a research team led by Natalija Kashuba at the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo, with collaborators at Stockholm University and Uppsala University, published a paper in Communications Biology reporting the successful extraction and sequencing of human DNA from three of the Huseby Klev pitch pieces. The pieces were directly carbon-dated to between 9,540 and 9,880 calibrated years before present, which is approximately 9,700 years ago in everyday language.

The team generated genome-wide data for three individuals from the three pieces, two females and one male. The DNA had survived in sufficient quantity that the team could examine population-level genetic affinities. The three individuals showed close genetic relationships with other Mesolithic Scandinavian hunter-gatherers and with the broader Western Hunter-Gatherer population that had spread across Ice Age Europe. The pitch pieces became, at the time of publication, the oldest sources of human DNA ever recovered from Scandinavia.

The mechanism of preservation, which the Kashuba team examined in some detail, came down to the chemistry of the birch tar itself. Birch bark pitch contains betulin, lupeol, and other terpenoid compounds that have natural antimicrobial properties. When the chewed pitch was discarded, the antimicrobial chemistry of the tar slowed or prevented the bacterial decomposition that would normally destroy DNA within decades. The pitch effectively encapsulated and chemically protected the saliva, cells, and oral microbiome of each individual chewer at the moment the pitch was spat out, and the marine clay sealing the site preserved the protected material for the next ten thousand years.

What had begun, in the early 1990s, as an effort to find conventional Mesolithic artefacts at a Swedish coastal site had ended with the complete genomic reconstruction of three teenagers and children who had lived and chewed at the site approximately a hundred centuries earlier.

What the 2024 follow-up revealed

In January 2024, a second team led by Emrah Kırdök at Mersin University in Turkey, again with Kashuba and Anders Götherström as co-authors, published a follow-up study in Scientific Reports. The 2024 paper used the same three pitch pieces from the 2019 study but applied a different analytical approach. Rather than focusing on the human DNA, the team examined the non-human DNA that had been preserved alongside it. The pitch pieces, on the new analysis, turned out to contain extensive genetic material from the microorganisms that had lived in the chewers’ mouths and from the plants and animals that had recently passed through them.

The diet, on the genetic evidence, was consistent with what would be expected for Mesolithic coastal hunter-gatherers. The Kırdök team identified DNA sequences from red deer, brown trout, mallard duck, European turtle dove, hazelnut, and European crab apple. They also identified DNA from wolf, red fox, and arctic fox, suggesting either that these canids had been hunted for fur and meat or that their remains had been processed near where the pitch was chewed. Most striking, the team identified DNA sequences from mistletoe, a plant which is known from later archaeological contexts to have been used by Mesolithic Europeans to produce poison for arrowheads.

The oral microbiome data was more sobering. The bacterial DNA in the pitch pieces showed substantial overrepresentation of species that are now known to be associated with periodontitis, including Treponema denticola, Porphyromonas gingivalis, Actinomyces johnsonii, and Streptococcus anginosus. The 2024 team applied two independent statistical methods to estimate the probability that the chewers had been suffering from periodontitis. Both methods returned probabilities above 70 per cent. For one sample, the probability of an active periodontitis-like oral microbiome was 84 per cent.

The teenagers, in other words, had bad gums.

What this tells us about Mesolithic life

The combined evidence from the 2019 and 2024 studies produces an unusually detailed picture of three individuals from a population whose lives have been otherwise inaccessible to history. Three teenagers or younger children, living at a coastal fishing camp in what is now western Sweden, ate a diet of red deer, freshwater trout, duck, hazelnuts, and apples. They were involved, at least peripherally, in the processing of fox, wolf, and arctic fox carcasses. They handled mistletoe, which their community may have used to poison arrowheads. They worked with birch bark pitch as part of the production of stone tools and weapons. They had visibly poor oral health, with gum disease that would, in modern clinical practice, prompt urgent dental intervention.

The poor oral health, in the view of the Kırdök team, is consistent with what is known about Mesolithic dental practices more broadly. Hunter-gatherer populations did not have dental care in any modern sense. They used their teeth for tool work, including stripping fibres, softening leather, and shaping bone and antler implements. The wider use of teeth as tools likely increased the bacterial load on the oral microbiome and made periodontitis more common. The teenagers at Huseby Klev were not exceptionally unhealthy by Mesolithic standards. They were typical.

The diet, similarly, is consistent with the archaeological record from the site itself. Animal bones recovered from the Huseby Klev excavations include red deer, brown trout, wolf, fox, and various waterfowl. Plant remains include hazelnut shells and apple cores. The DNA evidence from the chewed pitch confirms, at the level of individual chewers on particular days, what the bone-and-shell archaeology had already established at the level of the broader population.

The broader scientific significance

The Huseby Klev chewed pitch is now one of the strongest sources of Mesolithic human DNA in Europe. The technique that the Kashuba team demonstrated in 2019 has since been applied to other ancient pitch finds. A 2019 study by Theis Jensen and colleagues at the University of Copenhagen, published in Nature Communications, sequenced a complete human genome from a 5,700-year-old piece of chewed birch pitch found at the Syltholm site in southern Denmark. The Danish individual, whom the researchers nicknamed Lola, was a dark-skinned, blue-eyed female who had recently eaten hazelnuts and duck. The implication of both studies, taken together, is that ancient chewed pitch is a reliable and underused source of ancient genetic material that can extend the reach of population genetics into time periods and populations where bone preservation has been poor.

The implication for archaeology generally is more interesting than the implication for any single individual study. For most of the history of archaeogenetics, the recovery of ancient human DNA has depended on the survival of bone and tooth tissue. Bones survive only under certain soil and climate conditions, and many ancient populations are effectively invisible to the modern genetic record because the bones of their dead have decomposed. Chewed pitch survives under different conditions than bone does. It is preserved by anaerobic burial in clay and protected by its own antimicrobial chemistry, which means it can preserve DNA in environments where bone would not. The Mesolithic populations of southern Scandinavia, who left few well-preserved cemeteries, are now reachable through their chewing gum in ways they were not reachable through their burials.

What it means

Three teenagers chewed wads of birch bark pitch at a fishing camp on the western coast of Sweden approximately ten thousand years ago. They were processing the pitch as part of the production of tools or weapons. They were also, at the moment of chewing, recently fed, slightly unwell, and aware of nothing about what the act of chewing would eventually disclose.

Their saliva entered the pitch, was sealed in clay, and lay undisturbed under several metres of sediment for ten thousand years.

It was excavated in the 1990s, stored in a Swedish museum collection, and analysed with technology that did not exist until decades after the excavation. The complete genomes of all three chewers have now been sequenced. Their diet on the day of chewing has been reconstructed from the plant and animal DNA in their mouths. The bacterial signature of their gum disease has been catalogued.

The information density of a discarded wad of Stone Age chewing gum, on the strongest current evidence, is genuinely remarkable. The same is true for the approximately ninety other pitch pieces from the same site that have not yet been analysed.

The chewing was a moment of distraction in a coastal fishing camp ten thousand years ago. The wad was thrown away. The clay closed over it.

It turned out to be the wrong moment to be distracted.

The post Approximately 10,000 years ago, teenagers in what is now western Sweden chewed wads of birch bark pitch and spat them out, and the saliva preserved in the wads contained enough human and microbial DNA that scientists have since sequenced the chewers’ complete genomes, identified the food they had eaten that day, and detected the bacterial signature of their gum disease. appeared first on Space Daily.

Many of us live as though happiness is something earned. Land the job, secure the relationship, hit the income figure, fix the health problem, and contentment will follow. It is a sensible-sounding sequence, and it is the order in which a lot of people arrange their lives, perhaps without even realizing it.

However, a large review of the evidence suggested the sequence may run the other way at least as often as it runs forward.

What follows is journalism about a body of psychology research, not advice. We are not psychologists or clinicians, and the studies discussed here are largely correlational and longitudinal. They describe patterns across populations, not rules that predict what will happen in any one reader’s life.

The conventional view is that success produces happiness. Achieve the thing, feel good about it. That framing is intuitive, and for individual moments it is often true. The question the research raised was the opposite “Does Happiness Lead to Success? ”

The 2005 analysis was published in Psychological Bulletin by Sonja Lyubomirsky, Laura King and Ed Diener and titled The Benefits of Frequent Positive Affect: Does Happiness Lead to Success?

It is one review rather than a settled verdict, and its authors are careful about what correlational data can and cannot prove. Its scope, though, is hard to wave away.

What the review actually found

The review pulled together 225 studies covering more than 275,000 people, drawing on cross-sectional, longitudinal and experimental designs. Across that body of work, the authors concluded that frequent positive moods often come before good outcomes rather than only after them. As Lyubomirsky put it, “Our review provides strong support that happiness, in many cases, leads to successful outcomes, rather than merely following from them.”

“In many cases” is not “always”. The studies establish that happier people are more likely to do well later, which is an association measured over time, not a demonstration that good moods manufacture good outcomes on their own.

What the happiness seems to do is change behaviour upstream of the result. Lyubomirsky described the mechanism plainly: “When people feel happy, they tend to feel confident, optimistic, and energetic and others find them likable and sociable.” A person in that state, the review proposed, approaches work and other people differently, and that difference accumulates.

Three domains where happiness leads

The pattern shows up across the parts of life people tend to care about most. The 2005 review summarised it in one line: happy individuals, the authors wrote, “are more likely than their less happy peers to have fulfilling marriages and relationships, high incomes, superior work performance, community involvement, robust health and even a long life.” This is a difference in odds, not a guarantee.

On work, the finding has held up under scrutiny. A 2018 review by Lisa Walsh, Julia Boehm and Lyubomirsky revisited the career evidence a decade on and concluded that “the evidence continues to persuasively suggest that happiness is correlated with and often precedes career success.” “Correlated with” and “often precedes” leave the door open, so the direction is not closed.

On relationships, one of the more cited data points comes from Diener and Martin Seligman’s 2002 study Very Happy People. They screened 222 undergraduates and compared the consistently happiest tenth with average and unhappy groups. “The very happy people were highly social, and had stronger romantic and other social relationships than less happy groups,” they reported. It is a small, single-sample study of students, best read as a clue rather than a law. The authors noted that strong social ties appeared necessary but not on their own sufficient for happiness.

Why the arrow probably runs both ways

None of this means success has stopped causing happiness. The more careful reading of the literature is probably that the two feed each other. Positive moods seem to help produce good work, and good work in turn lifts mood, something closer to a loop than a one-way street.

The proposed mechanism is itself offered tentatively. Lyubomirsky suggested the link “may be because happy people frequently experience positive moods and these positive moods prompt them to be more likely to work actively toward new goals and build new resources.” That is a hypothesis the data is consistent with, not a process anyone has watched directly.

What this changes, practically

If even part of the directional claim holds, it complicates a common piece of life planning. Treating happiness as the prize at the finish line puts it last in the queue, after the achievements that the same research suggests it may help bring about. The arrow, in this reading, would have you attend to the moods now rather than bank them as a reward for later.

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In May 1972, a worker at a nuclear fuel-processing plant in France ran a routine check on a batch of ore and found a number that should not have been possible. Natural uranium anywhere in the crust, on the Moon, even in meteorites, carries the same fraction of the fissile isotope uranium-235: 0.720 percent. The sample in front of him, traced back to the Oklo deposit in Gabon, read 0.717 percent. It was a tiny gap, but in this field a tiny gap is a scream.

The explanation, once French scientists worked it out, was stranger than a measurement error. Roughly two billion years ago, parts of the Oklo ore body had begun running as a natural nuclear reactor, a self-sustaining fission chain reaction with no human hand involved. It ran, by the best reconstruction, for a few hundred thousand years. The missing uranium-235, around 200 kilograms in one zone alone, had been burned up as fuel, two billion years before anyone could build a reactor on purpose.

Why it could happen then and not now

The reason Oklo is a one-time event in Earth’s known history comes down to a slow clock running inside the rock. Uranium-235 is radioactive and decays about six times faster than the more common uranium-238. So the deeper into the past you look, the richer natural uranium was in its fissile isotope.

Today uranium-235 sits at under 1 percent of natural uranium, far too dilute to sustain a chain reaction on its own. But two billion years ago, around the time the Oklo deposit formed, that figure was roughly 3 percent. That happens to be close to the enrichment level used in many commercial power reactors today. The fuel was already, in effect, reactor grade. It simply needed the right conditions to ignite.

A prediction had been waiting in the literature for this. In 1953 two physicists, George Wetherill and Mark Inghram, suggested that some uranium deposits might once have worked as natural reactors. Shortly afterward, in the mid-1950s, the chemist Paul Kuroda spelled out what spontaneous fission in an ore body would actually require. The uranium vein had to be large enough that escaping neutrons would strike another uranium nucleus before leaving the ore. There had to be enough uranium-235. There had to be a moderator, something to slow the neutrons so they could trigger further fission. And there could not be too much of a neutron-absorbing “poison” like boron to smother the reaction. At Oklo, all four conditions lined up.

Water was the throttle

The moderator at Oklo was ordinary groundwater. Water slows fast neutrons to the gentle speeds at which they most readily split uranium-235, and the saturated ore had plenty of it. That detail turns out to explain not just how the reactor started, but how it kept from destroying itself.

When the chain reaction heated the rock past the boiling point, the groundwater flashed to steam and drove itself out of the reaction zone. With no water to slow the neutrons, the reaction stalled. The rock then cooled, fresh groundwater seeped back in, and fission resumed. The pattern repeats the logic of a geyser, which heats, erupts, refills, and waits.

This is not a guess pieced together from the surrounding geology alone. A team led by Alex Meshik at Washington University in St. Louis read the reactor’s operating schedule out of the rock decades later, by studying the isotopes of xenon trapped in grains of aluminum phosphate within a single fragment of Oklo ore. Because different xenon isotopes form on different timetables after fission, the gas preserved a kind of clock. The team’s model pointed to one reactor switching on for about 30 minutes and off for at least two and a half hours, cycle after cycle.

The numbers it left behind

Across the Oklo and adjacent Okelobondo mines, researchers eventually identified 16 separate zones where this had taken place. The reactors were not violent. The total energy released over the whole episode came to about 15,000 megawatt-years, and the average power output was probably under 100 kilowatts, which the researchers note is roughly enough to run a few dozen toasters.

They also left chemical fingerprints. The fission of uranium-235 produces lighter “daughter” elements, and the abundance of those products in the ore is what first proved, soon after the discovery, that a chain reaction rather than some exotic chemistry had drained the uranium. The reactors even bred more than two tons of plutonium-239 from uranium-238, almost all of which has since decayed away.

What did not happen is as striking as what did. Over hundreds of thousands of years of operation, the self-regulating water cycle meant there was, in the reconstructed record, not a single meltdown or explosion. The deposit handled its own radioactive waste in place, which is partly why repository scientists have studied Oklo so closely as a natural model for storing nuclear waste underground.

What this does and does not prove

It is worth being precise about what Oklo establishes, because the bare phrase “natural nuclear reactor” invites bigger claims than the evidence supports. The fission itself is not in doubt. The depleted uranium-235 and the matching spread of fission products are about as direct as geological evidence gets, and they were confirmed within a few years of 1972.

The finer details are reconstructions, and they carry the uncertainty of any model built from two-billion-year-old rock. The neat “30 minutes on, 2.5 hours off” figure comes from one reactor zone and one analytical approach, the xenon study, not from a stopwatch. The total duration is usually given as hundreds of thousands of years rather than a single confident number, and the average power output is an estimate. These are well-supported inferences, but they are inferences, and careful sources keep the hedges attached.

A second caution concerns reach. Oklo is often invoked in debates about whether the fundamental constants of physics have shifted over cosmic time, since the reactor’s behavior depends on nuclear properties that those constants govern. Different teams have drawn opposite conclusions from the same deposit, with some reading it as evidence of no change and at least one pair of physicists reading it as evidence of a small one. That disagreement is a live research question, not a settled result, and Oklo does not resolve it on its own.

A reactor older than complex life

Set against the human timeline, the strangest thing about Oklo may be simply when it happened. Two billion years ago, Earth’s atmosphere was only beginning to fill with oxygen and life was still single-celled. There were no plants, no animals, nothing that could be called a witness. The reactors ran their long, quiet cycles and shut down for good while the planet was still largely microbial.

When the French traced that 0.003 percentage-point shortfall back to its source, they were not discovering a curiosity so much as reading a message left by deep time. The conditions that made Oklo possible have not returned, because the fuel itself has thinned with age. Whether other natural reactors once flickered into existence elsewhere, and left fainter traces, is a question still open to anyone willing to go looking for the right wisps of gas.

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In September 1994, a New South Wales National Parks ranger named David Noble lowered himself on a rope into a narrow sandstone gorge inside Wollemi National Park, about 150 kilometres northwest of Sydney, and walked through a stand of trees whose ancestors had shed pollen over the heads of dinosaurs. The trees were tall, knobbly-barked, fern-like in the canopy. Noble snapped off a small branch, took it home, and a few weeks later botanists at the Royal Botanic Gardens confirmed what he had found: a living member of a conifer lineage known almost entirely from fossils, presumed to have died out long ago.

The species was named Wollemia nobilis — Wollemi for the park, nobilis for the ranger.

Fewer than 100 mature wild trees are known to exist. They all grow in a single canyon system whose precise location Australian authorities keep secret, partly to keep collectors out and partly to keep their boots, and the fungal spores on them, away from the roots.

A tree that was supposed to be a fossil

Botanists had seen the Wollemi pine before 1994 — just not alive. Its distinctive pollen and leaf imprints had been catalogued from rocks across what was once the supercontinent Gondwana, in sediments reaching back more than 90 million years to the Cretaceous. The lineage did not vanish with the dinosaurs. Its pollen kept appearing in the record for tens of millions of years after the asteroid impact, thinning out only in the last several million years. The youngest known fossils are about two million years old. After that the record goes silent — and that silence was why everyone assumed the tree was gone.

Then a park ranger abseiled into a slot canyon on a long weekend.

The closest living relatives of the Wollemi pine sit in the family Araucariaceae — the same group that contains the monkey puzzle tree of Chile and the Norfolk Island pine that turns up in shopping-centre planters. Genetic work has since placed Wollemia on its own branch, the surviving twig of a lineage that scientists describe as the botanical equivalent of finding a small dinosaur still alive in a paddock.

Carrick Chambers, then director of the Royal Botanic Gardens in Sydney, called it the botanical find of the century. He was not exaggerating for the press.

What the grove actually looks like

The canyon is narrow, deep, and damp. Sandstone walls funnel cool air and trap moisture, creating a microclimate that has barely changed since the last glacial maximum. Inside, the pines grow up to about 40 metres, roughly the height of a 12-storey building. The bark is dark and bubbled, often described as looking like Coco Pops welded together. The branches sweep down, then up, in a candelabra shape.

The adult trees produce two kinds of cone — male and female — on the same individual, but the species mostly reproduces by coppicing: sending up multiple trunks from a single root system. Many of the trees in the grove are not separate individuals at all. They are stems sharing one ancient genetic identity, replaying itself for tens of thousands of years.

That sameness is part of what makes the population so fragile. Genetic surveys of the wild stand have repeatedly found almost no variation between individuals. When researchers decoded the species’ genome — work published in a 2023 study — they confirmed extremely low genetic diversity, the mark of a population squeezed through a severe bottleneck and reduced to something close to a stand of clones. A single pathogen tuned to that genotype could take all of them.

Those clonal roots may be wired together below ground. Forest ecologist Suzanne Simard at the University of British Columbia has spent decades documenting how trees are linked by mycorrhizal fungi — threadlike networks that shuttle carbon, nitrogen and water between individuals. In one mapped stand, every tree in a 30-by-30-metre plot was connected to every other, with an estimated 250 to 300 individuals sharing a single network. Australian soils are far poorer in nutrients than the North American forests where most of that work was done, and researchers including Ian Anderson at Western Sydney University suspect such networks matter even more here. Beneath a grove of near-identical clonal pines, the fungal web may have been continuous for as long as the trees themselves.

The pathogen problem

The pathogen everyone worries about is Phytophthora cinnamomi, a water mould that attacks plant roots and is already widespread in Australian bushland. It travels in mud, on boots, on tyres, in the runoff after rain. Wollemi pines in cultivation have shown they are vulnerable to it. If it reaches the wild grove, the species in the wild could be functionally over within a generation.

This is the practical reason the coordinates are guarded. Park rangers and approved researchers visit on tightly controlled trips, decontaminating gear before entry. Bushwalkers who stumble across the area are asked to leave without photographing landmarks. In 2005, a group of unauthorised visitors was found to have entered the canyon; the response from New South Wales authorities was closer to that of a counter-intelligence service than a parks department.

The 2019–2020 Australian bushfires came within metres of the grove. A specialist firefighting operation, kept quiet until after the season, used helicopters to water-bomb the canyon rim and lowered crews in to set up irrigation lines. Most of the wild trees survived. A few were scorched. None of the adults were lost.

How a tree drops out of the record

The honest answer to how it persisted is that nobody knows exactly. The leading explanation is that the Wollemi canyon is what ecologists call a refugium — a pocket of stable conditions that survived while the climate around it changed beyond recognition. When Australia drifted north and dried out, when the inland seas retreated, when fire regimes shifted, the canyon held on to its cool, wet, sheltered microclimate. Generation after generation of pines coppiced from the same roots.

Related living fossils have similar stories. The dawn redwood, Metasequoia glyptostroboides, was known from fossils across the Northern Hemisphere before living trees were found in a remote valley in China in the 1940s — the same shape of story, a deep refuge and a stable climate sheltering a remnant population small enough to escape notice but large enough to keep reproducing.

The fossil record, in this sense, is a measurement instrument with limited resolution. A few hundred trees in one canyon, shedding pollen that does not travel far, will barely register. The Wollemi pine was there all along. The record simply stopped picking it up.

From a slot canyon to a million backyards

Once the species was confirmed, the Royal Botanic Gardens in Sydney began propagating cuttings. The decision was strategic: the more Wollemi pines existed outside the wild grove, the harder it would be for any single event to eliminate the species. Seedlings were distributed to botanic gardens around the world — Kew in London, the Australian National Arboretum in Canberra, and, more recently, gardens across the United Kingdom, Ireland, Europe and the United States.

Then the cultivated trees reached the public. The first were sold at auction through Sotheby’s in 2005, with commercial release following in 2006. A tree that science had known only from fossils could now be ordered with a credit card.

Hundreds of thousands of Wollemi pines now exist in cultivation, on six continents, descended from a few cuttings taken from a canyon almost nobody has been allowed to visit.

In strict botanical terms, the species is no longer at risk of disappearing entirely. In the wild, it remains critically endangered.

Why the discovery still matters

The Wollemi pine sits in a small category of finds that should temper how confidently extinction is ever declared. A bdelloid rotifer thawed from Siberian permafrost after 24,000 years and resumed eating and reproducing, as covered in an earlier Space Daily piece on suspended animation. The coelacanth, last recorded in the fossil record around 66 million years ago, turned up in a South African fishing net in 1938. Each case points the same way: the fossil record samples the past, it does not catalogue it.

What the Wollemi pine adds is a sense of how contingent that survival can be. It can hinge on something as small as a single canyon staying wet through an ice age, or a ranger choosing one weekend to rappel into one specific gorge instead of the next one over.

The grove sits roughly 150 kilometres from a city of more than five million people. Commercial flights cross above it every few minutes. The trees inside it belong to a lineage older than Tyrannosaurus rex, and they have spent the entire span of human history quietly coppicing from the same root systems, in a canyon whose coordinates almost nobody is allowed to write down.

On any given afternoon, the only sound in there is wind moving through needles that look almost exactly like the imprints in 90-million-year-old rock.

The post In 1994, a park ranger rappelling into a sandstone canyon 150 kilometres from Sydney found a living stand of trees known until then only from 90-million-year-old fossils and presumed long extinct, and fewer than 100 wild Wollemi pines still exist in a grove whose coordinates the Australian government keeps classified. appeared first on Space Daily.

You receive an email from someone you know. The subject line reads, simply, “ILOVEYOU.” The attachment is called LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU.txt.vbs — though most email clients in May 2000 hid the .vbs file extension by default, so what you see is just LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU.txt, an apparently harmless text file from a colleague or family member who, on this particular Thursday morning, has decided to send you a note titled with the three most universally recognised words in the English language. You click. The text file opens. Nothing visible happens. But behind the screen, the Visual Basic Script you have just executed is now opening your Microsoft Outlook address book, sending an identical copy of itself to every person you have ever exchanged email with, overwriting the JPEG, music, and document files on your hard drive with copies of its own code, and attempting to steal any internet passwords stored on your computer to send back to an email address registered in the Philippines.

Within hours, the virus reached email servers at major corporations, government agencies, and military installations across North America, Europe, and Asia. According to CNN Business’s retrospective on the outbreak twenty years later, the ILOVEYOU worm was the fastest-spreading piece of malware in human history at the time of its release. It moved approximately 15 times faster than the Melissa virus, which had been the previous record-holder in 1999. The US Pentagon shut down its external email systems to contain the spread. The CIA did the same. The British Parliament took its email offline for several hours. Major corporations across the world disconnected employees from email networks until they could clear the infection. The estimated total damage, calculated from lost productivity, data loss, and remediation costs, eventually reached approximately $10 billion globally — making ILOVEYOU, by some measures, the most expensive single piece of malware of its era.

What the virus actually did

The technical sophistication of the ILOVEYOU worm was, by modern standards, modest. The entire code was 10.31 kilobytes — small enough to fit in a single email attachment without any compression. It was written in Visual Basic Script, a relatively simple language designed for system administration tasks. It used no novel attack vectors, no zero-day vulnerabilities, no advanced obfuscation. The single feature that made it work was social engineering: an email with the subject line “ILOVEYOU,” apparently from someone the recipient knew, was sufficiently irresistible to overcome the cautious instincts that might have prevented victims from opening less personally-charged attachments. The author had correctly identified that in the late 1990s and 2000, the cultural script of “love letter from a friend” was strong enough to bypass essentially all of the rudimentary security awareness that email users had built up against more obviously suspicious messages.

Once activated, the worm performed two operations in parallel. The first was reproductive: it accessed the victim’s Microsoft Outlook address book and sent an identical copy of itself to every contact listed there, with the original recipient’s name and address as the sender — meaning that the second wave of infections arrived from someone the new victim actually knew, dramatically increasing the probability that the attachment would be opened. The second was destructive: it scanned the victim’s hard drive for image, video, and document files of certain types and overwrote them with copies of its own code, effectively destroying the original files. It also installed a hidden program called WIN-BUGSFIX.EXE that attempted to harvest internet account passwords and send them to an email address registered in the Philippines.

How the author was found

The investigation that followed was, by the standards of subsequent cybercrime investigations, remarkably fast. According to the Wikipedia reference on the ILOVEYOU outbreak, the FBI, in collaboration with the National Bureau of Investigation in the Philippines, traced the stolen passwords back to the email address in the worm’s code. The email address was registered to an apartment in the Sampaloc district of Manila. The apartment was occupied by the brother of a computer science student named Onel de Guzman, who attended AMA Computer College, a private university in the Filipino capital. Police searches of the apartment recovered computer equipment, draft code, and a rejected undergraduate thesis paper in which de Guzman had proposed creating a program that would steal internet passwords from neighbourhood users so that he could access the internet without paying. The thesis had been rejected by his professors on ethical grounds, and de Guzman had subsequently dropped out of the university. He had then written the ILOVEYOU worm and released it on 4 May 2000.

De Guzman appeared at a hastily-arranged press conference in Manila on 11 May 2000, wearing a striped shirt and dark Matrix-style sunglasses, with a towel partially covering his face. He spoke in halting English (later admitting he had been instructed by his lawyer to pretend he spoke less English than he actually did) and answered questions only briefly. When asked directly whether he had released the virus, he replied that he “possibly” had, and that he could not rule out having released it by accident. He was 23 years old at the time of the press conference and would turn 24 later in 2000.

Why he was never prosecuted

The legal situation that emerged in the weeks after the press conference was one of the more unusual aspects of the entire affair. According to the Computer Weekly long-form profile based on Geoff White’s investigative reporting for his book Crime Dot Com, the Philippines in May 2000 had no law specifically criminalising the creation or release of computer malware. The country had laws against fraud, theft, and various other property crimes, but the legal definitions of those crimes did not clearly extend to actions taken entirely through computer networks. Filipino prosecutors initially charged de Guzman under existing fraud and credit card theft statutes, but the charges were dropped by the Philippine Department of Justice in August 2000 on the grounds that the existing laws did not apply to the conduct in question, and that prosecuting under inapplicable laws would be unconstitutional.

The Philippines did pass the E-Commerce Act of 2000 (Republic Act No. 8792) later that year, partly in response to the ILOVEYOU outbreak. The new law criminalised hacking, the creation of malware, and several related computer crimes. But Philippine constitutional law prohibits retroactive application of criminal statutes. The new law could be applied to anyone who released malware after its passage, but it could not be used against de Guzman for conduct that had been technically legal at the time he committed it. The Filipino legal system, in other words, was forced to acknowledge that the author of what was at the time the most economically destructive piece of software ever created had not, technically speaking, broken any Filipino law. He was released. The case was closed.

What he is doing now

Onel de Guzman essentially disappeared from public view after 2000. Various online rumours over the following two decades placed him in Germany, Austria, the United States, or working for Microsoft on a generous contract that was never publicly disclosed. None of the rumours turned out to be true. According to BBC News’s coverage of Geoff White’s tracking down of de Guzman in early 2020, after months of searching, White was eventually directed to a small phone repair booth in a shopping mall in Manila. The booth was cramped, messy, and located at the back of the building. White waited several hours for de Guzman to arrive at the stall. When he did, the journalist recognised him immediately by his distinctive facial features. De Guzman was 44 years old, was working alone repairing mobile phones for walk-in customers, and had not given a public interview since 2000.

De Guzman acknowledged authorship of the ILOVEYOU worm to White in their first conversation. He explained that his original intention had been to steal internet passwords so that he and other Filipinos in similar economic circumstances could access the internet without paying the per-minute charges that dial-up service then required. He said he had not anticipated that the virus would spread to the United States or Europe, that he had not intended the destructive file-overwriting behaviour to operate on machines outside the Philippines, and that he had been horrified by the global scale of the damage once he understood what had happened. He had spent the intervening twenty years quietly, mostly in Manila, working at a series of small technical jobs.

The phone repair booth was his current source of income. He was, by every indication, an ordinary middle-aged Filipino man with a complicated past and no public profile. The booth has no signage indicating its proprietor’s identity. Most of the customers who come in for a screen replacement or a battery swap have no idea who is repairing their phone. The author of one of the most consequential pieces of malware in the history of computing now charges, by White’s account, the equivalent of a few US dollars per repair, and asks his customers not to share his location with strangers.

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We are not clinicians. This article reports on survey data about teen attitudes toward social media; it is not medical or psychological advice. If you have concerns about a teenager’s mental health, please speak with a qualified professional.

Two numbers  sit oddly next to each other. Pew Research Center found that 40% of US teens say they are online almost constantly and that 48% of teens say social media has a mostly negative effect on people their age.

Reading the second number as a sign teens are about to log off is tempting, and reading the first as proof they never will is just as easy. Neither holds up, and the gap between them is where the more interesting question sits.

What the data shows

Start with the time online. The share of teens who say they are online almost constantly has almost doubled since 2014-15, from 24% to 40%. Daily use is close to universal: 97% of teens say they go online every day. Whatever teens think of social media, almost none of them are off it.

Then the verdict. The 48% who call social media mostly negative for their peers is up sharply from 32% in 2022, a 16-point jump in two years. Over the same stretch, the share calling its effect on peers mostly positive fell to 11%, down from 24%.

Why teens might be the sharpest critics of their own feeds

The data complicates the easy narrative. While 48% see social media as mostly negative for teens in general, only 14% say it negatively affects them personally. A clear majority, 58%, say the effect on themselves is neither positive nor negative. Teens, it seems, are far readier to diagnose harm in their peers than in their own scrolling.

That gap between “it’s bad for them” and “it’s fine for me” has two plausible readings. It may reflect a genuine difference, or it may be the same self-serving bias adults show when rating other people’s screen habits as worse than their own. 

The perceptions are still vivid. One teen girl told Pew that on social media, “the people they see on social media, it makes them think they have to look and be like them or they won’t be liked.” Another said “everyone expects teens to have it all figured out by the time we get out of high school.” Keep in mind that these are individual voices, not population findings.

Among teens who were at least somewhat concerned about teen mental health, only 22% named social media as the main negative factor, against 44% of parents.

The same teens also report real benefits: 74% say what they see on social media makes them feel more connected to their friends’ lives.

What the shift since 2022 signals

The clearest movement in the data is not about behaviour but about attitude. “Still, teens are growing more wary of social media for their peers,” the report’s authors write, tying that wariness to the rise from 32% to 48%. The scepticism is spreading even as the screens stay on.

There are early hints it may be edging into action. The share of teens who say they spend too much time on social media climbed to 45%, up from 36% in 2022. And 44% say they have cut back on social media use, with an identical share saying the same about their smartphones.

What the survey cannot tell us is whether any of this lasts. Saying you have cut back and actually cutting back are different things, and self-reported restraint has a way of softening once a phone is back in hand.

Teens are using social media more than any cohort before them and judging it more harshly than they did two years ago. Whether that growing wariness reshapes how they spend their hours, or simply becomes a thing they believe while scrolling anyway, is what the next round of fieldwork will have to settle.

If you or a teenager you know is struggling, support is available. In the US, the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline can be reached by call or text at 988, or via chat at 988lifeline.org. A paediatrician, school counsellor, or licensed therapist is a good first point of contact for concerns about a young person’s mental health.

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Sometime around midday on April 20, 2021, a microwave-sized device on Mars finished its first hour of work and reported back to its operators at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It had produced 5.4 grams of breathable oxygen, enough for an astronaut to breathe for about ten minutes. The machine, called MOXIE, was the first device ever to manufacture air on the surface of another planet. By the time it shut down for the final time on August 7, 2023, it had run sixteen times and produced a cumulative 122 grams of oxygen — roughly what a small dog breathes in ten hours.

This is a very small amount of oxygen. It is also, depending on how you look at it, one of the most consequential 122 grams in the history of space exploration. The reason is that MOXIE was never meant to keep anyone alive. It was a proof of concept for a much larger machine that does not yet exist, and the question its operators were trying to answer was not whether a human could breathe its output, but whether the principle worked at all under Martian conditions. The principle worked. What follows from that is genuinely large, and considerably more uncertain than the popular framing of the story tends to suggest.

What MOXIE is and what it did

MOXIE, formally the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment, was a payload aboard NASA’s Perseverance rover, which landed on Mars on February 18, 2021. It was built by a team led by Michael Hecht at MIT’s Haystack Observatory, with Jeffrey Hoffman of MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics as deputy principal investigator, in partnership with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The instrument was described in detail in a 2021 pre-flight paper by Michael Hecht, Jeffrey Hoffman, Donald Rapp and colleagues in Space Science Reviews. The device measured about 24 by 24 by 31 centimeters, weighed 15 kilograms on Earth, and drew roughly 300 watts during operation. NASA officially describes it as the size of a microwave oven, although the popular shorthand has sometimes called it toaster-sized. Its design specifications, set out in the 2021 paper, called for producing at least 6 grams of oxygen per hour at greater than 98 percent purity, sustained across at least ten operational cycles.

The principle MOXIE was designed to test is called in-situ resource utilization, or ISRU: the idea that future Mars missions could manufacture some of what they need from materials already present on the planet, rather than carrying everything from Earth. The Martian atmosphere is about 95 percent carbon dioxide, which is, by mass, mostly oxygen. The chemistry to separate the two is well understood on Earth. What had never been demonstrated was whether the process would work reliably on the surface of Mars, at the relevant atmospheric pressures and temperatures, with the kind of equipment that could survive launch, landing, and the operational environment of a rover.

The first peer-reviewed report on the results, Jeffrey Hoffman, Michael Hecht, Donald Rapp and colleagues’ 2022 paper in Science Advances, reported on the first seven runs through the end of 2021. MOXIE produced oxygen at six grams per hour, hitting its design target, across daytime and nighttime operations and through different Martian seasons. The instrument was then pushed harder in subsequent runs. According to NASA’s final-mission announcement, MOXIE eventually reached a peak production rate of 12 grams per hour at a purity of 98 percent or better, twice the original design specification.

How it worked

The process is called solid oxide electrolysis. MOXIE drew Martian atmosphere through a dust-trapping filter, compressed it with a scroll pump, and heated it to roughly 800 degrees Celsius. The heated gas was then passed through a ceramic cell containing a scandia-stabilized zirconia electrolyte, where an applied electric current split carbon dioxide molecules into carbon monoxide and oxygen ions. The oxygen ions passed through the ceramic and recombined as molecular oxygen on the other side, where the instrument measured the purity and quantity before releasing the gas back into the Martian atmosphere. The carbon monoxide byproduct was also released.

None of the chemistry involved is novel. Solid oxide electrolysis cells have been operated on Earth for decades. What MOXIE proved was that the process could be made compact enough, robust enough, and energy-efficient enough to operate on Mars without breaking, while drawing power from a small rover and surviving the cold, the dust, and the temperature swings of a full Martian year.

The gap between proof of concept and a Mars return mission

The popular framing of MOXIE’s success often skips lightly over the scale of what would be required for the technology to actually bring astronauts home from Mars. The numbers are worth being specific about.

Hecht, in interviews around the time of the first run in 2021, gave the following figures. Getting four astronauts off the Martian surface aboard a return vehicle would require approximately seven metric tons of methane rocket fuel and roughly 25 metric tons of liquid oxygen to burn it with. Sustaining the same four astronauts for a year on the surface would require approximately one additional metric ton of breathable oxygen. MOXIE, at its peak rate of 12 grams per hour, would need to run continuously for approximately 2 million hours, or more than 230 years, to produce the rocket-fuel oxygen alone. The breathing oxygen would take roughly another nine and a half years at the same rate.

The actual plan, were such a mission to proceed, would involve sending a substantially larger ISRU plant to Mars ahead of the crew. A 2023 paper by Hoffman, Eric Hinterman, Hecht, Rapp and Joseph Hartvigsen in Acta Astronautica, summarizing eighteen months of MOXIE operations alongside an optimization study for a human-scale system, sets out the engineering parameters for what the MOXIE team calls “Big MOXIE.” The study targets the oxygen requirements for a six-person Mars Ascent Vehicle and finds that a viable human-scale system would need to produce oxygen at roughly two to three kilograms per hour and would draw on the order of 25 to 30 kilowatts of continuous power, about two orders of magnitude more demanding than the prototype on Perseverance. The system would need to begin operating more than a year before the astronauts arrived, producing oxygen continuously throughout that period. No such system has yet been built, and no firm timeline exists for building one. What MOXIE established is that the chemistry works in the conditions it would have to work in. The engineering of a system at this scale, capable of operating unattended for more than a year on the Martian surface, is a separate problem, and a large one.

What this proves, narrowly

What MOXIE proves is narrow and important. It proves that solid oxide electrolysis works reliably on Mars, across the range of conditions a future ISRU plant would encounter. It proves that the technology degrades gracefully rather than catastrophically over a Martian year, with the operators observing only a small increase in the internal resistance of the cell across all sixteen runs. It proves that the engineering challenges of operating sensitive electrochemistry inside a rover, with limited power and through extreme thermal cycling, are tractable. And it proves the broader principle that an interplanetary mission can manufacture a critical consumable from local materials rather than carrying it from Earth, which is the foundational assumption of every serious proposal for sustained human presence on Mars.

It does not prove that astronauts will reach Mars, or return from it. It does not prove that a full-scale ISRU plant can be built, launched, landed, deployed, and operated reliably for the year-plus that would be required before a crew arrived. It does not solve the much larger problems of radiation exposure during transit, of long-duration life support, of the political and budgetary commitments that a crewed Mars mission would require, or of the medical and psychological feasibility of keeping humans alive on the planet for the length of stay a return-window mission would impose. The popular framing in which MOXIE has “opened the door” to a Mars return is true in the technical sense that one specific technical obstacle, previously theoretical, has now been demonstrated in operational conditions. The door is large. MOXIE has unlocked one of the locks on it.

What is worth taking from the result

For all the careful narrowing above, the result is still genuinely significant, and worth saying so plainly. Until April 20, 2021, no human-made device had ever produced a useful consumable from materials found on another planet. The principle that interplanetary missions could partly support themselves, rather than carrying everything from Earth, had been a design assumption in mission proposals for decades and a demonstrated capability in zero cases. It is now a demonstrated capability in one. The case for in-situ resource utilization as a serious component of future Mars planning is much stronger after MOXIE than it was before, because the alternative scenario, in which the underlying chemistry would have proven uncooperative under Martian conditions, has been ruled out.

The 122 grams of oxygen MOXIE produced over its lifetime will not bring anyone home. The technology it tested, scaled up by two orders of magnitude and operated continuously for years, plausibly could, if the larger system is built and the larger mission is funded. Both of those remain open questions. What is no longer an open question is whether the underlying chemistry works on Mars. It does, and the first proof of that was 5.4 grams of breathable oxygen, produced in the spring of 2021, by a microwave-sized device on a rover most of the people on Earth will never see.

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