How To 'See' The World Like Daredevil

Is that even possible? Recent science suggests YES.

Hello! This is Everything Is Amazing, an enthusiastic romp through the sciences to stoke your curiosity and wonder.

If you’re feeling bruised by the outcome of the U.S. election, that’s two of us. I really don’t know what to say beyond that - I’m a Brit in Scotland, this wasn’t my country’s election, and yet it still knocked the wind out of me for the last week. I can barely imagine how most of my American friends are feeling right now.

(My friend Doug of the newsletter Snack Stack captured his grief, partly through the eyes of his 9-year-old daughter, in a heart-breaking piece of writing here.)

I also know some of you will be delighted at the result! If that delight is grounded in the pursuit of genuine empathy, kindness and respect for human dignity and a good-faith investigation of scientific fact, I hope you’re proven right in who you’ve chosen and my own fears are proven wrong, I really do.

But as for general advice for everyone going forward,

lyz

(the author Lyz Lenz) said it better than I ever could with her introduction to a newsletter yesterday:

“Here is the thing: Find the stories and the storytellers you want to support. Find the places making the art that you love and that crystallize a vision for a better place. Be rabid about the world you want and help to make it. I’ll be out there doing my best to do it too. And what does that look like? Well, I think I am going to get more personal, more contemplative. I am going to make more jokes. I am not going to look away from the truth. I hope you will stay with me.

And rather than marinating in the Elon Muskian media stew of hate-takes, I think we should all subscribe to and share the fuck out of the things we love and want to see more of in the world.”

Co-sign.

Some of you also let me know that you found the Oliver Burkeman newsletter I shared last week - “How not to freak out about the U.S. elections” - to be comforting and helpful, so I’m glad to say he’s now written a sequel, it’s equally great, and it’s here.

Okay. Returning to the science side of things: since it *has* been a hell of a week, I feel compelled to re-share this absolute state of a thing with you:

(Yes, it’s real. Except only in the sense that someone was bonkers enough to assemble it.)

And for something equally startling - behold this tree!

There’s actually only one tree in this picture - a quaking aspen (Populus tremuloides) in Utah that’s been nicknamed Pando. It may look like a forest of individual aspens, but it’s actually around 47,000 clones of one tree connected by a root system that covers a whopping 42.8 ha/106 acres, equivalent to 80 football fields.

Now, by sequencing hundreds of samples of this clonal organism, researchers have estimated that Pando’s age is - *deep breath* - between 16,000 and 80,000 years old. (Important to note: this still an estimate, and this study has not yet been peer reviewed.)

This would rank it among the oldest organisms on earth. Yes, incredibly that’s only “among” rather than “the oldest” - because the latter might be the strains of 45 million year-old yeast that Cal Poly biology professor Raul Cano retrieved from amber (fossilized tree resin) in Myanmar in the 1990s - which he’s now using to brew beer. Quite the thing.

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Anyway! Today, I have some surprising news from a British team of researchers about your own dormant superhuman abilities. (Yes, you.)

Are you ready to see the world like this man can?