Humans naturally need answers and so typically find uncertainty aversive. With a presidential election, war erupting in multiple zones, rising climate volatility and myriad other types of flux, it’s easy to feel overwhelming angst for the future and see certainty as a beacon in a darkening time.

But a wave of new scientific discoveries reveals that learning to lean into uncertainty in times of rapid change is a promising antidote to mental distress, not a royal road to angst, as many of us assume. A growing body of evidence and a range of new interventions suggest that skillfully managing uncertainty in the face of what’s murky, new or unexpected is an effective treatment for anxiety, a likely path to building resilience and a mark of astute problem-solving ability.

Tolerating and even delighting in uncertainty doesn’t merely help us to accept life’s unpredictability; it also readies us to learn and adapt. Each day, the brain uses honed mental models about how the world works, which are used to process a shifting environment. When we meet something unexpected, a neural “prediction error” signals a mismatch between what we assumed would occur and what our senses tell us.

Yet our uneasy sense of not knowing triggers a host of beneficial neural changes, including heightened attention, bolstered working memory and sensitivity to new information. The brain is preparing to update our knowledge of the world. Uncertainty offers the “opportunity for life to go in different directions,” says Stephanie Gorka of Ohio State University’s College of Medicine, “and that is exciting.”

This is why being open to uncertainty is critical for mental well-being. Pioneering work led by Dr. Dugas (who originated the term “intolerance of uncertainty”) and Nicholas Carleton of the University of Regina in Canada shows that being intolerant of uncertainty is associated with vulnerability to mental health challenges such as anxiety, eating disorders and depression .

Americans 65 and over are playing a larger role in the labor force, shifting the composition of U.S. workers and reflecting a new reality where retirement has become a more gradual process for many. The share of older Americans who are working, by choice or necessity, has doubled in the past 35 years, according to a report released Thursday by the Pew Research Center. Workers 65 and over also are working longer hours and making more money than they were in the past.

“In some ways, this isn’t surprising: We’re an aging society,” said Richard Fry, a senior researcher at Pew Research Center and lead author of the study. “But it isn’t just that there are more older adults in the workforce, it’s that a larger share of them are working. And it tends to be better-educated, older adults with a college degree.”

The increase of older college-educated workers in well-paying jobs has helped narrow the pay gap between retirement-age workers and younger ones, the Pew report found. Workers 65 and older made a median hourly wage of $22 last year, just $3 short of the median for younger workers; that’s down from an $8 gap in median hourly wages in 1987.

There are several reasons people are staying longer in the workforce. Older Americans are healthier than in the past and less likely to have disabilities, so they are able to work longer. The nature of work has changed, too, with flexible office jobs replacing more physically grueling positions in factories and fields. Policy changes also have played a role. Americans now have to wait until age 67, instead of 65, to access full Social Security benefits. And many companies have scrapped pension funds that offered regular payments after a certain age. Instead, they’re instituting more flexible contribution plans, such as 401(k)s, that tend to be linked to the stock market and other investments.

As a result, even when workers are ready to retire, they are having to consider additional factors such as the health of the economy and the stock market in determining the timing of their exit from the labor force, according to Joanne Song McLaughlin, a labor economist at the University of Buffalo.

Research funding amplifies the pace of scientific discovery needed to create new treatments. Historically, major supporters of research like the National Institutes of Health, pharmaceutical industry and private foundations funded studies on the most common conditions, like heart disease, diabetes and mental health disorders. A breakthrough therapy would help millions of people, and a small markup per dose would generate hefty profits.

As a consequence, research on rare diseases was not well-funded for decades because it would help fewer people and the costs of each dose had to be very high to turn a profit. Of the more than 7,000 known rare diseases, defined as fewer than 200,000 people affected in the U.S., only 34 had a therapy approved by the Food and Drug Administration before 1983.

The passage of the Orphan Drug Act changed this trend by offering tax credits, research incentives and prolonged patent lives for companies actively developing drugs for rare diseases. From 1983 to 2019, 724 drugs were approved for rare diseases.

Drug development is driven by the priorities of their funders, be it governments, foundations or the pharmaceutical industry. Based on the market, companies and researchers tend to study highly prevalent diseases with devastating societal consequences, such as Alzheimer’s disease and opioid use disorder. But the work of advocacy groups and foundations can enhance research funding for other specific diseases and conditions. Policies like the Orphan Drug Act also create successful incentives to discover treatments for rare diseases.

However, in 2021, 51% of drug discovery spending in the U.S. was directed at only 2% of the population. How to strike a balance between providing incentives to develop miracle drug therapies for a few people at the expense of the many is a question researchers and policymakers are still grappling with.

Subsea data pipes carry almost 99% of intercontinental internet traffic. TeleGeography, a research firm, reckons there are 550 active or planned submarine cables that currently span over 1.4m kilometres. Each cable, which is typically a bundle of between 12 and 16 fibre-optic threads and as wide as a garden hose, lines the seabed at an average depth of 3,600 metres. Close to half have been added in the past decade. Newer ones are capable of transferring 250 terabits of data every second, the equivalent of 1.3m cat videos. Data may be stored in the cloud, but it flows under the ocean.

Since 2019 demand for international internet bandwidth has tripled to more than 3,800 terabits per second, estimates TeleGeography. The boom in data-hungry artificial intelligence may strengthen this trend. Synergy Research Group, a data firm, predicts an almost three-fold increase in big cloud providers’ data-centre capacity over the next six years. To connect these data centres to the internet, between 2020 and 2025 the data-cable industry will install 440,000km of new subsea lines.

One big shift has come from big tech. Until the early 2000s subsea cables were mainly used for transporting voice traffic across the world. Telecom operators like BT and Orange (formerly France Telecom) controlled most of the capacity. By 2010 the rise in data traffic led internet and cloud-computing giants—Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft—to start leasing capacity on these lines.

As their data needs surged, the tech firms began investing in their own pipes. In 2012 the four companies used around a tenth of international bandwidth; nowadays they claim almost three-quarters. Big tech’s deep pockets ensure that projects are completed. According to Submarine Telecoms Forum, an industry body, only about half of all announced cable systems actually get built—unless they are backed by tech firms, in which case they almost always do.

Dedicated cables allow the tech giants to avoid competing with others for third-party bandwidth, and to react quickly to changes in user demand and to any problems (if a cable on a route is damaged, data can be redirected to another one of the firms’ lines). Their bandwidth and speed is further enhanced thanks to clever technology, which ownership makes easier to deploy. All this is transforming the business of data cables. Having begun as large buyers of bandwidth from telecom companies, big tech is now leasing capacity on some of its cables to telecom operators.

In the short term, diets do seem to help most people lose at least a small amount of weight, whether it's a low-fat or low-carbohydrate diet or just plain calorie restriction, said Dr. Ellen Schur, the director of the University of Washington Nutrition and Obesity Research Center.

But individual results can vary. In one 2018 clinical trial, for example, researchers asked 600 people to follow either a low-fat or a low-carb diet for one year. While most participants lost weight — on average, 5 to 6 percent of their body weight (or 12 to 13 pounds) — about 15 percent gained weight during the study, and a few lost as many as 50 to 60 pounds. It’s common, though, for people’s weight loss to plateau at around six to eight months, after which they are at risk of regaining that weight, said Dr. Maria Collazo-Clavell, an endocrinologist at the Mayo Clinic. Research suggests that most people return to their previous weight within about four years.

When you lose weight, your body responds by increasing your appetite and reducing the number of calories you burn, Dr. Hall said. He and others have estimated that for every two pounds of weight you lose, your metabolism slows by about 25 calories per day, and your appetite increases by about 95 calories per day. So in other words, if you lose 20 pounds, your body will burn roughly 250 calories less each day while craving about 950 calories more.

People sometimes think that if they just “grit their teeth and white-knuckle it through” a diet to lose 10 or 20 pounds, “they can start to relax,” Dr. Hall said. “That’s the wrong way to think about it.” If you want to change the way you eat in order to lose weight, you have to sustain those changes “for the rest of your life,” he said. “Otherwise, you’re going to regain the weight.” Given that, consider making healthy changes that you can stick with, he said.

If you consume a lot of ultraprocessed foods, reducing your intake can be a sustainable approach. Short-term research has shown that those who consume mostly ultraprocessed foods tend to eat more and gain more weight than those who consume minimally processed foods, though Dr. Hall acknowledged that a lack of time, money and access to whole foods are all potential barriers to making this change.

My grandmother developed signs of Alzheimer’s disease in her early 70s, and studies suggest that being bilingual can delay the onset of the condition by up to five years. Drawn by that potential benefit, many people, like my father, have attempted to pick up a new language in adulthood. According to a survey conducted by the language learning app Memrise, 57 percent of users reported “boost brain health” as a motivation for using the program.

But is that really possible? The studies on bilingualism and dementia were conducted in people who have used multiple languages in their daily life since at least early adulthood. Whether casually learning another language later on confers the same cognitive advantages is up for debate.

Lots of activities are linked to better brain health in old age, like getting more education when you’re younger, physical activity and cognitively stimulating hobbies. Experts say regularly speaking multiple languages may be especially beneficial, though. “We use language in all aspects of daily life, so a bilingual brain is constantly working,” said Mark Antoniou, an associate professor at Western Sydney University in Australia who specializes in bilingualism. “You don’t really get that from other enriching experiences, like playing a musical instrument.”

The age at which you learn another language appears to be less important than how often you speak it, said Caitlin Ware, a research engineer at Broca Hospital in Paris who studies bilingualism and brain health. “The cognitive benefit is from having to inhibit your mother tongue,” she said, which your brain is forced to do if you’re trying to recall the right words in another language. “So if the second language is used a lot, you’re getting that cognitive training.”

That process — called cognitive inhibition — is linked to better executive functioning. In theory, by improving these types of processes, the brain becomes more resilient to the impairments caused by diseases like dementia — a concept known as cognitive reserve. The stronger your mental faculties, the thinking goes, the longer you can function normally, even if your brain health starts to decline. In a landmark 2007 paper, researchers from Toronto found that among people with dementia, those who were bilingual developed symptoms four years later, on average, than those who weren’t. Several studies published since then have reported similar findings, though other research has found no such difference.

For the new meta-analysis, scientists at the University of Valencia in Spain aggregated 26 studies with close to 470,000 participants. Each study explored the effect of leisure-time digital reading on comprehension. They found that digital reading improves comprehension skills, but the beneficial effect is between six and seven times smaller than print reading, and it’s smallest for children.

Why does digital reading appear to be far less beneficial? The authors cited numerous speculations from the literature. First, the linguistic quality of digital text tends to be of much lower quality. When chatting, we often use informal language with simplified vocabulary, and we ignore grammar rules. Content is also typically far shorter, not requiring the focus and retention to understand and fully enjoy longer works with intricate narratives and numerous characters.

According to Naomi S. Baron, an emerita professor of world languages and cultures at American University, a book’s physical properties might also uniquely boost information retention. “With paper, there is a literal laying on of hands, along with the visual geography of distinct pages. People often link their memory of what they’ve read to how far into the book it was or where it was on the page,” she wrote. The physical properties of a book or magazine — the smell, the looks, the feel — can also make reading more pleasurable, she added in an email interview with Big Think.

Lastly, when reading content on digital sources, distractions from social media, YouTube, and video games are often just a click away, hampering full comprehension of texts. Because youth tend to have impaired impulse control, they can be more susceptible than adults to distractions when engaging in digital reading. They also are less likely to have mastered vocabulary and grammar rules, meaning they will be exposed to more rudimentary writing on social media and in chats with friends.

It’s for these reasons that the authors recommend that parents and teachers limit kids’ time with digital content, or at least emphasize printed works or using basic e-readers with ink-screens. (A 2019 study for the most part showed no difference in reading comprehension when reading works in print form versus on a Kindle, though readers were not as efficient at locating events in the temporality of the story.)

Other wealthy countries rely on a single negotiating body — usually the government — to decide whether to accept the price a pharmaceutical company wants to charge. In the United States, negotiations with drug makers are split among tens of thousands of health plans, resulting in far less bargaining muscle for the buyers. “Our lack of consolidation in negotiating is a key reason that we pay more than other countries — but also this unwillingness to negotiate as hard,” said Stacie Dusetzina, a health policy expert at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine.

Some countries set limits on how much they will pay for medicines. France, for example, caps the growth of drug companies’ sales: If sales exceed that threshold, the government gets a rebate. Drug companies in the United States have avoided legal restraints on prices for patients covered by commercial insurance and on introductory sticker prices when drugs first enter the market. “Drugs are so expensive in the U.S. because we let them be,” said Michelle Mello, a Stanford law and health policy professor. “We designed a system in terms of drug costs that is all engines, no brakes.”

Drug companies are not the only ones making money from high drug costs. Doctors, hospitals and an array of intermediaries also see higher revenue when costs soar. Experts also see misaligned incentives stemming from pharmacy benefit managers, or P.B.M.s, big businesses that negotiate with manufacturers on behalf of the employers and health plans that pay most of the bills for prescription drugs.

Drug industry executives often complain that they are unfairly blamed for high prices while other parties, including P.B.M.s and insurers, are profiting from a growing share of drug spending and saddling patients with high out-of-pocket costs. Manufacturers retain only half the money that health care payers initially spend on prescription drugs before discounts are applied, according to a 2022 study funded by PhRMA. The system is so confusing that doctors and patients trying to decide between seemingly comparable drugs have no easy way to determine what their actual cost will be at the pharmacy counter.

Around the world, countries issue patents to drug companies that grant them temporary monopolies during which lower-priced generic competitors can’t enter the market. But in the United States, drug companies have been especially successful in finding ways to prolong that monopoly period, through tactics like piling up patents to protect inventions that are only tangentially related to the drug in question.

What time and age actually do to music — to those who write it as much as those who perform it — is latently understood by the many listeners who adore late works but curiously underexamined. Less a maturing of sound or style, final compositions or performances often appear more as a reduction, the feeling of being left with the most essential expression of a person’s musical ideas. There are countless historical precedents for those who found greatest invention in their later years: Beethoven, Goethe, Monet are just a few.

It was while listening to Slenczynska’s album, uninhibited and elemental as it is, that I was struck by what has changed. It’s not just the fact that people are living, and working, for longer that has caused a shift in the classical music world, but also the long overdue broadening of the identities and figures we appreciate. If the past few decades of classical music were an era that fetishised the wunderkind, we have entered, in recent years, the era of the wunderalten, the older prodigy.

It would not be an overstatement to say that the past 200 years of musical history would have taken a different course had Beethoven not lived and, crucially, aged and died. It was in the years before he died, deaf and diseased, at the age of 56, that he wrote a series of works so strange and radical that they almost single-handedly wrenched the Classical era into the Romantic.

By writing them, Beethoven broke from the conventions that formed him and created something no one had ever heard before. His cultural descendants — Brahms, then Wagner, later Shostakovich and, eventually, LeFanu herself — are in his debt for making their work possible.

The tendency to view age and conservatism as interlinked trajectories might be convincing in the realm of politics, but they often have an inverse relationship in art. A desire to avoid repetition, receding fear of how the work will be received and an increased awareness of time make for later work that can tend towards the radical or bold.

In the rich countries of the West, the electric vehicle revolution is well underway. Climate-conscious consumers drive Teslas or Polestars for reasons of morality and fashion. Poorer countries are also experiencing a wave of electrified mobility. In Bangladesh, electric three-wheeler taxis, known as tuk tuks or rickshaws, are rapidly replacing their gas-powered forebearers on the streets of Dhaka. Such electric vehicles are climate friendly, cost effective, and help reduce air pollution.

Yet a peek under the hood of these vehicles reveals a toxic secret: each tuk tuk runs on five massive lead-acid batteries, containing almost 300 pounds of lead in total. Every year and a half or so, when those batteries need to be replaced and recycled, about 60 pounds of lead leak into the environment. Battery recycling, often at small-scale unregulated smelters, is a highly profitable but deadly business.

Lead is a dangerous neurotoxin, and any exposure to it is harmful to human health. Lead that has entered the environment hurts people on an extraordinary scale. The myriad ways in which lead enters air, water, soil, and homes across the developing world—and the enormous toll it takes on human health, wealth, and welfare—poses one of the biggest environmental crises in the world yet receives little attention. Estimates published by various organizations suggest that lead kills between 1.6 million and 5.5 million people each year.

The World Bank estimates that lead kills 5.5 million people per year, which would make it a bigger global killer than AIDS, malaria, diabetes, and road traffic deaths combined. On top of that staggering toll, the social burden of lead poisoning is extraordinary, as is its contribution to global inequality—our research on the cognitive effects of lead poisoning suggests that it may explain about one-fifth of the educational achievement gap between rich and poor countries.

But unlike many challenges faced by developing countries, lead poisoning is a problem that is eminently fixable with some attention and a relatively modest financial investment. Better surveillance, research, and regulation can help protect children all over the world from the dreadful effects of lead poisoning and reduce the massive global costs it incurs.

Road traffic accounts for most of the nitrogen dioxide emitted in British towns and cities; cars bring pollution straight to where people live; and air pollutants have been linked to asthma, cardiovascular disease, dementia, and other ailments, according to the United Kingdom’s chief medical officer.

More than 300 low-emissions zones have been put in across Europe with little fanfare, says Dr. Fuller. And studies show local communities have benefited, with reductions in heart and circulatory problems, and fewer admissions to hospitals.

Yet there’s a cost-of-living crisis, and societies are more polarized and unequal than before, creating an environment where antipollution efforts can become unpopular quickly and weaponized by politicians. That’s what the Conservative Party did in the Uxbridge by-election, says Bob Ward, policy director at LSE’s Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment. It was worried about dropping poll numbers and also felt pressure from fringe climate change critics on its right, and so attacked the ULEZ as a Labour policy – despite it originally being a plan announced by Mr. Johnson when he was mayor of London.

In addition, the ULEZ has raised questions about who should bear the brunt of its cost. Health- and climate-related policies are typically based on “polluter pays” principles to incentivize people to change their behavior, says Mr. Ward. With the ULEZ, the idea is not to collect money, but to spur owners of polluting vehicles to upgrade to cleaner ones.

But Mr. Ward says that the burden of the ULEZ has fallen too heavily on working-class vehicle owners who are struggling to make the needed upgrades. Even with a trade-in payment implemented by the London mayor’s office, the maximum subsidy was only £2,000 for cars and motorcycles, and there were all kinds of exceptions that vehicle owners found confusing and exclusionary. (Larger vehicles like vans do get a larger trade-in payment, which was increased in August.)

A knitted wool sweater may be one of the warmest pieces of clothing to grab when temperatures turn chilly, but this insulating material can often be downright itchy when wearing it. So, what is it about wool that triggers us to itch uncontrollably?

One of the main reasons an otherwise cozy piece of clothing can go from being comfortable to unbearable is the thickness of the wool fibers used to make the item. "The thicker the fiber, the itchier the wool will be," Ingun Grimstad Klepp, an ethnologist and professor of clothing and sustainability at Oslo Metropolitan University in Norway, told Live Science. "That's one factor. Another is the softness of the fibers used to make the yarn."

In other words, a thicker fiber spun by humans will likely be more abrasive and less flexible, which can lead to itching and irritation on the skin, while thinner, softer fibers, such as merino wool and downy-like alpaca fleece, can help " ditch the itch."

Another less common cause of itchiness is the presence of lanolin, a waxy substance secreted by the sebaceous glands of wool-bearing animals. Also called wool wax or wool grease, lanolin is great for repairing dry, chapped skin, but it can also cause an allergic response in some people, according to Healthline.

"Wool isn't an allergen in and of itself, but it is possible to be allergic to lanolin," Grimstad Klepp said. "However, most wool today doesn't contain much lanolin because the majority of it has been washed and dyed out during production, so there's not much lanolin left in the yarn."