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(I’d love to blame science, but let’s face it, I’m the one choosing what I write about.)

It’s been over a week since I last sent something your way (below) - and on reflection, after receiving a concerned message from a reader, I realise that ending my last newsletter with a dramatic walk into the Scottish sea and then going silent…well, that might have conveyed a slightly different message than the one I intended?

To be clear, then: I haven’t just spent the last week in hypothermic shock, and I am still working on the second part of that essay, because I kept discovering new science papers to read - and then I found a whole book, which really messed everything up.

In the meantime, here in Europe we’re heading into another record-breaking heatwave, and while this part of the world isn’t known for embracing indoor cooling of all kinds, it’s clearly going to have to learn fast (despite it apparently being something of a taboo in some places).

Since that means our near-future energy requirements are only going to rise, here are three encouraging developments that could help with that.

A Magnificent Swiss Roll

This month, Switzerland is once again in the news for taking a look at stuff and saying, “hmmm okay, but - how about we did this instead?”

First, a question I’d not considered until now: are railways a waste of good land?

I don’t mean the specific parts that hold trains up (I’m all for those, especially the ones that allow trains to run overnight) - but everything around them. Whenever I encounter train tracks when out walking, I’m struck by just how much space they use, and how barren the results are - a vast, ugly scrape of metal, concrete and gravel, all to serve that relatively tiny strip of tracks in the middle. Is that really all that could be done here?

In a commendable bit of rethinking, Swiss startup Sun-Ways took a 100-metre stretch of rail track in western Switzerland, and paved the space between the rails with easily maintained photovoltaic cells!

The result: despite a month’s shutdown due to bad weather and technical upgrades, these panels have still produced more than 16,000 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity since May 20, 2025 - enough to power 3 or 4 households, all from a single stretch of track the length of a football field.

Scaling this up: Switzerland has around 5,300 kilometres (just under 3,300 miles) of rail lines, meaning that’s potentially up to one billion kWh of solar energy per year, enough for 300,000 households, if mass rollout could be made practical.

A lovely detail here: what about dust settling on the panels until their output is nobbled, which has been the bane of many a sun-powered Mars Rover? The answer is the Earth equivalent of a lucky Martian dust devil - the gust of wind accompanying the passage of the train! Very neat.

This was only a trial, therefore a long way from making the whole thing as affordable as it needs to be, but French and Italian railway companies have already expressed interest in seeing what’s possible elsewhere. And hey, what about the UK’s 14,700 kilometres (9,100-ish miles) of rail track? It’s fun to think.

Meanwhile, in the words of this understandably excitable headline in The Pulse a few days ago, “Switzerland bolted 5,000 solar panels onto a dam wall 8,000 feet up in the freezing Alps where everyone said solar made no sense, and the plant now makes three times more winter power than any farm down in the valleys.”

(More precisely, it’s being managed by the energy company Axpo, Switzerland’s largest supplier of renewable energy, and it’s generating about 3.3 million kilowatt hours a year, enough for 700 households.)

All this is, in a sense, upcycling existing land. It’s already in place, there’s comparatively little disruption in augmenting it this way, and presumably there’d be far fewer planning permissions needed before work can begin, making the process a lot quicker.

Where else would this work? Urban developers of the future: please scan through the Typology Of New Public Sites, seriously reconsider all those ugly concrete something-somethings we can’t name and therefore barely even see as we walk around our towns and cities, and let your imaginations go wild.

Solar Finds Even More Ways

Not only is solar power rolling out everywhere at an astonishing rate (including in America, and particularly the plug-in kind), the tech itself is still improving quicker than expected.

Most commercially available solar panels are currently in the 20-25% efficiency range - that is, converting around a quarter of the energy in the sunlight hitting it into electrical power. The more efficient the panel, the more useful it becomes to folk in places that get relatively little sunshine, like up here in Scotland, and the better it works all year round.

A few decades ago, when I was first starting to get my head around how solar energy worked, I read a major newspaper article that stated with absolute certainty that solar panels will never, ever pass 31% efficiency, because of something called the Shockley-Queisser Limit.

This writer then used a line that’s forever seared into my brain because of how it affected me at the time: “Because of [this limit], we will never make solar panels efficient enough to power everyday life.”

I found this enormously depressing. Really? But - but science fiction has been telling me that solar energy is going to change the world! Are you saying that future can’t happen now?

In fact, the Shockley-Queisser Limit indeed a real thing, first calculated in 1961! It has not been disproven and seems unlikely to be. In this regard, the author was correct - and he was also yet dead wrong. The physics principle seems to be correct, but his conclusion failed to see how engineering could find a way round it to achieve higher module efficiencies.

This is more or less why I don’t trust performative certainty when I see it - even though it seems most online audiences instinctively crave it, especially in these hyper-polarised times! Want to get a ton of attention? Say something is utterly impossible in your shoutiest voice, and stand back while the traffic roars in!

(Meanwhile, good science continues to get things done in a state of rigorous uncertainty - which is exactly the kind of statement that will get you ridiculed from one end of X/Twitter to another by folk who are determined to believe some really outrageous things. Performative certainty is charismatic, it prints money and it’s often proven deeply stupid, given enough time. It’s a real problem in science communication, and I intend to have a go at writing about it soon.)

Instead, it seems we’re now in a time when, under lab conditions and using concentrated sunlight, a solar cell can achieve a staggering 47.6% efficiency. Nearly half!

But that’s in idealised conditions - what about on the roof of the average house?

This week, Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems (which set that 47.6% record in 2022), announced they’d developed a new panel for commercial use with an efficiency of 34.2%, and a new way of deploying panels in a shingle-like pattern that ensures no cell is caught in the shade of another.

Where next for solar innovation? I’m keeping my hopes alive for a ultra-lightweight, fold-out panel I can use while camping that will charge all my gadgets (laptop included) in maybe an hour to 90 minutes. Once that happens, I might never come back indoors ever again. See you out there.

Dirty Bottles Mean Clean Burps

Plastic bottles are cheap, convenient and thoroughly awful. It hurts my soul every time I realise it’s time to chuck any into my recycling bin, because I know the majority will be burnt (!!!) and the remainder either thrown in a landfill, send to another country or - at last, but to a horrifyingly small extent - recycled into new plastic.

As I wrote here, glass really should become the new plastic - but in a way where food packaging is greatly reduced as a whole, so there’s a hell of a lot less waste. But in the meantime - well, here we are, with all of this waste plastic, fouling our environment and turning into bizarre new types of geology.

Surely there’s a better way to do this? (Hey, has anyone asked the Swiss?)

One spectacular new answer from researchers at the University of Cambridge that sounds like science fiction: you pop it in a device that uses sunlight to turn waste plastic into hydrogen!

This isn’t just theory. The team has built a lab-sized prototype, they’ve tested it in natural sunlight, and it worked. They used chopped up polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic bottles, and it gobbled them right up:

“What surprised me was, after all the optimisation, just how simple it is,” said [the paper’s co-first author Ariffin Bin Mohamad Annuar]. “We just have this huge panel, we spray our catalyst on it, put it into our solution, put it under the sun, and it produces hydrogen and other valuable chemicals just from plastic waste. It’s just simple and scalable.”

It’s a long way from becoming efficient and affordable enough to be rolled out at scale - but the fact it’s even possible is mind-blowing. Could it also become a way to do something with all that plastic currently in the ground? Fingers crossed.

In short: as usual, there’s an awful lot going on in the world. But some of it is from a future we actually want (and hopefully deserve), maybe arriving right in the nick of time.

On we go, then.

Images: Alison Pang; Teslariu Mihai; Markus Spiske.

Hello! This is Everything Is Amazing - and based on today’s edition, who knows what it is?

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This one is best listened to - I must have aged myself ten years recording it for you. Nevertheless, there’s a transcript below.

Oh, hello.

The other day, when it was 28 degrees Celsius outside here in western Scotland, I had an absolutely brilliant idea.

For the past week I’ve been going swimming in the sea pretty much every day - it’s pretty easy to do here, there’s a stretch of sandy beach a half-hour’s walk from my flat that slopes very gently down into the Firth of Clyde, and when the sun’s out and the tide is high, all that water gets baked by the sand underneath it until it’s as warm as bathwater. You can splash your way into the shallows, sit down in one of the warmest bits, let your body get used to the idea, then go venture further out where the water’s a bit deeper and colder.

My brilliant idea - and let’s be clear, this is a brilliant idea - was to do this while recording the first part of my next newsletter.

Has anyone else done this? No! This would be Substack’s first semi-aquatic audio essay. I would be celebrated from one end of the platform to the other. What a brilliant idea, people would say.

And as I got deeper and the water explored new areas of my anatomy, I would be forced to utter things like ooooh and ahhhh. Comedy gold!

The one tiny flaw in my brilliant idea is that I was doing this in Scotland. Scotland is a place where the weather is utterly unpredictable - and there I was, unthinkingly making predictions about it, eg. good grief, it’s absolutely baking out there right now, so of course in a few days - which, let’s face it, is only a few days away - it will also be a similar temperature. This is a heatwave, for pity’s sake. And it’s the end of June! There’s literally no chance that it’s going to be as cold and windy as it was just 2 weeks ago - despite it being June back then as well.

Well. Here I am.

It’s early afternoon on Monday, it’s a good 10 degrees colder than it was on Friday, there’s an icy wind blasting up the beach from the direction of Northern Ireland, and having already tested the water, I can confirm it is baltic.

Once again, I’m taking what might be a brilliant idea at another time, and turned it into yet another cautionary tale for other newsletter writers - but to hell with it, I’m doing it anyway, and if the worst that can happen is what’s actually going to happen, I might as well just get it over with.

This, then, is a paywalled two-part story. Today, you get this, and tomorrow (or maybe the day after), if you’re a paid subscriber, you’ll get the other half - which I will hopefully be recording at home, having fully recovered from what is about to happen to me.

Here we go!

In 1908, Scottish electrical engineer and fellow of the Royal Society Alan Archibald Campbell Swinton sent a letter into the journal Nature, which its editor duly published.

It read as follows:

Distant Electric Vision

“Referring to Mr. Shelford Bidwell’s illuminating communication on the subject published in Nature of June 4th, may I point out that though, as stated by Mr Bidwell, it is wildly impracticable to effect even 160,000 sychronised operations per second by ordinary mechanical means, this part of the problem of obtaining distant electric vision can probably be solved by the employment of two beams of kathode [cathode] rays (one at the transmitting and one at the receiving station) synchronously deflected by the varying fields of two electromagnets placed at right angles to one another and energised by two alternating electric currents of widely different frequencies, so that the moving extremities of the two beams are caused to sweep synchronously over the whole of the required surfaces within the one-tenth of a second necessary to take advantage of visual persistence.

Indeed, so far as the receiving apparatus is concerned, the moving kathode beam has only to be arranged to impinge on a sufficiently sensitive fluorescent screen, and given suitable variations in its intensity, to obtain the desired result.

The real difficulties lie in devising an efficient transmitter which, under the influence of light and shade, shall sufficiently vary the transmitted electric current so as to produce the necessary alterations in the intensity of the kathode beam of the receiver and further in making this transmitter sufficiently rapid in its action to respond to the 160,000 variations per second that are necessary at a minimum.

Possibly no photoelectric phenomenon at present known will provide what is required in this respect, but should something suitable be discovered, distant electric vision will, I think, come within the region of possibility.”

- A.A. Campbell Swinton, 66 Victoria Street London, S.W., June 12 1908.

What he’s talking about, of course, is television - a good two decades before the war of battling patents that birthed the first commercial TV sets.

But before that was actual war, the Great War that engulfed Europe from 1914 onwards - and it was this time of intense and rapid innovation in the field of wireless technology that paved the way towards this new industry.

Alas, Campbell Swinton didn’t really benefit from any of it. He shared his ideas widely and with enthusiasm, yet patented nothing - perhaps thinking that since he hadn’t discovered cathode rays himself - that honour belonged to a couple of German physicists - or the cathode ray tube (CRT) - that was Ferdinand Braun in 1897 - then maybe he didn’t have the right to make a claim.

He died in 1930 at the age of 66, having never seen a working cathode ray tube display, the basis for the very first commercial television.

What Campbell Swinton also helped bring into the world is what we now know as the screen - a mostly flat, slightly served surface, lit from behind, completely refreshing itself anything upwards of 30 times a second, more often than not 60 or 120 if it’s a phone, and creating the illusion of a moving picture that looks like you’re gazing through a window.

But the thing about windows is - you’re on one side of them, and the thing you’re looking at is on the other side.

I know most discussions about the danger of screens this day focus on the way we never turn them off, or the unreal ways they can skew our view of the people we see on them - but there’s also the window-like qualities themselves.

A window makes you feel distanced, peripheral, to whatever you’re looking at - and, isn’t it interesting that we use that same word for all our gadgets, when it also means “at the extreme edge of things?”

In this season of Everything Is Amazing, I’m writing about the effect of the outdoors on our psychology and wellbeing - and one thing I find really interesting is how completely and utterly edgeless the real world is, compared to the artificially bounded confines of all our interfaces with the virtual world. All those windows we’re anxiously pressed up against.

What’s that doing to us, and to the way we’re connecting, or fail to connect, with the wider, unbounded world around us?

Let’s take a look!

Part 2 to follow soon.

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A few days ago I saw this image from the magnificent (posted here):

What a perfect name that would make for a regular round-up of interesting and hopeful things, I thought greedily.

So, as the title of this newsletter confirms, I’m stealing it.

Either I’ll get away with this, or I’ll be meeting wmg’s Olivia Swarthout in court where I won’t have a leg to stand on and will be quickly and completely ruined. Please stay tuned either way.

In the meantime, here are some incredible things I have been thoroughly wondering at.

1. We’re Cooking, But Certainly Not Cooked

Well, that was crazy.

On Friday, and for the third day in a row, the record for the hottest recorded June day in Britain was smashed, with Suffolk reaching a truly incredible 37.3C (99.14F).

As for those of you living in France where it was a good 10 degrees hotter - my imagination fails me. Please leave a comment saying you’re okay?

I know all the big news sites adding the obligatory “Is It Climate Change?” explainers are just doing their jobs, but - yes, of course it’s climate change, because just about everything is now (ie. it’s going to have an impact on every part of our lives), and because extreme weather researchers have confirmed this couldn’t have happened without climate change.

It’s also another sign that in years to come, we Northern Europeans can expect our summers to get hotter and winters to get colder, as extreme temperatures become increasingly unexceptional.

That means a lot needs to change - in the way our houses are built or rebuilt, in the way we generate and store energy in preparation for extreme weather, and in the way we use architecture, technology and urban planning to engineer smarter methods of keeping cool or warm, as needed.

Thankfully, there are plenty of good examples to draw upon! In the EU, the Nearly Zero-Energy building standard has been in place since 2020, and in a few years it’ll be enhanced by a Zero Emissions requirement. A key part of both is better “electric and thermal energy storage,” including measures that help get occupants through extreme temperature events like the heat dome over Europe this week. The faster the UK (and elsewhere) fully and successfully implements something like that, the better.

I’m also wondering here about the potential role of ultra-reflective paint and structural colour, as I wrote about previously:

“A team at Purdue University in Indiana has been experimenting with different compounds that absorb less UV light than usual paint materials, and in 2021, they created a paint that reflects 98.1% of all the sunlight landing on it - which means it could cool the surfaces it’s painted upon below the ambient temperature, without aircon. Pretty spectacular!”

Meanwhile, as just noted, Australia is now so awash with cheap solar energy that its citizens will be getting 3 free hours of electricity every afternoon. It’s not quite a giveaway - it’s also designed to encourage more usage in hours when there’s much more power entering the grid - but as a demonstration of how quickly things are changing, it’s a dramatic one:

“Now, in one large part of the earth, for one large part of the day, electricity will be too cheap to meter. You want some abundance? Here you go.”

There are so many ways that the world can get nudged in a better direction. But when ethical choices also become the most cost-affordable ones - as with China’s renewables revolution (memorably dubbed by WIRED as a “huge mess that might save the world”) driving the cost of solar installation and energy generation down to hitherto barely imaginable lows - that feels like a real turning-point. When even the most ruthless capitalists among us can’t help doing the right thing, you can expect a lot to change for the better very, very quickly.

So yes, there’s a lot going on. But the parts that are encouraging? I remain firmly encouraged.

2. Take THAT, Cervical Cancer

The above screenshot is of the incredible headline the BBC ran last week.

It’s since been changed to “Young women now have ‘close to zero’ risk of cervical cancer death after HPV jab” - and I suspect they did this because of folk yelling AT LAST, A CURE FOR CANCER!

I wouldn’t blame anyone for getting that excited. It’s absolutely warranted! This is the relevant sentence from the study in The Lancet:

“In women aged 20–24 years between 2020 and 2024, in whom vaccination coverage was around 88–90% at age 12–13 years, no deaths occurred, compared with 23.1 expected deaths based on historical rates, corresponding to a mortality reduction of 100%.”

“No deaths”.

“Mortality reduction of 100%”.

Zero.

Incredible stuff. Nevertheless, the authors of the study conclude:

“That is likely to be a chance finding corresponding to a very low underlying rate of cervical cancer mortality in the population, rather than a true eradication of cervical cancer as a cause of death in young women.”

This doesn’t change the fact that yet again, as with this earlier study in Scotland, it’s confirmation the HPV vaccine is already saving lives, and going a long way towards the World Health Organization’s aim of eliminating cervical cancer as a public health risk. If that happened, yes, we could safely say that in practice that’s one type of cancer defeated, sparing hundreds of thousands of women a truly devastating amount of suffering.

In other news, here’s a promising new genetically engineered virus therapy that can infect & kill brain cancer (!), making it easier for cancer-fighting immune cells to infiltrate glioblastoma tumors. Absolutely amazing.

So no, there’s not yet a ‘cure for cancer’, in that widely-understood sense. But it really does seem like we’re getting near at last.

3. Wait - Is That A Pulse?

A few months ago, sent me a message:

“ sent me this last week and I immediately thought, “this is some Mike Sowden shit right here.”

Accompanying it was a link to a piece by Marian McKenna of the Montana Natural History Center, titled “I saw the Earth breathe.”

Here’s an excerpt:

“As I was about to stand up, I saw or felt a slow movement on the surface of the earth. This movement, a very gentle lifting, carried all the way to the horizon. I stayed rock still. Was I feeling or seeing this phenomenon? Nothing on the surface of the earth moved. It was a very infinitesimal lifting as if the earth was expanding with breath, contracting in a sigh. In that moment, I had no understanding of what I was seeing and feeling. Was it even real?”

I’d just spent an hour fighting through some stridently pro-AI essays in the run-up to writing this, and I’d had more than my fill of fanciful hyperbolism for the day. No, Marian, my inner voice shrieked like an exasperated David Mitchell. Let’s all get a grip here, shall we? It obviously didn’t happen, because the idea that it did happen is, quite clearly, absolute balderdash.

Possibly anticipating this reaction in many of her readers, McKenna quickly continues:

“Telling a colleague about this experience, she shared with me that the scientific community discovered what they are calling a “26-second pulse” in the early 1960’s".”

This statement is in fact entirely correct, and I had no idea. (Thanks, Marian! Sorry I was sounding like a jerk back there.)

This mysterious pulse was first noticed by researcher Jack Oliver (who I think is the geophysicist John E. “Jack” Oliver) of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York in the early 1960s - “a worldwide storm of microseisms with periods of about 27 seconds.”

A microseism is a tiny vibration of the Earth’s surface, just strong enough to show up in seismograph readings as chaotic background noise that needs filtering out. However, this one was a faint but unmistakable recurring pulse, strengthening in the Northern hemisphere during its summer months, while almost - but not quite - dying away during its winter.

If you’ve been reading me for a while and that sounds familiar, yep, this is where my thoughts went as well:

But then in 1980, USGS geologist Gary Holcomb took a closer look at the data:

“During storms, the amplitude of this ground motion increases to high levels which allows detailed studies of its characteristics. Analysis indicates that the energy arrives as Rayleigh waves from a source in the southern Atlantic Ocean.”

It seems the explanation wasn’t as ‘simple’ as a glacier-triggered standing wave. (Note the inverted commas, because I do not want to disrespect the incredible detective work of the geologists who discovered the recent Greenland and Alaska megatsunamis.)

It seemed something else was happening. But what?

In 2005, grad student Greg Bensen stumbled over the same signal in his work at the University of Colorado. Working with his advisor, he triangulated it to single source somewhere in the Gulf of Guinea, off western Africa.

Weirdly, this is the body of water where Null Island is located! It doesn’t seem this is relevant to this story, but if you’re in need of a new conspiracy theory to keep yourself busy in a vaguely unhealthy way, please take this with my non-liable blessing.

Rediscovering Oliver & Holcomb’s earlier work, Bensen then teamed up with co-authors M.H. Ritzwoller (said advisor) and N.M. Shapiro to publish this paper in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Now - if you’re looking for a kind of breathless X-Files style narrative arc here, with obsessed investigators stopping at nothing to uncover the truth - unfortunately, here in the real world, all this stuff needs funding.

As a layman, one thing I found surprising about the Greenland BONG BONG BONG story was that most of everyone involved worked on it in their spare time, as a couple of its geologists confirmed to me on Bluesky when my take on the story went viral. I’m sure this wouldn’t be news to any working scientist. However intellectually stimulating it may be, does such a mystery hold the promise of, for example, quantifiable commercial value? Nope. Did those scientists actually need to work on stuff that, you know, paid their monthly bills? Yup. And so on.

So maybe that’s why even today, this tiny pulse remains unexplained. It’s probably the result of massive winter storm waves battering against the African continental shelf in a place called the Bight Of Bonny - and if so, that’s another reminder of the incredible energy water can throw around when it’s on the move. (Never forget the violence unleashed by the Storegga Slides!)

But 60 years after this pulse’s discovery, nobody has confirmed this for sure.

Via science writer ’s brilliant write-up of this story for Discover Magazine in 2020:

““We’re still waiting for the fundamental explanation of the cause of this phenomenon,” says Ritzwoller. “I think the point [of all this] is there are very interesting, fundamental phenomena in the earth that are known to exist out there and remain secret.” It may be up to future generations of students, he says, to truly unlock these great enigmas.”

And if you’re worried it’ll be forgotten and require rediscovery all over again, fear not - its immortality is now sealed with its own xkcd cartoon:

(A tip to all science postgraduates looking for a topic for your thesis: just pick your way through the xkcd archives until you find something suitable. I mean, look what happened with Time and all the new discoveries about the Zanclean megaflood!)

As for Marian McKenna, right now she’s perfectly happy not having all the answers:

“I think I like the idea that we don’t exactly know what is causing this pulse that can be located and recorded. I don’t even know if this mysterious pulse is what I experienced. For me, the earth was breathing that day as I lay in the aspen grove. It’s enough. I shared a moment with the living, breathing earth.”

Maybe some mysteries are worth sitting with, like Rebecca Solnit’s ‘blue of distance’ - not just “a problem to be solved" but a thing to be enjoyed as the curiosity-tickling question that it currently is?

If so, this will do nicely.

Thanks for reading,

Mike

Images: MatheoJBT; Joshua Chehov; weird medieval guys.

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Today’s edition is a quick but important one, and it’s particularly aimed at folk in my corner of the world.

I certainly don’t have to check this magnificent ‘weather station’ at the edge of my local golf course to know it’s really, really warm in Scotland right now:

Alas, as I write this, a thoroughly alarming and absolutely brutal heat dome is descending upon central Europe…

…with temperatures in some places set to reach 44°C (111.2°F) by the middle of the week. Even the relatively chilly UK is getting a kicking, especially in southern England.

Because of this, I’m sneaking this extra edition in before the newsletter I originally planned to send you. It’s a re-run of a piece I sent out in 2024, and the final part of a trilogy of unsettling articles I wrote when I was a travel writer.

(The first and second, on what happens to your body when it gets too cold or when you don’t sleep for days on end, are here and here.)

If you’re skimming this newsletter and looking for a one-sentence takeaway, it’s this:

Please drink more water this week - even if you’re not thirsty.

And if you have the stomach for it (because this is one of the scarier things I’ve ever researched and written) - here’s why you need to do that.

First, a personal note.

In my earliest days of travel writing, I had a terrible habit of failing to drink enough water when I visited hot places. I more or less got away with this for a few years, with the blithe, arrogant resilience of the young and truly clueless - but in the summer of 2016 it all caught up with me in an air-con-free wooden cabin in Portugal, during a 40°C/104°F heatwave.

I spent a week drinking maybe a litre and a half of water a day when I should have been glugging back four or five - and the result was heat exhaustion (the forerunner to heat stroke), lumbering me with a pounding headache that lasted two weeks, and damage to my internal thermostat that seemed to take years to heal - although I’m unconvinced I’ve ever fully recovered, since even mild dehydration instantly knocks me sideways these days.

If this newsletter helps someone else avoid the same fate, that would make me very happy indeed.

So! Deep breath, if you’re reading onwards. This is very much a scientific horror story. I hope that’s you warned.

Being alive is a remarkable balancing act between two cliff edges. When the temperature drops, we’ve only got a 10 degree margin of safety, a few paces backwards, before we’re feeling the icy touch of death.

But this leeway is luxurious compared with what happens when we start overheating. Here at our normal core body temperatures, at 37 degrees Celsius / 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit (or thereabouts), our toes are already poking over the edge of our very own heat-deaths.

Because right now, all that separates you and runaway thermal meltdown is...

3 degrees.

Let’s apply a little heat and see what happens.

37.8°C / 100°F

Maybe you’re in a nice warm room, and you’ve just had a big meal. You’ve got a bit of a glow on. This is because our bodies are amazingly efficient at converting food into heat - so much so that if left unchecked, your metabolism would push your core body temperature around 1.5° C higher every hour. Two hours and you’re approaching done.

But yet again, your hypothalamus is here to haul you out your own fire. As soon as you started straying above optimum temperature, it triggers two notoriously unloved bodily processes for venting heat. Your skin’s blood vessels dilate and blood rushes up and into them - and that blood is being pumped straight from the hot zone, so when it meets the coolness of the outside air, the unwanted heat is safely pushed out your body. That’s why a flushed face feels sizzling hot.

But far more embarrassing - and more marvellous - is when tiny glands all over your body start squirting out droplets of water mixed with sodium, potassium, calcium, magnesium and a host of trace minerals. You’re doused by your own sprinkler system, a warm liquid that immediately cools on contact with air (for “cools” read “transfers heat off the body and into the air”) and then evaporates, shifting remarkable amounts of heat in the process.

An amazing biological achievement - which of course we hate. Nothing like a big sweat patch to flag up to the world that you’re a repulsive dork, even though it’s actually a small sign that Darwin’s dice are rolling in your favour.

You pull your clammy shirt away from your body and fan it surreptitiously. Ugh - human beings are so gross.

38°C / 100.4°F

Maybe you’re newly arrived in an equatorial country you’ve never visited before. And maybe you’ve just tried to carry two suitcases up five flights of stairs in the height of summer. You’re in great shape, and under normal circumstances this physical feat would literally be no sweat.

But these aren’t normal circumstances.

As wonderful as the hypothalamus is, it’s not fitted with a GPS. It doesn’t know you’ve just arrived somewhere that’s on average 25 degrees warmer at this time of year, and at a different humidity than you’re used to. In fact, if your thermoregulatory system could be confused, it’d be thoroughly nonplussed by now. Why isn’t a mild sweat doing the job? Why isn’t turning you lobster-red achieving the required cooling results?

(Your hypothalamus also raises your temperature when you’re sick, to “cook the enemy” - this is a good overview from Andrew Smith.)

You’re suffering from a kind of thermal jetlag, and your body needs time to acclimatise. Until then, sorry: you’re going to sweat buckets. The floodgates are open.

This is a sensible and effective cooling mechanism in the short term (which also kicks in when you’re exercising, when your core temperature can briefly spike by as much as three degrees) - but you’ve got to do your bit to help it. You’re like a breached dam, losing massive amounts of fluids and salts, and if you don’t keep both of them topped up, you’re going to lose the fuel you need to keep you alive. So, lots and lots of water. Go nuts.

But remember, it’s not just the water here. You’re also going to need to replenish some of those body salts, mostly that sodium that’s crusting nicely in the wrinkles of your skin.

You know what you need?

Salty snacks.

Yes, it’s medically important that you eat a moderate amount of dry, pre-packaged snack food (which will even make you thirstier, making you drink even more water for your own good).

Oh, life is a struggle.

38.5°C / 101.3°F

Whoops. For your own good tragically foolish reasons, you’ve decided to sip a strong coffee instead.

It’s probably a myth that caffeine itself significantly dehydrates you (it can increase your rate of urination, but usually not enough to derail your fluid levels). However, a strong coffee will psychologically slake your thirst for a short while. This can turn out Very Bad Indeed. You’re sipping fluids when you should be drinking them.

Now you’re getting too hot, and it’s time to start your meltdown.

Your skin is painfully hot to the touch . . . but it’s drying up. This is because you simple can’t perspire enough, and your body heat is scorching away what little sweat you’re managing to squeeze out. Your lips feel swollen, and your face is a truly livid lick of scarlet.

With your blood so close to the surface of your skin, it’s losing its water due to evaporation - which means it’s thickening.

Thickened blood? Clotting.

Congrats! Your chances of suffering a stroke or a heart attack just spiked.

Please don’t go standing up suddenly. Your brain needs a regular blood supply - around 15% of your cardiac output. With so much blood currently diverted elsewhere, your blood pressure is dropping and not enough is being pumped up to your head, making you woozy, nauseous and unable to stand without waves of dizziness.

You’re becoming severely hyperthermic - the warm-blooded twin of hypothermia.

You’re understandably terrified right now.

But don’t worry, the fear will pass soon - because you won’t be conscious for much longer.

39.5°C / 103.1°F

You’re scared and in pain. Your breathing and your pulse are both racing. You’re also yawning convulsively. Your brain is in trouble, and it’s forcing you to suck in cool air and the oxygen you need to keep conscious in your elevated metabolic state.

Are your surroundings helping or hindering your last-ditch attempts to save yourself? If the air around you is almost as warm as you are, your sweat can’t evaporate...which is why heat exhaustion is such a danger in high-humidity (75%+) environments, especially to non-acclimatised new arrivals.

At this stage, you might be panicking. Hopefully you’re knocking back as much water as you can - and it’d be great if you kept snacking too. Dilute your body’s salt-water mixture too much and you’ll be hit with a bout of hyponatremia. Symptoms? Same as those from heat exhaustion - except with the rollercoaster thrill of possible brain swelling.

It could well be that the only thing between you and a coma right now is half a tube of Pringles.

40°C / 104°F

Welcome to the death zone.

If you’re still conscious at this temperature, your awareness is severely impaired. You’re almost certainly not going to do the right thing - and the right thing is to get your temperature down as quick as possible, because you’re starting to die.

Beyond 40 degrees Celsius, you’re into heat stroke.

This is ugly. Your hypothalamus can’t do anything. Your core body temperature is rising, your natural thermoregulatory functions can’t do a damn thing to stop it, and your body tissues are suffering permanent damage as a result.

Your one and only hope right now is for medical services to arrive and cool you with specialist equipment.

If well-meaning samaritans lay wet towels on your skin, it’s probably only going to be a few seconds before the damp material warms and becomes an insulator.

Fans blowing cooler air, periodically-applied cold compresses, water and a little salt. . . this is how passers-by can keep you alive until professional help arrives.

But you can’t tell them that because you’re now unconscious, just minutes from a coma.

Heat stroke isn’t necessarily fatal, if treated swiftly and skilfully.

But even if help arrives in time and your temperature is brought down to safe levels, it could be months before it’s known how much damage has been dealt to your organs.

42°C / 107.6°F

Your last shot at salvation is now gone. You’re boiling in your own skin.

Here’s how. Your body temperature is so elevated that the proteins in your cells are cooking - as Alok Jha puts it, “like egg white as it boils”. Muscles are starting to lock up - including the ones that allow you to keep breathing. Your thickened, low-pressure blood supply can’t reach your brain...

Your brain, the nerve centre of your body, shuts down.

Game over.

Further reading:

• “Boiled Alive“ - Alok Jha, The Guardian, 26th July 2006.

• “Avoiding Heat Illness“ - Dr. Gary F. Arnet, Backwoods Home Magazine.

• “After Heatstroke, When Is It Safe To Exercise?“ - Gina Kolata, New York Times, 14th June 2010.

• “Heatstroke“ - Robert S. Helman M.D., eMedicine.

• “‘Non-survivable’: heatwaves are already breaching human limits, with worse to come, study finds” - Graham Readfearn, The Guardian.

• The incredible first chapter of Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry For The Future (2021), which hammers home better than anything else I’ve read the urgent need to start preparing for extreme temperature events.

Images: Alexander Grey, Hans Reniers, 96dpi, Patrick J. Lynch and Kansas Poetry (Patrick).

There’s a popular meme that’s been haunting me for the last few years:

I have no idea who invented it, or drew the original it’s adapted from, or how long it’s actually been going. But as a Brit enduringly baffled by Brexit or what’s happening with international politics, when I see it, I think: “yeah - wow, every year since 2016, right?”

You’ve probably gathered by now from my idiot-dog-with-a-bone enthusiasm that I very much don’t believe our world is spiralling out of control - but this meme still gets to me, with its quietly whispered OH FOR PITY’S SAKE WHAT NOW, LOOK, PLEASE, CAN WE ALL JUST TRY BEING MORE NORMAL FOR A CHANGE?

Then I remember my archaeological training, and the history lessons that went with it.

Let’s imagine you’re an inhabitant of London in the year 1667.

Two years ago, the profound horror of the Great Plague was stalking the streets, taking at least one-sixth of your fellow Londoners with it.

Then, late last year, a small fire in a bakery in Pudding Lane got out of control, quickly leaping from house to house until it had burned down half of the old city, destroying St. Paul’s Cathedral along the way…

And now (“OH COME ON!”), in mid-1667, you’re hearing that the Dutch fleet has just sailed up the Thames, plundering and sinking English ships as it went, until it captured and towed away the jewel of the English navy, the flagship HMS Royal Charles.

On June 12th, in his not-yet-famous diary, Samuel Pepys writes:

“And, the truth is, I do fear so much that the whole kingdom is undone.”

A month later, he concludes:

"…in all things, in wisdom, courage, force, knowledge of our own streams, and success, the Dutch have the best of us, and do end the war with victory on their side".

It’s an incredibly humiliating turn of events, and it’s left England dangerously undermined in military power and prestige - suddenly making your country’s place in European politics feel alarmingly precarious.

As a Londoner, how would you be approaching the new year?

I reckon most of history is like this, if you looked hard enough at it.

But hey, that’s way too much to think about. What about now? What about all this? And to hell with the big stuff - what about down here, at ground level?

If you’re already feeling like 2026 is too much to handle, and you can’t quite muster the enthusiasm to tackle the rest of this year in the way you really wanted to - I think I have the perfect book for you.

It was out yesterday in the States, and it’s out tomorrow in the UK - and it’s by my friend Mr , who is now writing on Substack here.

For the last five years, Steve has thrown himself into the philosophy, psychology and behavioural science of navigating failure and change, and he’s drawn on his 17 years of experience helping frantically over-busy people transform their health at Nerd Fitness (which he founded in 2009), to work out some good ways we can all get ourselves un-stuck.

It’s aimed primarily at anyone who has found themselves temporarily flattened by something in their lives - some chaotic wider event or cruel twist of personal fate that’s totally knocked the stuffing out of them. This is very much a practical book about how to get yourself up and moving again, rediscovering your energy and excitement as you go.

But it’s also a book about what you’re moving forward towards - and this is why I’ve got Steve’s permission to publish the following excerpt from its third chapter.

Take it away, Steve:

“In order for us to take our next step, we need a new life skill. One that might change your life like it did mine.

Enter ‘acceptance’.

As a recovering overachiever, I used to believe that acceptance is a sign of weakness. I thought it meant giving up all ambition, letting myself off the hook, and enabling lazy behaviour. So I made things worse instead: I set high standards and remained unbelievably critical of myself, always felt behind, and never felt ‘enough’. I know. Super fun!

Fortunately, I couldn’t have been more wrong. Acceptance is the most important skill that helped me navigate these last few years.

Instead of lamenting about life not going a certain way, or complaining that things didn’t work out the way I expected, acceptance taught me to see things for how they actually are.

Depending on when you read this, we might be in the middle of yet another once-in-a-lifetime, world-changing event that nobody saw coming. Personally, at the time of this writing, I could point to ten things that have me concerned.

I just paused to gesture wildly in every direction, so feel free to do the same.

The only truth is that we will never be able to accurately predict what life will throw at us next week, let alone next month or next year.

Which leaves us with two choices.

We can spend all day raging at the universe when things don’t go the way they should, or we can get to work accepting things for how they are now. We can get mad at ourselves for magically developing the skills to plan better, or we can learn to prepare for whatever life throws at us and say, “Okay, what’s next?”

We’ll start with the most common problem when it comes to acceptance, and then get into what to do about it.

The “Back to Normal” Fallacy: There Is No Normal

We have a normal morning routine. We have a normal work-week. We have a normal way of eating. We have a normal workout schedule.

When we think of “normal,” what we really mean is “predictable.” Knowable. Expected. Planned.

But then life happens.

Parents and caretakers know all too well that when a routine is thrown out the window, chaos reigns supreme. We feel like we’re caught in a storm, getting tossed around, desperately wanting for things to get “back to normal.”

A “normal” is where we have some semblance of control over our lives again. Because not being in control is uncomfortable.

The problem, of course, is that our lives aren’t completely our own. We have other complications like families or babies or dogs that “accidentally” ate the cat’s poop and then barfed on the carpet in the middle of the night.

For many of us, “normal” isn’t coming back any time soon. And we’re not doing ourselves any favors by waiting for life to be any different than it is right now.

The longer we wait for “back to normal,” the more we reinforce an “all or nothing” mindset. Worse, when we tell ourselves that we can only make progress when things are normal, we’re training ourselves to give up as soon as things get busy again.

Right now, “busy” is our new normal.

“Normal” is not synonymous with “predictable”.

If 80% of our days are spent dealing with unpredictable schedules with kids or work that’s chaotic, that’s the actual normal part!

The real unlocks start to happen once we embrace and accept the fact that right now, today, with all its messiness, is normal.”

I find this reframe incredibly helpful - and my only complaint is that I wasn’t aware of it five years ago, when I started growing this newsletter, because Steve hadn’t written this book yet.

(Thanks, Steve! Some friend you are.)

Abandoning this weird, human idea of “normal” is still monumentally tricky. It can come with managing a lot of grief and anger over a previous life you’re not returning to - and there’s a chapter of Steve’s book that looks at our incredible friend , who has had to manage some heartbreakingly cruel challenges regarding her health in recent years.

There’s also the ever-present fear of the unknown, and the exhausting stress of self-reinvention, including when you think you’ve finally “got somewhere” at last…

But it’s also hugely liberating, to realise that actually, this moment is actually nothing like the previous one, that everything is constantly in flux and always will be, that yes it really is possible for everything to be uncertain like this and for us to still stay upright (because *points at the whole of human history*) - and it’s also possible for us to take some of the stuff that’s already working and move forward with it, to make something better than anything that ever existed before.

(Was that old “normal” holding us back in some way? Maybe? Well - I guess there’s only one way of finding out!)

How To Try Again is such a great book - and if you’re feeling like your life is in need of the kind of shake-up that leaves you excited and re-energised for what’s next, I can’t recommend it to you enough.

Grab your copy by clicking below:

Click here to get the book.

Thanks, Steve!

1.

In the second chapter of Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard Of Earthsea (1968), the aspiring wizard of the book title is having a really bad day:

“Ged had thought that as the prentice of a great mage he would enter at once into the mystery and mastery of power. He would understand the language of the beasts, and the speech of the leaves of the forest, he thought, and sway the winds with his word, and learn to change himself into any shape he wished. Maybe he and his master [Ogion] would run together as stags, or fly to Re Albi over the mountain on the wings of eagles.

"But it was not so at all.”

To Ged’s immense frustration, all they were doing was meandering - in no hurry to get anywhere, and with no apparent destination in mind. No spells were being cast. No dastardly enemies thwarted, no epic quests afoot. Just silence and endless hillsides in all directions. What the hell were they doing? What the hell was Ged learning?

Then it started to rain.

In Ged’s experience, rain is the simplest of problems to solve - you enlist the help of a weatherworker, among the commonest of magic users, and you convince them (perhaps with money) to bat the clouds away, as befits such nuisances.

But oh no, not his master!

“…Ogion let the rain fall where it would. He found a thick fir-tree and lay beneath it. Ged crouched among the dripping bushes wet and sullen, and wondered what was the good of having power if you were too wise to use it, and wished he had gone as prentice to that old weatherworker of the Vale, where at least he would have slept dry. He did not speak any of his thoughts aloud. He said not a word. His master smiled, and fell asleep in the rain.”

2.

Today’s newsletter is about AI, and I can’t quite believe I’m writing it.

You may not either. Have I ever given any sign of knowing the least thing about LLMs like ChatGPT or Claude or Grok or Gemini or FlapDoodle (yes, I made that one up)?

Nope.

Do I use AI tools for any part of writing this newsletter?

I do not.

Consequently, when I read about AI, it’s exactly this meaningless to my brain:

(That Note is satirical, by the way - just in case you’re at my level of cluelessness & need that pointing out.)

Yet there’s also no avoiding it, if you spend any amount of time online. LLM tools are now creeping into everything, often so intrusively that many of us are playing whack-a-mole to switch the damn things off again.

I recently subscribed to the author of a book I loved, and his latest essay was all about AI - not an amiable mosey around the basics, but a thunderous tirade against left-wing AI naysayers:

“Sometimes I want to shake people: have you actually used it?! Many skeptics seem to have opened ChatGPT in 2023, asked it to write a limerick, watched it fumble, and closed the tab. Well, that was three years ago. Three years in AI is a geological era. Judging today’s models by GPT-3.5 is like judging smartphones by a 2007 BlackBerry.”

I think his eventual conclusions sound sensible enough - funnel more people into AI safety positions in governments across the world, encourage more international collaboration around this, and try to divert some of these vast amounts of money and power away from big-tech companies and towards people who seem to like, you know, people.

But the “wake up, sheeple!” tone he takes to get there…ye gods.

To be clear, I do find it difficult to argue with anything he says - not because I think it’s particularly right or wrong, but because I currently know far too little to judge it either way, and reading something this zealous does nothing to whet my curiosity.

Since reading it gave me a mild headache, I initially figured I’m out. Let me return to my own version of standing in the rain and wondering what the hell everything means. That’s the fir-tree I choose to huddle under.

Or, at least I thought I was out. But as you can see, here we are.

It seems I do have a few things to say - and if you’re as bone-weary about this whole topic as I am, I hope you’ll bear with me, because it gets to the heart of the kind of newsletter I want to write for you.

Subscribe now

3.

When I first read about Ged’s suffering in the rain in my early teens, the injustice of it infuriated me.

Yes! Isn’t that the whole point of having power - so you can use it to do good in the world? Or, at least try to? What if Ged or Ogion caught pneumonia and died - what good would that do? What’s the point of pointless suffering?

Or - okay, fine. Keep your damn clouds then. But what about making, I dunno, a magical umbrella or something?

(Forty years later in our so-called real world, I’m still surprised these haven’t caught on, at least for hill walkers.)

My point here is that Ogion - and I guess Le Guin, too! - seems to be sidestepping the obvious: if you can do something, isn’t it actually immoral to not do it? Isn’t that what being a good human is all about - to accumulate enough power to yourself to be an active force in the world for the greater good?

In fact, isn’t that a good argument for becoming a hero?

4.

“Do you know what the definition of a hero is? Someone who gets other people killed. You can look it up later.”

- Zoë Alleyne Washburne, Serenity (Joss Whedon, 2005).

5.

Is AI putting people out of work?

Yes, of course it is! And no, it’s definitely not!

Both of these are presented as self-evidently true by writers I’ve read recently - people whose voices I continue to respect and trust. It’s all a bit maddening really.

For that reason, I wouldn’t know where to start with answering that question - although Amazon laying off 16,000 employees probably says something, and Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey slashing the workforce of his latest company because AI "fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company" is probably shrieking the same thing.

In a sense, this is nothing new. Companies fanatically beholden to their bottom line axing the jobs of long-standing employees - well, AI certainly hasn’t invented that. It’s just the latest excuse to betray the people you hired (there, I said it).

I know I’m naive in thinking a primary role of any company should be to support and nurture the human talent within it. I’m absolutely fine dying on this hill. At least the view is nicer up here.

But one recent case study that doesn’t get talked about enough is what happened to independent blogs when Google moved towards AI.

As my friend Rand recently wrote:

“For 25 years, Google told websites to “just make great content,” and they’d sort out the rest. This advice was incomplete, problematic, and reductive, but also… sorta true. If you made 10X Content in 1997, 2007, or 2017, it often worked (at least, so long as you *marketed* that 10X content).

But, no more.”

With algo update after algo update, Google Search sent less and less traffic to independent websites & to the writers who had invested their entire careers in them. By 2020, many friends in & around travel writing, who were hitherto making a decent (or at least increasingly hopeful) living from work they loved were suddenly teetering at the edge of not even covering rent.

Then the pandemic struck - and it wiped some of them out completely.

And then, in 2024, Google’s AI Overviews arrived.

Most AI summaries aren’t like this, of course. They’re workmanlike enough that they’ll answer your query in a bland but sane manner, with only a fairly small chance of them hallucinating up an answer that lands you in an E.R. What more could you ask?

Only - nobody clicks the links. Why would they? AI just answered your question for you, didn’t it? Job done!

As Rand notes: “In the first four months of 2026, a whopping 68.01% of Google searches ended without a click.”

But where did AI Overviews get all these search answers? From those still-existing websites, of course! Overviews may include links back to them, but it’ll now be crystal-clear to folk at Google that most of nobody is clicking them. They surely must see this happening. They’re not daft.

Well, neither are we - all us small-fish writers (and now much bigger publications) who put the information onto the Web in the first place that Google and every other AI company has scraped and rehashed for their own purposes. We see this for what it is: theft. Not of the facts themselves - we hold no copyright on reality - but of our own unique interpretations of them, banished by Google Search into the realm of dust-gathering citations nobody will ever bother reading.

This has murdered the business of some of my friends. Many are better writers than I’ll ever be, and now they might never get the chance to find that out (although I really hope they’ll try).

I will never get over this. It’s so unthinkingly cruel, and so heartless - and so monstrously wrong.

It’s also what AI will allow the worst of the other companies to do to even more people! No ethical standards they’ll all agree upon, no internal checks on the power they’re abusing.

Again, this is nothing new - but it probably means we have to decide where we draw the line.

So hey, how’s that going?

Last year I got chatting to someone on Threads (Meta’s version of Twitter). I’d just asked a question about how everyone felt about OpenAI’s new “Studio Ghibli AI filter,” which can turn photographs into clever but usually fairly lifeless facsimiles of characters from Spirited Away and the like - and the guy replying to me was beyond delighted about it!

Paraphrasing:

• Him: My job is making great artwork for other people’s websites, and I love love LOVE Hayao Miyazaki’s work - in fact, he inspired me to become a digital artist in the first place. Utterly thrilled I can use this!

• Me: But - you know how Miyazaki feels about generative AI?

• Him: Nope! How does he feel?

• Me: He hates it with the power of a trillion blazing suns.

• Him: Huh. Well - that’s dumb of him.

• Me: Dumb?

• Him: Yeah, I’m surprised. This is the future, and he’s going to get left behind. I hate he thinks that way - but no, it’s certainly not going to stop me using this filter. I’d love him to get on board, but I’m not interested if he doesn’t. That’s his loss. I’m still a fan of his work though. It changes nothing.

He’s still a fan of his work though.

I have lots of friends and acquaintances using AI tools right now, and some using generative AI for work purposes. I hope nothing in this newsletter makes them feel attacked or ridiculed, and I hope they don’t conclude I’m actually a smug, self-righteous arsemonger. But they might. That’s part of the reason I haven’t wanted to write about AI before now, because - who the hell am I to be throwing my opinions at others, considering my vast ignorance on this subject?

But I can’t get past this, or what Google did. Based on recent events, we probably should form an opinion, even the smooth-brained idiots like me. Not necessarily about what other people should be doing, but what we’re going to do.

Many of the companies aggressively pushing AI on us are acting like they don’t consider the ethical side of things to be in their wheelhouse. Maybe they do and I’m dead wrong, but I don’t see it.

In that case, they might (shamelessly) say to us that their tech itself is completely neutral, and therefore any ethical concerns are irrelevant at their end - ah, that old chestnut again - and how we decide to use it, as case-by-case individuals, makes it our moral responsibility.

This is why getting more AI Safety people into government is needed, as Rutger Bregman suggests. It really shouldn’t be entirely our call.

But if in practice it is (however temporarily 🤞), we’d better decide as individuals where our own lines should be drawn.

6.

Sometime in my thirties, I re-read A Wizard Of Earthsea for the fifth or sixth time, and Ged’s struggle in the rain landed very differently with me.

Oh, stop whining, you young fool. Can’t you see he’s trying to teach you patience? Must you always run before you can walk? Doesn’t great power come with at least some bloody responsibility, and all that? Can’t you see how being a hero gets other people killed, like in that film I saw the other day?

Ged was clearly an idiot, and he therefore deserved everything coming to him in the rest of the book. No doubt about it!

Realising this made me feel very smart indeed.

7.

The other day I used the AI chatbot on my bank’s app, for what financial services would call a “non-standard query”.

It wasn’t really that complicated an ask, but it was the kind of thing you need a real person for, because they’d understand what it’s like to be asking a chat-bot the same damn question in a dozen differently-worded ways for 45 minutes because it just couldn’t seem to understand what I was asking it to do.

This kind of AI is very smart but also extremely stupid. You wouldn’t realise it from reading the most bug-eyed pro-AI screeds - but I guess that’s the nature of anything screeds? Down with the hot takes, & up with the ones you’ve popped in the fridge for a week.

The best thing I’ve read on this is from Adam Mastroianni, who defines AI intelligence as follows:

“Some problems have clear boundaries and verifiable solutions, like “What’s the cube root of 38,126?”. These problems require objective intelligence. Other problems are vague and squishy and it’s not clear whether you’ve solved them, or whether they exist at all, like “How do I live a good life?”. These problems require subjective intelligence. Objective intelligence can be trained, reinforced, and validated. Subjective intelligence cannot.

It’s unfortunate that people use one word to refer to both of these capabilities, when in fact they have nothing to do with each other. It is also, ironically, a case of objective intelligence overshadowing subjective intelligence: these skills are obviously and intuitively different, but a century of psychological research has “proven” that only one of them exists.”

This is really about the stupendously slippery concept of wisdom (which Adam makes explicit with a Montaigne quote at the end).

LLMs aren’t at all wise, at least right now - partly because wisdom sometimes requires an embodied understanding of the stomach-knotting, butt-clenching impact of being wrong, as Kyle’s tweet parodies so well. There’s no weight behind an LLM’s mistakes. When it says “sorry,” it's not frantically riffling through its back-catalogue of remembered experiences for a response that would make it, the idiot who just ruined everything, feel and look less awful. That would require it to care - and it can’t, no matter how well it fakes it, because it literally has no skin in the game.

I honestly can’t think of a worse quality to have in a service that manages your financial wellbeing. But hey, here we are!

However much that AIs continue to perform more and more impressive feats of objective intelligence for the good of individuals/humanity/profits/some terrifying Other, it’ll probably remain as subjectively unwise as ever, in a whole bunch of ways that will matter deeply to us humans when we encounter them.

What we need is the kind of wisdom being demonstrated by Adam Sandler’s Italian tour operator in this SNL sketch:

Another side of things that AI-assisted creators should be worried about: from some polls, it seems a lot of consumers really, really hate AI-generated stuff.

This may be an open question in the long run as tastes adapt, but what if it is generally true and remains generally true? What do you do then - hide the fact you use AI, and gamble your career on not being found out, because the fallout from that would be so ruinous for you? (Case in point!)

It also baffles me on another level - the level where I know my own skills as a writer fall vastly short of all my writing idols (for example, Ursula K. Le Guin). Aren’t I doing all this to get better at it, so I can acquire some measure of the ability to do it even with the most basic tools to hand? Isn’t that the majority of the point of doing it - even if I’m also trying to make a living here?

(Katherine May summed up my thoughts in a newsletter the other day: “Writing is a hard thing to do well, but it still astonishes me that so many people have thrown in the towel so quickly.” I can’t avoid concluding that some writers don’t actually want to write - they only want to have written, for all the fickle rewards that might unlock for them.)

Me, I’m with Adam when he says “I would rather die than let a computer write my posts.”

However, unlike Adam I don’t understand all this stuff terribly well, and most of these conclusions originate in my gut. It just feels wrong. That’s probably worth interrogating in my own time.

This is why I’ll continue reading wise and balanced voices like Jasmine Sun, to get a better (and determinedly hopeful) view of what’s going on. That’s my own way forward here.

8.

A few years ago, in going through the entire 6-book Earthsea cycle (including my first reading of its final two books), I once again encountered Ged and Ogion under their fallen tree in the rain.

I’d now had over 40 years to think about this. Okay, crunch time. Who was in the right here?

My current thoughts are:

• Of course, Ogion’s respect for the balance of the natural world is a good frame for the rest of the story and the world of Earthsea as a whole, and Ged’s youthful hastiness fits perfectly with A Wizard Of Earthsea being a cautionary tale.

• But hey - was Ogion really being wise? Look: Ged’s a kid. Doesn’t Ogion remember what that was like? All that fire and rebellion and self-assuredness of one’s own invincibility? Can’t he see how staying silent and doing nothing is only going to stoke those things to melting point and drive Ged away?

• Or, wait - does he sorta-kinda want Ged to go away and get into the kind of trouble that might get him killed, “for his own good”? Is Ogion - and I shudder to consider this - actually an asshole, deep down? Or is he just a great wizard but a bad teacher and poor judge of human character, with none of the emotional smarts required for steering an unruly teen in the right direction?

• But what if they’re actually both right - and that’s both the message and the richly human tragedy of it?

I’d love to ask Le Guin herself, but that time is long passed - and hey, maybe she wouldn’t quite know either. The entire Earthsea cycle took her 33 years to write - and as magnificently coherent as it is, it also reads to me like someone thinking through their big themes as they go, which Le Guin herself confirmed here:

“What I’d been doing as a writer was being a woman pretending to think like a man … I had to rethink my entire approach to writing fiction … it was important to think about privilege and power and domination, in terms of gender, which was something science fiction and fantasy had not done… All I changed is the point of view. All of a sudden we are seeing Earthsea … from the point of view of the powerless.”

Isn’t that one of the joys of reading someone’s work, to have the immense privilege of going on that journey of discovery with them, in that illusory “real-time” that good storytelling creates?

An AI summary, on the other hand - well, it’ll summarise. It’ll collapse the boundless wave-function of all that time-won knowledge and experience down into one deafeningly hard answer - with all the self-assured confidence of someone (some-thing) knowing that if they’re wrong, hey, they can just apologise for it later, no harm done!

This will also happen instantly: THUD. Behold the answer! With our help, you’ll never have to sit with the actual question at all. Oh, how efficient that’ll make everything. Information gaps? Pah, who needs ‘em? The thrill of discovery? Yawn, life’s too short, let’s optimise that shit away. What do you mean you’re “undecided”? Can’t you read?

(An AI Overview will also never reply with, “Sorry! No idea really - philosophers have been chewing that one over for at least 2,000 years. Any answer I give would be reductive, misleading and painfully dumb in a way I’m incapable of recognising [see: Mastroianni, 2026], so your best bet is just to go out and try a bunch of stuff for yourself. Best of luck!”)

Anyway, as you may have already gathered, I find a lot of AI discussion tremendously un-fun - and it’s also happening whether I like it or not. So if you don’t mind, I’ll just raise my own shields and get back to writing in the way I’ve done for the last 5 years, about all the sciencey things that recently made me go wow - at least until a better idea comes along.

Hope that’s okay with you?

Thanks for reading,

Mike

Hello! This is Everything Is Amazing, a mid-life crisis newsletter about how liberating it is to realise you’re an idiot science and wonder.

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We’ve got mind-numbingly colossal ancient floods, impossible colours your brain still thinks it can see, the world’s tallest waterfall in the last place you’d look, some birds refusing to explode and, in the last edition, a French guy eating a bicycle. Who knows what’s next?

(The honest answer is neither of us, which is perhaps a little worrying.)

One recurring theme for EiA is: I spot something I think is quite delightful, then I work extremely hard to fit it into what I was already writing about, and then it seems I’ve just about got away with it without sabotaging my career, based on my rate of unsubscribes.

Alas, this is not one of those times. I don’t have a clever segue here. All I have for you is this video, which I’ve seen before, and every single time it makes me laugh myself silly:

(If that tickled you, try “Why the Germans Can’t Get Enough of English Markets” next.)

Now, if you’d be so kind, let’s proceed as if I know what I’m doing here, and move on to today’s main topic - returning to look further at what we like to call the Great Outdoors and what it does to us.

I

In 2020, I did something very enjoyable and also excruciatingly embarrassing in my front garden.

Everyone remembers the summer of that year, how it made us feel, and the unsettling way it slowed time down. It’s unsurprising how patchy our memory is (even though some of those patches are seared into our memories forever). And for similarly obvious reasons, we weren’t getting outside much.

But one thing I definitely remember about that summer was how hot it was, up here in western Scotland. I was living in a rented, non-insulated wooden cabin, and when the sun beat down upon it, it turned into an oven, with myself as the dish du jour. There was no escape here - the British lockdowns allowed us around 30 minutes a day outdoors, which wasn’t quite enough time to walk to the beach and go for a swim. [CORRECTION: See Melissa's comment below. Mind blown!]

At one point there was a stretch of maybe a week with unrelenting sunshine - and then on the final day of it, around 5pm, the sky clouded over, clotting with that deeper grey that promises rain. Then I could smell it - that fresh tang of ozone sucked down to ground level by an incoming rainstorm’s downdraft, as I previously wrote about here…

And then - nothing, for the next 7 hours.

But then, at midnight, the first drops started clattering onto my cabin’s wooden roof. I was, I’ll admit, a bit feverish with excitement at this. I wanted all this rain for myself. I wanted to feel it.

I rushed outside, into the darkness of my front garden. This was, in fact, the back garden of my landlords at the time - I was living in what was essentially their glorified shed, and on either side and behind me were other houses. But right now, because of this sudden stormy darkness, nobody could see me.

I was soaked through in seconds. Glorious, sensual seconds, the kind that years later can still make you blush when you think about them. I’ve never been more delighted to be so utterly sodden in my whole life. Rain-water coursed down my unfortunate excuse for a body, seeking out every nook and crevice, caressing every curve and flirting with every orifice, until it was exploring regions of me we won’t be talking about today.

Then I did - what I feel any of us would do. I stripped off, all the way down to my flimsy boxers - and then I stepped into the middle of the garden, and lifted my arms to the sky.

Did people do this kind of thing before The Shawshank Redemption? I’m sure they did, but now, that’s our reference point and we probably need to verb it.

I Shawshank-Redemptioned at the clouds.

And then the sky fell in on me.

I had my eyes screwed shut at this point - that’s what you have to do when the rain is driving straight into your face. So it took maybe a minute or two to realise I was seeing red, the red of light through the flesh of my eyelids. So I opened my eyes.

What had happened is that I’d forgotten to turn off the motion-sensor floodlight installed at the front of my cabin. It hadn’t come on when I was near the door, but when I stepped forward, I both triggered the sensor and entered its Zone Of Unfortunate Enlightenment.

For maybe 2 minutes, I’d been standing there, flood-lit, in all my unsightly, enraptured and nearly naked glory, in front of the rear windows of every house in the street. I noticed a few of these windows had now lit up - and one of them belonged to the elderly neighbour whom I’d been trying to get on the good side off, ever since she discovered me returning to my cabin late at night and rang the police because she thought I was a burglar.

Now she was looking down at me, with an expression of the purest horror I’ve seen on a human face.

We locked eyes.

And then I panicked, and waved - and then I did a little dance.

I’ve thought about this a lot in the years since. What do you do when someone discovers you more or less exposing yourself in public, and that person already has a recent history of notifying law enforcement about you? Here’s my conclusion: if you react in a normal way - say, covering your modesty with your hands and crab-sprinting back indoors - you’ll end up with a warning from the police.

But what I think I did, in attempting to style it out and failing by a huger margin than I ever thought was possible, was to push the situation so far over the line between awful and weird that my neighbour….just didn’t know what to do.

She backed away from the window, and closed the curtains - but not in a fast way, not in a “right, it’s time to get you put away for good” manner, but the way you do things on autopilot when half your mind has suddenly decided it needs a holiday, and you spend the rest of the day thinking things like, “how does soap get dirty?” and “how can I find my spectacles when I can’t see my spectacles because I’m not wearing my spectacles?”

That was, mercifully, the last time I ever saw her. But she didn’t ring the police, and after rushing back indoors, waiting for the light to go off again, and then spending nearly an hour looking up at the other windows to convince myself nobody else saw me, my life returned to whatever the hell it was before all this happened.

Anyway. Isn’t rain such fun?

II

I’m a newcomer to the world of rain writing (an off-shoot of nature writing), so the only books I’ve read that are entirely dedicated to it are ’s Rain: Four Walks In English Weather and Cynthia Barnett’s Rain: A Natural And Cultural History. I enjoyed them very much, so I’ll recommend both to you.

But my love affair with rain - and it really is one, despite what it has a habit of doing to me - goes back to when I was a travel writer.

The very first piece I ever had accepted by a major newspaper was about getting lost in a rain-storm, which I landed at the San Francisco Chronicle….

And if you’ll allow me, I’d like to read a version of it out to you today.

III

Rain lashes at my back. I’ve just fallen over for the 3rd time in 10 minutes. Around me, the hillside disappears into the growing gloom, capped by scudding clouds low enough to see even in these appalling conditions. I know where I am to within 5 miles. Here on the moors, that means I’m lost. I’m self-disgusted, panicking and utterly drenched.

This is how people die.

Imagine the English landscape rendered in miniature under your fingertips. Trail your hand north along the country’s rocky spine until the Yorkshire Dales knots chaotically into the Lake District. Now east. A long, glacier-excavated scoop, which browns, bulges, rasping under your fingers like stubble. It’s like England has developed mange, and it’s this faintly cankerous-looking vista that I’ve been fighting my way across, in a storm that’s in its 6th hour.

Welcome to the North York Moors, one of England’s nine national parks - and a wilderness.

Hold on: wilderness? In England?

The land of sleepy hamlets, cream teas and nuns on bikes? Ask a non-Brit for words that sum up the English countryside and the results are predictably hokey: charming, quaint, verdant, sweeping, the dreaded “quintessential”, and, most tellingly, safe.

Our warm, fuzzy view of England is partly the result of a PR campaign started by the romantic landscape painters of the 19th century. We forget how different it was before they put brush to canvas. Thomas Hardy chose English moorland as a metaphor for fear, ignorance and savagery. Beyond the safe confines of town and village, England was out to get you, any way it could.

I’m certainly feeling that vibe now as I hunch over the pulpy remains of my map with a flashlight. In a storm, the Moors are terrifyingly nondescript. Where the ground isn’t thick bog, it’s springy with gorse. The soil up here is poor, supporting only the most tenacious of vegetation. It’s also mainly peat.

By looking at ancient pollen grains, environmental archaeologists have unearthed evidence of Neolithic forest clearances, tipping the local ecology toward peat production. Is this one of the earliest human-made eco-disasters? Despite thousands of years of inventive use (moors are terrific for grazing sheep), it’s still a barren land.

The rain continues to whip me. Frankly, I deserve it. This is a pitiful way for a world traveler to meet his end - in his own backyard. I only live 30 miles away. In good conditions, I could walk home. And yet it’s just that kind of sloppy, complacent thinking that has got me in this mess. I could not be less prepared for this ordeal. I’m a dimwit. Flog me harder, rain.

In England, there’s no escaping the word “rain.” We open most conversations with “Ooh, it’s going to rain” (a safe bet), and have an astonishing range of rain-related phrases, from “hoying it down” to “a proper shanking” or “belting” or “siling” to the glorious “Oh, it’s that wet kind of rain.”

True, our rain is rarely fierce, but it’s always stubborn. What it lacks in ostentation it makes up with relentless, cantankerous persistence.

This can be lethal.

Everyone knows Britain’s climate is mild. Sure, it’s often unpleasantly dank and we have only two seasons: winter and July (quip copyright: David Hasselhoff).

But - dangerous?

A glance over the reports of the Mountain Rescue service (England and Wales) confirms it: 37 fatalities and 667 injuries severe enough to warrant rescue in 2009 alone. And the numbers are rising. In the same period, incidents in the Yorkshire Dales National Park more than doubled. There’s a lesson here and, while lost on a hillside, I realize what that lesson is.

Anywhere is dangerous if you’re unprepared, unaware or downright stupid enough.

Even England!

For my 39th birthday, I’d decided I needed adventure. I’d never walked across the moors in one day. The forecast said “rain”; I scoffed at it. I have waterproof gear. What can go wrong?”

I thought my country was tame. And now it’s bitten me.

But even idiots can conquer their panic. I squint at my ruined map, make a few compass-assisted guesses, slip-slide to where the ground seems highest, spot a distant glitter of lights that become a road (the only road), realize I’ve been heading the wrong direction, face the correct way and trudge on. And it’s one soggy yet increasingly high-spirited hour later that I’m walking down into the village where my caravan is parked. I’ve made it.

The moors are lovely this time of year. Lather yourself up with sun-block, pull on some sturdy shoes and trousers (don’t wear shorts, the gorse will shred your ankles) and go visit. Maybe we’ll even cross paths. You can’t miss me - I’m the guy with the tent, waterproofed map and fanatically overcautious manner.

England has teeth, but I’m not stupid enough to be bitten twice.

[Footnote from 2026: I was, in fact, stupid enough to be bitten by England at least 5 more times. But they made good stories and I even sold a few of them to newspapers. Anyway, whatever the original moral of this story was, it’s long been undermined by my own behaviour. Just go and enjoy the outdoors, in whatever manner seems fruitful, and please don’t blame me for any of it. Thank you in advance.]

Images: Ethan Ridd; Valentin Müller; Ben Wicks.

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Today, in something of a sequel to this, let’s talk about the rest of you.

1)

In early September of 1978, French entertainer Michel Lotito sits down to one of his favourite meals - one he’s regretfully concluded is a little too rich for his constitution to enjoy more than three times a year.

His first act is to cut his food up into pieces one or two cubic centimetres thick (just small enough to pass through Lotito’s remarkable gullet without chewing). This isn’t easy, since it requires an electric power-saw.

His first chosen delicacy: a steel bicycle chain, for the tragic reason that unlike every other item on his menu today, “it has taste”.

Once that’s slipped down with the aid of a big gulp of mineral oil, Lotito tackles the remainder of his banquet. It consists of more than 15 pounds (7 kg) of metal, constituting the rest of an entire bicycle sans the rear wheel, pedals, handle-bars and crank-gear - and once he’s finished, he’ll be paid $5,000 by the Regina, Saskatchewan fair he’s the star attraction at. This is how Lotito makes his living.

Of all the inadvisable courses of action this edition of my newsletter might suggest to the terminally incautious, eating raw metal is particularly daft. Not only did Lotito suffer from a recognised if unusually bizarre eating disorder, he also had exceptionally robust guts, with stomach and intestine linings twice as thick as the average person, protecting him from internal tears and punctures that would land you or I into an emergency room.

(Not that any of this was comfortable for him. He revealed to Guinness World Records he’d built a high tolerence for pain from the age of eight, through “sophrology, a combination of self-hypnosis and other relaxation techniques that can assist pain control”.)

All this sounds completely absurd until you consider the nature of the average human stomach.

What we call “gastric juice” is partly hydrochloric acid - the same stuff you were warned about in chemistry lessons at school - surrounded by thick and continually replenished layers of mucus awash with bicarbonate (the ingredient in many antacids), which helps protect our sensitive stomach lining from being eaten away by all this fierce acidity.

Meanwhile, anything else entering our stomachs is in for an astonishingly rough time - and that seems to include metal, as one 1997 study suggested:

“Razor blades, disc batteries, and pennies were incubated in simulated gastric juice at 37 degrees C. The weights of the objects were recorded hourly. When no change could be detected, the solution was subjected to mass spectrometry to verify absence of effect. The findings were correlated with clinical observation in one patient who swallowed razor blades repeatedly.

Results: Dissolution of the razor blade was proportional to the duration of acid immersion. At 24 hours, the blades weighed 63% of the original weight…. The thickened back of the single-edged blade totally dissolved in 2 hours.”

- “In vitro effects of simulated gastric juice on swallowed metal objects: implications for practical management,” Gastrointestinal Endoscopy, August 1997.

(That ‘patient who swallowed razor blades repeatedly’? I think I know who that might be, considering he was alive and well at the time, & would only die of natural causes, aged 55, in 2006.)

So - next time you sit down for a meal in a nice restaurant, take a good look around you. It’s quite possible that, with the right amount of time, effort and health-destroying recklessness, you’re entirely capable of digesting most of the room you’re in, and most of everything in it.

Bon appetit.

2)

“It is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust, none of which had ever been alive but all of which had once been you.”

- Bill Bryson, A Short History Of Nearly Everything.

3)

As a human being, you’re already aware of how marvellous it is that you can use your breath to warm your hands up and to cool them down.

However, here's another way to achieve the former that I never knew until I started reading :

“Cold hands? Deep breaths. Like taking 5 seconds to breathe in, and then 6-7 to breathe out. Within a minute this can magically tame the sympathetic tone in our whole bodies, and we feel a vital warmth returning to the outposts of our cold hands and fingers. With so many nerve endings concentrated in our fingertips, this warming has an outsized effect on our sense of wellbeing.”

Examined

Cold hands, warm and stressed heart

You are running about 30 minutes late seeing patients. They are waiting. They are waiting for you. Your heart is beating quickly, as if spurring you to keep up. The last person had so many problems. You absorbed them long enough to understand, to plan, to move on as you must. Your hands are ice cold. And it’s not even that chilly in the office…

Read more

3 years ago · 54 likes · 11 comments · Ryan McCormick, M.D.

4)

Substituting “blood vessels” for a more precise “capillaries,” the answer is…well, nobody quite knows, because nobody’s tried it. I personally feel this is for the best.

By the way, the beloved and opt-quoted “100,000 km long” is from an estimate in 1922 (!) by August Krogh, winner of a Nobel Prize for Medicine, and - ehhhh, yeah. Probably not? 10,000-ish km is probably much nearer. But that’s still an astonishing amount, and I hope we’ll continue to be wise enough to leave it there, thanks.

5)

A few weeks ago, I had the honour of being on a panel for the virtual yearly conference of the American Society Of Journalists And Authors, alongside the supremely accomplished and Pamela Weintraub, to talk about the power of braiding multiple narratives together in a non-fiction essay.

I’d honestly struggle to explain to you exactly what I was doing there, considering my lack of experience in writing for big publications! For actionable essaying advice, you’re much better off subscribing to Erika’s newsletter - she’s an experienced longform journalist and a professor at the University of California in its Literary Journalism Program.

But as a fan of the narrative grab-bag approach, and because I also teach storytelling, I frequently challenge myself to weave together as many interesting story threads as possible to discover if something readable can emerge (for example: teddy bears, anthropomorphism and my favourite video game).

This is messy and imprecise work, at least for me. I often feel like I’m madly wafting fog around, trying to make shapes that look recognisable enough to tell me I’ve stumbled on something workable.

But there’s one piece of advice I gave on the panel, and I’ll continue to give to all new writers until I run out of breath, and it’s this:

Inside you are two writers. Unfortunately, you’re the dumb one.

By “you” here, I mean you, the conscious, fleetingly aware, hopefully somewhat upright version of yourself that regularly interacts with the wider world.

Because modern life is a primal scream given material form, this version of you is always tight on time and has a similarly throttled mental bandwidth. Any creative demands you put upon it will yield limited results.

But have no fear! Because you’re a tag-team! Inside you is another mind, a deeper you, sitting in pristine darkness and silence, undistracted by the noisy world pressing against your senses, and with the ability to think about stuff in a way you just can’t.

In this sense, it’s functionally a lot smarter than you are. It’s what you’d be like if the whole world would just ****ing well shut up for five minutes.

Unfortunately, you can’t hear what Deeper You is saying. Your conscious thoughts are far too noisy, and this quiet, wise voice is always getting drowned out. It can only communicate with you indirectly - say, by churning up the emotions in your body and sending mysterious ‘gut feelings’ your way, or by smuggling an idea into your overheated brain through a dusty cognitive side-door you hardly ever use.

And while you’re thinking about a particular problem, it can’t.

Your role in the great creative team of You & Other You is simple.

(a) You should do all the necessary and relatively mindless legwork - all that research, background reading, notemaking, scribbling down interesting ideas and so on - everything your deeper mind can’t do itself , because you have control of all this outward-facing apparatus….

(b) …and then you should stop thinking about the problem altogether, handing it over to that deeper-thinking self, until the regions of your mind assigned to this problem has quietened enough that Conscious But Overwhelmed You will be able to hear any message Smarter, Calmer You has sent back up the well into the daylight of consciousness.

None of this is terribly original. Writers have been speculating on the creative role of the subconscious for centuries, and it’s unlikely they’re done yet. Take author Mark Haddon’s recent realisation that he’d subconsciously built the plot of his novel around a central image from a story he’d previously abandoned, as if some deeper part of himself decided this was the right course of action, but neglected to inform the rest of him…

And as I recently wrote here, newer ideas around embodied thinking outside our brains suggest ways this might (might!) be happening.

But honestly, who knows? Not the idiot writing this newsletter. All I can say is: like any creative tool, it’s worth testing.

6)

As everyone has known since forever, human noses are utterly pathetic. Dogs have roughly forty times the olfactory receptors we have, and they’re specialised enough to be able to out-smell us numbed meatbags many millions of times over. Meanwhile, we’re stuck with a measly nasal “vocabulary” of just 10,000 different smells.

At least, that’s what researchers believed until they actually started to test this - at which point, those calculations made in the 1920s started to look embarrassingly incomplete - or, to put it another way, yet another late 19th-Century myth.

According to the first of these new studies, undertaken at Rockefeller University in New York City in 2014, our real range of discernable smells might be closer to a trillion:

“The researchers calculated that the least successful smeller in the study would be able to smell only 80 million unique scents. And the best performer had a far more sensitive sense of smell, likely able to distinguish more than a thousand trillion odors.”

What this suggests - and I’m tapping the “more work needs to be done” sign here, as always - is that our sense of smell, generally regarded as the most disposable of our senses, is potentially staggeringly more powerful than we give it credit for.

With echoes of what tetrachromacy (seeing 100 times the colours the rest of us can) might be like for the women who could train their eyes to take advantage of it, one of the study’s co-authors, neurobiologist Leslie Vosshall, noted:

"Knowing we have these capabilities, I hope people, as they go about their business, start saying, 'Hey, I can smell all these things.' Maybe the companies that make scented products will start making greater use of the human capacity and develop cleaners and perfumes with new, more interesting scents," she says. "Maybe we're going to start using those corners of our smell capacity that have just not been exercised lately."

7)

“Our bodies are like tubes or levers or computers, but they are, above all things, like bags. Bags that are stuffed in other bags, stuffed in still more bags. Our bodies are nesting bag situations like the used bags stuffed under your kitchen sink, with the added bonus of thumbs and anxiety.”

- Bethany Brookshire, “The Human Body Is Bags, Bags and More Bags,” Scientific American.

8)

“Kish [has] taught himself to form a broad acoustic map of his surroundings, but it’s still nowhere near the fidelity of bats (which can determine distances down to 1 centimetre, which is how they can snatch insects out the air) or of mechanical acoustic location devices like active sonar.

It’s also a very long way from Daredevil/Matt Murdock’s ability to dodge unseen punches or air-ballet his way through a brawl. But it’s certainly something - and that something requires Daniel Kish’s brain to be doing things most of ours can’t.

In 2021, Assistant Professor Lore Thaler of Durham University (England) co-led a study of 14 sighted and 12 blind people learning to echolocate using mouth clicks, the same way Kish does - and by taking brain scans of the participants before and after their training sessions, “both groups showed increased auditory ­cortex activation in response to sound in general, as well as higher gray matter density in auditory areas.”

In other words, the sound-processing parts of their minds seemed to get a boost from doing it, which is the kind of progress they expected to see if any manifested during training.

However, at the same time, the visual parts of their minds were put into action as well - suggesting that this acoustic mapping process really is, on some level, creating a spatial map inside our head:

““We weren’t sure if we would get this result in sighted people, so it was really rewarding to see it,” Thaler says. She suspects that rather than just processing visual data, this brain area takes in information from varied senses that aid spatial understanding.”

As for why you’d even want to learn this skill:

“Three months after the 2021 study, a follow-up survey found that 83 percent of blind participants who had learned echolocation reported improvements in independence and well-being. The researchers are working on disseminating the training more widely, Thaler says: “It’s a powerful sensory tool for people with vision ­impairments.””

And that training? It took just 10 weeks of echolocation training to show progress. Admittedly, that’s 2-3 hours a day, which is no mean commitment, but still - as a sign of the power of neuroplasticity…it’s an exciting glimpse of what our brains might be capable of.”

- from “How To ‘See’ The World Like Daredevil”.

9)

Vampires may sparkle - but humans are aglow.

(A bit.)

10)

One remarkably tedious thing I discovered about the Internet while researching this newsletter is that when you look for articles on remarkable human feats of human endurance on various search engines (and scroll past the AI summaries as fast as possible), you’ll find umpteen pieces on high-ranking fitness websites that answer this question by only using examples of men.

To properly address such a - well, I wouldn’t even call it a bias, to be honest - is the work of a newsletter much longer than this one. So I’ll just use this opportunity to once again yell about one of the most astounding performances in the history of ultrarunning, which took place in 2019:

“The British ultrarunner Jasmin Paris is celebrating after becoming the first woman to win the gruelling 268-mile Montane Spine Race along the Pennine Way. What made the performance even more extraordinary was that she shattered the course record by 12 hours – while also expressing breast milk for her baby at aid stations along the route.

Paris, a 35-year-old vet who works at the University of Edinburgh studying acute myeloid leukaemia, is well known in British endurance running circles having won the British women’s fell running championships last year as well as a series of leading ultraraces. However, her performance at the Montane Spine race was undoubtedly the best in her career as she beat all her male and female rivals in completing the course from the Edale in the Peak District to the Kirk Yetholm in the Scottish borders in 83 hours, 12 minutes and 23 seconds.”

- “Jasmin Paris becomes first woman to win 268-mile Montane Spine Race,” Sean Ingle, The Guardian.

(This was also far from being a one-off.)

11)

The time you will spend on the toilet during your lifetime is time you cannot avoid spending. That’s the thing about bowels: there’s no arguing with them.

(Just imagine if we could talk to ourselves with the unquestionable authority of a squirming innard. How transformational that would be!)

It’s also a surprisingly considerable duration. It doesn’t feel like it on a day to day basis, but holy hell does it add up.

Calculating an average rate of 1 poop per day, each with an average time of 12 minutes, gives you 4,380 minutes or 73 hours per year. Assuming a life expectancy of 79 years old, that’ll give you a total of around 240 days on the cludgie. That’s more than half a year dropping the kids off at the pool.

I hope this makes you think - because what it makes me think is, “I really need to fit a mini-library in my bathroom.”

(You should also get a foot-stool.)

12)

Somewhere between the folk who absolutely refuse to think about their bodies and what they do with them and put into them, and the horrifying obsessives who will go as far as grading the biome of their partner’s ‘Eye Of Sauron’ is - what?

Maybe it’s an appreciation of the everyday wonder of that incredible bag-of-bags you’ve been born into, and look out at the world through, every day of your life. It’s got you this far, against so many odds - and you know better than anyone what an absolutely journey that’s been.

Science is still learning what the human body is really capable of. It’s probably more than any of us will ever know - which, to my mind, is a good reason to raise an eyebrow at any form of technology presented, implicitly or bluntly, as “better than human”. (Especially if money is involved. 🚩🚩🚩)

And hey, never forget how your body got here:

“The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.”

- Carl Sagan, Cosmos.

Give yourself a high five. You’re one hell of a team.

Images: Dayne Topkin; Megan Dujardin; Paul Dobson; Casey Horner.

This article is narrated by its author - click on the voiceover at the top.

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Yesterday, I got stuck in traffic. I was walking briskly along the pavement (that’s the British word for “sidewalk”) and I had to stumble to a halt because there were two teenagers in front of me, covering the whole path, and walking incredibly slowly because they were on their phones.

Maybe this is where I should tear off on a rant about young people, but that’d be hypocritical - because of my job I’m glued to my phone most of the time, and I’m always getting in the way of other people because something happens like: OMG, the legendary Jane Espenson who wrote episodes of Firefly and Battlestar Galactica and Foundation has just shared something I wrote on Bluesky, that’s it, I’ve finally made it as a writer, and I’m so thrilled I’m going to name all the subheadings in my next newsletter after TV show episodes she’s written - and suddenly, there’s a polite cough behind me, and I realise I’m at the front of a queue of my own making and I’m the idiot that everyone is exasperated with.

I hate doing this. And I’m always doing this.

But yesterday, with these teenagers blocking my way, my options were many. I could stride out onto the road and be swept under the wheels of the afternoon bus to Kilmarnock. I could pretend that I always meant to stop anyway, and lean against a lamp post with an air of being a great literary observer of the human condition, smoking an imaginary pipe like a Scottish version of Substack’s . I could lunge forward and throw them under the bus to Kilmarnock. I could politely - but firmly - ask them to get out the way.

Or I could lean into my natural cowardice, and slow down to match their snail’s pace.

It’s not important which option I chose. There’s no need to dwell on it, and I’m sure that you would have done exactly the same as I did, because deep down, aren’t we all cowards? Moving on.

What all this got me thinking about was a throwaway line I read in Alexandra Horowitz’s On Looking about the walking pace of pedestrians, and how it varies from place to place.

Lovers Walk

(Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 3, Episode 8)

It seems the first big study into urban walking speed was by Marc and Helen Bornstein in 1976 (here) which found a positive correlation between local population size and walking speed in 15 cities and towns in six countries across Europe, Asia and North America.

Its suggestion was that people walk slower in a tiny Scottish seaside town like the one I live in, and absolute blaze along in a big city like Alexandra Horowitz’s New York. That was just one study, but these findings have been replicated in many other studies since, collecting data from different towns and cities. It certainly seems like it’s a thing.

The latest was run by MIT and took place in cities in North America, and it’s currently being expanded upon in Europe this year - and it found something fascinating and maybe a bit worrying. It appears we’re all speeding up.

MIT’s 2025 study looked at pedestrians in four public space in three American cities: Boston, Philadelphia and New York, using timelapse video footage filmed by urbanist William H Whyte in 1980, and Keith Hampton in 2010. Then the researchers used AI modelling to map individual pedestrians to find their walking speed and trajectory, from which they could derive an average for each location.

What they found across three decades was an increase in median walking speed of about 15% in every location.

Another study by Richard Wiseman and the British Council in 2006 looked at 35 city centres around the world, finding Singapore had the most hot-footed walkers - and it found an median increase of around 10% since the 1990s.

Escape Velocity

(Battlestar Galactica, Season 4, Episode 4)

Now, these are all looking at cities, where younger people tend to go when they want to speed something up in their lives: job opportunities, income, romantic prospects, their sheer pace of life.

Cities accelerate humans in so many ways, so it’s not hard to see why they’d walk faster as well. In the ‘70s the Bornsteins figured it was due to how crowded the streets were - when we’re feeling hemmed in, we speed up to escape - or the presence of so many people overstimulates us, a kind of visual caffeine mixed with airborne pheremones and other things that tend to hype us up.

I’ve felt something like this myself! In 2019 I was in New York for a few days, and took a long walk down to Battery Park - and I don’t think I’ve ever walked faster in my life, it was like my blood was fizzing, and I could really feel it in my legs the next day.

Cities are also more expensive, which potentially means everyone’s time is worth more - so the quicker you get from A to B, the more money you’d save. So it makes sense that city-dwellers would be prone to dawdling less.

But the recent MIT study found this was changing too. The proportion of people lingering in all four locations - where “lingering” means “moving at less than half a metre per second” - had fallen from 43% to 26%. Also, and no doubt relatedly, in 1980, one in twenty people interacted with other people in the space around them. In 2010, it was one in fifty.

What’s that going to be like now, with the lingering trauma of a pandemic still simmering away inside us? What about, you know, the state of everything right now?

All this means that urban designers have a challenge on their hands - that’s partly what urban design is for, to solve emerging problems like this by bringing people together in better ways.

A Golden Crown

(Game of Thrones, Season 1, Episode 6)

I really do think all this is a problem. In this season of Everything Is Amazing, I’m looking at the ways getting outdoors could be good for us, and my working bias I’m trying to interrogate here is “yes, getting outdoors more often is a desirable thing.”

There are lots of people writing on this topic with far more expertise and eloquence than I ever could - I’ll just point you towards social ecologist here, also writing on Substack - but I get how this stuff can feel a bit more abstract if you live in a big city, especially on a really hot day when the smells are particularly ripe, or when the traffic is particularly deafening.

I can easily imagine that what you might want to do is to leave one type of Indoors and cross the city as fast as possible to reach the climate-controlled safety of another Indoors - which means, if you have to walk, you’re trying to be efficient, weaving your way around obstacles, checking your phone’s map if you need it, no time to waste because time is money and both are in short supply, so you’re walking faster and faster, fixated on your destination, the sweat dripping, your calves aching, until, until you can finally….

Stop.

And that’s when you realise you have no memory of the journey you’ve just taken. We make memories by paying attention, and you were paying none of it.

Sometimes that’s exactly what you want. Just to get it over with. But maybe it means that next time you’re considering going for a walk like that just for fun, you’ll have nothing pleasant to remember about the previous one you took, nothing to help coax you out again.

It was “boring”. There was “nothing to see”.

In a way, you were barely there at all.

A.K.A. Hellcat

(Jessica Jones, Season 3, Episode 11)

In the summer of 2021, I was out for a swim at my local beach here in western Scotland. The water temperature was almost bearable, the wind was just under gale force - in other words, perfect conditions for swimming in Scotland, or at least, as good as you’re ever going to get.

I saw two people laid on surfboards, kicking lazily along, and since this was 2021 and recent lockdowns meant I was feeling a bit starved of chance encounters with strangers, I decided to splash my way over and say hello.

Then, a few miles away, the coast exploded.

Ka-BANG!!!

We were all a bit startled. This bit of coastline doesn’t tend to explode very often - if it did, well, I probably wouldn’t live here.

We all just looked at each other in silence, in that moment of wonderful confusion when the normal world does something you never thought it could.

Then we were all talking. What the hell was that? Can you see smoke? Yes, I see it too. Wait, it was probably what?

As a girl on one of the surfboards explained, there used to be a dynamite manufacturing plant just to the north (built by one Alfred Nobel, he of the famous Prizes) - and for a time it was the largest explosives factory in the world. It’s been closed for a while now, but it seems someone that day was disposing of some unwanted bang-sticks and just forgot to warn everyone. (Alas, I’ve never been able to find anything about it in the local news.)

But what it did for us was give us a conversation to have - the kind it’s difficult to engineer without some literally awesome external event you can use as an excuse to break the ice with a stranger.

(Difficult, but not impossible, as I argued here.)

This was only possible because we were lingering. The sea was our temporary destination, and we were just hanging around in it, enjoying how it made us feel and, it turned out, waiting for a stick of dynamite to bring us together for a quick chat.

One possible explanation for the decline in lingering-time is the rise of coffee shops - they’ve been around for centuries alongside tea-rooms and cafés here in the UK, but they’ve exploded in popularity over the last few decades - the coffee shop sector has now become a £6 billion

industry. And what’s a coffee shop? It’s a formalised lingering place, where it’s not weird to sit sipping your cortado, eavesdropping on as many conversations as possible. Or at least I hope not, or I’d be in real trouble.

But if a consequence of that is that we’re lingering less outdoors - that feels like a tragedy in the making.

For starters, it’d make us forget about the commons, the shared public resources that we all have the right to use, the pavements and public benches and sea-walls we can sit on, dripping our ice-creams everywhere - you should go read everything by to learn about what happens if we lost access to those things by unthinkingly surrendering our right to them.

But it also turns the outdoors, particularly the urban outdoors, into something to hurry through because it’s an inconvenience - the kind we should find a way to technologise away as soon as possible.

The Demon In The Snow

(Fallout, Season 2, Episode 4)

So maybe we do need someone or something to be in the way, to encourage us to slow down a bit and find out what’s around us.

So how about this: next time you’re walking somewhere and you can spare an extra quarter or half-hour, deliberately take a wrong turn - and then, without doubling back on yourself, try to find a new route to where you were going in the first place.

Or: the next time you see a public bench, occupy it. Treat it like the invitation to “pointlessly” linger that it is.

I don’t know if anything interesting will happen if you do these things. That’s the whole point of serendipity and applied curiosity - they’re unpredictable.

But I bet they’d feel better than just scurrying through the world, furious with everything because you haven’t arrived yet, and having a non-experience you’ll never be able to remember. Surely life’s too short for a walk like that?

Thanks for listening.

Images: Mike Sowden; Ryoji Iwata; Arto Marttinen; ben o’bro; Mark Stuckey; Will Francis.

In today’s edition, I’m once again channellling a bit of Season 4, by looking at a few remarkable discoveries within (and under) the two-thirds of our planet covered with water.

To get us started - wait, what the hell is that?

Yes, that blue patch’s name is indeed the Cold Blob (or, in some publications, the North Atlantic Warming Hole).

I do love modern science’s willingness to use the rather silly word “blob” - a word you can imagine Rowan Atkinson getting his mouth around with great relish - in all sorts of serious work, like the “blob of nightmarishly gigantuan proportions” far under our feet right now.

When I recently wrote about the incredible natural wonder called the Denmark Strait Cataract….

…I stumbled over the fact that the coldest water in the Atlantic is in the vast basin of the Irminger Sea, 4.8 kilometres deep, which the Cataract empties its polar water into. Aha, yes, I smugly thought to myself, that must be the reason for this ‘Cold Blob’ I’ve seen mentioned - cold water is denser than warm, therefore it sinks, so of course this crater-like expanse collects cold water. Simple physics!

What I’d got wrong is the Cold Blob is surface water, not the deeper stuff. That’s what’s so weird. While the seas around it are heating up, the Blob is getting colder, and has been for the last century.

Okay then. What’s going on here?

It’s all about what that water contains. at hit upon the answer a few days ago, in his piece about thermoclines:

“Also affecting ocean layering is salinity—how salty the water is. Salty water, as well as colder water, is denser than fresh water and so will tend to sink beneath it.

Ever since the incredible “underwater lake” in BBC’s Planet Earth, I’ve been meaning to sketch a halocline, the change in density when fresh and salt water meet.”

The water coming in from the Denmark Strait is partly melting ice - which is fresh water, at least relative to the surrounding ocean. As it enters the region of the Cold Blob, the fresh(er) water stays on top of the cold-but-salty water, and so the Blob gathers and lingers.

As I understand it, that’s only part of the reason. The other, much more concerning factor (not that melting polar & Greenland ice isn’t concerning!) is all this Atlantic water just isn’t moving like it used to.

Our planet’s seas move according to the thermohaline circulation (THC), a vast array of surface and deep-water currents that transport water, heat and nutrients around our planet. The main Atlantic component of this is called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation - and because of global warming, the AMOC is increasingly showing signs of running amok, moving smaller and smaller amounts of heat and salt into the north Atlantic.

It’s now looking increasingly likely that over the next few decades, this circulation system could either slow down or come to a complete stop - with potentially dramatic changes for the climate, including greater temperature extremes from season to season in Europe and elsewhere.

(Here in Scotland, the Institution of Engineers is already considering the challenges this would bring onshore & offshore, including unusually brutal winters.)

What’s being actually done to fix this is, of course, fiendishly complicated to track - but I think it’s important to gravitate towards the voices highlighting the very real positive steps now underway, like , and , rather than relying just on anxiety-inducing news headlines that tend to cater to our negativity bias.

However, some suggestions are so wildly bonkers that you can’t avoid them - like this one:

(Here’s the paper, published in Science Advances last month.)

Uh. Wait. Isn’t that….isn’t that basically another version of….?

Yep! It’s the thundering madness of Atlantropa given new life.

In some ways this would be easier to build than Sörgel’s monstrosity, and not just due to a century of technological progress - for example, the Bering Strait is on average a lot shallower than the Strait of Gibraltar (30-50 metres vs 300-900 metres).

However, the individual sections of a Bering Strait dam would have to be far longer than an Atlantropan dam at Gibraltar - and that’s despite using the two islands (Big Diomede and Little Diomede) as connection points.

Putting aside the fact that Little Diomede is populated by Alaskan Inuit, and the further fact that these are violently energetic seas being squeezed through a relatively tight space, and the even further fact that (as is often the case geoengineering proposals this ambitious) nobody knows exactly what environmental chaos this might unleash in practice - well, it certainly won’t be the last “hooray this will fix everything!” megaproject we’ll see proposed and excitedly jumped upon by the big newspapers.

Those headlines will keep coming, no doubt to the delight of those who profit from how such proposals distract from more impactful long-term solutions (*whispers* it’s about the greenhouse gases, guys).

But there’s still a tiny part of me that likes the gonzo ambition at work here. As I did with my writeup of Atlantropa, I’ll once again quote Cal Flyn, author of Islands Of Abandonment and the upcoming The Savage Landscape: How We Made the Wilderness, who wrote for Prospect Magazine about the power of big, imagination-intoxicating stories of change that could rally us into collective action:

“A quotation, commonly attributed to the writer and pioneering French aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, says: “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” This, if I ever read one, is a manifesto for nature writing in the present day. This is our own task: to evoke the experience of being in this wild and beautiful world. To stir people to love the planet with a jealous passion, to act in a way more befitting of a custodian or even lover. Go in through the heart, and the head will follow.

We need to be roused. We need to feel. We need a siren song that lures unsuspecting souls to the cause: a song to enchant us, to put us to work.”

Read on to learn about:

• A “collapsed crème brulee” taller than Australia…

• …an 2025 Alaskan wave nearly half a kilometre high…

• …and a whole new way to see underwater!

Read more

The voicover for this edition is read by me, the author - and I think it will work better on you than the transcript, for reasons I’ll go into shortly.

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TRANSCRIPT:

The other day, I did something that millions of people have been doing daily for the last 25 years, and it horrified me.

Here’s what happened. I learned from author Tom Cox of the following ridiculous but apparently true story, covered by The Independent in 1997:

“For more than a year, Neil Simmons went out into his garden every evening and mimicked the calls of the owls, but they never replied.Until one evening last year, they began to hoot back at him.

Mr Simmons, 41, [why does his age matter? Do all British men start hooting at owls in their 40s? Anyway….] was delighted and logged each occasion when his imitations met with a hooted response. But unbeknown to him [you see, this is how you know it’s a funny story, no journalist will ever use the word “unbeknown” in a serious story], Fred Cornes, 58, his neighbour in the village of Stokeinteignhead in Devon, was also hooting at the owls and was equally delighted to be receiving a response.

The exchange continued for almost a year before they realised what was happening.”

Yes, that’s wonderful. But - stop a second here.

I would like to ask you what your face just did.

If you’re listening to this essay, there’s probably a medium to high chance that if you found that story appropriately absurd, your face creased into a smile or maybe you even laughed. But if you’re reading, there’s less of a chance of that, and if you’re reading it on your phone, there’s maybe not much of a chance at all.

My reaction? I found this story really funny, so I used my phone to forward it to a few friends, accompanied by the crying with laughter face tipped to one side emoji (🤣).

In fact, I used about 10 of them in a row (🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣), just to really hammer home how much it tickled me.

But then I had an in-body moment - that’s the opposite of an out of body moment, and it’s where you back out of the virtual world of the internet, and to your surprise you find yourself to be a warm bag of chemicals and electricity, a person, sitting on a metal bench by the seaside, in the place you were when you looked at your phone and the internet completely consumed your sense of self.

To be clear, this isn’t new human behaviour - we’ve had the ability to become completely lost in books or daydreams or worries for centuries. Maybe the Romans did it too. Maybe the tribes of Mesolithic peoples wandering the fertile lowlands of ancient Doggerland, now under the North Sea, maybe they did it too - perhaps when they noticed signs that the sea had been creeping inland over the last few decades, ey up, Trevor, that doesn’t look good.

Maybe this is just what it is to have a human mind - you naturally create these vast virtual spaces for your imagination to romp around in, playing with ideas and roleplaying what-ifs with complete creative freedom, and nobody should try to convince you that’s a bad thing.

But when you disappear into yourself like that - what happens to the body you leave behind?

In one sense, this is a daft statement. All this is still happening within your body, in the same way the internet couldn’t exist without the massive server farms and undersea cables that form its real-world body.

But when I came back to myself on my metal bench by the sea, after forwarding that funny story to friends accompanied by a blizzard of emojis, I realised - I wasn’t laughing.

I wasn’t even smiling. Just a very slight curl of the lips and a crinkling at the corner of my eyes. Almost indistinguishable from a wince.

Isn’t it weird that every day millions of people, not just younger people who grew up in the great new weirdness of the internet and therefore are weirder by default, but also people my age who existed before it, we all emote at each other without using our bodies - other than the tiny muscle movements required for typing symbols onto a screen? We sent these little pictures that convey an emotion that on some level we may be feeling some trace of, but more often than not, it hardly breaks the surface on our actual faces?

We have to do this, of course. Anything else would be unforgiveably rude. Just imagine if we were honest about our physical reactions - “that’s really funny, Tom, I almost smiled. 😐”

Well, that reads like withering sarcasm. If I did that I’d end up with no friends and double my enemies. Which is too many.

But it is so strange that we’ve got used to such an exaggerated form of expression that sometimes is little more than a flat-out lie.

Unlike disappearing into our own heads, this is actually a new thing. Emojis came about as an extension of emoticons, which we also still use today - those ;-) winky faces or smiles we can type with a combination of punctuation, numbers and letters.

The first batch of 90 emojis were released by carrier Softbank in 1997, and in the late 2000s, both Apple and Google petitioned to have emojis introduced into Unicode, the standardised text of the modern internet. By 2011, Apple had added an official emoji keyboard to their latest release of iOS - and then there was no stopping them.

Every year, new emojis are introduced, perhaps to convey new emotions required for a whole new year of this increasingly complicated world.

One of this year’s crop is a large, swollen-looking face, as if seen through a fish-eye lens, with enormous bulging eyes, meant to convey shock, amazement and distress mixed with deep anxiety:

(So, you know, there’s a statement about how many people are feeling about 2026.)

And on it goes. The language of emojis continues to evolve and to become embedded deeper and deeper in how we communicate with each other - a new language, treacherous with continually renegotiated meanings.

But why do we need a new language? I guess you could say - because it’s hard to put emotion into text. But haven’t the best writers been doing that pretty successfully for centuries? Isn’t this a reading problem and about not treating the meaning of language as something you should be beaten over the head with? I would love to ask a professional linguist what they think of all this.

But in a way it doesn’t matter, because emojis are here to stay, and I feel sure that something even more obvious will replace them at some point.

Yet it’s already making us insincere, I guess - a somewhat fabricated performance of what we think we should be feeling when we’re talking to someone that would be a hell of a lot harder to pull off if they were actually in front of us.

This season of Everything Is Amazing is looking at the effect of what we like to call the outdoors upon our lives…

…and unless you live somewhere enormously distant from any kind of urban centre, one thing that going outside virtually guarantees is that you’re going to meet other people.

I talked a while back about how deceptively challenging it can feel to say hello to a stranger, because we tend to think we’re being a bother, whereas other people are much more likely to be delighted that we said hi:

But then you have an actual conversation, in which you’re both assessing each other based on your tone of voice, body language, micro-expressions, all of it - and at some point, you form a kind of pre-opinion about this person: oh, they look shifty, I don’t trust them, or oh, they have a kind face, look at those laughter lines around the eyes, or oh yikes, they’ve clearly had too much coffee, I bet they write a science newsletter or something, time to get out of here.

What you’re doing is something you couldn’t do online, and certainly not with an emoji. You’re using your body, and you’re assessing the way they use their body, to create a gut feeling about their character.

It’s an interesting term, gut feeling, because it doesn’t just mean “a feeling you have in your gut” - it means a form of intuitive thinking. You’re engaged in a form og analysis where you’re allowing your emotions to have a say - you know, those things that up-tight rationalists would say are utterly irrelevant for thinking, because of their fickle nature and implied meaninglessness.

This is often the model for creative work that’s taught to us from a young age: ignore what your body is telling you and just push through. But - we know gut feelings aren’t entirely trivial. They might be unreliable and chaotic and throw up all sorts of false messages, but that doesn’t mean they’re all illusory.

Someone who has looked into this in detail is science writer Annie Murphy Paul, whose most recent book, The Extended Mind, is a terrific introduction to the body’s role in thinking. She looked at successful day traders, whose finely attuned instincts - gut feelings! - could make the difference between big wins and crippling losses.

She quoted John M. Coates, a former trader turned neuroscientist and applied physiologist working on the biology of risk taking, formerly working at the University of Cambridge.

Coates said that on a Wall Street trading floor:

“...you will find high-IQ Ivy League-educated stars who cannot make any money at all, for all their convincing analysis, while across the aisle sits a trader with an undistinguished degree from an unknown university, who cannot keep up with the latest analytics, but who consistently prints money, to the bafflement and irritation of his seemingly more gifted colleagues.”

The key, believes Coates, is the trader’s interoceptive ability - their awareness of what their own body is telling them and an understanding of what it means.

Annie Murphy Paul mentions a quick test of your interoceptive skills that you can try on yourself right now. Without putting a finger to the pulse in your wrist or neck, can you feel your own heartbeat?

(I can only do this when I’m walking briskly and my blood is pumping hard enough to feel in my jaw and inner ear.)

Another test is how good you are at a ‘body scan’ when you’re meditating, where you’re focusing your attention on different parts of your body, one by one - this also may also be a great way to train your interoception over time.

I’m hardly the person to teach you about the power of interoception - my friend Jonny is a better person to consult, because he’s partly built a business around it - but it’s worth bearing in mind two key ideas: that the state of your body is, a lot of the time, heavily involved in creating your emotions as well as reflecting them, and that your wider body is sometimes aware of things that your conscious mind isn’t.

We could see this “deeper mind” at work in the case of Henry Molaison, the man who lost his ability to form new memories when his hippocampus was destroyed, whom I wrote about a few years ago:

In Henry’s case, while his conscious or working memory was completely disconnected, his embodied memory kept working, and allowed him to learn through repetition how to draw a five-pointed star while looking at a reflection of his drawing hand in a mirror. When he finally did it correctly, he was astounded:

“That’s strange. I thought it would be difficult, but it looks as though I’ve done it rather well.”

He had no conscious memory of practicing it, again and again. But his body did, and it learned from these reps, presumably with the help of billions of neurons that exist in our bodies outside of our brains.

Interoception can also act as a kind of social bridge to access other people’s emotions. We can read other people’s physical state, we can emotionally identify with it, that creates a response in our own bodies, and hey presto - you experience empathy as a real bodily sensation.

For example, I find it almost impossible to watch someone on a stage making themselves look like idiots in front of a live\ audience, even if I fully consciously know that it’s fictitious because it’s a scene in a film or TV show and they’re all actors - it doesn’t matter, my stomach churns, I start sweating, full-body cringe, it’s just too much. I’m sure you have something like this too - at least I hope so, or else I’m going to feel very uncomfortable about having confessed this.

But what happens when you take that body completely away? What happens when you shut that deeper mind off when you’re interacting with strangers, because neither of you is actually physically present?

Well, according to theories around embodied thinking, it seems what happens is - you think less. Maybe this explains a lot of the utter foolishness on social media, all the cruelty and shaming and dunking and the rest of it. I love using social media to meet new people, but I can absolutely accept that I’m only showing up with a relatively small part of my mind, simply because my body isn’t present.

Maybe that’s one of the best arguments for getting outdoors. It’s where you can meet other people in full, and have conversations using your entire mind, to say something no emoji will ever be able to convey - instead of just continuing to hoot at each other in a language we don’t quite understand.

Thanks for listening.

Images: Giles Lambert; Jeremy Hynes.

Further reading on embodied memory:

As I announced yesterday…

…I’m running my random curiosity calls once again - a chance to say hi, a chance for me to say thank you so much for supporting this newsletter (🙏), and hopefully an opportunity for me to hear your story and to learn what’s lighting your brain up right now.

In summary:

“A one-to-one chat for paid subscribers of the newslett…

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Hi. It’s Mike from Everything Is Amazing - and I’m wondering if we can talk (in a fun way, I mean)?

But first, two things.

A while back I posted this startling image, which shows how no recorded tropical storm in human history has ever crossed the equator:

“In theory one could, if it grew big enough to overcome….well, whatever is stopping such storms from crossing the equatorial boundary. Atmospheric scientists seem to still be chewing this over, but the Coriolis Effect might be a major factor? If you know more on this than I do, please correct me!

(They also don’t seem to form within 5 degrees of latitude of it. So, if you suffer from Lilapsophobia - that’s a fear of hurricanes and tornadoes - then moving to somewhere smack on the equator and never straying 5 degrees of latitude in either direction might be worth a try? Here are some countries you can pick from.)”

(Or you could just build yourself a home on Null Island.)

Just a few weeks ago, our planet served up a perfect demonstration of this chart on a colossal scale:

To the north was Super Typhoon Sinlaku, whirling counter-clockwise - while just south of the equator Cyclone Maila perfectly mirrored its movement, whirling in the opposite direction. [Hat-tip CosmicRami.]

It’s an elegant demonstration of atmospheric physics - and alas, in Maila’s case, a deadly one. (Remarkably, despite Sinlaku causing widespread damage in the Northern Mariana islands, no deaths have yet been reported. 🤞)

As our planet continues to warm and extreme weather events increase in frequency, understanding & modelling them accurately will become even more vital - making funding cuts like this look shockingly boneheaded. Here’s hoping future administrations will be quick to turn things around.

Secondly, if you were wondering what Scotland’s contribution to the recent Artemis II mission was, this photo should clear things up:

(Explanation and credit.)

Yes, this is very foolish - and I, an allegedly credible science communicator, should be ashamed of myself for posting it.

I’m not, though. Not in the least. But I certainly recognize I should be, which is maybe worse.

Anyway, and to business!

Here’s a thing that I’ve genuinely lost a bit of sleep over:

I genuinely hate how many of you I’m never going to meet.

If you just rolled your eyes, I get it. That statement sounds like fatuous virtue signalling, even to a social klutz like me.

But - isn’t the power of having a platform like this mostly in its ability to spark actual conversations afroth with constructive ideas, instead of me sitting alone in a room going waah waah waah into my keyboard all day as if that’s sensible behavior for a human being?

There are now around 32,000 of you signed up to Everything Is Amazing - and if my Open rate can be believed, around half of you are reading it regularly.

This is a ridiculous number, and it causes me some discomfort. Not just in a self-deprecating way which I’m Britishly disposed towards (“why are YOU reading ME and not the other way round?”) but also in the horrible knowledge of what I’m missing out on.

I used to be a travel writer - a person whose job it was to strike up conversation with random strangers, to discover that most (not all, but most) people are grand company, and that no stranger is “random” because everyone is doing something uniquely interesting with their lives, even if they’re not fully aware of it.

(Not aware until, perhaps, they chat to some “random” stranger who writes about travel for a living. I really loved this about conducting travel interviews - the way someone lights up when they hear their own story coming out of them in their own words, and learn it’s well worth paying attention to.)

I would dearly love to tour the world, buying 16,000-ish coffees and sitting down 16,000-ish times with all of you kind enough to read EiA, to learn who you are and what you’re curious about. That’s a lovely thought.

But alas, that’s not happening right now - unless you visit my local beach and stroll past me enough times, of course:

Instead, here are two things I can do:

1. I can point you towards the Great Spring Chit Chat Challenge currently being run by and :

“The Great Spring 2026 Chit Chat Challenge. Rob Walker of The Art of Noticing and I triple-dog-dare you talk to a stranger every day for ten days. Easy peasy. Bonus points for sharing your stories.

Starting Thursday April 23 for ten days, you will initiate a conversation with a person unknown to you. About anything. Or nothing. The particulars are totally up to you: fellow dog walkers, plane seatmate, the mail lady; the weather, the footie, the meaning of life.”

2. I can bring back my Curiosity Calls, one of the most fun things I’ve been able to do with this newsletter - which I’m restarting in May, beginning just with EiA’s paid subscribers:

   “The general idea is: you may have a specific thing you want to ask me, or you may want to correct me on something I’ve written about - or you may just have a powerful urge to tell me to stop all this nonsense and get a real job. All are valid! But equally valid is turning up and not knowing what we’re going to talk about in advance - because, isn’t that what normally happens between two strangers, the kind you get chatting to on public transport, or at the pub? Isn’t that the default interaction between human beings in the ‘real world’?

   
   …I did the first back in the British lockdown of mid-2020, posting a Calendly link on all my social channels in an attempt to Zoom-chat with total strangers.

   
   Around a hundred calls later (most of them absolutely delightful), I had a full notebook of new ideas to read and write about, and a wonderful re-appreciation of the fact that no, random strangers generally aren’t a bunch of terrifying lunatics, and Hanlon’s Razor usually applies.

   
   (My friend , who has a flair for engineering conversations in the unlikeliest places, did something similar a few years previous to this, so I probably stole the idea from her - and also from comedian Dave Gorman, who famously went in search of other versions of himself.)”

This time round, we have a question to hang on. It’s the same as the one powering my very first discussion thread - “What do you wish more people were curious about?” - but you can completely ignore it if you’d rather chat about something else or pick my brains about something.

(However, if you do answer the question on our call, I might include your answer in a round-up newsletter sometime soon, so I can help infect everyone else with your own unique nerdy fascinations.)

If you’re a paid subscriber to Everything Is Amazing, you’ll be getting the link to sign up for a call in another newsletter by the end of today.

Cheers!

Mike

Sign Me Up For Whatever This Thing Is!

I’m currently writing something new about our Moon - that thing in the sky that’s still so hard to imagine as a real place that four remarkable humans just took a trip around, even after seeing sanity-warping photos like this one:

That piece is coming your way shortly - but as sometimes happens with this newsletter, it needs a bit more time to hit the right trajectory for splashdown [✅ obligatory super-weak orbital mechanics pun].

In its place, but staying with the theme of solar system exploration, here’s a piece from 2023 on just how terrifyingly big stuff is up there.

Let’s start with a question that really belongs in the 4th season of this newsletter, when we looked at the 71% of our planet we tend to overlook - and it’s prompted by a throwaway line from astrobiologist Lewis Dartnell in his marvelous book Origins, which we were all reading together a while back:

“So the water that fills our oceans arrived after the Earth was born.”

Adam Bodensteiner of commented:

“This is fascinating! And I know we’re talking about GEO-logy here, but I can’t help but think about how if our water here on earth came to us from space, how that undoubtedly happened on many other exoplanets!”

I hadn’t stopped to really think about the implications here. But Adam did - and his “wow!” pulled me in.

Now, I might not be the right person to investigate this. I’m sure Phil of the Bad Astronomy newsletter or Tad of First Excited State would do a far more competent job, and get all the math correct. But, here goes.

The questions I tried to answer:

• Precisely how much water is there on our planet?

• Does it really have extraterrestrial origins, as Dartnell claims, and how do we know? (“…brought by a bombardment of icy comets and asteroids from the colder, outer regions of the solar system - like a blizzard from deep space…”)

• How much water is out there, beyond the Earth - and will future astronauts, off-world colonists and solar system explorers ever be in danger of running out of it?

How Much Water Does The Earth Have?

Lacking the time to measure it all by hand, I’m forced to rely on a credible source of data - and few scientific agencies are more trustworthy than the United States Geological Survey, which has been tackling some of the biggest questions in biology, geography, geology, and hydrology over the last 146 years.

It notes that 96.5% of our planet’s water supply is in our oceans. The rest - what we call freshwater (shorthand for “doesn’t contain enough dissolved salts to render it undrinkable”) is held in water vapour, in rivers and lakes and icecaps and glaciers, in the ground, via soil moisture & aquifers, and in living creatures including us humans (we’re 55-60% bags of water, with the remainder comprised mostly of carbon, nitrogen, caffeine, pizza and anxiety).

Since we very quickly sicken and die without adequate hydration, our continued existence as individuals, communities and as a species depends on adequate water supplies.

At first glance, these stats are heartening: oh wow, so the tiny fraction of the world’s freshwater that we draw upon is just a vanishingly small part of just 3.5% of the supply we could get from the sea? That’s basically endless!

Well, yes and no!

There’s a good reason that we satisfy less than half a percent of human water needs with desalinated water: energy. In a practical sense, it still costs too much to process it at scale. To that end, energy generation (clean energy, avoiding creating pollutants that end up back in the water supply and render the whole thing a bit pointless) needs to get a lot cheaper.

And - it is getting cheaper! To an quite astonishing degree, as Bill McKibben explained here.

(2026 UPDATE: this is another exciting plot twist!)

Nevertheless, in pragmatic terms it’s still largely impractical. In time, perhaps?

So, uh - that doesn’t look like a lot. Seriously? All the water in that single blue drop?

Firstly, it’s not a drop: it’s a sphere, with a diameter of 860 miles.

That means there’s around 332 million cubic miles of water in that thing.

Yes, I know that’s just a number, but - you can see how big it is compared to the United States (if it “popped” and emptied all its water onto the U.S., the layer of water would be over a hundred miles deep).

And if it was hovering over Europe, it’d stretch from London to Rome.

A fact I found surprising, via the USGS page:

“Of the freshwater on Earth, much more is stored in the ground than is available in rivers and lakes. More than 2,000,000 mi3 (8,400,000 km3) of freshwater is stored in the Earth, most within one-half mile of the surface.”

So in theory, even if we ran low on freshwater from lakes and rivers - which is frequently the case in many parts of the world, and the subject of a few environmental disasters, like this one - there is still plenty of water locked up not-too-far underground (including under our oceans!).

If there was an environmentally responsible and cost-efficient way to reach it, we wouldn’t need to rely on processing any seawater to meet our needs?

That’s a lot of “if”s there, and a lot of over-idealistic uses of the word “we”, but - good to know, I think?

Did All Our Water Come From Outer Space?

Dartnell’s statement is solidly on the side of extraterrestrial origins - and it reflects what was until recently the agreed-upon model.

But geologists have been poking at this for decades. What’s the actual evidence for such a thing being true?

One indicator is an isotope of hydrogen (deuterium) that goes into making so-called “heavy water” - which is well-named, because if you freeze a sample of it and drop that lump of ice into normal water, it’ll sink to the bottom. The modern ratio of heavy to “light” water on our oceans has the potential to tell a story about where Earth’s water came from (because, for example, many comets seem to be unusually rich with deuterium, so bombardment with similar forms of space-ice could throw that ratio out of whack over time).

It’s an extremely complicated piece of detective-work, with many researchers (like astronomer Karen Meech) dedicating much of their careers to untangling it.

Meanwhile, as this 2020 study concluded, water may also have been present in the materials that formed the inner solar system - namely, the stuff that collided and melted together to form the Earth in the first place.

A form of meteorite called an enstatite chondrite has been found to contain enough hydrogen that, if it was of equivalent accumulated size, it could create the water in our planet’s oceans three times over.

At first glance this might look like more evidence for extraterrestrial origins, but the hydrogen and nitrogen isotopic compositions of these meteorites also match those of the Earth’s mantle, which has been mostly locked away underground since our planet formed.

It suggests that the vast reservoirs of water under our feet were an innate feature of the material that came together to create the Earth. If true, some of that water - in the form of hydrogen, since the early days of the planet were much too hot to hold water - was here from the start.

Neither model is exclusive of the other. And in the way of these things, a mix of the two seems…not outside the realm of possibility?

But no, it doesn’t look as simple as “all our water came from space”.

(Sorry, Professor Dartnell.)

So Exactly How Much Water Is Out There?

“Exactly”? Oh come on. Are you trying to give me a headache?

On the one hand, we certainly know that water is all over our solar system. In 2018 the Indian Space Research Organisation’s Chandrayaan-1 lunar probe confirmed the existence of ice in the shadowed areas of the Moon - and in 2020, NASA announced the discovery of water on the sunlit side.

(In the case of the latter study, it’s roughly enough to fill a 12oz bottle for every cubic metre of lunar soil.)

Further afield, Cassini probe data suggests Saturn’s moon Enceladus has “curtains of vapour” erupting out of cracks in its surface (some of which are up to 75 miles long), suggesting an ocean under the surface that’s up to 6 miles thick.

Plus there’s Europa, with its proposed liquid ocean that descends a truly abyssal 90 miles, as I wrote about previously.

Relatively speaking, our seemingly unremarkable solar system should be pleasantly awash. In 2016, Scientific American writer Shannon Hall reported there’s at least 50 times more water that is found on Earth - and that’s just based on the small amount of confirmed evidence to date.

This isn’t to say it’s going to be easy to tap, as the Moon water example suggests (processing a cubic metre of soil just to get enough water to fill a can of Coke is not getting us very far).

Nevertheless, technical challenges notwithstanding, our interplanetary future should (🤞) be more than adequately hydrated if the right technology is put in place.

But I’d like to use all this as a super-thin excuse to talk about my favourite part of our solar system. You know, the really, really insane part.

Welcome to the sublimely distant edge of our planetary neighbourhood.

There’s no real way to visualise this wider structure of our solar system, but here’s one artist’s attempt to at least get the idea of it across in a way that fits into our brains.

The utmost rim, more or less everyone agrees, is the point where the Sun’s gravitational pull is negligible compared with that of the other stars in our galactic neighbourhood.

Within this boundary should be drifting an essentially unimaginable expanse of fragmented rock and ice, forming billions of comets and trillions of asteroids.

All this stuff drifts around according to the mathematical elegance of the laws of gravitational force. You can see them at work in the image above: an inner “cloud” in the form of a faint torus (or upended infinity-sign, appropriately enough), surrounded by a far larger outer bubble.

It’s called the Oort Cloud, after the Dutch astronomer Jan Hendrik Oort - and nobody has directly seen it yet, even though its existence is not currently in dispute.

As to how far away it is, the best measure is the AU (Astronomical Unit): roughly the distance from the Earth to the Sun, around 93 million miles (150 million km). The inner Oort Cloud begins at 2,000 AU - and its outer edge is anything up to 100,000 AU away.

These are stupid, ridiculous numbers, so here’s another way of thinking of it.

Since 1977, the Voyager 1 space probe has been tirelessly hurtling towards the rim of the solar system. The inner planets and the warm light of our Sun are now far, far behind it - and it’s travelling over a million miles every day into that profound blackness.

At its current velocity, it’s going to take Voyager another 300 years before it reaches the inner edge of the Oort Cloud - and then it’ll need tens of thousands more years to get out of it again.

Ooof.

But wait - the Oort Cloud is mostly ice? Isn’t that even more water for future explorers to draw upon?

Okay, firstly, you read the bit about how far away it is, right? Just checking. And here’s something that really needs emphasizing: it looks like there is nothing else out there. This is otherwise empty space.

(There was a highly controversial theory that the Oort Cloud contains a gas giant several times the size of Jupiter, called Tyche - a so-called “extra planet” of our solar system - but in 2014, the findings from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer found absolutely nothing to suggest it exists.)

Secondly: the Oort Cloud, in a tangible sense, is itself a whole lot of nothing. We’re talking about a staggeringly vast number of bodies spread out over a space that is itself staggeringly vastly more staggeringly vast. It’s incredibly diffuse.

Based on the mass of comets, one estimate for the combined mass of everything within the Oort Cloud is just five times that of Earth. Five Earths, pulverised and scattered over that utterly terrible volume of space…

So no - future astronauts aren’t going to be taking trip to the Oort Cloud to refill their water-bottles.

It’s also possible no human being will ever see it up close - partly because it’s simultaneously too big and too small to see, and partly because the trip isn’t (currently) survivable. Even Voyager 1, when it reaches it in the 24th Century, will be long drained of power. It’s just too far for everything.

For now, humanity’s best bet is to look after the plentiful supplies of water it has at home - and learn to share them properly in a spirit of respectful cooperation, assisted by all the new technology we can bring to bear. If we did that, there should be more than enough for everyone.

So hey, maybe we should get on with doing that?

Images: USGS; Gatis Marcinkevics; Cristofer Maximilian; Pablo Carlos Budassi/Wikimedia Commons; NASA.

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TRANSCRIPT

Oh, hello.

The other day I went to the woods at the edge of town here in western Scotland, around an hour away from home. It had been absolutely belting down with rain, but when I arrived the sky cleared a bit. Hooray, I thought, I’ve got lucky, and started recording the piece I’m going to read for you today.

But - I hadn’t got lucky. For some reason, maybe the nearby communication tower at the top of a hill, there was an awful ticking noise across the three recordings I made - you know, one recording, and then a couple of backup recordings in case there was any weird noise. I listened back to all of them today, and the ticking was on all of them.

So instead, I’m recording just outside the entrance to my apartment, as outside the remnants of Storm Dave rage outside as it finishes tearing through Scotland with a chaotic fury that I wouldn’t normally associate with the name “Dave”.

(No offence to any Daves out there.)

The woods I visited the other day were ancient - that term in Britain that designates woods that are at least multiple centuries old. In this case, there are archaeological sites going back to both the British Iron Age and Bronze Age, which means at least 3,000 years, and at another site a few dozen miles away there are flint artefacts dated to over 14,000 years old.

That’s a lot of archaeology in a small area, and the locations of sites usually have something to say about access to raw materials, so I bet these woods have been useful for a long time - and also the coast, which is only a few miles away.

From what I can gather, almost all the trees are three varieties: Elm, which is Ulmus minor; Ash is Fraxinus excelsior (what a great name that’d make for a spell), and Larch, which is Laris decidua.

Most of those trees are older than me, and some of them even look it - Ash and Elm can grow for 300 years, Larch for 600, so maybe a few of these trees could have been alive at the time of the Aztecs, or before Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press.

This is one of the great gifts to us humans from trees - their incredible age. Not to get all spiritual about this, but I bet you’ve experienced something like this around trees - that weird relief creeping into your bones, making you feel that yes, some of all this confusing, infuriating awfulness in the news will pass at some point to be replaced with hopefully something a bit better, and in the meantime, like trees, we can just look for a way to sink our roots a bit deeper so we can stand our ground to get through it. Trees can be very reassuring metaphors of that process.

But there’s also what trees become, if they’re given enough time.

The other day, I was leaving my apartment and I noticed some new shoots coming up in a couple of big plant-pots I’d left empty over the winter. I took a photo with my PictureThis app, and it told me they’re sycamores (acer pseudoplatanus).

It seems that late last year, a few of the helicopter-blade-like seeds from the big old sycamore tree in my garden whirled down here and then got to work, and now I’m growing 6 or 7 baby trees.

If I took them somewhere and planted them properly, they’ll get busy doing what they’re best at doing: becoming the tallest plants on the block. That’s partly what a tree is: it’s a perennial plant with one really neat trick - to be able to grow higher than all the other plants and hog the most sunshine so it can put all that energy to work in becoming the biggest plant it can be.

Well, actually - that’s what I used to think, but then I learned about Professor of Geography Donald Rusk Currey.

In 1964 he was a graduate student in Nevada, and he was taking core samples from trees in order to date them with dendrochronology, which most people know as “counting the rings”, although it’s a bit more complicated than that. One day, he took his expensive drill and began screwing it deep into one particular tree, a bristlecone pine growing in what is now Great Basin National Park. But for some reason, he was finding this really hard going - and then, according to one version of this story, *ting* - the drill bit broke off.

This was a disaster for Currey, this was a specialised bit of equipment called an increment borer, it cost him quite a bit of money and he only had one of them, so if possible he wanted to get it back. He asked the Forest Service for permission to cut the tree down, and they gave it, so Currey to work with a chain saw.

Now, there are conflicting reports about the facts of this story - we can’t ask Currey himself because he passed away in 2004, but he later said he already suspected the tree could be old - some of the other cores he’d taken from trees in the area, over a hundred of them, showed bristlecone pines could be well over a thousand years old. That was the purpose of his research.

When the tree came down, Currey chopped the trunk into thin slices to take home and study, and a week later, he had his answer. This tree, which is now nicknamed Prometheus, was over 4,900 years old when it was cut down, meaning it started growing before the stones went up at Stonehenge.

This is still the oldest single tree known to have existed on this planet - and you can imagine the uproar when this story broke. (Thank god social media didn’t exist back then, or, you know, the Daily Mail.)

But despite that, Currey was still hounded by reporters and people wanting to hear his story, and he was having none of it - he kept his head down, he published his findings, he went on to have a well-respected career as a researcher and professor, but he generally refused to talk about the whole thing publicly.

In the mid 1980s the area gained National Park status and bristlecone pines became a protected species, and it’s telling that Currey himself went to Congress to speak in support of the park’s creation.

As I’ve written about before, Prometheus certainly isn’t the oldest organism on Earth, and it’s not even the oldest tree - that honour seems to belong to a clonal forest of quaking aspens in Utah nicknamed Pando with a single massive root system that has created over 47,000 genetically identical trees, which is regarded by scientists as one organism covering 42 hectares. Absolutely wild.

But Prometheus was incredibly old - even though it wasn’t incredibly big. It wasn’t the size of a redwood - it was only about 5 metres high, what any of us would call a moderately-sized tree. Before I learned this, I figured there was a fairly straightforward relationship at work here: the bigger the tree has gotten, the older it is. I was mostly wrong - it turns out the species has a lot more to do with it, and possibly other facts, instead of just its age.

I hope there will be a lot of that in this new season of Everything Is Amazing - a lot of moments where I thought I knew a thing, and I absolutely didn’t. This time round, we’re looking at what now gets called ‘The Great Outdoors’…

…or perhaps we can call it Nature, you know, that term we’ve come up with to draw an entirely arbitrary and you might say foolish line between ourselves and the world we live in. And it’s about looking at the cutting-edge science about what being quote unquote outside, in places like the woods I visited yesterday, is doing to our mental and physical health.

But what I don’t want to do is assume there are easy answers. Answers like: “oh, it’s a small tree, so that automatically means it’s young.” That was wrong, and now I’m wondering what else I can be wrong about.

For example, here’s something I’ve seen in a lot of online conversations in recent years. Climate change is very worrying - especially to young people, who I couldn’t blame for being increasingly furious about it. The main driver of climate change right now is carbon dioxide. But wait - don’t we already have a great way to get CO2 out of the air? If we cut back on deforestation and plant a hell of a lot more trees, can’t we drag a lot of that carbon out of the air where it’s creating this greenhouse effect that’s heating the world to dangerous levels? Can’t we fix global warming by just going absolutely nuts with tree-planting?

The answer is - yes, but only sort of. It’s true, there seem to be very few downsides to planting vast numbers of trees and leaving a greater number of existing trees in the ground so they can hoard their carbon and help keep it out of the atmosphere.

But this is also the kind of easy answer that dodges the cause of the problem it’s there to fix, so tree planting could easily be turned into a very attractive PR campaign by, say, fossil fuel providers who want to maintain the profits they make from putting carbon dioxide into the air in the first place. Keep the oil flowing, just plant loads more trees to offset everything, and everyone is happy!

Unless, say, someone blockades the Strait of Hormuz for some reason, but that would never happen, would it?

Even this apparent solution of turning the world into a megaforest has a few drawbacks. A surprising one to me is that trees are often relatively darker against the landscape they grow upon, and dark surfaces have a different albedo - the amount of sunlight they reflect - so they absorb more heat. This means that towards the poles, trees could have more of a warming effect than they do in equatorial regions, so it’ll matter where you decide to plant these forests.

Or there’s the question of how the aerosols generated by forests affect incoming sunlight, you know, all those delicious earthy piney smells that make you feel so alive, they’re due to tree-emitted chemicals suspended in the air - and recent research suggests that the volatile gases above forests block direct sunlight but enhance diffused light, which can help the trees grow better - in other words, the trees are altering the atmosphere for their own benefit. How about that for a bit of sly geoengineering?

So there question is - how much could these affect things at a global scale? There’s currently work being done to model this - and, it seems, a lot of fruitful arguing.

All this is fiendishly complicated. Yet the signs so far are that reforestation is still an excellent strategy to lean into - as long as it’s not treated like the environmental processes of our planet are only here to clean up the messes we’ve made for our own ridiculously short-sighted reasons - for example, making even more money, which, let’s not forget, is a human invention, and one that probably deserves a rethink at some point soon.

What planting lots of trees could give us is time. Time to tackle the root cause (look, another tree metaphor, thank you, trees), and time to understand how these extremely complicated systems actually work by properly supporting and funding the sciences investigating them.

In the October edition of Scientific American last year, there was a profile of the work of forest ecologist Mark Harmon, who is working in Oregon’s western Cascade mountains. His work is studying what happens to trees after they die. For the last 40 years, he and his colleagues have been monitoring more than 500 rotting logs, looking at the plants and animals that make their homes there. This has become a model for other studies worldwide, and it’s important because it’s another piece of the puzzle of understanding the atmosphere - how quickly do trees decay and release their carbon?

What’s already clear is that different species of trees decay at wildly different rates - some in a few years, others in centuries. Because of that, this is a colossally long-term study. Two hundred years. Harmon won’t live to see the end of it and neither will anyone else alive today. Of course, that’s if its funding continues - it’s supported by the National Science Foundation, and right now, Donald Trump’s administration is proposing even more cuts to NSF funding in general. But as the article notes about the study:

“Its timescale might save it. The project requires little maintenance, and the logs will rot whether anyone is watching them or not. For now, someone is.”

Once again, trees teach us the value of patience, and of considering our frequent inability to look beyond the anxious hastiness of our own timescales, to see all the other ways of living and cooperating that exist on this planet. There is also something about the very deliberate way that trees grow, taking centuries to fulful their potential, that I find inspiring.

One of the things you hear about a lot of technology these days is that it’ll save you so much time. Particularly with all these large language model tools we call “AI”. You want to do a thing? Great! Just hop on ChatGPT or Claude or whatever, and you can do it in seconds.

But - firstly, you didn’t “do it”, the machine did it for you, based on the parameters you fed into it. You got to use the result, but you didn’t learn the skill - or rather, you learned the skill of using an LLM (which is a service that costs you money at some point), but without access to that tool in the future, you’d be rendered completely useless. This is what I wonder about all the students using AI tools in Universities who at some point will find themselves in an exam with nothing except a pen and paper and what’s actually in their heads at the time.

And secondly, you didn’t learn anything because you can’t do that in a few seconds. Learning takes time. Learning is immensely frustrating in this manner, filled with all sorts of false starts, and forgetting of the basics again and again until it’s properly drummed into you. To learn something, to fully internalise it and especially to turn it from knowledge into what we call instinct and also the kind of muscle-memory where it feels like you hardly have to think at all - that takes a lot of time.

I’m well aware that folk half my age are doing things with technology that I’m incapable of learning because of the generation of computer-users that I grew up in. Fine! Call me as outdated as a larch, and go do your thing with my blessing.

But please don’t fall into the trap of equating speed of production, aka, efficiency, with depth of understanding.

The writer was being interviewed recently, and he said this:

“AI is super helpful for transcription. I understand there must be other harmless things that writers use it for. But I am very hesitant to become reliant on it for anything. I don’t mind missing the boat. It’s okay. I am not good at what I do because I am very efficient or optimized. Inefficiency and friction is a big part of thinking, in my opinion.”

So maybe all that ‘time wasted’, in doing things the long, messy, hard way that seemingly takes forever, is also time well spent, because it burns into you the skill you will eventually need to not be replaced by a robot.

Maybe that’s something we all need to relearn, yet again, over and over, for as long as it takes to actually remember it.

And what I’m relearning right now…is that when bad weather is blowing through, the entrance to my flat acts like a cross between a wind-tunnel and a carwash, and I’m getting soaked - so it’s time to go in.

Thanks for listening, and go hug some trees with my blessing. I reckon they deserve it.

Photos: Mike Sowden

Well, it’s official - the Ig Nobels are leaving the United States, at least for now.

I’ve written before about my love of these satirical science awards - particularly how they invite winners in to share the joke, like lab colleagues good-naturedly ribbing each other while respecting the important work they’re doing:

In 2000, Sir Andrew Geim was joint-awarded the Ig Nobel for Physics, along with Michael Berry, for their work in levitating a frog using diamagnetism. Ten years later, Geim would joint-win the actual Nobel Prize for Physics for his work with the carbon allotrope Graphene, a material that’s currently making headlines for how it’s unlocking all sorts of new scientific breakthrough.

But the Ig Nobels are also intentionally daft. They make a priority of aiming for a LOL - like how, in the very first ceremony in 1991, then-US-Vice-President Dan Quayle won in the Education category “for demonstrating, better than anyone else, the need for science education.”

(I also love their description of him: “consumer of time and occupier of space.”)

That’s the other side of the awards, the utterly merciless roasting - and it’s just as fun.

• The 1991 Ig Nobel Prize for PEACE: awarded to Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb and first champion of the Star Wars weapons system, for his lifelong efforts to change the meaning of peace as we know it.

• The 1996 Ig Nobel Prize for MEDICINE: awarded to James Johnston of R.J. Reynolds, Joseph Taddeo of U.S. Tobacco, Andrew Tisch of Lorillard, William Campbell of Philip Morris, Edward A. Horrigan of Liggett Group, Donald S. Johnston of American Tobacco Company, and the late Thomas E. Sandefur, Jr., chairman of Brown and Williamson Tobacco Co. for their unshakable discovery, as testified to the U.S. Congress, that nicotine is not addictive.

• The 2009 Ig Nobel Prize for MATHEMATICS: awarded to Gideon Gono, governor of Zimbabwe’s Reserve Bank, for giving people a simple, everyday way to cope with a wide range of numbers — from very small to very big — by having his bank print bank notes with denominations ranging from one cent ($.01) to one hundred trillion dollars ($100,000,000,000,000).

• The 2020 Ig Nobel Prize for MEDICAL EDUCATION: awarded to [BRAZIL, UK, INDIA, MEXICO, BELARUS, USA, TURKEY, RUSSIA, TURKMENISTAN] Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, Boris Johnson of the United Kingdom, Narendra Modi of India, Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico, Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus, Donald Trump of the USA, Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, Vladimir Putin of Russia, and Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow of Turkmenistan, for using the Covid-19 viral pandemic to teach the world that politicians can have a more immediate effect on life and death than scientists and doctors can.

(Wince.)

Now the Ig Nobels will be held in Zurich, beginning with this year’s ceremony on the 3rd September - and although the official (and perfectly believable) reason for this is the increasing difficulty in getting nominees to attend, I wonder if this isn’t going to feature in the awards? If so, I can understand the organisers not wanting to be in the U.S. when that’s announced….

So - for whatever reason, it’s all change after 35 years. And as a fan of the Ig Nobels and of utterly shameless listicles, I can’t resist the call here.

Here’s the first part of a roundup of thirty-five Ig Nobel Awards that tickle me no end.

1. THE 2012 IG NOBEL PRIZE FOR ACOUSTICS

You know when you’re on a Zoom call and the other person isn’t using headphones and hasn’t muted their audio, so you’re met with a slightly delayed version of your own voice every time you speak?

More than a decade ago, Kazutaka Kurihara and Koji Tsukada first discovered what we’ve all now learned from bitter experience - that it’s incredibly annoying when this happens, and can instantly derail your train of thought.

The device they used to demonstrate this is called the SpeechJammer, and it was built with a noble purpose in mind:

“This technology ... could also be useful to ensure speakers in a meeting take turns appropriately, when a particular participant continues to speak, depriving others of the opportunity to make their fair contribution.”

- Kazutaka Kurihara.

This also made me realise we can do this manually!

Is someone in your already tedious work Zoom meeting just droning on and on, and you’re ready to ask them to finish their contribution before somebody dies? Simple! Just slyly unplug your headphones, nudge your speakers up to full volume and SpeechJammer the wretch until they splutter to a halt.

Oh dear, sorry about the technical difficulties, you say with hand-wringing contrition. But I think it’s fixed now. So, where were we?

(NOTE: you probably only get to try this once, or twice if your acting skills are up to the challenge. Choose your moment wisely!)

2. THE 2005 IG NOBEL PRIZE FOR ECONOMICS

How much do you rely on the snooze button on your alarm clock or phone to get you up in the morning?

I’m not here to judge you either way - although it seems that repeat snoozers suffer no ill effects and may even have slightly sharper minds than instant-arisers.

However, if you’re in the latter category as I am, and you want your alarm clock to absolutely, unambiguously get you out of damn bed the very first time it goes off, maybe you need the clock invented by Gauri Nanda of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology two decades ago.

It’s called Clocky, and it has one job - to infuriate you awake in the shortest time possible. Yes, it has a snooze button, but it also has wheels, and when that alarm rings, off it scarpers across your room in as fast and as random a path as possible…

Alas, there’s only one way to shut it up.

Thus its mission is accomplished, maybe adding hours of productivity to your workday - or even helping you meet the love of your life!

3. THE 2014 IG NOBEL PRIZE FOR NEUROSCIENCE

If you’ve been reading me for a while, you’ll know my soft spot for the human visual bias called pareidolia - which is how you can see Marlene Dietrich, Gillian Anderson or the Virgin Mary in the grilled cheese sandwich that Diana Duyser sold to GoldenPalace.com for $28,000 in 2004.

It’s also how you can see this aggressively drunk octopus:

But in 2014, the international team of Jiangang Liu, Jun Li, Lu Feng, Ling Li, Jie Tian, and Kang Lee, went deeper - asking what is actually happening in the brains of people who can see the face of Jesus in a piece of toast.

As I said in my original write-up:

“There’s a region of your brain called the right fusiform face area that’s strongly associated with processing the patterns of human facial features, letting us spot the faces of our loved ones in a sea of strangers. And when it gets activated, it so easily drowns out other conflicting messages. It’s like a megaphone at a town hall meeting.

Only problem is: like every other process, it’s working with the same “corner-cutting” visual guesswork inputs. And it’s easily tricked into making mistakes, as with Upside-Down Adele.”

More recently, researchers from the University of Queensland in Australia found that pregnant women and new mothers seem to have hightened sensitivity to face pareidolia - perhaps to help with social bonding between mothers and infants, perhaps facilitated by increased levels of the hormone & neurotransmitter oxytocin.

There’s clearly much more work to be done here. But any mechanism in the brain for heightening emotional connections to parts of the world around us - for making us care about it, in a way that motivates us into acquiring a sense of stewardship around it - is well worth learning more about.

Coming up after the paywall:

• Dodgy car manufacturing…

• madly excessive co-authorship…

• an inventive (if highly inadvisible) way of tackling a snakebite…

• the remarkable minds of taxis drivers…

• the best way to beat procrastination…

…and other lovable madness.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Oh hello.

You’ve caught me at the beach - this is my local beach here in Scotland - and as you can maybe hear, the wind’s a bit fierce and the sea’s a bit rough and it was hailing half an hour ago, and only an idiot would be outdoors right now, which is maybe why - I’m at the beach. Hello.

But look, to be fair to Scotland, I was at the beach the other day, and it was much nicer - the first scorcher of the year, where the temperature soared to the dizzying heights of…11 or 12 degrees Celsius? Proper tropical.

And this beach, which is currently being lashed with rain and spray and windblown sand, was packed with people.

You know, the kind of people determined to have a good time, in that way I’ve experienced in northern England - like when your parents get this mad glitter in their eyes and suddenly say “Oooh, it’s a lovely day, let’s spend it at the beach!” and you pile into the car and drive for 3 hours, with the rain pulsing up the windscreen and your dad yelling “It’s fine, it’ll pass, it’s just a squall,” and then at some point someone unveils some unpleasantly clammy sandwiches and because you’re so determined to survive all this you eat them, then try to blot the taste out with a single stick of KitKat…

And then after hours of this misery, you get there, and the wind is absolutely baltic and so fierce you can barely get the car door open, and feeling exactly, exactly like Ernest Shackleton (because you’ve read those sorts of books because those are the sorts of parents you have) you fight your way to the cliff edge to peer down at a quagmire of a beach half-obscured by curtains of rain, and then you fight your way back to the car because it seems the wind is now going in the other direction, and you clamber back in, and the windows instantly fog up - and your dad says, “Aren’t we glad we did this?” in a tone where it’s obviously not a question, and if you dare to treat it like a question you’ll be in real trouble.

But look. There’s no need to go over all that again. Leave it, Mike.

My point is: at any sign of sunshine, the Scots go to the beach. I’ve been here for 5 years, I’ve seen it happen every time, and it’s magnificent.

Good on them. Fine attitude. If I had kids I’d drive for hours just to get them to enjoy the same experience.

But look, this is a science newsletter, not a therapy session. And what fascinates me on days like the sunny day earlier this week is the people saying hello to each other.

You know - that thing that went away for about a year, starting in 2020, where you’re in close proximity to another human being and you’re feeling comfortable and curious enough to break the ice with them. That thing that’s somehow a little harder to do, in the wake of a global pandemic or seemingly endless cycles of intensely polarising politics. All that stuff.

I used to be a travel writer, so here’s a great trick you can use when you’re travelling.

What you do is: you carry a paper map.

If you’re under the age of 30: yes, maps used to exist on paper too, and you can still buy them, and no, the following trick is much harder to do on your phone and probably won’t work and also, paper maps are beautiful things, and they will do wonderful things to your brain if you use them - it’s something about the lack of the kind of border your screens have, something about filling your peripheral vision and really being able to feel the relationship between all the landmarks you’re looking at. Seriously. Paper maps, try it.

So - if you want to meet a few strangers, you pick a place with a lot of foot traffic, and you stand there with your map out and the most confused and ideally gormless expression on your face that you can muster, turning this way and map, obviously trying to fit what’s on the map with what you’re seeing…and failing completely.

It doesn’t matter where you are in the world. Honestly. It works everywhere. A universal cry for help. And it won’t be long before someone will stop and offer to show you where you are.

You can even accelerate this process by visibly holding your map upside-down.

If all this doesn’t lead to you becoming a magnet for every pickpocket in a 5-mile radius, you’ll have the chance to meet some new people, and maybe to strike up a conversation with them.

You may be feeling intensely awkward at this point. If you’re English, you may be bordering on mania. Talking to strangers can be an intensely vulnerable-feeling thing. Oh god, these people don’t know what an idiot I am, how do I break it to them? And so on.

But here’s some science to help you with that. It’s courtesy of behavioural scientist Nicholas Epley, who is a professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He’s spent a lot of time looking into this and picking through countless studies, and via his article in Scientific American, I learned that all the studies he looked at point towards one game-changing revelation:

You have to overcome your natural tendency to underestimate how positively strangers will respond to your attempts to spark up a conversation with them.

Obviously this isn’t always true - sometimes people just want to be left alone. You can look for Nature’s warning signs: their headphones, or an avoidance of eye contact, or a blood-spattered broadsword, that sort of thing. But generally, they’ll be more willing to say hello than you expect. That’s the trend, it seems. It’s a misplaced psychological barrier that afflicts us all.

One study was of people commuting on public transport. They were randomly assigned either solitude or a conversation. But here’s the weird thing: the commuters who were randomly assigned conversations all reported a more positive-feeling commute than the ones left to themselves. This included the grumpier ones, who would much prefer to be left alone in peace because chatty randos on your daily commute are just the worst. Those people also recorded feeling better about their journey.

They thought what they needed was a quiet moment to catch up on their doomscrolling and make a list of all the things they’re feeling behind with, but what they actually needed was to collide with the endlessly fascinating, endlessly challenging universe of another person’s mind.

I see the wisdom in this, and I’m an introvert. I’m who is talking about when she says some people’s social battery is running down when they’re in a crowd, and when it runs out, so do they, as fast as possible. I am that person. But I was also a travel writer, and that’s all about learning how other people live and think. It was quite the learning curve. I’m still fighting my way up it.

But talking to strangers is nowhere near as dreadful as we think - partly because we’re nowhere near as dreadful to them as we think we are.

One final thing that Professor Epley noted. In a study where participants were asked to reconnect with an old friend, either by voice-calling them, or by sending them an email. Which is easier? The email, obviously - far less awkward, they don’t get to answer right away so you can just say your piece and feel good about yourself and deal with the fallout later when they reply in a way that suggests they don’t feel quite as approving of your heroic efforts as you do, and so on. Manageable, that’s what email is. And the study reflected that. A majority of people initially preferred to use email for the same reason.

But those participants in the study who were actually told to get over their feelings of awkwardness and use a voice-call (god, I hope they were paid to do this study, it sounds horrible), they reported that they enjoyed the experience much more than the aloof e-mailers did AND they didn’t feel any more awkward afterwards. They expected they would, but they actually didn’t.

There is just so much that happens to us, and that happens between us, when we actually talk to each other, using our cake-eating equipment. What we say matters a great deal, of course - and I’m not ever going to claim we should or even can do away with things like email, because - well, I’d be out of a job.

But in so many ways, we are all here to make odd noises at each other and to benefit from the broad emotional bandwidth advantages of doing so, especially with the tricky stuff, including those critical first few words we’ll ever exchange with them.

Okay, that clearly isn’t happening here today. There’s a bloke with his dog, and the dog…looks furious with him. Good god. I mean, dogs always want to go for a walk, right? Well, not this one, and that should tell you something about the weather. So I’m going to wrap this up and go home.

I hope you’re doing well - and please, never be afraid of saying hi. You’d be amazed at how many people want you to do that.

Cheers!

Mike.

Images: Mike Sowden; Frames For Your Heart.

Hi. This is Mike of Everything Is Amazing.

One of the most delightful and terrifying things about writing this newsletter is knowing who I’m sending it to.

Thanks to your countless comments, to hundreds of chats over Zoom, and, I’ll admit, a certain amount of nosy Google-searching on my part, I know my enthusiastic blunderings are now read by:

• geologists, palaeontologists, marine biologists, psychologists, neuroscientists, science fiction writers, engineers, computer scientists, oceanographers, physicists, astrophysicists, high-school teachers, doctors, nurses, that bloke I sat across from on a train last year who seems to know everything about bridge construction (you know who you are, and yes, I’m loving the book, thank you)…

And also there’s YOU - perhaps somewhat described by one or more of those labels up there, or not described at all because you’re a label-defying rebel and you’ve made a point of never joining a club that would have you as a member. Fine work, if so.

As far as I can tell, you’re all here, and the collective knowledge of what you know is staggering to me - the product of thousands of lives lived differently enough to mine that you hold within you an endless (endless!) capacity to not just suprise me, but to look like this when I stumble my way into a topic you actually know something about:

Hence my delight, and hence my terror. Some days I don’t quite know what to do with them.

But today, I do. What I’m doing is getting out of the way.

If you’re willing, please answer the following question by leaving a comment below:

What’s something amazing that you wish you could teach everyone?

See you in the comments. (And thank you!)

1.

It’s the stitching that gives it away.

Conservator Theresa Zammit Lupi is working through a collection of 2,300 year old scraps of papyrus, that fabulously useful plant that gave ancient Egyptians their reed boats, mats, baskets, ropes and footwear - and, most famously, something to write on.

Even these days, papyrus seems near-magical: the product of little more than sliced reeds, water, pressure and immense patience, giving something that’s tough, flexible and highly rot-resistant as long as conditions are dry enough.

The piece she’s now examining so keenly was retrieved from the wrappings of a mummy, tucked into its linen bindings.

The amount of linen used to wrap high-status mummies was often considerable - sometimes over 300 square metres of the stuff - and often surrounded by a case made of hardened cartonnage: layers of linen or papyrus covered in plaster.

In both coverings, scraps of papyrus were used to add bulk and strength - and anything would do. Imagine fishing in the waste-paper bin of the average modern household: scribbled shopping lists, urgent reminders, anxious totting-up of expenses, plus everything we used to jot down before smartphones arrived.

Since papyrus was so valuable, these throwaway scraps proved perfect for a bit of funerary upcycling - and now researchers have found a way to peer through the layers to read what’s written on them, glimpsing an everyday life in ancient Egypt that was deemed too trivial to be directly recorded for posterity.

But in this case, no scanning is required. This 15x25 cm tatter is written upon with easily decipherable Greek, revealing a record of taxes due on quantities of beer and oil, somewhere around 260 BC. It’s exactly the kind of work Dr. Zammit Lupi has enthusiastically dedicated herself to, since abandoning plans for a career in law after becoming entranced by a National Geographic article on the restoration of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican.

But now, here’s something she’s never seen before:

"First I saw a piece of thread, only then did I notice the format of a book. I saw a central fold, the stitching holes and the written text within clearly defined margins on the papyrus.”

She realises she’s looking at part of a codex, the ancestor of the modern book (and now a word usually reserved for non-paper pages bound along one edge).

Only, it’s much earlier than she expected. The two earliest known stitched codices date to 150-250 AD. This one predates them by - what, up to four centuries?

Wow!

Has she discovered the earliest book in the world?

2.

As far as I can tell, there’s no way to answer that question - because nobody can fully agreed on what a book is.

Do you mean “the oldest collection of writing in the world”? I guess this 40,000 year old collection of artifacts engraved with geometric signs might just about qualify!

Oh, you mean the oldest text, as in, a sustained body of writing physically imprinted on a single, uh, I-guess-what-we’d-now-call “document”? That might be the Sumerian Instructions of Šuruppak (2600-2500 BCE), if you’re counting stone tablets, except there are actually engraved clay tablets from Nineveh that date from much earlier, so - erm?

But if you mean a book has to be printed on paper, oh well then, that’s probably China’s Diamond Sutra (around 868 CE) - but that depends on how you want to define “printed”, presumably not just with movable metal type because that’s the Buljo jikji simche yojeol (which predates the Gutenberg Bible by 78 years), but if you mean just with ink conveyed symbols onto paper, there are examples in the British Museum that go as far back as….

Oh lordy. What a headache.

And hey, another thing - do you mean to claim that the book I was most definitely reading this morning on my beloved Kobo Libra 2 e-reader isn’t actually “a book”?

You outrageous luddite. I feel so attacked!

What about at Christmas, when for the first time in my life I read half of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights on the Kindle app on my phone, before giving up on it because it was so relentlessly grim? Should I have another crack at it then, because by your argument I haven’t actually tried to read Wuthering Heights at all?

In short, that big thorny question for the modern reader, author and generative AI copyright lawsuit claimant: isn’t a real “book” defined by the words it’s made from, independent of the physical medium employed to carry those words to you and convey the meaning of them into your brain? In all the ways that matter, doesn’t a book have a fundamental identity beyond its physical reproductions, beyond its manifest “thing”-ness?

It’s all delightfully messy, and I guess it won’t be solved anytime soon.

But one thing we can agree upon: however you want to define it, the human invention of the book has proved to be a terrific way to store information (ideas, stories, the kind of wisdom that’s incredibly hard-won and so easily forgotten) and carry it forward throught time. So far, it’s a job so very well done.

But in this age so hell-bent on generating more information than we know what to do with (so much of it quite literally rot), seemingly doomed to lose almost all of it in the long run, save the relatively little that can be physically printed out or desperately forwarded as a copy-of-a-copy-of-a-copy to future generations…well, can’t we invent something better?

It seems the answer is yes - and it could have profound implications for our role as a species going forward.

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This edition is a bit late, so apologies for that!

This week I hoped to send you a piece about the first “book” that humans have designed to last hundreds of millions of years, as part of this series for paid subscribers. But since it’s still in progress and I try to only show up in your Inbox with something that’s fully worth reading - alas, I’ll need another day or so with that one.

In the meantime, I’m falling back on my favourite formula for writing this newsletter:

1. Someone smart, knowledgeable and supremely well-regarded in their scientific field puts something on the internet that’s so remarkable it even blows their cavernous minds…

2. I clumsily leap into it like a dog jumping into a pile of leaves…

3. I try to convey this whole experience to you, hopefully without mangling the actual facts too much…

4. If neither of us is too annoyed by the results, I will consider it a job well done in the service of SCIENCE COMMUNICATION.

For today’s example, I’m indebted to University of Maine climate, extinction, & biodiversity scientist - and let’s face it, total legend - Jacquelyn Gill for this curiosity-grenade of a post on Bluesky:

A what now?

OK I’ll type it into Wikip-WHAT THE HELL IS THAT?

First discovered by amateur fossil hunter Francis Tully in 1955, Tullimonstrum (yes, that’s the official Latin name) is a 310 million year old marine animal that looks like - well, is there anything? A dustbuster designed by Jim Henson? A mutated, sentient colon?

I’ve got nothing, and honestly continue to have nothing.

From a scientific perspective, it’s just as baffling. As Scientific American’s Jack Tamisiea asked in 2023: was the Tully Monster a fish, a worm, or a giant slug with fangs?

What a delight, albeit with a certain amount of Well Thank God That’s Extinct.

In other news, even the rocks are finding 2026 a bit much:

What you’re looking at is a pebble discovered at Christmas by fossil-hunter Christine Clark, while she was out for a walk on Holy Island in Northumberland - and those “teeth” are actually parts of an ancient marine animal called a crinoid.

When I was growing up in East Yorkshire in the north of England, I’d see a lot of crinoid fossils embedded in stones on the beach, in particular at the chalky outcrop of Flamborough Head (the site of one of the battles for American independence, oddly enough).

But thanks to the human visual bias of pareidolia…

…none of us have a hope of seeing this example as anything other than toothy. Ah well.

Meanwhile - if you’ve been following the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics, and in particular the unrelenting drama of the curling events, you’ve probably been watching (and it feels very weird to say this) sports people flinging about pieces of my corner of Scotland.

is right! (As she always is.) The Olympic curling stones are made from the famous Ailsa Craig common green and blue hone varieties of granite.

I know this because I can see the island as a shadow on my horizon, less than 40 miles away from my current home town, as the crow flies.

It’s quite the sight.

The extinct volcanic plug called Ailsa Craig is in the middle of the Firth of Clyde, the waterway which opens out into the ocean between western Scotland and northern Ireland.

You can see it directly behind the isle of Pladda here:

It also regularly creates its own weather, as the following spectacular photograph by Rob Wilson demonstrates:

(Rob seems to be cornering the market on Ailsa Craig Weather Photography, and you can see more of his gorgeous work here.)

The only other source of professional curling stone material is a quarry in Wales. That’s it - just two places in the world, both in the UK.

As Andrea Thompson writes in Scientific American, this could probably do with a rethink:

“In principle, there’s no reason rock from other places couldn’t work for curling…. Ailsa Craig and the Trefor granite quarry probably became the go-to sources over time through some combination of their performance characteristics, tradition and standardization. And blasting is no longer allowed at Ailsa Craig, a now-uninhabited bird sanctuary, so another source would help keep curling clubs stocked in the future.”

I actually find it astonishing that Ailsa Craig was ever long-term inhabited. Just look at it. Can you imagine? I already knew it has a fresh-water spring, and that fishermen have used it as a base for the last 400 years, but - ye gawds, it must have been hard, with near-as-dammit no native trees & therefore no wood as fuel.

Nevertheless:

“The Girvan family, who were tenants of the island from at least the mid 19th century along with the lighthouse keepers, their families and granite workers – about 30 in all – lived as a community on Ailsa Craig until the 1950s.”

- Dr. Bernard Zonfrillo, Glasgow University.

The nopiest of nopes.

But - would I spend a night there in my bivvy bag? Is that even allowed? I don’t know and I’m afraid to ask, yet I feel I must.

I’ll report back when I know more.

Images: Nobu Tamura (Spinops/Paleoexhibit/Wikimedia); Tony Jolliffe; Rob Wilson; August Schwerdfeger.