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No coward soul is mine
No trembler in the world's storm-troubled sphere
I see Heaven's glories shine
And Faith shines equal arming me from Fear
O God within my breast
Almighty ever-present Deity
Life, that in me hast rest,
As I Undying Life, have power in Thee
Vain are the thousand creeds
That move men's hearts, unutterably vain,
Worthless as withered weeds
Or idlest froth amid the boundless main
To waken doubt in one
Holding so fast by thy infinity,
So surely anchored on
The steadfast rock of Immortality.
With wide-embracing love
Thy spirit animates eternal years
Pervades and broods above,
Changes, sustains, dissolves, creates and rears.
Though earth and moon were gone
And suns and universes ceased to be
And Thou wert left alone
Every Existence would exist in thee.
There is not room for Death
Nor atom that his might could render void
Since thou art Being and Breath
And what thou art may never be destroyed.
~ Emily Brontë
Oriana:
My favorite stanza is this one:
Vain are the thousand creeds
That move men's hearts, unutterably vain,
Worthless as withered weeds
Or idlest froth amid the boundless main
It expresses the rejection of conventional religion in favor of a personal one — the “God within my breast.” Let’s face it: this is a blasphemous poem, written by a parson’s daughter at that! And this gorgeous, high-style heresy has gained a place as one of the immortal poems in English literature.
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HEATHCLIFF AS A TOXIC ANTIHERO
Emily Brontë, who was born 200 years ago, imagined a character who for many is the ultimate romantic hero but for others is a menace, writes Hephzibah Anderson.
Brooding, untameable, downright tortured – what’s not to love? For many a reader, Heathcliff is the rugged embodiment of Byronic allure, all sturm und drang. This isn’t the only romantic cliché he personifies, either. He’s a walking rescue fantasy, the rejected child who’s suffered endless slights on his journey to manhood and requires only the love of a good woman to soothe his volatile soul. He’s misunderstood – deep and complicated and badly in need of someone who’ll truly get him.
Love for him is extreme, addictive, nihilistic – it’s about merging with another with such urgency that nothing else matters. And let’s not forget the tall-dark-handsome part, which is further enhanced by athleticism and smoldering eyes “full of black fire”. With his kinetic blend of instinct, intelligence and intensity, there’s something about Heathcliff to entrance readers of almost every erotic persuasion.
Since Wuthering Heights was first published in 1847, its larger-than-life hero (or should that be anti-hero?) has had a profound impact on romantic literature across the spectrum, from bodice rippers and YA hits to highbrow literary fiction. His influence isn’t confined to the page, either.
Author and Brontë buff Samantha Ellis recently struck a chord with an article titled How Heathcliff ruined my love life. A self-described “recovering Heathcliff addict”, she says Heathcliff was her “gateway drug”. After him came Rhett Butler, Rupert Campbell-Black, Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Spike, Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell… Unfortunately, they were accompanied by real-life bad boys: “As I hit my teens, I actively chased bad men… In my twenties, I went out with men who were not always honest to me, or nice,” she writes.
Privacy-loving Emily, shown here in a portrait derived from one by her brother, died aged 30 – many believe, without having had a romantic relationship.
Literature – especially the really good stuff, and there’s no denying that the totemic Wuthering Heights deserves its status as a classic – is the very best teacher, embedding its messages in our hearts and minds under the cloak of cracking storytelling and indelible imagery. We absorb the truths of brilliant fiction almost subliminally, and that makes them so much harder to root out.
‘Operatic intensity’
What makes Heathcliff all the more intriguing is that he was unleashed upon our collective romantic daydreams by a woman who is thought never to have had a lover, a woman who was born 200 years ago and has been variously characterized as a fragile mystic, a people-hating spinster.
Emily’s fierce attachment to privacy and the absence of documentation has only fuelled speculation about her short life (she died aged just 30), leading to posthumous diagnoses of everything from agoraphobia and anorexia to Asperger’s.
Some academics have simply refused to believe that the passion oozing from the pages of Wuthering Heights could have been conjured up using imagination alone. They’ve suggested romantic interests for her, including her own brother, Branwell, and even their sister, Anne.
Strip away some of the wackier speculation, and Emily Brontë is still quite a character, handy with a pistol and certainly not one for small talk. Much of the ‘Mad Emily’ myth derives from the fact that she was simply born in the wrong era. As Claire O’Callaghan notes in her new biography, Emily Brontë Reappraised, “Emily was an independent spirit at a time when female independence wasn’t culturally welcomed.”
So how does Heathcliff fit into this? Because while he is the ultimate romantic hero for many, regularly popping up in polls to determine literature’s most romantic character of all time, others find him considerably less charming. As the novelist Anne Tyler confided to the New York Times in 2015, “I somehow made it to adulthood without ever reading Wuthering Heights, but then I found out that several of my women friends considered Heathcliff their all-time favorite romantic hero. So I read about three-quarters of it as a grown-up, and immediately developed some serious concerns about the mental health of my friends.”The crucial point here is that Tyler read the book as a “grown-up”.
Most of us read Wuthering Heights in our teens. In other words, when we’re wildly impressionable and at an age when our crush on that kid in the year above feels like the greatest love story ever. Heathcliff’s desire is beyond obsessive, and for self-dramatizing, ego-hungry teenage girls, that’s potent stuff. There’s also this to note: despite the operatic intensity of it all, there remains something safe about Heathcliff and his passion, because he’s always filtered through a narrator or two. At one point, we’re reading Isabella’s account as told to Nelly as told to Lockwood. And their love, remember, is never consummated. It’s all very – well, teenage. It makes absolute sense that it should be the favorite novel of Twilight’s Bella and Edward.
Bad romance
Cinematic renderings of the text have much to answer for, too. Heathcliff has been portrayed by Laurence Olivier, Ralph Fiennes and… Cliff Richard. Most of these adaptations only deal with the first half of the novel, dodging the raw bleakness of its later chapters, which can feel claustrophobic in their portrayal of unpleasant characters being utterly vile to one another.
Remember when Gordon Brown likened himself to Heathcliff? It was assumed he meant the character’s filmic incarnation, especially when he qualified it by saying “maybe an older Heathcliff and a wiser Heathcliff”. In the novel, we actually get to meet an older Heathcliff, and he’s even more difficult – a tyrannical landlord consumed by his desire for revenge.
I am Heathcliff
Return to the novel older, maybe wiser, and almost certainly with some experience of dating those who might politely be dubbed rogue, and Heathcliff is an altogether less appealing proposition. He’s surly and sulky. He’s violent, abusive and needy. He grins, he growls, he sneers. And he’s really not one for moving on. Emily’s sister Charlotte, ever ready to do her own sibling down, called Heathcliff’s love “perverted passion and passionate perversity”. It’s true that having been raised as siblings, Heathcliff and Cathy’s infatuation is laced with a queasy tug of incest. But even without that, their relationship can easily be read as obsessive, destructive, co-dependent – in a word, toxic.
Maybe it’s best not to think of Wuthering Heights as a romance at all. In the words of cult literary theorist Terry Eagleton, the relationship between Heathcliff and Cathy is “scarcely a relationship at all.” Why? “There is no question of otherness involved.” Certainly, Cathy’s famous quotes “I am Heathcliff” and “he’s more myself than I am”, connote something annihilating.
Whatever your take on Heathcliff, it’s astonishing to think that a quirky, relatively isolated young woman, born in 1818, and very likely drawing on zero experience of sexual passion, could have been the one to create him. That she did so should make us think again about eroticism. Because private though she was, we do know from her verse that she took vivid, sweeping delight in the natural world, proving that you don’t need to have had sex or even fallen in love to experience that same surging swell of emotion. Of course, you still might want to think twice before casting Emily Brontë in the role of romance counselor.
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20180725-heathcliff-and-literatures-greatest-love-story-are-toxic
Oriana:
It has occurred to me that great literature gains its power chiefly from the creation of unforgettable, haunting characters. Heathcliflf is there with Count Dracula as much as Tristan and Lancelot. Milton's Satan is arguably in the same category. When I think of unforgettable female characters, it's not so much Isolde as Scarlett O'Hara.
But let's stay with Heathcliff. Myths surround Emily Brontë, a particularly persistent one being that she was immensely attached to her brother Branwell, whose last years were tragic (alcoholism and laudanum addiction; laudanum was a form of morphine). According to this myth, Branwell was the model for Heathcliff, and Emily died of grief soon after her beloved brother’s death. But unsentimental modern scholars who carefully examined Emily’s life and writing point out that there is no doubt that like most of the Brontë children, Emily died of TB, and her sister Anne soon followed. Branwell provided Emily with the knowledge of what an alcoholic is like; he was more likely a model for Hindley Earnshaw, Catherine’s alcoholic brother in the novel.
But let’s turn back to Heathcliff. Catherine speaks: ”It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now; so he shall never know how I love him: and that, not because he's handsome, Nelly, but because he's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same; and Linton's is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire."
~ Wuthering Heights, Ch. 9
This is the romantic inflation of the similarity between the lovers’ inner essence, especially the way a woman sees her “true love” as her male self, the idealized man she’d be if she happened to be a man.
Like Catherine, the reader (most likely female) tends to idealize Heathcliff, whose cruelty and drive for revenge in fact make him a villain. True, we can see how early abuse results in the victim’s becoming an abuser himself, and sympathize with that (Louise Hay: “We are victims of victims”).
But let’s not forget that adult Heathcliff’s main personality trait is cruelty. The novel is regarded as one of the greatest love stories in Western literature, but Catherine dies by the middle of it, and it could be argued that this is above all a story of revenge overshadowing the “love that continues beyond the grave.” (Marxist critics see Heathcliff as a ruthless capitalist.)
It’s also been suggested that Catherine does not actually know the “real Heathcliff.” She clings to her inner image of him as her soulmate, a symbol of the freedom she had in childhood when the two of them roamed the moors.
Charlotte felt ambivalent about Emily and about the novel; she disapproved of its characters, especially Heathcliff. There is a strong suspicion that after Emily’s death, Charlotte burned the manuscript of Emily’s second novel, Birth, which Emily wrote about to her publisher, but whose manuscript was never found. Was Charlotte’s aware and jealous of Emily’s greater talent, or did she think of herself as the best writer in the family, and simply disapproved of Emily’s personality and the themes of Wuthering Heights?
Not surprisingly, like many solitaries, Emily loved animals. She taught at Law Hill School for one semester – she didn’t last longer than that – and famously told her students that she preferred the house dog to any of them.
The evening before her death, Emily insisted on getting up and feeding the family dogs, as always. 
Watercolor painting by Emily Brontë of her dog Keeper, dated 1838
There is no evidence that she ever experienced a romantic love relationship.
Not surprisingly, both Marxist and feminist critics have had a field day with Wuthering Heights. There is a long chapter in Gilbert and Gubar’s classic, The Madwoman in the Attic, devoted to Emily Brontë, entitled “Looking Oppositely: Emily Brontë’s Bible of Hell.”
Anne Brontë is also held in high esteem by the modern critics, but continues to be underrated. 
Emily’s flower is the heather. But rather than any flowers, I think the appropriate image for commemorating her is the moors near the Haworth Parsonage, her real heaven (remember that in her dream Catherine is miserable in Christian heaven, and keeps sobbing until the angels toss her out, and she returns to the moors).
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THE MEANING OF “WUTHERING”
“Wuthering” always looked to me like misspelled “weathering” — and I enjoyed Bronte’s own explanation that the house was named for “its bracing ventilation.” I also knew the Polish translation of the title, which uses a slightly archaic but fully comprehensible word meaning “vehement wind” or “gale.” It seems that the translation was correct, besides having a lovely poetic aura.
Through a windswept synchronicity I’ve just come across a brief article that explains the word “wuthering.”
~ Despite the book’s popularity, many people still might find themselves unaware of what wuthering actually means. It turns out that wuthering is a real word, albeit one that few people use or know in modern times—yet it describes one of the novel’s most central and consequential images.
The word wuthering is an adjective that, according to Cambridge Dictionary, is “used to describe a wind that is blowing very strongly or a place where the wind blows strongly.” It is sometimes used interchangeably with the word whithering, though this term is much rarer, and both have their roots in the Old Norse term hvitha, which means “a squall of wind.”
The term wuthering is sometimes also associated with the roaring sound that comes with strong winds.
In essence, wuthering means extremely windy—and Brontë, ever the consummate wordsmith, could not have chosen a more apt term to title her sole novel. Wind, and specifically the wind that blows across the moors surrounding Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff’s home in Wuthering Heights, is a character in itself in the book, creating a haunting atmosphere of chaos and desolation that pervades the entire story.
Wuthering is also a variation on the terms wuther and wither. According to C. Clough Robinson’s A Glossary of Words used in the Dialect of Mid-Yorkshire (1876), these terms meant “to hurl, with an impetus imparting a trembling or whizzing motion to the object thrown,” and wuthering, specifically, also could “denote any object of huge size, or a person who, in conjunction with a heavy appearance, has a violent manner of displaying activity.” In the context of this definition and the domestic violence and emotional intensity featured in the book, wuthering becomes an even more appropriate title.
In Brontë's book, Wuthering Heights is the name of the remote farmhouse where Cathy lives as a child. It is also the home that a young, orphaned Heathcliff moves into when the house’s master, Cathy’s father, brings him home from London, and the house’s imposing, cold nature provides the main setting for the novel’s primary events.
Along with the wild moors outside, the house acts as a mirror of the book’s protagonists’ wild inner natures, which could easily be described as stormy, windy, or perhaps most accurately, wuthering.
Oriana:
Another association I have with “wuthering” is the Whirlwind of Passion in Dante’s Inferno, the beautiful canto in Dante’s Inferno in which we meet Francesca da Rimini.
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DO SOULMATES EXIST?
Nelly, I am Heathcliff! He’s always, always in my mind: not as a
pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own
being.
On Valentine's Day, there's the temptation to believe that somewhere out there is "The One": a soulmate, a perfect match, the person you were meant to be with.
Across history, humans have always been drawn to the idea that love isn't random. In ancient Greece, Plato imagined that we were once whole beings with four arms, four legs and two faces, so radiant that Zeus split us in two; ever since, each half has roamed the earth searching for its missing other, a myth that gives the modern soulmate its poetic pedigree and the promise that somewhere, someone will finally make us feel complete.
In the Middle Ages, troubadours and Arthurian tales recast that longing as "courtly love", a fierce, often forbidden devotion like Lancelot's for Guinevere, in which a knight proved his worth through self-sacrifice for a beloved he might never openly declare.
By the Renaissance, writers such as Shakespeare were talking of "star-crossed lovers", couples bound together by an overwhelming connection yet pulled apart by family, fortune or fate, as if the universe itself both wrote their love story and barred them from a happy ending.
In more recent times, Hollywood and romance novels have sold us fairy tale love stories.
But what does the latest science say about soulmates? Is there a particular special someone out there for us?
How we fall for 'The One'
Viren Swami, Professor of Social Psychology at Anglia Ruskin University (ARU), in Cambridge, has traced our contemporary European understanding of romantic love back to medieval Europe and those stories of Camelot, Lancelot, Guinevere and the chivalry of the knights of the round table that swept across the continent.
"These stories first pushed the idea that you should choose one other individual as your companion and that companion is for life," he says."Before that, in much of Europe, you could love as many people as you like, and love was fluid, and it was often not about sex."
Over time, as people are uprooted from their agricultural communities as industrialization tears apart people's familiar attachments, individuals become "alienated", he says. "They start looking for one other individual to save them, to save them from the wretchedness of their lives.”
Today's dating apps turn that story into an algorithm, which Swami calls "relation-shopping". The search for a soulmate turns into the opposite of what they are looking for: "For many people, that's a really soulless experience.
"You're shopping for a partner… going through possibly dozens of people on the dating app until you get to a point where you go… I need to stop," he says.
The One
Jason Carroll, Professor of Marriage and Family Studies at the US Brigham Young University, based in Provo, Utah, is sympathetic to the longing for "The One."
"We are attachment-based creatures," he says. "We desire that bond." But in his lectures, he tells students they need to leave the idea of a soulmate, without giving up their desire for The One.
It sounds like a contradiction, but for Carroll, it's the difference between destiny and graft.
"A soulmate is just simply found. It's already pre‑made. But a one and only is something two people carve out together over years of adapting, apologizing, and occasionally gritting their teeth," he says.
Soulmate trap
Carroll's argument draws on decades of research, which he put together in his report, The Soulmate Trap, much of which distinguishes between what psychologists call "destiny beliefs" — the idea that the right relationship should feel effortless — and "growth beliefs", which focus on what partners can do to make things work.
In a widely cited series of studies in the late 1990s and early 2000s led by Professor C. Raymond Knee at the University of Houston, researchers found that people who believed relationships were "meant to be" were far more likely to doubt their commitment after conflict. Those with more growth-minded views tended to stay more committed, even on days when they argued.
Those with growth-based views, Carroll argues, still want something special, but expect rough patches. "They ask… what can they do to make their relationship better, have improvement and have growth?
"In his view, the soulmate belief is a trap — not the romance itself, but the expectation that love should never be hard. The most "soulful" part of a long relationship, he says, is not a cinematic charge, but having "front-row seats not only for each other's strengths, but... [their] challenges and weaknesses".
"That's a pretty sacred space," he says. "We only know those things because they've let us be there."
For Carroll, when love is treated as fate, people become less willing to do the unshowy work that actually keeps love alive. Carroll says the soulmate trap makes it much harder when a relationship hits its first serious snag.
"The first time there's any type of struggle, the immediate thought is, 'well, I thought you were my soulmate. But maybe you're not, because soulmates aren't supposed to deal with things'," he says. "But if relationships are going to go long term, it's never just going to be a downhill run."
Spark or trauma?
Vicki Pavitt, a London-based love coach, often helps people who thought they'd found their soulmate, only to discover that the fairy tale came with emotional manipulation, flakiness, and a constant sense of anxiety.
"When there is a lot of chemistry and the spark, I think that can sometimes be about opening old unhealthy patterns, like old wounds", she says.
"A person who is inconsistent or plays a bit hot and cold can make you feel 'I can't wait to see them again', but what's really happening is they're giving you so much anxiety and that it has you wanting more".
Pavitt says what we feel to be destiny may be a pull from our nervous system recognizing something that hurt us before and trying to fix it, a pattern therapists call a trauma bond.
This bond can seem like love, she says, and leads to people magnetically drawn into unhealthy dynamics because they are familiar, not because they are the perfect match.
One study often cited is by Canadian psychologists Donald Dutton and Susan Painter. In research published in 1993 while they were at the University of British Columbia, they followed 75 women after they had left abusive partners.
The team measured how strongly the women still felt attached to their exes and compared this with what their relationships had been like.
They found the strongest bonds were not in women who had consistently been abused, but in those whose partners alternated between charm and cruelty.
Dutton and Painter argue that this trauma bond helps explain why people can feel magnetized back to relationships that are objectively bad for them – because the mix of danger and affection is familiar, not because it is healthy.
It is that distinction Pavitt tries to surface in coaching: "It's about discerning whether the chemistry you feel is showing me this person's compatible with me or if it is a familiar sense of anxiety.
"In my language, I never talk about soulmates," she says. "I don't personally believe that there is one person for everybody... but I do believe that we become "The One" for someone."
Real chemistry
If ruling out the existence of a soulmate sounds unromantic, the biology of attraction points in the same direction.
Hormonal contraceptives may subtly reshape how partners feel about each other. Research suggests that pills which flatten the natural ebb and flow of fertility can dampen shifts in attraction that typically occur across the menstrual cycle, potentially altering initial mate choice.
One large study of 365 hetrosexual couples found that women's sexual satisfaction was higher when their current contraceptive status matched what it was when they first chose their partner, hinting that changes in pill use can change how a partner is experienced. These effects are small but could help explain some couples' puzzling shifts in chemistry over time.
If hormones and pills can tilt who feels like "The One", then it becomes harder to argue there is a single, pre‑ordained match – which is where the mathematicians come in.
The one but not the only
Psychology and biology offer one way of thinking about "The One", but mathematics puts forward another.
Dr Greg Leo, an economist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, has come up with a compatibility algorithm. It finds that not only might you have a "One" – you have lots of "Ones".
In his Matching Soulmates paper in the journal of Public Economic Theory, everyone is in a computer simulated dating pool, where thousands of digitally created daters rank each other. His algorithm picks "first‑order soulmates": pairs who choose each other in a stable matching. It removes them, and runs it again with those left, and you get second‑order soulmates, and so on.
In his simulations, it was extremely rare for someone to have their mutual first picks; but many people had those that were second or third picks. In this scenario a couple counts as happy if each is near the top of the other's list and neither can find someone they and that other person would both prefer more.
It may only be number crunching, but the love algorithm tells us that there are many viable partners, not just The One.
So how can a couple co-create their Ones?
Jacqui Gabb, Professor of Sociology and Intimacy at The Open University, assessed this in her Enduring Love project, published in the journal Sociology in 2015.
It surveyed around 5,000 people and then followed 50 couples in forensic, sometimes intrusive detail, combining statistics with diaries, interviews and "emotion maps" of what happened in the home.
When she asked people what made them feel appreciated, it wasn't sunset proposals or surprise trips to Paris.
It was "surprise gifts, thoughtful gestures and the kindness of a cup of tea in bed". Warming the car on a cold morning. Picking wildflowers and putting them in a vase. Sharing a private smile at a party.
Quantitatively, what she describes as these "everyday attentive acts" turned out to be much more powerful than grand romantic gestures.
In her survey, 22% of mothers and 20% of childless women picked such small gestures as one of the top two things that made them feel valued – more than big nights out or expensive presents.
Relationship satisfaction in the data wasn't primarily about money or romance; it was about "intimate couple knowledge" and its expression in daily life.
In one young couple's diary given to them for the project, Sumaira describes her partner coming home, the dinner she has cooked, the hug in the hallway, the two of them eating together at the table.
"It's perfect," she writes in her research diary. "Just us and food. What more could I want?"
Then there is a spontaneous dance in the living room, a walk in long grass where she gets scared of the dark, and a photo her partner loves so much he makes it the background on his phone.
It reads like a lovely every day tale, not a fairy tale: no glass slippers, but wellies.
Yet Gabb points out that woven through the sweetness are money worries, family obligations and a history of depression that the couple are learning to manage together.
"The soulmate feeling here doesn't float above life; it is made, inch by inch, by life, in the way the pair meet those pressures," she says.
Valentine's Dinner
The science doesn't steal the romance – rather it's there to help it bloom, in good times and bad, according to Carroll.
"I'm pretty comfortable with the aspiration to be in a unique special relationship as long as we remember it needs to be created," he says.
Pavitt thinks "it's fine, helpful, even to have faith that your person is out there, so long as you know there are many people that you could form a really great connection with and stop expecting anyone to be perfect."
As for soulmates, the science points to a paradox. The people who end up with relationships that feel uniquely "meant to be" are often the ones who stopped waiting for fate, turned towards the flawed person in front of them and said, in effect: shall we make something of this?
Kindred Spirits; Asher Durandhttps://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crrnyg9e91jo
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RARE EARTHS WITHOUT MINING
As nations posture over access to rare earth deposits, scientists say these coveted materials are hiding in plain sight – and can be harvested without any conventional mining at all.
In a lab in Austria, two scientists are watching a fungus grow. Developing fungi form sprawling microscopic networks called mycelia, inserting themselves into nooks and crannies all around. Searching, spreading, feeding. It's through the mycelium's millions of tiny, root-like strands that the fungus draws up nutrients. But some fungi soak up other things, too. Things that humans want.
The lab fungus, at the University of Vienna, is growing in a petri dish and some clear plastic bags, across a special clay that has been purposely laced with rare earth elements. These sought-after elements are used in batteries, magnets, renewable energy devices and other tech. The scientists want to see whether the fungus can extract the rare earths for them. "You might be able, actually, to recover resources," says Alexander Bismarck, head of the polymer and composite engineering group at the institution.
Rare earths are a group of 17 metallic elements, all chemically very similar to one another. They include dysprosium, yttrium and scandium, to name a few. Despite the name "rare earths", they're not actually very rare but scattered almost everywhere around the Earth. It's just that these elements tend to be in fairly low concentrations in most places, which makes extracting a high volume of them difficult.
Given the usefulness of rare earths, interest in them is growing. US President Donald Trump, for one, says the US will spend $12bn (£8.8bn) on creating a "strategic reserve" of rare earths, and lately he has bullishly sought access to rare earth deposits in Ukraine and Greenland. Currently, China dominates the rare earths industry, with roughly 70% of rare earths mining and 90% of processing occurring within the country.
Researchers around the world are working on new ways of obtaining these elements – from harnessing the power of fungi, to developing techniques for separating rare earths out from gigantic piles of industrial waste. All developed economies require rare earths to some extent and it might actually be possible for many countries, including the US, to harvest more of the rare earths they need at home, reducing or perhaps even eliminating the need to tussle for these elements internationally.
It takes several weeks for the fungus in the University of Vienna lab to grow, says Bismarck. He and his colleague Mitchell Jones, a materials scientist, envisage using fungi on a much larger scale one day, for example to recover rare earths from land that has been contaminated by industry. "We really could do this over large areas and quite easily collect that biomass using existing agricultural machinery," says Jones, though he admits that's a long way off. "This is all a little bit speculative.”
Fundamentally, though, it is an attempt to repurpose fungi. While fungi play important roles in ecosystems, they can also cause illnesses or other problems – including contamination of containers and samples in labs. Getting a fungus to work for you might be a good idea, though, because these organisms are tough and can survive in the dark. They also grow much faster than most plants, which could make them a particularly good choice for cleaning up industrial sites. It's a process called bioremediation but, in this case, it would also involve recovery of useful minerals. Bismarck and Jones call it "mycomining". They published a paper in 2024 describing the concept.
Once harvested, the fungi could be processed to produce biogas, and burned as a fuel, with the rare earths later separated from the ash produced. Bismarck and Jones stress that this way of recovering rare earths might only ever be "supplemental". For example, the concentration of cerium in dissolved e-waste (old computers and other tech) could be nearly 5,500 parts per billion – but in fungi, the concentration of cerium might only reach roughly 350 parts per billion. Plus, there could be environmental risks associated with growing fungi on a large scale. "Are you actually altering the natural biome there, and is that OK or not?" says Jones.
He and Bismarck are not the only ones working with fungi, though. Oona Snoeyenbos-West at the University of Arizona says she plans to launch a start-up company that will explore using fungi for bioremediation and bio-recovery of critical minerals, especially rare earths and copper. She says the fungi could be sourced from industrial and contaminated sites because such fungi might already be genetically adapted to soak up relatively high concentrations of rare earths.
Novel approaches to rare earth extraction are worth exploring, says Julie Klinger, an associate professor in environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and author of Rare Earth Frontiers. "Figuring out how to get the materials we need without digging holes in the ground, I think, is really the way we need to be going," she says. Klinger points to a study published in 2025, which described how lots of critical minerals required by US industries, including rare earths, are actually already present in piles of waste littering the US. "If we look at waste with fresh eyes, we see a different picture in terms of scarcity and abundance," says Klinger.
Around 15 years ago, French firm Rhodia announced it had developed a process for extracting rare earths from disused fluorescent light bulbs. Rhodia was subsequently purchased a company called Solvay. A spokeswoman for Solvay says the firm no longer extracts rare earths from these bulbs because, with the adoption of LED lighting, there are now far fewer fluorescent bulbs being thrown away than there were before.
There is plenty of other waste around. Leftover materials from mining, called tailings, can be rare earth hotspots, including the tailings at the Mountain Pass Rare Earth Mine in California. Klinger suggests that these tailings themselves could be processed in order to obtain the residual rare earths that remain within them.
"I think that we have all the rare earth elements that we need in our waste," says James Tour, professor of chemistry, computer science, and materials science and nano-engineering at Rice University in Texas. Tour and colleagues have developed a process for recovering rare earths from various different sources, including waste magnets.
It involves flash joule heating – wherein a material is brought to high temperatures through the application of an electric current. Electrical resistance in the material leads to the production of heat, keeping the material at temperatures reaching into the hundreds or even thousands of degrees Celsius.
Target elements within the heated material bond with a chlorine-containing compound. "We get it to stick to [chlorine] and that comes off as a vapor, we capture that," says Michael Walshe, chief executive of Metallium, a company that has licensed the flash joule process for industrial applications.
Tour adds, "I think [it] can work on all the rare earth magnets. We've done it with a couple of the different, most common types, it worked on both of them."
She also says that roughly 30 million tons of red mud is available in the US and that the rare earths within it are at roughly 10-to-20 times the concentrations found naturally in the Earth's crust. Scanlon's university is working with a company called ElementUSA, which is developing methods of extracting rare earths from waste including red mud. Ellis Sullivan, chief executive, says the details of how they plan to do this are proprietary but that the process will involve using acids and solvent extraction –- a way of separating materials by dissolving them into different liquids.
ElementUSA plans to retrieve as much gallium and scandium, both rare earths, as possible using this approach. One of the uses of scandium, for example, could be in metal alloys that reduce the mass of aircraft – potentially by as much as 15% or more – and, therefore, the volume of fuel those aircraft need to burn. That could save huge sums of money and lower aviation emissions. Sullivan says that a prototype plant is scheduled to begin operations in 2028, with a full-scale plant following in late 2029 or early 2030.
All these approaches have promise, says Klinger. Though she stresses one point – the reason so much rare earth material is lying around in waste is because, to date, it has been costlier or more difficult to retrieve it from that waste than via conventional mining. Rare earths, despite their usefulness, do not actually command as high a price as certain other elements. "The real devil in the detail here is that rare earths are fundamentally different from, say, platinum or gold when it comes to the price point," says Klinger.
That is why all of the projects mentioned above are considering what other materials they could harvest alongside rare earths. Carbon from coal ash could be sold to make water filters, for example. Sullivan says ElementUSA intends to extract iron as well as gallium and scandium from red mud. Meanwhile, biogas produced by the rare earth-recovering fungi could have value as a fuel.
But if any of these efforts do prove economically viable, a big prize awaits. Not just because countries may soon be able to obtain many more rare earths domestically, reducing the need for imports, but also because they could clean up contaminated environments in the process.
Gigantic heaps of coal ash, mine tailings and red mud are traditionally expensive and difficult to deal with. But if new processes allow rare earth harvesters to engage in remediation while hoovering up rare earths, then industry and environmentalists might no longer be at odds over what to do about all that waste. It would trigger "a kind of symbiosis", adds Klinger. Like turning a fungus from a menace – into an ally.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260203-landfills-and-coal-ash-the-untapped-sources-of-rare-earth-metals-needed-to-fuel-modern-technology
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HOW TINY PORTUGAL BECAME AN EMPIRE
It’s one of history's great puzzles: how did a small nation on the periphery of Europe, with a population of just over a million people in the 15th century, establish the world's first global maritime empire? The answer lies in a unique combination of geography, timing, technology, and a very specific imperial strategy.
First, consider Portugal's unique position. Geographically, it was an Atlantic nation, its back to a rival-filled Europe and its face to the open ocean. More importantly, Portugal completed its Reconquista—the expulsion of Moorish rulers from its territory—in 1249, nearly 250 years before its larger neighbor, Spain. This gave Portugal internal stability and a unified purpose much earlier. The crusading energy, military expertise, and a class of ambitious noblemen, who might otherwise have caused internal strife, were now available to be directed outward.
This outward push was driven by a powerful combination of motivations, often summarized as "Gold, God, and Glory."
Gold: The primary economic driver was the desire to bypass the Venetian-Ottoman monopoly on the lucrative spice trade. Spices like pepper, cloves, and nutmeg were astronomically valuable in Europe, and the overland routes were controlled by rivals. Finding a direct sea route to the Indies promised unimaginable wealth.
God: The centuries-long fight against the Moors had instilled a powerful crusading spirit. Portuguese exploration was framed as a holy war, a continuation of the fight against Islam. They also hoped to find the mythical Christian kingdom of Prester John to forge an alliance.
Glory: For the crown and for ambitious men like Vasco da Gama, exploration offered prestige, titles, and a path to fame and fortune.
These motivations were supercharged by a technological edge. Under the patronage of figures like Prince Henry the Navigator, the Portuguese developed the ideal tool for exploration: the caravel. This was a revolutionary ship design, small and maneuverable enough to explore coastlines and rivers, yet sturdy enough for the high seas. Its lateen sails allowed it to sail against the wind, a crucial advantage for returning from expeditions down the African coast. This was paired with advances in navigation—like the use of the astrolabe and quadrant for determining latitude—and superior cartography.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, was their strategy. The Portuguese knew they were too small to conquer vast land territories. Instead of a land empire, they built a maritime and commercial one, the Estado da Índia (State of India). Their approach was not to occupy vast interiors, but to seize and fortify key coastal choke points.
They used their naval superiority, particularly their ship-mounted cannons, to dominate the Indian Ocean. Portuguese caravels and carracks were essentially floating fortresses. They could obliterate the trading fleets of their rivals, who were unaccustomed to naval artillery warfare. By capturing strategic ports like Hormuz (controlling the Persian Gulf), Goa (on the coast of India), and Malacca (controlling the strait between the Indian and Pacific Oceans), they could control the flow of trade. They forced local merchants to buy a special license (cartaz) to trade, effectively turning the Indian Ocean into a Portuguese-controlled lake for a time.
In essence, Portugal didn't need millions of soldiers. It needed a few thousand determined sailors, superior ships, powerful cannons, and a brilliant strategy of controlling the sea lanes. This unique formula allowed a tiny nation to project its power across the globe and build an empire that would last for centuries.
~ Amy Martin, Quora
Boquilobo Hunter:
I would just add that the maritime epics were built upon much earlier foundations. It required planning and consistency across several reigns.
The best ships could only be built with the best wood. Forests were planted by King Denis (D. Dinis) two centuries earlier.
Maritime knowledge, cartography, and navigation required proper training. At the beginning of the 15th century, the School of Sagres was created. There they studied mathematics, astronomy, cartography, shipbuilding, winds, currents, tides, ...
Later, the 'Aula da Esfera' (Classes of the Sphere) was established in Lisbon.
These schools were open, and among their students were some of the greatest names of the discoveries of that era — Spaniards, Venetians, Turks, Germans, Flemish, ... Some of those names we know from universal history of that period
It’s interesting to see how multicultural the crews of the caravels were. It was common to find a mix of people from various European kingdoms and the Middle East.
In fact, the beginning of the discoveries took place in the early 15th century, with prospecting voyages, studies of winds and tides, and cartography. These actions didn’t receive much attention or glamor. They served to learn and improve techniques.
Macaronesia was discovered starting in 1418 (Madeira), by João Gonçalves Zarco, Tristão Vaz Teixeira, and Diogo de Silves.
It was colonized from 1425 by Prince Henry the Navigator, with Portuguese, Genoese, and Flemish settlers. This clearly shows the multicultural nature of Portuguese society at the time.
Cape Verde was discovered in 1460 by Diogo Gomes and António de Noli (another Genoese trained at Sagres). Colonization took place in 1462, just two years later, which shows that the process was already more refined. Cape Verde became a strategic base for future voyages of discovery.
North America (what is now called Canada) was discovered by the Corte-Real family. First the father, João Vaz Corte-Real, in 1472, and later the sons, Gaspar Corte-Real and Miguel Corte-Real. Miguel was lost and never returned. Gaspar returned to Lisbon with Indigenous people (Beothuk) and detailed maps. Canada erected a statue in his honor.
Curiosity: Notice how Portugal never showed interest in going further west beyond a certain imaginary north-south line. See the Treaty of Alcáçovas and later Tordesillas.
James Cobban:
The Netherlands was smaller and more remote than Portugal but it took over the most important assets of the Portuguese, the Spice Islands, built the richest corporation prior to the 20th century the Verenigde Ostindische Compagnie (VOC), and continued to rule the East Indies until they were seized by Japan in WWII.
England was smaller and poorer in 1497. But by 1900 it was the superpower. It had the largest Navy. 50% of all world trade was carried in British merchant ships, and the second largest merchant fleet was from a country that also spoke English.
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A SURPRISING LINK BETWEEN LESS EXPENSIVE WEDDINGS AND LONG-LASTING MARRIAGES
If you’re serving burgers and Bud Light at your backyard wedding, don’t worry. You and your spouse may have the last laugh.
A new study found that couples who spend less on their wedding tend to have longer-lasting marriages than those who splurge. The study, by two economics professors at Emory University, found a similar correlation between less-expensive engagement rings and lower divorce rates.
The study’s authors didn’t examine why, although they floated a few theories.
“It could be that the type of couples who have a … (cheap wedding) are the type that are a perfect match for each other,” said Professor Hugo M. Mialon, who co-authored the study with Andrew M. Francis.“Or it could be that having an inexpensive wedding relieves young couples of financial burdens that may strain their marriage,” he said.
The research was based on a detailed survey completed by 3,151 adults in the United States who are, or have been, married. The authors believe theirs is the first academic study to examine the correlation between wedding expenses and the length of marriages.
Specifically, the study found that women whose wedding cost more than $20,000 divorced at a rate roughly 1.6 times higher than women whose wedding cost between $5,000 and $10,000.
And couples who spent $1,000 or less on their big day had a lower than average rate of divorce.
The study won’t be cheered by the booming wedding industry, which encourages couples to spend freely on everything from invitations and flowers to videographers and Champagne. Couples in the United States spent an average of $29,858 for their big day in 2013 – a record high – according to a survey of 13,000 brides and grooms by wedding website TheKnot.com.
“The wedding industry has long associated lavish weddings with longer-lasting marriages. Industry advertising has fueled norms that create the impression that spending large amounts on the wedding is a signal of commitment or is necessary for a marriage to be successful,” Francis told CNN in an e-mail.
“Overall, our findings provide little evidence to support the validity of the wedding industry’s general message that connects expensive weddings with positive marital outcomes,” he said.
Planning a wedding? In addition to slashing costs, you might want to invite those extra co-workers and far-flung cousins, too. The Emory study also found that the greater the number of people who attend a wedding, the lower the rate of divorce.
“This could be evidence of a community effect, i.e., having more support from friends and family may help the couple to get through the challenges of marriage,” Francis said. “Or this could be that the type of couples who have a lot of friends and family are also the type that tend not to divorce as much.”
https://www.cnn.com/2014/10/13/living/wedding-expenses-study
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IF YOU GREW UP SOMEWHERE ELSE, WOULD YOU BE A DIFFERENT PERSON NOW?
Would you be a different person if you had grown up somewhere else? A growing body of research is helping to answer this age-old nature verses nurture question and what it means for your identity.
It was a hot afternoon in the little village near Kolkata, India, and the adults were asleep. My cousin and I were sitting on the floor munching on puffed rice with mustard oil when she turned to me and asked: "Is it true that people in Sweden eat cows and pigs?" I, just about ten years old at the time, felt ashamed as I nodded. "So do they eat dogs and cats too?" she probed. It was a perfectly logical question. If you can eat one four-legged mammal, why not another?
Having grown up in Sweden, albeit with an Indian mother, it wasn't something I had thought about before – vegetarianism was rare at the time, especially in Europe, and Swedish kids were accustomed to seeing cows as a source of food. My cousin, on the other hand, was a passionate animal lover with a habit of rescuing creatures she perceived to be in danger. She didn't eat meat.
My visits to India were full of such moments, which made me realise just how much culture shapes the way we think, feel and behave. If I had grown up in India, would I have had a different set of morals? A different sense of humor? Different dreams, hobbies and aspirations? Would I still have been me?
These are questions that scientists and philosophers have been grappling with for centuries, and now a new field of study – cross-cultural psychology – is beginning to investigate possible answers.
Nature vs nurture
In one sense, every human being's DNA is unique and its fundamental structure (in big-picture terms) does not change depending on where we go.
But DNA alone does not make us who we are, says Ziada Ayorech, a psychiatric geneticist at the University of Oslo in Norway. Born in Uganda, Ayorech moved to Canada when she was three, spent most of her life in the UK, and then moved to Norway a couple of years ago. "When I think about all the places I've lived and all the ways they have influenced my perspective, I intuitively imagine there's no way that that couldn't have made a difference," says Ayorech.
To explore this, scientists typically use studies comparing identical twins, who share almost identical DNA, to non-identical twins, who share, on average, half of their genome. This way, if identical twins are more or less likely to share a trait than non-identical twins, it suggests that that trait is more governed by genetics than environment.
The brain you have right now would be very different if you were born and had grown up in Taiwan, even if you have the same DNA – Ching-Yu Huang
In one large 2015 analysis of nearly 50 years of studies about 17,000 different traits in 14 million twins all over the world – exploring education and political beliefs to psychiatric conditions – scientists concluded that genetics accounts for, on average, just 50% of differences.
"It's that combination of nature and nurture that makes us who we are and contributes to our beliefs and our cultures," says Ayorech. "And so we couldn't have that same combination in another place."
The environment shapes some traits more than others, of course. Research shows that IQ is on average over 50% heritable, with the caveat that genetics plays a larger role later in life than it does in childhood. While personality traits are roughly 40% heritable and therefore more influenced by the environment. (This doesn't mean 40% of one person's extroversion is down to their genes, but rather that 40% of the differences in extroversion among a population as a whole can be explained by genetics.)
Although Ayorech is quite extroverted, she says Norway caters less to the types of outgoing expressions she is familiar with. For instance, one is less likely to break into a spontaneous conversation with a stranger on the streets of Oslo. This has changed her, she says.
"If you compare the version of me living here in Norway to the version of me that was living in the UK, it would be fair to say I'm less extroverted now," says Ayorech. But given her genetic makeup, she's unlikely to ever completely lose her outgoingness. She continues to subconsciously gravitate towards activities that encourage more spontaneous interactions, Ayorech says.
"We tend to seek out environments that are in line with our genetic traits."
In turn, this combination shapes our brains over time, allowing us to grow into ourselves. Neural pathways form and solidify as we integrate experiences, according to Ching-Yu Huang, a cross-cultural psychologist at National Taiwan University. She argues that culture is an "absolutely crucial part" of who we become.
"You would have been a different person if you'd grown up in Taiwan," she tells me, confidently. "The brain you have right now would be very different if you were born and had grown up in Taiwan, even if you have the same DNA."
'When in Rome': Cross-cultural psychology
Vivian Vignoles, a cross-cultural psychologist at the University of Sussex, agrees. "I think people tend to get overexcited about the genetic side of it," he says. "Whatever genes you've got, you need a certain environment to bring them out."
While the basic idea that culture shapes how people see themselves is now well supported in psychology, it did come as a surprise to some psychologists in the mid-20th Century, Vignoles says. Scientists had long assumed that human psychology was universal and that study results about human behavior conducted in the US and Europe would hold true across the world. But by studying and comparing psychology from elsewhere, Vignoles and others have found that this isn't the case.
In a study comparing people's brain scans, Westerners had the part of their brain responsible for self-awareness light up when thinking about themselves, whereas Chinese participants had that part light up when thinking about their mothers, too.
In similar tests, Huang and her colleagues looked at whether children of ethnically Chinese immigrants in England (who had come to the country from different parts of the People’s Republic of China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Vietnam and Malaysia) viewed authority differently from non-immigrant English children and from Taiwanese children who had lived their whole lives in Taiwan. All children were equally likely to obey their parents across all three groups, but Taiwanese children were more likely to obey them even when they were initially reluctant, compared to Chinese immigrants raised in England.
Huang argues this is likely down to Taiwanese and Chinese culture valuing compliance and respect for parents, while the children whose families had emigrated to England were likely influenced by the culture in the UK to become more individualistic.
Your willingness to obey authority, levels of extroversion or openness can all differ according to the culture you grew up in
A 2022 study comparing personality trait tests across 22 countries found that people living in a cluster of countries with cultures that place strong emphasis on self-discipline – such as Albania, India, Germany, France, Hong Kong and China – scored higher on measures of dutifulness and organization. Countries with more egalitarian, flexible, and individualistic cultures – such as Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, Australia, the UK, Ireland, Norway, Philippines – demonstrated higher levels of agreeableness and openness to experience instead.
Researchers have also recently identified that Western cultures are more likely to be monumentalist, viewing the self as a stable and unchanging thing, like a monument, says Vignoles. Flexible cultures, common in East Asian countries, on the other hand, view the self as more malleable.
Another cultural difference is the extent to which people notice context. One study asked participants to describe a series of underwater scenes, and found that Western study participants focused more on individual objects, whereas Japanese participants emphasized the wider context, such as the color of the surrounding water or how the different objects related to one another.
"There is some evidence that in Western cultures, particularly North American culture, people are more likely to attribute that behavior to the person's characteristics rather than to the situation," says Vignoles. In a dentist's waiting room, Vignoles says, a Westerner is more likely to interpret a person who looks anxious as anxious overall, rather than just someone who is anxious about getting their teeth pulled in that context.
These results are always to be taken with a grain of salt, though, says Vignoles, as it is extremely difficult to disentangle behavior, personality, culture and many other influences that come into play in this realm – and there is still so much more research to be done in the field.
For instance, a growing body of studies suggests that the east-west binary view of individualism versus collectivism is "far too simplistic", says Vignoles, and that the collectivism surfacing in many of these tests is probably more a feature of economic development than of culture.
What's more, measurements of individualism in a country may miss important variations between specific groups or individuals in that nation. And a lot of studies in this area are based on self-reported responses from people, which aren't always accurate, rather than objective standardized tests.
Where you grow up isn't the whole story, as personalities can of course vary within an individual country and culture too
Philosophy's take on the conundrum
Perhaps the question of whether we'd be the same person in a different culture is ultimately a philosophical one – and one that interrogates the concept of self.
An online survey in 2020 of English-speaking philosophers revealed that 19% supported the view that each individual is a specific animal, resulting from a specific sperm and egg, and that it is not one's thoughts, feelings, or memories that make them who they are. "In this view, even if your memories were wiped, you'd still be the same person," explains Philip Goff, a philosopher at Durham University.
Similarly, about 14% supported theories suggesting the self isn't biological but rather encapsulated in something like a soul, and that that is what makes us who we are, no matter where we've grown up. In fact, studies show that many people believe they have a "true self" that is fundamentally morally good, and that this shouldn't change depending on where they are.
But other philosophers hold that one's surroundings also shape one's core identity – a theory dubbed social constructivism.
Politics, in fact, seems to play a role too. In one experiment, researchers asked people with different political views to evaluate the morality of a Christian man who was attracted to other men. People who identified as liberals thought the man was acting according to his true self, while people who identified as conservatives believed instead he was going against his true, Christian self.
Goff himself believes that there is some sort of "fundamental unity" of cells and particles – and that consciousness is baked into this hardware – that makes us who we are, no matter where we grow up. But this likely changes over time as we grow and mature.
"These are just human concepts of what a 'person' or 'I' are," says Goff. There is likely no clear-cut answer, he says, on whether "that person in a very different circumstance would be me or not".
For people who have grown up in more than one culture, the feeling that humans are largely a product of their social environment is hard to shake. While it's difficult to know exactly who I would have been if I had spent my whole life in that village on the outskirts of Kolkata, I'm pretty sure there would be signs.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260206-is-our-identity-affected-by-where-we-live?at_objective=awareness&at_ptr_type=email&at_email_send_date=20260211&at_send_id=4545317&at_link_title=https%3a%2f%2fwww.bbc.com%2ffuture%2farticle%2f20260206-is-our-identity-affected-by-where-we-live&at_bbc_team=crm&at_audience_id=266492954
Oriana:
This question is of special interest to me, even though I know I’ll never have a verifiable answer. Would my “core self” be the same if I happened to grow up in the US? Would it remain the same if I continued living in Poland?
Some years ago I asked a Polish woman poet who lives in Poland if she thinks I would have become a poet if I had stayed in Poland. She replied, “Of course you’d have become a poet — but of course as a completely different person.”
My favorite Polish poet was — I know this may be hard to believe — an avant-garde language poet, Miron Bialoszewski. I loved to play with words, including words in foreign languages. I adored archaic Polish. After coming to the US, and once I started writing for good, language poetry actually repelled me. I wrote totally non-avant-garde poems about my childhood, family stories, historical poems, myth poems. As I put it in one of my poems, finding myself in a different culture “hurt me into meaning.”
Nor can I imagine being the way I am now if I happened to grow up in the United States. I probably wouldn’t hide books under my pillow for secret night-time reading. I’d probably care much more about my hairstyle and clothes than about matters of the intellect. Not that I think I’d grow up completely empty-headed — just with significantly less knowledge of history, geography, the sciences.
Rushing to the science library to read about the structure of proteins or the variety of hexose sugars? A laughable idea. No way would I read Kafka or the biographies of writers and scientists — or so I imagine, with no way of knowing for sure. Would I have gone through a period of serious, tormenting religiosity? Would I have had recurrent dreams about concentration camps? I’ll never know — but ultimately, does it matter? I’ve become a cultural hybrid, and I’m comfortable with it. I even feel lucky.
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HOW THE MAYA SURVIVED
For many years the prevailing debate about the Maya centered upon why their civilization collapsed. Now, many scholars are asking: how did the Maya survive?
As a seven-year-old, Francisco Estrada-Belli was afraid all of history would have been discovered by the time he was old enough to contribute. The year was 1970 and he and his parents had come from Rome to visit relatives in the Central American country of Guatemala. On the trip, they visited the ancient Maya ruins at Tikal.
“I was completely mesmerized,” Estrada-Belli told me recently. “It was jungle everywhere, there were animals, and then these enormous, majestic temples. I asked questions but felt the answers were not good enough. I decided there and then that I wanted to be answering them.”
Thanks to technological advances, we are entering a new age of discovery in the field of ancient history. Improved DNA analysis, advances in plant and climate science, soil and isotope chemistry, linguistics and other techniques such as a laser mapping technology called Lidar, are overturning long-held beliefs. Nowhere is this more true than when it comes to Maya archaeology.
Last year, Estrada-Belli’s team, including his Tulane University colleague Marcello A Canuto, published a study with a central finding that would have seemed, just a few years ago, like an outrageously speculative overestimate. When Estrada-Belli first came to Tikal as a child, the best estimate for the classic-era (AD600-900) population of the surrounding Maya lowlands – encompassing present day southern Mexico, Belize and northern Guatemala – would have been about 2 million people. Today, his team believes that the region was home to up to 16 million. That is more than five times the area’s current population. This would mean that more people lived in the classic-era Maya lowlands than on the Italian peninsula during the peak of the Roman empire – all crammed into an area a third of the size.
A comparison between the classic Maya and ancient Rome is instructive in other ways. Some Maya cities were established hundreds of years before the founding of Rome, and they included significantly larger architecture that still stands. Both cultures developed sophisticated astronomy, mathematics, writing and agriculture, as well as elaborate trade arrangements across vast cosmopolitan lands.
The ruins of Rome are today covered by a bustling world city where some of the most prominent elite families claim to trace their ancestry directly to ancient times. Many Maya ruins, in contrast, are now covered by more than 1,000 years’ worth of tropical forest while the descendants of the peoples who built those cities are some of the poorest people on Earth.
According to census records, the various Maya and much smaller Indigenous groups, such as Xinka and Garifuna, today account for more than 11 million people across Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador, Honduras and the US.
Most of them, 7.7 million, live in Guatemala, where they officially comprise 44% of the population. (Human rights organizations believe the number may be higher as it has long been stigmatized, even dangerous, to identify as Maya.)
History – both ancient and recent – is a key political issue for the Maya. In Guatemala, they have two central demands: first, that there be a full reckoning with the civil war and genocide that lasted from 1960 to 1996, and claimed about 200,000 lives, most of them Maya. Second, that they are recognized as the original inhabitants and legitimate owners of this land. As they see it, half a millennium of prejudice and discrimination against their community has led to a situation where, among other issues, two-thirds of the country’s arable land is controlled by only 2.5% of its farmers, few of them Maya, while 60% of Indigenous children are undernourished.
In 2023, the Maya peoples played a key role in the unlikely presidential election victory of a former diplomat named Bernardo Arévalo. The campaign to protect the vote against a corrupt judiciary was led by Indigenous groups and included 106 days of nationwide protests. Although Arévalo is not himself Maya, he is sympathetic to their cause. One of the people he appointed to his government is Liwy Grazioso, another prominent archaeologist with Italian roots, who now serves as minister of culture and sports.
Grazioso is an expert in Maya history, and has published papers on the tombs of Rio Azul and the metropolis of Tikal, and overseen research on Kaminaljuyu, the ancient Maya city that rests under the capital. As a politician, she aims to build a country where the past and present can coexist, and where the country’s original inhabitants are a fully recognized part of the national story. “It’s not that the Maya are better, or that their ancient society was somehow superior to ours, but because as humans they are the same,” she said while offering me a glass of unsweetened hibiscus tea.
We were sitting in a grand, wood-paneled office, on the third floor of El Guacamolón, a mighty palace colloquially named after the color of a mashed avocado dish, in the centre of Guatemala City. Since the palace’s completion in 1943, these bombastic halls have accommodated half a dozen military coups, as well as the planned annihilation of the lives, cultures, languages and history of the Maya. This oppression, of course, has a long history.
Grazioso explained how Maya elites – intellectuals, royals, astronomers, priests, writers and historians – were systematically killed by the Spanish colonizers, and their texts burned as works of the devil.
Outsiders’ power over the story of the Maya is written into the people’s very name. After their arrival in the early 1500s, the Spanish named local populations “Maya” after the ruined city of Mayapán in present day Mexico. Yet the Maya never saw themselves as one people and were never governed under one empire. They spoke many languages – 30 of which are still around – and belong to an intricate mix of cultures and identities.
By the time the field of Maya archaeology began in the 19th century, most of the knowledge once held by local leaders was gone. Over time, some observers spread pseudoscientific stories claiming that Maya temples were more likely to have been built by aliens than by ancestors of local people. (Vikings, Mormon Nephites and other mysteriously vanished civilizations have also been dubiously credited with building the ancient sites.) Grazioso believes that these fantastical theories serve a political purpose. “If we deprive the actual Maya of their glorious past, we don’t need to give them power today,” she said. “Talking about collapse and aliens becomes a distraction from what is right in front of us.”
That is where the work of present-day archaeologists comes in. Until recently, the prevailing debate about the Maya centered around the question of why their civilization collapsed. While scholars continue to study this question, an increasing number of archaeologists are now also asking: how did the Maya survive? The question addresses both their ancient – and modern – abilities to transform extremely challenging circumstances into enduring survival.
For a long time, the idea that complex human settlements could once have existed in the Maya lowlands was seen as impossible. The theory was based on research in the Amazon rainforest in the 1950s and known as “the law of environmental limitation”. It held that lowland rainforests, with their thin soils, were not suitable for large advanced societies, as they could only produce limited amounts of food. This kind of land could only support small, primitive tribes. For many years, the idea was considered the closest thing to a natural law in anthropology.
When the theory was formulated, no large settlements had yet been discovered in the Amazon, but the Maya lowlands held thousands of massive stone pyramids, countless temples, raised causeways, engraved stone monuments and intricate tombs where buried royals were clad in luscious jade jewelry. Rather than positing the existence of highly populated, sophisticated Maya lowland cultures, many researchers tried to square what they found on the ground with the perceived law of environmental limitations. According to the “segmentary state” model, Maya kings ruled symbolically over a few disconnected communities living in tiny settlements separated by forest.
The law of environmental limitation was largely overturned in the 1980s, as the deciphering of Maya hieroglyphs allowed researchers to read the texts on large stone monuments, known as stelae, in city centers. The carvings had been believed to be astronomical or ceremonial but turned out to be historical. And the stories they told were not of primitive forest dwellers, but of kings and conquerors, queens and revolutions.
In recent years a new story has formed, partly thanks to Lidar technology. Short for “light detection and ranging”, it consists here of bulky laser machines attached to twin engine aircrafts that fly half a kilometer above forests and fields. The equipment produces contour scans of the ground, making it possible to identify straight, round, or squared features, such as ancient ruins, fields, roads, temples, dams and fortifications.
Lidar isn’t new – it has mapped the moon and is today a key feature in many technologies, including self-driving cars – but it made the leap into archaeology in 2009 after researchers at the classic Maya city of Caracol in Belize saw biologists using it to measure forest growth. With some tweaking, they thought, it could also map the ground beneath rainforest canopies.
In 2016, when Francisco Estrada-Belli saw Lidar scans of Holmul in north-eastern Guatemala, he realized that “archaeology had changed for ever, there was no going back”. He explained to me how he had labored for 16 years to map this major city, using measuring tape and the help of countless assistants. They waded through thick jungle to reconstruct what the city might have looked like throughout its 1,700 years of history. His teams had outlined about 1,000 structures.
Now, he could compare this with Lidar findings. During just three days of scanning, it had mapped more than 7,000 structures: residential buildings, canals, terraces, field enclosures, causeways and defense walls. Lidar had produced a continuous scan of an area 10 times larger than his teams had managed on foot.
Subsequent large-scale mappings led to Estrada-Belli’s estimate that between 9.5 and 16 million people once lived in the Maya lowlands. He calls the lowlands in the 700s a “continuously interconnected rural-urban sprawl”. This was a cosmopolitan region with high degrees of trade and settlements interconnected by a close web of causeways and roads. The ancient Maya did not use pack animals, or carriage wheels. Everything that was built and traded had to be carried by human force alone.
Shoes had to be repaired, and people had to sleep and eat – not by distances of a day’s ride by horse, as in Eurasia, but within walking distance. There was no wilderness in these lowlands, Estrada-Belli told me, but rather a low density scattering of people, businesses and agricultural fields, and managed wetlands and forests – everywhere. Interspersed with all this were larger buildings, presumably for members of the elite.
This urban sprawl landscape opens a new set of questions. The most important of these, according to Estrada-Belli, has to do with agriculture. “When looking at Central American forests today, we must reckon with the fact that ancient humans affected everything,” he said. “The tree species are there because the Maya chose them, the types of flowers are around because they made use of them, the wetlands served a human function. And so on. And all these methods were sustainable over thousands of years.”
He described “the enormous investments the Maya put into canals, terraces and raised fields in water. They used extremely diverse, advanced and flexible farming methods, rotating and combining hundreds of species.”
Yet today humans use the land “for cattle farming and monocultural corn plantations that does nothing but destroy the land,” he said. “We have a lot to learn.”“We don’t really talk of collapse any more, but about decline, transformation and reorganization of society and continuation of the culture,” said Kenneth E Seligson, an associate professor of archaeology at California State University. “Several similar shifts have happened in other places, such as Rome,” said Seligson. But “we rarely talk of the great Roman collapse any more, because they came back in various forms, just like the Maya.”
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2026/feb/12/apocalypse-no-how-almost-everything-we-thought-we-knew-about-the-maya-is-wrong?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
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CHINA IS FIXATED ON CLOUD SEEDING
China hopes to increasingly control when and where it rains. Ally Hirschlag examines why its ambitious cloud seeding plan is so controversial – and whether it actually works.
In March 2025, a fleet of 30 planes and drones fired silver iodide pellets into the sky in northern China. As the pellets hit the air, the pale-yellow powder inside them emerged and soon turned to wisps of grey, lacing the sky as the aircraft released them in criss-cross patterns. Far below them, more than 250 ground generators fired rockets holding the same pellets.
The aim was to bring relief to the drought-stricken north and northwest regions, also known as the country's grain belt. The huge operation was the country's "spring rain" project, undertaken by China's Meteorological Administration, and was timed to support crops at the start of the sowing season.
The huge operation was an apparent success, purportedly producing an additional 31 million tons of precipitation over 10 drought-susceptible regions.
China has been attempting to artificially increase its rainfall since the 1950s using a well-known yet still controversial method: cloud seeding. This aims to coax clouds to produce more moisture using tiny particles, often silver iodide, which has a similar shape and weight to an ice particle.
Cloud seeding has long caused concerns, from the potential environmental risks and the impacts of the chemicals used to potentially harm to people in nearby areas due to changes in rainfall patterns, and the security tensions that could follow.
And even as the world's most populous country ramps it up, scientists and experts continue to question how much it really works.
Road to rain
In recent years, China has significantly ramped up its cloud seeding efforts, largely thanks to improved drone and radar technologies. The country is now carrying out weather modification over more than 50% of its land area, mainly to increase rainfall although it is also attempting to prevent it in some areas. It has even turned to using it to manage weather on specific days, such as the Beijing 2008 Summer Olympics and the centenary celebration of the Chinese Communist Party in 2021.
Weather modification has become "a vital project for the scientific development of atmospheric cloud and water resources, serving the country and benefiting the people", Li Jiming, director of China's Weather Modification Center, said at the time of the 2025 spring rain operation. "[It] is a crucial component of building a strong meteorological nation," he added, noting the need to propel China "from a major player in artificial weather modification to a global leader".
China's rising interest in controlling precipitation is obvious: since the 1950s it has been facing more frequent and severe droughts, taking a toll on the country's agriculture and economy.
The country's cloud seeding experimentation began in 1958, when an aircraft reportedly triggered precipitation over the drought-stricken Jilin Province. But cloud seeding had actually been discovered in the US a decade earlier, and, like so many brilliant ideas, it was by accident.
In the 1940s, Vincent Schaefer was a General Electric researcher working to prevent aircrafts from getting too icy in flight. He'd developed a special refrigerator to demonstrate how ice forms in clouds. One day, he came into the lab to find the fridge had turned off. When he put a piece of dry ice (extremely cold, solid carbon dioxide) into it to chill the inside, he witnessed a dazzling reaction: ice crystals suddenly appeared floating inside. He had artificially produced precipitation.
A year later, in 1946, Schaefer dropped pounds of dry ice into supercooled clouds above the Adirondack Mountains in New York. It appeared to trigger snowfall.
In the wake of this experiment, cloud seeding endeavors sprang up around the world, albeit with mixed, inconclusive results involving data measurement challenges.
To show genuine cloud seeding results, scientists need a control meteorological setup nearly identical to the one they attempt cloud seeding with in nature. "We can't make the same cloud happen twice. So we can't do a controlled experiment," says Rauber.
Seeding snow
In China, and globally, cloud seeding for both experiments and practical use is most commonly done in the mountains to produce snowpack, mainly as snow is easier to see and measure than rain. Scientists use radar to find clouds containing supercooled liquid water (from -15 to 0C, or 5 to 32F), then release tiny silver iodide particles into them using aircrafts or ground-based generators. These particles freeze onto the supercooled liquid, forming ice crystals in clouds, which get heavier and eventually fall to the ground as snow or ice.
Warm weather cloud seeding works similarly but uses salt to encourage small water droplets to merge and get bigger so they fall to the ground. It is less common, however, as warmer clouds are often faster-moving and less filled with supercooled liquid, and the water doesn't collect as visibly as snow, so it is harder to track.
China's first operational cloud seeding base was established in 2013, and today it has six bases that collaborate on research. Its weather modification program is now the largest in the world, and its rainmaking ambitions have grown in tandem. In particular, the country's enormous Tianhe ("sky river") initiative aims to create a water vapor channel from the Tibetan Plateau all the way to China's dry northern region using thousands of ground-based generators.
But China has also faced criticism due to concerns over wider impacts from these operations. "Applied over a large enough scale, such weather modification technologies can present habitability and security concerns for surrounding countries," says Elizabeth Chalecki, a researcher in international relations and technology governance at the Balsillie School of International Affairs in Canada.
One recent report argued that such a large-scale intervention on the Tibetan Plateau could lead to China's unilateral control of water resources that are shared with neighboring countries, such as India, leading to geopolitical tension. But another yet-to-be-published analysis of 27,000 cloud seeding experiments in China found the effect on other nations was minimal.
The potential harms of cloud seeding can be overblown, according to Katja Friedrich, a professor in atmospheric and oceanic sciences at the University of Colorado.
For example, "there's no indication that cloud seeding gets out of hand and just suddenly you have this explosion that generates a thunderstorm", she says in reference to flooding in Dubai in 2024 and Texas in 2025, both of which have been erroneously attributed to cloud seeding.
Still, experts such as Chalecki warn there is a lack of international policy to protect against potential transboundary impacts as China's weather modification program advances. China might even be able to get "an ancillary security benefit out of it by low-key degrading the environment and the habitability of a rival state", she suggests.
A lack of evidence
There's another problem with cloud seeding, though: scientists say China simply may not be producing the rain it says it is. "I think that the claims are not supported sufficiently by the data," says Robert Rauber, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the US.
Over the past decade, the Chinese government has made multiple claims that its cloud seeding programme is producing noteworthy results. One press release said the 2025 spring rain initiative had increased precipitation over the targeted area by 20% compared with 2024. And China's meteorological agency said in December 2025 that its overall artificial rain and snow operations had resulted in 168 billion tonnes of additional precipitation (around 67 million Olympic swimming pools-worth) since 2021.
"There are a lot of claims [globally], whether it's from government agencies or companies that have the opportunity to gain from cloud seeding operations," says Jeffrey French, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Wyoming. "I do think that there are a lot of claims [out of China] that cannot be scientifically validated or backed up."
Back in 2017, French led a major breakthrough in cloud seeding evidence, when the "Snowie" project in the Payette Mountains of Idaho in the US managed to collect data that unambiguously showed cloud seeding efforts producing snow. The results have since rippled across the world.
"We were able to, in a number of cases, identify exactly where the seeding material was in the clouds and make measurements directly in those areas," says French, who was principal investigator of the project. They managed this despite there being "so much natural variability, so much variation in the nature of clouds and precipitation", he says.
The researchers took additional measurements in nearby areas 1-2km (0.6-1.2 miles) away, allowing them to compare and contrast the two regions, and show a decided difference between the amount of snow produced naturally and artificially by the same cloud system.
It's the closest any independently funded study has ever gotten to a successful controlled experiment in nature. Snowie's extensive dataset was a pivotal achievement; it not only showed that cloud seeding can work, but the complex balance of when and how it can work best. The data became a gold standard for a scientific field that was in desperate need of evidence.
The benchmark study has been cited in various peer-reviewed Chinese cloud seeding studies, with one saying the research "rigorously demonstrates that cloud seeding really has created precipitating clouds and increased surface precipitation".
Underwhelming
Still, Snowie's results indicated the output of cloud seeding is ultimately underwhelming. "That's why people were struggling to show it in these precipitating systems," says Friedrich. And while cloud seeding has been shown elsewhere to work to some extent, even scientists who have seen the results firsthand are unsure if it works well enough to be worth the effort.
Some also think that use of the technology has outpaced the scientific research, and there just isn't enough reliable data to support the results. "The problem with these cloud seeding programs is that most of them are done by the government, like in China, like in the UAE," says Friedrich."But there's really very little independent analysis."
This is important as it's still incredibly difficult to differentiate between precipitation produced by seeding and what the clouds may have produced on their own. "In general, it is very difficult to know if cloud seeding works in every case," says Adele L Igel, associate professor in cloud physics at the University of California, Davis. "The theory and the science say that it should work, but it is hard to verify these predictions with observations and measurements routinely.”
And plenty of limitations remain to it working predictably. For example, cloud seeding doesn't work if clouds with precipitation potential aren't present. And it's far less successful in the warmer months when clouds with supercooled liquid are scarce.
It all means the cost could often be outweighing the output, especially when using airborne methods. Ground-based methods, on the other hand, which rely on generators sending silver iodide or another trigger up into the clouds via air currents, are cheaper but far less predictable. "Airborne seeding is pretty efficient, but it's also very expensive, so that's why people do the ground-based seeding," says Friedrich.
It's also impossible to know what the outcome will be of wider, consistent climate modification, in China or elsewhere. "It is very difficult to assess, let alone predict, regional climate impacts and remote anomalies from weather modification operations," says Manon Simon, a lecturer at the University of Tasmania, who's done extensive research on the potential geopolitical implications of China's weather modification. It's particularly hard to know whether long-term programs may result in more frequent or intense droughts or floods, says Simon. Ascertaining these risks, she adds, needs ongoing assessment and monitoring as well as extensive international cooperation.
A new frontier
In the almost 10 years since Snowie, seeding techniques and radar technologies have improved, which could mean more precipitation is being produced. As drone technology has improved in recent years, China in particular has increased the use of advanced drones and begun leaning on AI to improve the accuracy of silver iodide drops.
Both China and the United Arab Emirates are also experimenting with flare seeding and sending negative ion charges into clouds to help kickstart droplet bonding, which leads to precipitation.
And yet, just as with traditional cloud seeding, there remains a scarcity of independent research showing these new methods definitively produce more precipitation. Scientists now fear that rising droughts worldwide due to climate change will fuel uptake of cloud seeding technology, but not the research needed to show when and where it works cost effectively.
Experts agree: more independent data would help pinpoint when cloud seeding might work, and when it likely won't. The same data could inform safeguards for protecting adjoining nations from any adverse consequences.
But that all takes time; a hard sell when water scarcity is already here – and many countries want solutions now.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260203-why-china-is-pushing-controversial-cloud-seeding-tech
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PEOPLE AGE AT DIFFERENT RATES
No two different people age the same. Although age is the principal risk factor for several chronic diseases, it is an unreliable indicator of how quickly your body will decline or how susceptible you are to age-related disease. This is because there is a difference between your chronological age, or the number of years you’ve been alive, and your biological age – your physical and functional ability.
A landmark study of 38-year-olds found their biological ages ranged from 30 to 60 years old, with some individuals aging at a rate of nearly three years for every one calendar year.
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CAN AGING BE REVERSED?
As a teenager in Germany, Steve Horvath dreamed of living to 1,000. He made a pact to dedicate his life to making this a reality for mankind.
Horvath no longer harbors fantasies about living for hundreds of years, but he’s made good on his childhood promise to devote his career to extending healthy human life. A geneticist and researcher of aging, Horvath in the early 2010s built the first widely used biological-age clock, a test that is designed to measure the age and function of cells, tissues, and organs.
His invention, based on DNA methylation, a type of chemical modification to DNA, was a significant milestone for the field of aging research as it gave scientists a tool they could use to quantify aging.
Horvath has since invented many more such clocks, including a pan-mammalian clock, which purports to measure the age of many mammal species, and a clock known as GrimAge, which Horvath describes as the world’s most accurate mortality-risk predictor. “It’s named after the Grim Reaper,” he says. “It measures the probability that you will die in the next year.”
A former professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, Horvath is now principal investigator of the U.K. research arm of Altos Labs, a longevity biotech company that says it is developing therapies that could reverse age-related diseases and disabilities.
Having precise and meaningful ways to measure aging could make it possible for drug developers like Altos Labs to test longevity treatments in people, Horvath says: “It’s a quintessential tool to find interventions for rejuvenation.”
As part of TIME's series interviewing longevity leaders and influencers, we spoke to Horvath about his pioneering invention and what he thinks might be possible for human life extension.
What spurred your interest in aging?
It really goes back to my teenage years in Germany. My friends and I loved reading science- fiction novels, like the Perry Rhodan series and books by Philip K. Dick. We were especially fascinated by space travel. Then I learned about how long it would take to reach other planets—and in some cases, it was like a thousand years. So I started thinking about how we needed to work on extending our lifespan before we could even think about space travel.
It’s funny, because as a teenager, I felt that our human lives were way too short. Now I'm 58 and I'm at peace with our lifespan, but at the time, it seemed to me that you could really do nothing with a lifespan of 80 or 90 years. I felt that we needed to work on rejuvenation and extending longevity.
And so, I came up with a plan with my twin brother Markus, who was studying biochemistry, and another friend who was interested in computer science. It was so immature. I was like 19. We decided that we would divide up the work. I would work on the math and the gene networks, and we would each do our part and use modern science to follow the ancient dream of Gilgamesh.
Gilgamesh was one of the earliest novels of mankind and it deals with this Sumerian king who loses his friend and wants to extend lifespan, so he goes on a journey and he finds an herb that supposedly keeps us young and then the herb gets eaten by a snake. It has a bad ending, but basically, Gilgamesh goes on a quest for rejuvenation. We felt it was a cool name for our project.
We called it the Gilgamesh contract and my friend actually kept it, so there’s literally handwritten notes in which we vowed to honor this agreement.
But of course, we all then went off to different universities, and I got totally diverted.
The most relevant thing I worked on in those earlier years was what are known as early-detection biomarkers for cancer, and I picked up a lot of skills related to biomarkers. Then I received tenure at UCLA and I was very happy about that, and I said, OK, now I’m free. I can do anything I want, and that’s when I decided to go back to the thing that started it all.
I wanted to go back to longevity research, but I thought that, because of all of my training, the easiest way for me to make a contribution to the field was to develop a biomarker for aging. People had already recognized that biomarkers of aging were important, and there had been substantial efforts from the National Institute on Aging [a division of the U.S. National Institutes of Health] to find biomarkers. The Institute had spent many millions of dollars on the effort, but overall, it had failed.
I felt that it was important to develop [an aging] clock to advance scientific inquiry in the field of longevity. I felt we needed exact measurements of aging before we could really study it and then hopefully one day find interventions that can reverse aging.
I need to say, though, that I never took a single class in longevity. I came in as a complete novice. But I got so unbelievably lucky because I entered the biomarker field just when a new technology had been invented that allowed you to measure DNA methylation.
Every cell in the body has the same DNA and the same four letters: A, C, T, and G [the building blocks of DNA], but, of course, cells turn on and turn off different sets of genes. A liver cell turns on certain genes; a brain cell turns on other genes. What determines this are all these epigenetic modifications [chemical or structural changes on DNA that can turn genes on or off but don’t alter the underlying DNA sequence]. There are many different types of epigenetic modifications, and DNA methylation is one type.
People have been interested in measuring epigenetic changes as a way to measure different kinds of stress, like pollution, obesity, and social stressors.
After I got tenure, I decided that I wanted to try to build a clock based on gene expression. But then I burned through two years analyzing so-called gene-expression data and found nothing.
At around that time, Eric Vilain [a physician-scientist then also at UCLA] was doing epigenetic research on sexual orientation, and he asked me if my twin brother Markus and I would take part in his study. Markus is gay and I’m straight, so we’re what is known as discordant twins. Given that we have identical DNA, the question was, is there something different in our epigenome? I was the statistician for that study, which looked at DNA methylation patterns, but we didn’t find any signal for homosexuality.
But then I thought, maybe I should look at this data for aging. And because I had just done all this work on analyzing gene-expression data in a hundred different ways, I had all the software scripts. So it was literally a five-minute analysis—and I'm telling you, I fell off the chair. I thought there was a coding error. It couldn’t be right because the signal was so strong. I immediately knew that methylation was the future. It was a real eureka moment.
The first clock I built was a chronological-age clock [chronological age is someone’s actual age] based on saliva, and it could estimate the age of individuals within approximately five years. So let’s say a 50-year-old gave me their saliva: the clock would tell you their age plus or minus five years. I was blown away.
After that first clock, I started building more clocks based on blood and skin and different organs. I was like a kid in a candy shop. New important data kept coming in, and eventually, I worked my way towards what is now known as the pan-tissue clock [which measures the age of most tissues and cell types]. People call it the Horvath clock, but I don’t call it that.
Epigenetic clocks were very controversial for many years, but now, I would say most leading labs in the aging field use methylation clocks or have used them.
The No. 1 criticism of these clocks has been that they are blackbox measurements, and we don't know what they actually measure. Are they just measuring noise? But leading labs of the world have looked at these clocks in 100 different ways and used them to test pretty much any stress that you can think of—everything from metabolic stress, obesity, viral stress, and many diseases—and I think we really understand a lot by now.
What I can tell you is we're using clocks, and in 2023, we published what I think is an important paper that details a multi-species clock we built that can apply to all mammalian species. It’s very accurate, and this pan-mammalian clock has since been used in phenomenal studies to understand the nature of aging. A recent preprint uses this clock to study the axolotl, which is a very exciting animal because it can regenerate its limbs.
Broadly speaking, my research at Altos focuses on rejuvenation. I'm excited about anything and everything rejuvenation—so finding both gene-therapy approaches, but also small molecules to accomplish rejuvenation.
There are now hundreds of aging clocks out there, and efforts are underway to validate them so they might one day be used in clinical trials and by medical doctors. Do you think any of these clocks are ready for prime time?
Yes, I would say so. The field is developing and all over the world, there are amazing efforts to build better clocks. Sometimes you need to see the forest for the trees, and I see the forest.
It doesn't mean we can't do better and we need to have some standardization, but sometimes one needs to recognize that certain milestones have been reached, and I feel like in this case, they have been.
When it comes to consumer versions of these clocks, though, I don’t think people should be using them overall. Clocks differ. So if you take a GrimAge measurement, it gives you one readout. If you take my pan-tissue clock, it's another readout. As a scientist, I know these are actually very different clocks. So if one readout says you're 50 and the other says you're 40, I have no problem with that, because I understand different biology. However, a naive consumer might say, "My methylation age is that." Company A might be measuring certain parts of the DNA, and company B is measuring other parts of the DNA. There naturally could be inconsistencies, so that's why it would be very desirable to have some standardization.
What became of the Gilgamesh contract?
In my late 30s, I met up with that friend who had kept the agreement, and he said, “Do you remember the Gilgamesh contract?” He gave it to me to read, and it blew my mind. My work had basically followed the trajectory that these immature teenagers had written down so many years ago.
I had promised to work on gene networks. At the time, I barely even knew what they were. But then, I ended up writing a whole book on gene networks. It was eerie. There’s some research that suggests that your dreams as a teenager really determine your life, and I have to say that for me, this is 100% correct.
My brother, Markus, initially got totally derailed. He was the first one to violate the contract because he became a psychiatrist. But this all has a happy ending, because he now works at Altos on longevity research. Can you believe it? In the end, he finally joined the Gilgamesh project.
As a teenager, you hoped humans could live for a thousand years so they could go to another planet. Are we any closer today to that fantasy?
We're not close at all. It's totally science fiction. But my mathematical answer is, I do think at some point there will be drastic extensions of lifespan.
Imagine we have 100 more years of biomedical innovations—what will that do for health? Of course, we would expect major breakthroughs. So in an abstract sense, if we don't wipe each other out in a nuclear holocaust and if we can avoid wars and pandemics, I think our species at some point will find ways to extend lifespan drastically.
When you say drastically, does that mean living to 150?
150 is a very fashionable number now. I have no doubt it will happen. No question.
https://time.com/collections/future-of-living/7357365/steve-horvath-longevity-aging/
Oriana:
The question is whether this can happen soon enough for those alive today. We know that progress will be made, but it may take a major discovery — an event that can’t be predicted — just for the average global life expectancy to reach 100.
Still, the anti-smoking campaign proved surprisingly effective, showing that once society gets serious enough about a problem, and there is sufficient collective will, what seemed impossible turns out to be possible — not 100%, but to sufficient extent to make a difference.
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A DISCOVERY THAT CHANGED OUR UNDERSTANDING OF AGING
In the 1990s, molecular biologist Cynthia Kenyon made a discovery in a tiny roundworm that transformed our understanding of aging.
She found that a single gene mutation could double the worm’s lifespan, proving that the aging process, previously considered unchangeable, could be modified—at least in some creatures. That opened the door to the notion that drugs and other interventions could potentially slow aging and improve health span, the amount of time spent in good health, in people.
“Back then, people thought that if you studied aging, it was because you probably weren’t a very good scientist,” says Kenyon, who now heads aging research at Calico Life Sciences, the secretive longevity biotech backed by Google’s parent company Alphabet. “People thought I was wasting my time.”
Today, some 30 years since her groundbreaking research was published, many companies including Calico are working to develop treatments that could boost health span. Researchers have been able to extend the health and lifespans of more complex animals like mice, and many scientists think that helping people live healthier for longer is within reach, too.
“Since the days of Ponce de León and the fountain of youth and even before that, it’s always been a dream of people to live forever or at least age in a healthy way,” says Kenyon, a former professor at the University of California, San Francisco. “But now we can actually start from science and not just wishful thinking.”
When did your interest in aging science first take root?
When I was little, I liked animals and nature. I explored the woods and had a lot of pets, and I was interested in what you might call “truth”—understanding myself and the world. I realized that science was a good way to address the truth.
As my career as a scientist progressed, I began to get really interested in aging biology, which wasn’t well understood at the time. All animals appear to age, yet they age at really different rates. Among mammals, whales can live to be hundreds of years old, but other mammals live only a few years. But how does that happen?
My thinking was: the reason different species age at different rates is because they have different genes, and evolution changed those genes from an early precursor. For example, dogs have much shorter lives than we do, and they age much more quickly than we do, but humans and dogs evolved from a common precursor that gave rise to all mammals. What happened that led to these different lifespans? It occurred to me that there had to be genes that control the aging process, and I wanted to understand what those genes were.
Was there a specific project that sparked these questions about aging?
I was working in my laboratory on a type of roundworm called C. elegans. It’s very tiny, about the size of a comma in a sentence, and it ages really quickly and dies within a few weeks. But it’s a complex animal: it has different tissues and muscles, a gut, and a little brain that can do lots of things.
At the time, there were a couple of researchers who were looking for gene changes that affected lifespan in C. elegans. They found a gene change that made worms live longer, but the problem was that it also decreased the worms’ fertility. I thought, “My gosh, I just want to look for these genes myself.” I became really, really, really obsessed with the idea of trying to find gene changes that allowed the worms to live longer.
I also had this idea that maybe there were universal genes that control the rate of aging in all animals—like a thermostat for temperature, except this would be a thermostat for lifespan. Turning it up or down could make animals age faster or slower. I thought that maybe every animal had a little dial like that, but evolution set this dial differently in different species. It was just a hypothesis, and we still don't know if it's true or not, but I think aspects of it might be true.
That idea motivated me. It made me think that there could be a great discovery to be made, and I had the tools to do it—I had this little animal, a little worm with a three-week lifespan. So, I could do an experiment, and at the end of three weeks, I could just do another one. I was really, really excited about it.
Were other scientists as enthusiastic as you were?
Nobody would work on it, actually, because they thought this just couldn’t be done. People assumed that there would be all these different genes, so you’d get all these tiny little effects.
Everybody had an idea of why it wouldn’t work.
But I was lucky. It turned out to be right that you could find a mechanism [for aging] and get a big change.
We started by looking for long-lived mutant worms and we found one that had a mutation in the gene DAF-2. This gene had previously been identified, and it was known that it played a role in the development of the worm before puberty. It controlled a switch that allowed the animal to grow to an adult or, under stressful conditions, to pause for a while and wait until conditions improved in the environment before growing to become an adult.
What we discovered was that partially disabling DAF-2 caused the worms to live twice as long as normal. They were completely fertile, active, and healthy. They aged more slowly. It was really amazing. It wasn’t a miracle because it was science, but it was like a miracle.
We also found that these long-lived worms needed another gene called DAF-16. Without a functional DAF-16 gene, they aged more quickly. So right away, not only did we find a gene change that could double the worm’s lifespan, but we had a little circuit: this one gene was somehow talking to this other gene, and there was a kind of a program, in a way, for aging.
I always tell young scientists: if you have a good idea and you think it’s possible that it’ll work after thinking really critically about it, always do it—even if everybody else says no.
How did the DAF-2 discovery transform the field of aging research?
This whole area of science had been like a cesspool. Really, no one wanted to work on it. People thought it was a waste of time. But, my God, it then became hot, it became interesting. That was 30 years ago now, but since that time, it’s just become more and more interesting.
There are now all these different ways of extending lifespan and health span in mice. We’ve seen that a version of these genes can make mice live longer and look younger. There are also labs that have shown that clearing senescent cells [damaged cells that stop dividing but don't die] can improve health span in mice, and others that have apparently been able to turn back the clock by using [special proteins known as] Yamanaka factors that can make mice much healthier and youthful. We don't know yet if that will ever be possible in humans, but people are trying.
Is that what you and your colleagues are working on at Calico?
I won’t go into specifics, but Calico and many other companies are trying to slow down aging in people. Calico is taking more than one approach, which I think is a smart thing to do.
Aging is very tightly linked to age-related diseases, so the idea is, if you could slow down aging, it would give us new ways of treating diseases like Alzheimer's, heart disease, cancer, and osteoarthritis. It would also be a way of learning more about these pathways in humans.
I'm really excited about the possibility that we could be healthier. I’m not talking about living longer while being sick. Can you imagine going into the nursing home and just staying there twice as long? No one wants that. But my goal in life is to help people to just be healthier when they’re older. And that's what Calico lets me do. As an academic, I couldn’t be as close to the translational aspect of this—bringing this science to people. That’s why I’m so in heaven right now with my job.
I'm just super excited about the whole field. We're on the brink of something unbelievable. Or maybe not. We won't know until we know—and really proving it in humans won't be easy, but I still think we are part of something that’s really big.
I remember giving a talk about the DAF-2 mutation in the early 1990s at one of these big scientific conferences. It was this huge room, and it was so empty. There were only like 30 people in there, and most of them were people I knew and people who were also working on C. elegans. And I remember standing there and spreading my arms and saying, “This room should be full!” I was so passionate about it.
And now, when I give talks or when other researchers give talks about aging, the room is full—even overflowing sometimes. Just thinking about it, tears are welling up in my eyes. It's like a dream come true.
Is there anything you’ve changed in your life in the hopes of extending your own health span?
As a matter of fact, yes. At some point, I decided to try giving the long-lived C. elegans some sugar, because other researchers had found that sugar made other animals live shorter lives.
And it happened with the worms too. They didn’t live as long—and interestingly, they lived shorter because the same genes that made them live longer were having the opposite effect.
When I got this result, I thought, "Oh no." At the time, I ate tons of sugar. I was a sugar addict. I remember going to Costco one time and buying a bag of sugar that was so big, it came up almost to my waist.
I decided to follow a low-glycemic diet, and I’ve basically been doing that for 23 years. I do that and I exercise—aerobics and weight-lifting. I don't take any pills or anything to live longer. The reason I don't is, I would like a Phase III clinical trial to be done first before I try anything. But the problem here is, those trials cost a ton of money to do. What I would love to see is a kind of World Health Span Organization—like the World Health Organization, but for health span—where lots of governments chip in and we could do clinical trials for a lot of these substances.
I know other people are taking their chances. They are taking things like metformin or rapamycin, but I don't know—I would say, buyer beware. Until the proper trials are done, I think exercise and the diet that I'm eating right now is about the best I can do for myself. I don’t actually know that they are going to extend my lifespan, but I feel great.
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The Yamanaka factors are a group of four transcription factor proteins—OCT4, SOX2, KLF4, and c-MYC (OSKM)—discovered by Nobel laureate Shinya Yamanaka in 2006. When expressed, these factors can reprogram specialized adult somatic cells (such as skin cells) back into an embryonic-like, pluripotent state, creating induced pluripotent stem cells.
https://time.com/collections/future-of-living/7357156/cynthia-kenyon-longevity/
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BENEFITS OF CAULIFLOWER
Cauliflower is a cruciferous vegetable, like broccoli and cabbage. It’s actually a flowering plant that we harvest before it has blooms. What we eat are the undeveloped florets — called curds — because they look a bit like cheese curds.
Cauliflower is white primarily because it contains anthoxanthins, a type of flavonoid pigment that is white or colorless, rather than chlorophyll. Its white color is maintained by covering the developing curd with large leaves to block sunlight, which prevents the production of other pigments like anthocyanin (purple) or chlorophyll (green).
Key health benefits of cauliflower include:
Nutrient-Rich Low-Calorie Food: With only 25 calories per cup, it provides significant amounts of Vitamin C, K, folate, and fiber, making it excellent for weight management.
High in Antioxidants: Contains sulforaphane, carotenoids, and glucosinolates that protect against cell damage, reduce oxidative stress, and fight inflammation.
Boosts Heart & Brain Health: Healthline notes its potential to reduce risk of cardiovascular diseases, and it is a good source of choline, a nutrient crucial for brain development.
Cancer-Fighting Properties: The National Institutes of Health indicates that cruciferous vegetables like cauliflower contain compounds that may help prevent certain types of cancer.
Aids Digestion and Immunity: High fiber content promotes gut health, while the high Vitamin C content helps stimulate immune cells.
Versatile Low-Carb Substitute: Due to its mild flavor, it is used as a healthy, low-carb alternative in many dishes, such as pizza crust, rice, and mashed “potatoes.”
Weight Management: High water and fiber content promote a feeling of fullness. Swapping one cup of white rice for riced cauliflower can save approximately 175 calories and 45g of carbohydrates.
It is also a good source of folate, which is essential for healthy cell growth during pregnancy. Folate is also essential for making red blood cells, which carry oxygen throughout your body.
Steaming cauliflower is one way to keep most of the veggie’s antioxidants while cutting down on its gas-inducing properties.
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Ending on beauty:
To-day, I will seek not the shadowy region;
Its unsustaining vastness waxes drear;
And visions rising, legion after legion,
Bring the unreal world too strangely near.
I’ll walk, but not in old heroic traces,
And not in paths of high morality,
And not among the half-distinguished faces,
The clouded forms of long-past history.
I’ll walk where my own nature would be leading:
It vexes me to choose another guide:
Where the gray flocks in ferny glens are feeding;
Where the wild wind blows on the mountain side.
~ Emily Bronte, Often rebuked, yet always back returning
