As I announced yesterday…

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

In summary:

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

Read more

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

But first, two things.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Explanation and credit.)

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

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

Anyway, and to business!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Instead, here are two things I can do:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cheers!

Mike

Sign Me Up For Whatever This Thing Is!

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

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

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

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

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

Adam Bodensteiner of commented:

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

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

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

The questions I tried to answer:

• Precisely how much water is there on our planet?

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

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

How Much Water Does The Earth Have?

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

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

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

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

Well, yes and no!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A fact I found surprising, via the USGS page:

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

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

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

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

Did All Our Water Come From Outer Space?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Sorry, Professor Dartnell.)

So Exactly How Much Water Is Out There?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Welcome to the sublimely distant edge of our planetary neighbourhood.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ooof.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Subscribe now

TRANSCRIPT

Oh, hello.

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

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

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

(No offence to any Daves out there.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photos: Mike Sowden

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Wince.)

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

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

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

1. THE 2012 IG NOBEL PRIZE FOR ACOUSTICS

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

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

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

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

- Kazutaka Kurihara.

This also made me realise we can do this manually!

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

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

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

2. THE 2005 IG NOBEL PRIZE FOR ECONOMICS

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. THE 2014 IG NOBEL PRIZE FOR NEUROSCIENCE

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

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

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

As I said in my original write-up:

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

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

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

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

Coming up after the paywall:

• Dodgy car manufacturing…

• madly excessive co-authorship…

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

• the remarkable minds of taxis drivers…

• the best way to beat procrastination…

…and other lovable madness.

Read more

Subscribe now

TRANSCRIPT:

Oh hello.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What you do is: you carry a paper map.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cheers!

Mike.

Images: Mike Sowden; Frames For Your Heart.

Hi. This is Mike of Everything Is Amazing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1.

It’s the stitching that gives it away.

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

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

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

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

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

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

But in this case, no scanning is required. This 15x25 cm tatter is written upon with easily decipherable Greek, revealing a record of taxes due on quantities of beer and oil, somewhere around 260 BC. It’s exactly the kind of work Dr. Zammit Lupi has enthusiastically dedicated herself to, since abandoning plans for a career in law after becoming entranced by a National Geographic article on the restoration of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican.

But now, here’s something she’s never seen before:

"First I saw a piece of thread, only then did I notice the format of a book. I saw a central fold, the stitching holes and the written text within clearly defined margins on the papyrus.”

She realises she’s looking at part of a codex, the ancestor of the modern book (and now a word usually reserved for non-paper pages bound along one edge).

Only, it’s much earlier than she expected. The two earliest known stitched codices date to 150-250 AD. This one predates them by - what, up to four centuries?

Wow!

Has she discovered the earliest book in the world?

2.

As far as I can tell, there’s no way to answer that question - because nobody can fully agreed on what a book is.

Do you mean “the oldest collection of writing in the world”? I guess this 40,000 year old collection of artifacts engraved with geometric signs might just about qualify!

Oh, you mean the oldest text, as in, a sustained body of writing physically imprinted on a single, uh, I-guess-what-we’d-now-call “document”? That might be the Sumerian Instructions of Šuruppak (2600-2500 BCE), if you’re counting stone tablets, except there are actually engraved clay tablets from Nineveh that date from much earlier, so - erm?

But if you mean a book has to be printed on paper, oh well then, that’s probably China’s Diamond Sutra (around 868 CE) - but that depends on how you want to define “printed”, presumably not just with movable metal type because that’s the Buljo jikji simche yojeol (which predates the Gutenberg Bible by 78 years), but if you mean just with ink conveyed symbols onto paper, there are examples in the British Museum that go as far back as….

Oh lordy. What a headache.

And hey, another thing - do you mean to claim that the book I was most definitely reading this morning on my beloved Kobo Libra 2 e-reader isn’t actually “a book”?

You outrageous luddite. I feel so attacked!

What about at Christmas, when for the first time in my life I read half of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights on the Kindle app on my phone, before giving up on it because it was so relentlessly grim? Should I have another crack at it then, because by your argument I haven’t actually tried to read Wuthering Heights at all?

In short, that big thorny question for the modern reader, author and generative AI copyright lawsuit claimant: isn’t a real “book” defined by the words it’s made from, independent of the physical medium employed to carry those words to you and convey the meaning of them into your brain? In all the ways that matter, doesn’t a book have a fundamental identity beyond its physical reproductions, beyond its manifest “thing”-ness?

It’s all delightfully messy, and I guess it won’t be solved anytime soon.

But one thing we can agree upon: however you want to define it, the human invention of the book has proved to be a terrific way to store information (ideas, stories, the kind of wisdom that’s incredibly hard-won and so easily forgotten) and carry it forward throught time. So far, it’s a job so very well done.

But in this age so hell-bent on generating more information than we know what to do with (so much of it quite literally rot), seemingly doomed to lose almost all of it in the long run, save the relatively little that can be physically printed out or desperately forwarded as a copy-of-a-copy-of-a-copy to future generations…well, can’t we invent something better?

It seems the answer is yes - and it could have profound implications for our role as a species going forward.

Read more

Subscribe now

This edition is a bit late, so apologies for that!

This week I hoped to send you a piece about the first “book” that humans have designed to last hundreds of millions of years, as part of this series for paid subscribers. But since it’s still in progress and I try to only show up in your Inbox with something that’s fully worth reading - alas, I’ll need another day or so with that one.

In the meantime, I’m falling back on my favourite formula for writing this newsletter:

1. Someone smart, knowledgeable and supremely well-regarded in their scientific field puts something on the internet that’s so remarkable it even blows their cavernous minds…

2. I clumsily leap into it like a dog jumping into a pile of leaves…

3. I try to convey this whole experience to you, hopefully without mangling the actual facts too much…

4. If neither of us is too annoyed by the results, I will consider it a job well done in the service of SCIENCE COMMUNICATION.

For today’s example, I’m indebted to University of Maine climate, extinction, & biodiversity scientist - and let’s face it, total legend - Jacquelyn Gill for this curiosity-grenade of a post on Bluesky:

A what now?

OK I’ll type it into Wikip-WHAT THE HELL IS THAT?

First discovered by amateur fossil hunter Francis Tully in 1955, Tullimonstrum (yes, that’s the official Latin name) is a 310 million year old marine animal that looks like - well, is there anything? A dustbuster designed by Jim Henson? A mutated, sentient colon?

I’ve got nothing, and honestly continue to have nothing.

From a scientific perspective, it’s just as baffling. As Scientific American’s Jack Tamisiea asked in 2023: was the Tully Monster a fish, a worm, or a giant slug with fangs?

What a delight, albeit with a certain amount of Well Thank God That’s Extinct.

In other news, even the rocks are finding 2026 a bit much:

What you’re looking at is a pebble discovered at Christmas by fossil-hunter Christine Clark, while she was out for a walk on Holy Island in Northumberland - and those “teeth” are actually parts of an ancient marine animal called a crinoid.

When I was growing up in East Yorkshire in the north of England, I’d see a lot of crinoid fossils embedded in stones on the beach, in particular at the chalky outcrop of Flamborough Head (the site of one of the battles for American independence, oddly enough).

But thanks to the human visual bias of pareidolia…

…none of us have a hope of seeing this example as anything other than toothy. Ah well.

Meanwhile - if you’ve been following the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics, and in particular the unrelenting drama of the curling events, you’ve probably been watching (and it feels very weird to say this) sports people flinging about pieces of my corner of Scotland.

is right! (As she always is.) The Olympic curling stones are made from the famous Ailsa Craig common green and blue hone varieties of granite.

I know this because I can see the island as a shadow on my horizon, less than 40 miles away from my current home town, as the crow flies.

It’s quite the sight.

The extinct volcanic plug called Ailsa Craig is in the middle of the Firth of Clyde, the waterway which opens out into the ocean between western Scotland and northern Ireland.

You can see it directly behind the isle of Pladda here:

It also regularly creates its own weather, as the following spectacular photograph by Rob Wilson demonstrates:

(Rob seems to be cornering the market on Ailsa Craig Weather Photography, and you can see more of his gorgeous work here.)

The only other source of professional curling stone material is a quarry in Wales. That’s it - just two places in the world, both in the UK.

As Andrea Thompson writes in Scientific American, this could probably do with a rethink:

“In principle, there’s no reason rock from other places couldn’t work for curling…. Ailsa Craig and the Trefor granite quarry probably became the go-to sources over time through some combination of their performance characteristics, tradition and standardization. And blasting is no longer allowed at Ailsa Craig, a now-uninhabited bird sanctuary, so another source would help keep curling clubs stocked in the future.”

I actually find it astonishing that Ailsa Craig was ever long-term inhabited. Just look at it. Can you imagine? I already knew it has a fresh-water spring, and that fishermen have used it as a base for the last 400 years, but - ye gawds, it must have been hard, with near-as-dammit no native trees & therefore no wood as fuel.

Nevertheless:

“The Girvan family, who were tenants of the island from at least the mid 19th century along with the lighthouse keepers, their families and granite workers – about 30 in all – lived as a community on Ailsa Craig until the 1950s.”

- Dr. Bernard Zonfrillo, Glasgow University.

The nopiest of nopes.

But - would I spend a night there in my bivvy bag? Is that even allowed? I don’t know and I’m afraid to ask, yet I feel I must.

I’ll report back when I know more.

Images: Nobu Tamura (Spinops/Paleoexhibit/Wikimedia); Tony Jolliffe; Rob Wilson; August Schwerdfeger.

I’ve written before about Katherine’s most recent book, Enchantment: Reawakening Wonder In An Exhausted Age, and if you haven’t read it yet, you’re missing out on a rare invitation to fully connect with the world around you. That’s Katherine’s gift - to tell stories that tease fascination, awe & wonder out of the near-invisible everyday things that make up 99% of our lives, and to reveal the extraordinary in what’s most present and therefore most accessible to all of us.

She also has a podcast, in which she talks to wise and thoughtful people about helpful ideas for living a calmer life - well, apart from its most recent episode, which for some reason features this idiot:

We talked about the important power of enthusiasm for helping reconnect everything that’s so broken right now; about two months I spent in Corfu in 2019 that helped me decide what I wanted the rest of my life to look like; the danger of big waves in stormy seas; the superpower of being able to endure temporary mild discomfort (I stole this from Oliver Burkeman, another of Katherine’s guests) and my lifelong, ever-changing relationship with Ursula Le Guin’s A Wizard Of Earthsea.

It was such a fun chat, and made me feel very lucky, in a “pinch me” sort of way, to be able to hang out with folk as smart as Katherine - yet another reason I’m so grateful for stumbling into this whole newslettering lark.

If you’re a paid subscriber to Katherine’s newsletter The Clearing, you can listen to the ad-free version of our chat here - but there’s also an ad-supported episode available through all the usual podcasting channels here.

(Also, I can’t recommend Katherine’s newsletter enough to you, so please do give it a read. Absolute ray of sunshine of a thing, it is.)

- Mike

It’s the late 1950s, and France’s first nuclear submarine, Plongeur, is in deep trouble.

Subscribe now

For the last few terrifying minutes, and for wholly mysterious reasons, it’s been in an uncontrollable crash dive.

As the crew look on in horror, the depth gauge spins past 500 metres…then 1,000…then registers they’re two full kilometres down, with the skin of the submarine around them popping and groaning with the building pressure. It wasn’t built for this. It can’t take much more.

Somewhere below them - maybe a thousand metres away, maybe much less - is the sea floor of the Atlantic. They won’t know where until it’s far too late. Impacting it at this speed and depth will be instant death: with a breached hull and vertical kilometres of ocean pressing down upon them, the pressure (anything up to 400 times atmospheric) will crush them quicker than an eye can blink.

4,000 metres. It’ll be any moment now.

…

…5,000?

Impossibly, they’re still alive, and the numbers keep falling.

According to where they think they are, the submersible is now below the depth of the Atlantic at that location. Maybe they’ve somehow been quickly dragged sideways, to somewhere it’s much deeper?

Time passes - and their depth continues to build.

8,500 metres now.

This is absurd. They’re now below the deepest known point in the Atlantic (the Milwaukee Deep), and rapidly approaching a depth exceeding that of any ocean on the planet.

Even more perplexingly, the creaking and groaning has stopped. When they check the pressure upon the hull, it’s lessening - and when they test the water out there, it’s no longer salty. It’s fresh.

Only one utterly fantastical explanation presents itself. Somehow (and honestly who knows how?) they’ve fallen through a crack in the sea floor, into a vast, undiscovered sub-oceanic ocean.

Now their dive quickens, as if they’re caught in a mighty downward current (an underwater waterfall, perhaps?) - and it’s pulling them….where?

If you want to know what happens next, you’ll have to read the rest of Twenty Trillion Leagues Under The Sea by British author Adam Roberts, who is having enormous fun writing some of the most gleefully unhinged yet firmly-scienced speculative fiction being published today.

(I’ll give no spoilers, except that things get particularly bonkers when they’ve passed a depth equivalent to the entire radius of the Earth.)

Sometimes that’s the fun of sci-fi. You read a story & think, “well, that was a madly good knees-up of a thing, and I appreciate the wild imagination of the person who wrote it! But obviously it’s fantasy. There’s zero truth in all this. How could there be?”

Incredibly, it seems this is not one of those times.

In the '60s and '70s, the US Geological Survey reported finding traces of freshwater beneath the sea floor of the east coast of New England, in the United States.

In 2025, a team of scientists went for a proper look at what's down there.

After 3 months, they'd pulled up 50,000 litres (13,200 gallons) of water - some of it drinkable - from hundreds of metres below the sea bed.

Their current working theory based on what they've found, as reported on January 21st by Sascha Pare at LiveScience here:

• There's a gigantic reservoir of fresh water under the sea floor, off the East Coast of the United States…

• The word “gigantic” is barely adequate, because it stretches from New Jersey as far north as Maine, with a volume of trapped water maybe as great as 1,300 km³…

• That amount of water could supply a city the size of New York for 800 years.

GOOD LORD.

The most plausible explanation for this seems to be ancient glaciation.

Sometime between 2.6 million and 11,700 years ago, when the seas were a little (or a lot) lower, freshwater - perhaps melted water from the heat of ice grinding over bedrock - collected underneath the glaciers covering this enormous area.

Then the immense weight of ice above them pressed down with enough force to squeeze this water through a clay-silt layer (known as an aquitard) which would trap it when that mind-boggling pressure was released as the glaciers retreated.

The result: a vast reservoir of water-engorged sediment, hundreds of metres below the sea floor, varying in impurity depending on location, but with some of it on the salty side of potable.

According to a presentation on the website for Expedition 501, the expedition’s international team of scientists predicts there are global reservoirs of offshore freshwater covering as much as [gulp] 500,000 cubic kilometres - which the USGS believes is only a tiny fraction of the water that’s down there at a greater depth, as I previously wrote here:

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

Since the United Nations recently announced the world is entering the “era of Global Water Bankruptcy”, requiring immediate international collaboration on a recovery plan, that's pretty hopeful news, if - and it’s a thunderously big “if” - some practical and affordable way to tap these reserves could be cobbled together. I am sure the engineering challenges would be considerable (but well worth tackling).

Here I’m reminded of this arresting graph on global food supplies from Our World In Data, recently shared by :

(Here’s how they calculated it.)

Since the graph records the state of things in 2022 when red & processed meat still dominated many Western diets (as it still does, of course), how much more hopeful could this graph look in a future graced with the efficiencies of shifting to a more plant-based diet?

I wonder how similar the picture for global water is - how much less it’s down to the absence of the water itself, and more about inadequate infrastructure, shortsighted politics, blinkered capitalism, outdated technology and all those messy but fixable imperfections in the ways humans tend to get things done at scale?

(I’d certainly find that message a lot more inspiring in a newspaper headline than a plain old “the world is running out of water” - which isn’t to say that isn’t happening locally, with dramatic consequences. Just look at what’s happening in Tehran.)

When I mentioned all of this on Bluesky:

Good catch, Other Guy!

“Flood is a 2008 work of hard science fiction by English author Stephen Baxter. It describes a near future world where deep submarine seismic activity leads to seabed fragmentation, and the opening of deep subterranean reservoirs of water. Human civilisation is almost destroyed by the rising inundation, which covers Mount Everest in 2052. Baxter issued a sequel to this work, entitled Ark, in 2009.”

- Wikipedia

When you’re in need of ideas to change the world, maybe it’s a great idea to check in with the science fiction writ- no NOT LIKE THAT…

Anyway! This is a remarkable find, maybe even laying the foundation for a future breakthrough in resupplying the world’s freshwater needs, and I can’t wait to see where it goes.

In the meantime - I wonder how trials are going with this marvel?

Images: Sarah Lee; Our World In Data; Deborah Diem; ECORD.

Subscribe now

Before we begin: oh, this. So much this.

I actually hadn’t twigged this properly until now. The last manned mission to orbit and land on the Moon was Apollo 17 in December 1972: Gene Cernan, Harrison Schmitt, Ronald Evans.

To date, Cernan is the last human being to have walked on the Moon, on December 14th 1972 - when I was just over a year old.

So yes, this is huge. I reckon we should all be talking about this (yelling, in fact) - and applauding the astronauts who are about to travel further from home than almost any living human being:

(Yes, I said “almost”. The crew of Apollo 13 travelled the furthest distance from Earth - 248,655 miles - and of the three crew members, Fred Haise is the only one alive today, making him the current holder of the title of furthest-travelled person in world history.)

Returning to ground level…

As a BSc Archaeology student in the early 2000s, one thing I loved finding out is that scientific discoveries work in both directions.

There’s the stuff that could dramatically change the future - this new cancer treatment, for example, discovered by scientists a few dozen miles away from where I’m writing this newsletter - and there’s also the new discoveries that expand upon or even overturn what we thought we knew about the recent and ancient past.

It’s easy to misconstrue the importance of the latter type of scientific progress, and how newsworthy it should be. eg. Yes yes, but with everything going on in the news right now, who cares that Roman soldiers stationed in Britain were often laid low with the squits, or that there are the remains of a 90-million year-old rainforest under the ice of Antarctica?

Firstly: have you seen the news right now? Perhaps a fascinating distraction from all that would be more than welcome?

Secondly: what you need (and honestly, what news reporters need) is to get a skilled archaeologist to stand in front of you, maybe with a few pints of cider already in them, jabbering in wild but but super-articulate excitement about how profoundly this stuff matters.

It’s been 25 years since I was one of those - and cider always gave me a headache, so I’ll stick with my glass of 12 year old Glenfiddich - but here’s my best attempt to do that for two recent stories you might have missed.

1. The Flooded Legend That’s (Maybe) Telling A Different Story

The top image is an undersea chart of the sea floor around a series of rocky outcrops to the west of the French island of Sein, off the rocky shoreline of Brittany (the part that juts furthest westwards into the Atlantic).

If you squint at where those arrows are pointing in the top chart, you’ll see some very unnatural-looking shapes. Particularly the one labelled TAF1, which runs in a straight line for 120 metres (400 feet).

Upon investigation, this was found to be a 20-metre-thick underwater structure, standing metres off the sea bed: dozens of pairs of huge monoliths running in parallel lines just over a metre apart, with the space between filled with smaller slabs, angular blocks and scatters of pebbles.

A wall, then, and a hugely substantial one - it’s not clear how deeply the monoliths are sunk, but they could be as tall as 3 metres.

Then there’s the age of the thing. This is trickier than normal (no organic material = no radiocarbon dating), but two working hypotheses based on reconstructing the coastline based on changing sea levels suggest dates around the 5,500 BCE mark - making this structure upwards of 7,000 years old.

This means it would predate the building of Stonehenge…by around the amount of time currently between us and the Roman invasion of Britain. (!)

This puts it smack in the second half of the Northern European Mesolithic, when Doggerland to the north was fast disappearing under the sea, as I previously wrote about here:

But Mesolithic people were hunter-gatherers. Their lifestyles were seasonal and mostly spent on the move! How on earth did they have the time and gather the resources to build stone structures weighing thousands of tons?

In a way, all this is really doing is exposing how imprecise or even arbitrary our definitions of archaeological periods can be - it’s not like there were hard rules to what people could do within them (“non, you cannot build that there, François, it’s not the Neolithic yet”). What’s now regarded as “hunter-gathering” is obviously an incredibly varied range of behaviours, some of which might even be faintly recognizable in some people today.

From this example, it’s clear that some coastal communities were putting a lot of time and energy into building permanent stone structures we’d now associate with a more settled lifestyle in more recent periods of prehistory.

But [knocks back rest of whisky] where this gets really exciting is how this archaeology ties in with the local legends - the stories verbally passed from generation to generation, surviving long enough to be written down so they become an indelible part of the region’s cultural history.

Half a dozen miles up the coast is the Bay of Douarnenez, widely regarded as the best location for the mythical city of Ys.

If you’re a videogamer - yes, that’s where they got the name for the series (although everything else about the games is made up).

The real-world myth of Ys tells of a fabulously wealthy settlement on the shoreline, protected from the rising sea with a series of enormous dikes. Every day at high tide these dikes were shut to protect the city - until one day, the king’s feckless daughter opens one to admit her secret lover, a mysterious, charismatic stranger (in some versions of the story revealed to be the Devil).

Unfortunately she’s done so at precisely the wrong time in the tide cycle - and the sea roars in.

The King leaps onto a horse, throws his daughter up behind him and gallops for safety - but then God intervenes, ordering the King to ‘throw off the demon on his back’. Promptly dumping his daughter into the floodwater (depicted above in a church window in Kerlaz), the King rides away to safety, as Ys disappears beneath the waves forever.

The word to focus on here is “dikes”. If that’s what some of these submerged walls are (particularly TAF1), with smaller structures perhaps being weirs designed to trap fish, then it’s striking that their double-monolith structure is similar to many pairs of standing stones along this coastline dated to much later periods.

This kind of continuity suggests a transmission of building knowledge across centuries and even millennia.

How?

Well - what better way than using a really thrilling, culturally resonant story?

“It is likely that the abandonment of a territory developed by a highly structured society has become deeply rooted in people's memories. The submersion caused by the rapid rise in sea level, followed by the abandonment of fishing structures, protective works, and habitation sites, must have left a lasting impression…

Thus, the discoveries of TAF allow us to question the origin of the history of the city of Ys, not from the historical legends and their numerous additions, but from scientific findings that may be at the origin of this legend.”

- Yves Fouquet, Jean-Michel Keroulle, Pierre Stéphan, Yvan Pailler, Philippe Bodénès, et al.. “Submerged Stone Structures in the Far West of Europe During the Mesolithic/Neolithic Transition (Sein Island, Brittany, France)”. International Journal of Nautical Archaeology.

Without the presence of written records, archaeology usually has to rely upon the incomplete material traces of what ancient people did.

To take that fragmentary physical evidence and build theories about what they were thinking, including what stories they told each other and why - that’s so much harder, often leading to a great deal of fascinating but wildly speculative theory (see: phenomenology).

There’s rarely a direct, uncomplicated explanation that won’t leave your brain in knots, or turn first-year undergraduate students into hardened cider drinkers.

But this? It’s obviously still a hypothesis, but what a stunningly elegant one, tying scientific evidence directly to mythology in a way that so rarely happens, while demonstrating the wisdom of dividing the study of archaeology into both the Arts and the Sciences, so they can cross paths under the same roof like this so spectacularly.

Blimey.

2. An Empire Two Planets Rounder Than Expected

This is the circulatory system of the Roman Empire: the colossal road network across Europe and North Africa that allowed information, goods and armies to move around at a speed that could keep everything running for centuries.

Only thing is: you’re currently seeing more roads than anyone’s ever known about, including Roman historians. If you could zoom in - which you can do here - you’d see all the minor routes, including highways between minor settlements, that previous studies have missed.

This map (which I spotted via ’s Curious About Everything) is the work of Itiner-e, a phenomenal integration of sources, including existing databases, satellite photographs and archaeological reports, into one big picture. And in doing so, it’s uncovered more than 60,000 miles (100,000+ km) of roads never recorded until now.

That’s the equivalent of a single route wrapped more than twice around the Earth!

But here’s an important caveat to all this from archaeologist and co-lead Tom Brughmans, via Scientific American:

“Brughmans cautions that only a few percent of this length is known with certainty, whereas almost 90 percent is “conjectured” based on good evidence. For example, in what is today Israel, a road that ran between the coast and a military camp appeared in Roman records. And about 7 percent of the more than 185,000 miles of roads [in total] is “hypothetical”—that is, it represents where roads are expected to have existed but where there isn’t good evidence of their exact locations.”

(A fun memory I have here: a senior archaeologist telling me on a dig that since we knew for certain where a feature started and where it ended, it was my job to “draw a line between them” on the plan, suggesting I could “maybe make it wiggle a bit to look good.” Scandalous, yes, but sometimes an educated guess is the only way to keep things moving forward.)

So, why is this important?

Well - it’s a further insight into what it took to run an ancient empire.

And as an exercise for your imagination, it’s like the world of Anno 117 has come to life. (I think will be a fan, based on this recent newsletter of hers.)

But also? As someone who can’t get the thousands of miles of the Great Pangean Mountain Trail out of his head - this is far longer, and therefore a much more intriguing challenge.

And it’s on roads! Far more walkable.

Is anyone out there willing to do a Paul Salopek and devote themselves to walking every single proposed Roman road on this map within their lifetime, like William B. Helmreich’s epic quest to walk the whole of New York but on a vastly greater scale? And could it be me, please?

(I know it can’t be, I’ve got too much to do, but - hey, can it?)

BONUS!

Remember when I wrote about the astonishing up-to-60,000-mile yearly migrations of the Arctic Tern, which they’ll do every year for the whole of their roughly 30-year lifespan?

In the October edition of Scientific American, Lauren N. Wilson and Daniel T. Ksepka unpack the results of their studies in the Arctic:

“To date, we have identified more than 50 three-dimensionally preserved bird bones, along with dozens of teeth from the site…

Together these fossils demonstrate that birds have been nesting in the Arctic for at least 73 million years, nearly half the time they have existed on Earth.”

But how many were migrating there, versus inhabiting the Arctic all year round? Wilson and Ksepka will continue to hunt for clues, possibly using isotopes in teeth or bones to infer the diets of animals and reconstruct their movements via a map of their food supplies.

Yet it’s certainly possible that birds like the Arctic tern have been migrating from one end of our planet to the other for tens of millions of years - somehow encoding the detailed knowledge of those journeys to pass along to their offspring (“a genetic mix-tape of the memories of their ancestors”, I suggested here), and charting a course through our skies for vastly longer than our own species has existed…

If we ever learn how to talk to birds, this is clearly where we need to start.

Images: Itiner-e; Moreau.henri; HAL open science.

Subscribe now

Someone who can definitely help you do the latter is the bloke at the end of this table:

That’s , who is heading a writing and trail running course (that’s one course where you get to do both things) this June, from the 7th to the 12th, in Montana.

Brendan is such a terrific writer, so if you’re wanting to learn from the best and enjoy the many benefits of getting a bit of an outdoorsy sweat on, go grab your place before they’re gone.

In Brendan’s words:

“…we have a $300 Early Registration discount if you sign up by midnight MST on Saturday January 17 (that’s today). If you like the sound of six days of mellow trail running, talking about writing and creativity with a group of fun people, and hanging out in the mountains of Montana, here’s the link for more info.”

On the other side of the Atlantic…

It’s an early morning in 2016, and 29-year-old animator Stef Roberts is swinging from a tree.

Well, two trees, actually: a single sturdy oak (which was easy to fling his ridgeline around when he set up his hammock) and a hazel (trickier, being an upward-explosion of thin branches converging at ground level).

He’s been here all night, in a wood just outside Cambridge - but now it’s time to leave and head to work.

Throwing his legs over the side, he pulls his rucksack over from where it’s been hanging, changes from pyjamas to street clothes, unties the boots dangling an arm’s length away and drags them on…

His tarp remains rock-steady. If he’d tied it onto the same ridgeline as his hammock, all this movement would have sagged and crumpled the tarp down onto his head - but when Stef assembled his “bedroom” the night before, he used a separate rope for each. Of course he did. It’s been over 2 years since he started sleeping in the woods. It’s become second nature.

The fire he (expertly) lit the night before is still warm, so he leaves it for last. The ridgelines are quick-release, so it’s only a five-minute job to stuff everything into his rucksack. Then it’s back to the fire: he scatters the cooling ashes in a widening circle with the toe of his boot, kicking cool earth over them to make sure they’re fully out, then hiding the scar with a scatter of twigs.

A final tidy-up, and he looks back:

“Alright - I think I feel pretty pleased about that…I’m confident that if someone was to walk through here five minutes from now, they wouldn’t really know someone had been here.”

This is “Leave No Trace”, the unofficial mantra of the wild-camper (as outlined by Alpkit here).

It’d also help him plead his case if he was caught - because what Stef is doing is technically illegal, even though thousands of English wild campers do it every year.

(Only in one place in England, where less than 1% of the population own more than 50% of the land, is it legal to wild-camp - on Dartmoor, a national park in southwest England. In recent years, landowners Alexander and Diana Darwall tried to have this overturned. The British Supreme Court heard their case - and then unanimously rejected it in the middle of last year, opening the door to similar challenges to landowners in the future.)

As Stef walks to where he parked his 2002 Subaru Forester, he chats away to the camera on the end of his selfie-stick:

“One of the things I love doing is just wandering through the forest, especially when I’m going back to the car in the morning. I love naming all the trees…this is a Hazel, which is Corylus avellana….over here, my favourite tree, Common Beech, which is Fagus sylvatica…”

He goes on to identify and scientifically name eleven other species of tree.

This is important to him for two reasons. Every night he tries to pick a different place to sleep, and since he’s never been to this particular wood before, knowing these tree types makes him feel at home (in an expansive, geographically diffused way that us house-dwellers might find a bit confusing).

It also reminds him of how reductive our nature labels can be:

“So now one thing - ‘tree’ - is now a million things.”

This is where I had to hit pause on Stef’s YouTube video on the whole experience.

I’ve slept in more than a dozen woods over the last decade (and under the odd bridge), part-inspired by the example set by journalist Erin Berger here.

Has it made me an expert on trees, right down to their fancy Latin names?

It has not, dammit.

Is this just a quantity, frequency thing? By my calculation, Stef has slept outside maybe 500 times now (probably more, beyond these two years of solidly dedicating himself to it), so at some point, did his curiosity cross a tipping-point and he started absorbing all this stuff without really trying? Is that my problem - I just haven’t slept outdoors enough yet?

That feels as daft as calling trees “trees”. Curiosity isn’t that passive. Stef wants to learn about trees, and no doubt the time he’s spent unconscious in the middle of them has helped, but it’s still a decision on his part - and unfortunately, on mine too.

For a multitude of reasons (for example, “sleepless exhaustion due to freaking out at every tiny sound I hear in the pitch darkness for hours on end”), I just didn’t make the effort like Stef did. More fool me.

(However, I can choose to do so in the future! Challenge accepted.)

In Kim Stanley Robinson’s Fifty Degrees Below, biomathematician Frank Vanderwal decides to start sleeping outdoors.

There are good practical reasons for this (or at least they feel good enough to him). He’s in Washington D.C., which has just suffered catastrophic storm flooding due to dramatically accelerating climate change. Rental prices have skyrocketed as a result, and after coming to the end of a homestay for a returning friend, he can’t find anywhere new to live. Hunting for affordable apartments is exhausting and demoralising. The whole thing is becoming so tiresome. Surely there must be an alternative?

Frank decides it’s time for a new experiment in living outdoors - not to roll back the clock to a fully palaeolithic lifestyle, but to use modern materials (like his mountaineering gear) to make his nights bearable.

Bedtime arrangements? He tries sleeping in his parked car, which proves to be awful (too uncomfortable, too visible, too transgressive in that way that attracts questions or challenges). Then he swaps his car for a van, and shoves a single mattress in the back of it. Much better. And wow - he could now sleep anywhere that has a road. The whole city is his bedroom!

What about staying clean? Simple - he joins a gym to use the showers.

Clothes? Launderette. Piece of cake.

Food? Oh, luxury! Now he can park near any restaurant, supermarket or street-food vendor he chooses.

His day-job is working at the National Science Foundation (a real-world government department currently doing terrific work under an administration that’s partly trying to gut it), trying to halt or even reverse the global effects of rapid climate collapse - and in his spare time, he joins the Feral Observation Group, tracking the animals of the local zoo that were freed during the storm.

Eventually, he’ll find he’s spending so much time in and around Rock Creek Park that he decides to build a treehouse for himself in it, and…

Well, that’s as far as I’ve got in my read-through of the novel. I know [spoilers!] that later in the book a deep freeze is coming - hence its title - and I know it will drive Frank indoors once more.

But the parallels here with what Stef Roberts did in 2016 are fascinating.

Like Frank, Stef spent his days mostly inside, self-employedly working out of cafés in and around Bristol.

He used a launderette to…well, launder things.

Like Frank, he chose good-quality modern equipment to use for his nights out under the forest canopy (and used his car as a mobile storage locker, as well as his main mode of transport).

He kept himself clean in all sorts of ways, including swimming in lakes - and he brought food to his campsite to cook on the fire, never anything complicated: a boiled carrot and roasted courgette chopped into a pan of cooked rice, or a precooked salmon fillet scattered over pasta. Just the tasty, tasty basics.

So - do you see Stef as a pioneering modern adventurer, or a pointlessly reckless young fool?

(No offence intended, Stef.)

I’m hardly on the fence on this topic. I love sleeping outdoors, even though I’m not terribly good at it. (I am unfortunately still this idiot.)

But I can easily imagine the arguments against wild camping being dominated by the tyranny of usefulness - questions like “but but but what’s the point when you can be warm and dry and so much safer indoors?” or just “for god’s sake, why? Is the state of the world right now not enough for your nervous system?”

In its defence - well, it’s good for you to be outdoors so much! Or it feels like it is. Or it feels like it might be, which is something approaching a decent reason to give it a go, if you’re feeling careful/brave/stupid enough - as long as you don’t forget these are feelings you’re having, rather than facts.

In this way, wild camping edges dangerously close to the category of a “nature cure” - which, in the wrong hands, can become as commercially exploitable as any other predatory fad built upon the fumes of dodgy science.

Even if our intentions are well-meant, we risk turning the Great Outdoors into just another natural resource for us to strip-mine, as Polly Atkin explains here:

“The nature cure is only another iteration of the ways in which we exploit our environment for human gain, in which we seek to mine the hills and dredge the seas for the green gold of well-being. If we go to nature expecting it to heal us, we are not going to it for its own sake.”

(Hat-tip to Kizzia for making me aware of her work!)

There’s also the moral ick of it. There you are, super-privileged to be doing a thing for kicks that far too many people in the world are doing because they have to. It can feel insensitive - but maybe not feeling that internal conflict while you do it is the greater danger to our humanity?

(Also - let’s hear it for solar-blanket-inventing teenagers!)

But it’s also a fun thing to do, and I’m a big fan of how utterly useless that fun can be, especially as an antidote to the seriousness of professional wellmongers.

Okay, I know hanging from a tree or huddling in a sack in the dark may not sound especially joyous - perhaps because for many people it absolutely isn’t, being that particular flavour of fun that’s demanding, uncomfortable and alarmingly horrible at the time. Type 2 fun is like whisky: you need to return to it later, preferably after a few decades, for all that flavour to have come out.

(But it can be great fun, under the right circumstances and with the right precautions taken and attitude donned like emotional armour, etc. etc. disclaimers in abundance. Honest, guv.)

This season of Everything Is Amazing, I’m looking at all this with as much scepticism as my outdoors-besotted bias will allow (as I previously explained here).

I know that all this “nature cure” stuff is a bit out of control - but I’ve read The Nature Fix by Florence Williams, which tackles the subject with commendable scientific rigour, so I know there’s certainly something in it.

I know in this era of long waits for doctor’s appointments and nightmarish health insurance costs, it’s enormously exciting to consider there’s a free - or near-as-dammit free - method of improving our health. A way that’s fun! But isn’t that also selfish and short-sightedly extractive? A justification for another kind of land grab for our own benefit, instead of an acknowledgement of our responsibility as stewards of the world we live in?

And hey, in ’s words - doesn’t the fox own herself?

I know that there’s little that can lift our spirits like a walk outside on a sunny day when you can basically see forever (there’s something about refocusing your eyes on the very-far-away after too much squinting at screens that can be so relaxing, and not just for your eyes).

But I also know the very end of the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica, where they all decided to “abandon all their technology” and reboot civilization with a “clean slate” was…oh come on now. Please. Guys.

(I would not have asked Stef Roberts to abandon his rainproof tarp and thermal sleeping bag liner in the dead of the British winter, any more than the fictional Frank Vanderwal should have frozen to death in his treehouse.)

If hard-line digital Waldenponding disconnects us in the wrong ways as well as the right ones, isn’t it safe to assume the real, downed-modern-tools version will tend to be fraught with similar issues?

(And is Walden really the right standard for us to aspire towards? Kathryn’s Schulz’s yikes-inducing 2015 essay in the New Yorker suggests otherwise [archive link] - with a lively rebuttal in The Atlantic by Jedediah Britton-Purdy here [archive link].)

There’s a lot here! Some of it may even be life-changi….oh dear, look at that, it’s so easy to fall into this stuff. Let’s just say it should be interesting, and if any benefit to your health results of trying anything out for yourself, that’s entirely your win and not mine.

(“The same applies in the other direction.” - Mike’s lawyer.)

On the 13th September 2018, Stef Roberts announced on Instagram that after 4 years, 4 months and 13 days, his forest-dwelling life was coming to an end.

It wouldn’t happen immediately. He’d still spend a few nights out here and there, during a transition period where he’d gradually move his nights back indoors.

But he knew a lot had to change:

“…she sees me and knows all my quirks, yet she’s still somehow up for taking me on. It will be my utter privilege to spend the rest of my life with her and for her... that’s a long-winded way of saying we’re engaged! Wahoo!”

The outdoors is great and all, but maybe there are more important things in life.

Images: Brendan Leonard; Marcus Byrne; Mark Timberlake; Ethan Dow; Stef Roberts.

Staying with last edition’s consideration of the terrible but oddly comforting vastness of geological time, behold this brain-melter of a thing:

It’s a composite of images from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, which is spending the next 10 years scanning the night sky to reveal it in the most incredible detail.

Take the very first image, which the following pictures dizzyingly zoom out from.

First, you can see stars in what I’m laughingly going to refer to as the “foreground” (they’re still quadrillions of miles away). These are some of the brightest objects within the Milky Way galaxy we’re part of, with the furthest being around 27,000 light years distant.

Behind them is the 50-60 million light year distance to the Virgo Cluster of around 1,300 galaxies, some of which you can see as much larger spirals, with three of them merging together like creamer in a coffee cup in the upper right…

And behind all those, in ginormously deeper space, you can see galaxies so far away that some may not even exist anymore because of the colossal amount of time that their light - this light, the light we’re seeing in these images here - has taken to reach us.

Yet - all that is just a tiny, tiny part of our night sky. You could cover it with your thumb at arm’s length. As part of the total, it’s basically nothing.

Ye gawds. There’s just so much out there.

If your mind can take it, you can find more images like that at Scientific American’s Best Space Photos of 2025.

At the end of this month, it’ll be five years since I started Everything Is Amazing, so it feels like a good time to shake things up a bit.

In a few days, our next season begins - here’s what we’re mainly looking at, and also this.

But I also wanted to share a few updates on the bigger projects I’m working on behind the scenes - starting with a book idea I first had while sleeping in a ditch after a long day hugging ancient stones, which is both true AND exactly the kind of origin story I want for all my work going forward.

Let's dive in.

Read more

Subscribe now

I’m sending this newsletter out just after 10pm.

According to Carl Sagan’s famous cosmic calendar (first outlined in his 1977 book The Dragons Of Eden): if you think of the entire history of the universe represented by the year that’s almost passed, it's only at 10.30pm on New Year’s Eve that human beings first arrive on the scene.

That’s in fifteen minutes, so we don’t even exist yet. What a very odd thought.

(It’s even odder if you define “human” as “a member of the subspecies Homo Sapiens Sapiens” because then we only pop up at 11.58pm - barely enough time to fling off our coats and grab a glass of warm Prosecco.)

I have no idea how all this makes you feel. Giddy? Horrified? Riddled with existential vertigo?

Perhaps you’re in awe of just how long we’ve been around!

This haunts me. Everything but the most recent sliver of human history (just a half-dozen millennia out of hundreds) is an ongoing mystery. All those people, more or less just like us, living their lives! Blimey. Who were they, beyond the fragmentary traces they’ve left for us? What were they thinking? It’s impossible to say (but enormous fun to speculate about - just ask any archaeologist).

Perhaps you need a drink now. Well, I guess this is a good night for it?

What I mostly feel is three things:

• Mortification, because when I excitedly posted this on my social media accounts earlier today, I incorrectly wrote “think of the entire history of the Earth represented by the year that’s almost passed” - and I didn’t spot this error for at least 20 minutes. Egg meets face. I mean, I have actual scientists following me on there. This is not the way I wanted to start 2026.

• A second bout of awe, when I realised the Earth only makes its appearance around 70% of the way through that list, seven-tenths of this epic Story So Far already being over - and even if I adjusted this Cosmic Calendar into a version solely featuring the Earth, we’d still only be making our first appearance after 11.30pm tonight.

• Oddly comforted.

I know the last of these isn’t the standard reaction. It’s certainly not what 18th-century Scottish geologist James Hutton encountered when he laid out his revolutionary argument for an immensely older Earth than was currently believed. When he said of our world that “we find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end,” he knew how uncomfortable an idea it could be. To contemplate time and space on such a scale tests your sanity.

But I reckon human beings need two things to spiritually ground themselves: they need to feel special, and they need to feel part of something greater.

If you’re searching for a bit more of the latter at this time of year, I reckon you can’t go wrong by humbling yourself in front of Deep Time, just to see what it does to various parts of you.

(Especially your knees.)

I like this feeling: to put on a warm coat and hat and gloves, and go for a walk somewhere cold & quiet, feeling the vastness of everything around me and then imagining all of it stretching backwards in time, far beyond my shrinking-to-nothing lifespan, so far that I completely vanish. I’m suddenly an event so fleeting that even a single frame in a movie hasn’t the slightest chance of capturing it.

Here I am, feeling and experiencing plenty, and yet compared with how much more there is, and how much more there has ever been and will ever be…?

Brrr.

Contemplating deep time can do this to everything and everyone.

It also does it to everywhere. As I wrote here, more or less everywhere on the surface of our planet has been more or less everywhere - and it only looks this solid and reassuringly unchanging because we live so damn quickly.

Zoom out far enough (which on the wider scale of deep time can still be absolutely nowhere) and we flicker and vanish.

But despite all that, we do seem to be here - and what a thing that is.

In a 46.5 billion light-year observable universe that itself is only part of something that may even be infinitely (!) greater, in this fraction of an inkling of a moment that will barely have happened in the long run, here we all are together, with this ability to look out, and look back, and cast our imaginations in all sorts of directions - until maybe we can start to see just the tiniest part of what’s really going on around us, as we hunt for a whisper of a hint how it all fits together…

Yeah. I’m definitely up for another twelve months of that.

Happy new year, everyone - and here’s to another year of being part of this amazing story.

- Mike

Image: Genevieve Dallaire.

Subscribe now

Three and a half decades ago, I invented the perfect idiot.

This was pre-internet times, at least in the part of Yorkshire I grew up in, and since I had recently decided to try becoming a professional writer, my options seemed limited.

My best bet? Submitting something to the BBC Radio 4 Afternoon Play - a daily slot with an absolutely ravenous appetite for new fiction, offering hundreds or sometimes even thousands (!!!) of pounds for a really good story - and when they accepted my manuscript and I was officially Discovered by all the big talent agencies, I could sit back and watch the money roll in.

Did I actually have a really good story?

Not in the least. That would have required effort, which I tended to avoid, and writing skill, which I wasn’t yet aware I lacked.

But hey, I had the next-best thing: I had a great character. Story is just character in action, right? Well then. Job mostly done! And wasn’t my character completely brilliant?

Admittedly, it was heavily inspired by a few others. (“Stolen” might be a more legally-precise word.) I’d recently read W.E. Bowman’s magnificent mountaineering satire The Ascent Of Rum Doodle, and become greatly enamoured of its hapless protagonist, Binder - and then I discovered Terry Pratchett’s Corporal Carrot in all his heroic simplicity (which is not saying he’s stupid, as I previously explained here).

My character - let’s call him M. - was incapable of thinking the worst of strangers. This illustration of Hanlon’s Razor would be utterly wasted on him, because it would never even occur to him that other people might act out of meanness, cruelty and petty spite. I mean, why would they? That would be awful!

In his blissful innocence, M. would enthusiastically blunder through the world, approaching each challenge with near-perfect innocence and getting taken to the absolute cleaners by every feckless scoundrel he met along the way. It’d be something of a black comedy, in that gently bleak way we Brits enjoy in our storytelling. Nothing would go terribly well for him, but he’d zealously persist in assuming the best intentions in other people. He’d be someone you could admire, yes, but only from a safe distance, outside the disaster-zone created by his chaotic passage through life.

What I hadn’t yet realised is that when you fall in love with a fictional character that deeply, it’s probably your subconscious yelling something important back at you.

Fact is - I’m M. The real me is a knee-jerk optimist who tends to assume nearly everything and everyone is more or less lovely and we’re (almost) all just doing our best to muddle through without making too much of a hash of everything.

(For those reasons I should probably never be put in any sort of position of responsibility - but here we are, nearly five years into this newsletter, and I’m only going to double down on everything I’ve been doing. I reckon it’s your fault for encouraging me so much. Too late now.)

Now it’s 35 years later since I created that unwittingly fictionalised version of myself, and while I’m a different kind of writer these days, I’ve remained that same kind of idiot.

Am I really the right person for this particular job?

Subscribe now

Right now I’m back in the Yorkshire town I grew up in, visiting relatives for Christmas, and it’s giving me plenty of time to think about all this. Is semi-fanatical cheerfulness really a good trait for writing a science newsletter? Is enthusiasm a genuinely trustworthy guide, or will it just send you careening head-first into all sorts of disasters more world-weary & less credulous people would better be able to avoid?

Perhaps!

At the very least, it’s certainly a recipe for being massively wrong at least some of the time.

(But then, whispers the chronic optimist in me, so is pessimism - and since our attitudes also tend to influence our actions in ways we’re barely aware of, nudging them into mildly self-fulfilling prophecies, I know which one I’d rather invest my long-term emotional wellbeing in.)

In a wider sense, the stakes feel higher for 2026. Cynicism remains as fashionable as it’s always been (both the doomism kind and the weaponised, gaslight-y varieties) - and the internet is increasingly defined by how angry and disillusioned its users are feeling, both about various online platforms and the state of the world in general.

Meanwhile, science is under assault in the United States as its most impactful institutions are systematically dismantled - while everyone’s getting caught out by nonsensical slop pumped out by generative AI, making it harder to know who & what you can trust. The situation is better here in Europe and Canada and elsewhere in the world, but given America’s overwhelming influence upon the shape of the internet that connects us all, there’s a lot to push back against, and a lot to debunk.

But I think this is important too:

That’s a thing I can’t seem to get out of my head: when you rage about how stupid a thing is, you also help it reach even more people. It’s not a clean, neutral process.

Debunking nonsense is a vital part of what’s always needed - but it also comes with polluting side-effects that need offsetting. We still need reminding of all the things that can make this world feel like a joyful adventure, even while we’re learning how to rid it of the worst of its upsetting, hope-eroding garbage.

For this reason, and however self-serving it may be to say it: nearly half a decade into Everything Is Amazing, I still think there’s a lot of value in taking the role of a world-enthralled Binder or Carrot - especially if you’re willing to broadcast your mistakes so others can have a good laugh at them (and not just for entertainment purposes).

To return to an xkcd cartoon I’ve posted more than a few times in the nearly 5-year history of this newsletter…

Fun fact: I thought I was the narrator. The one on the right, confidently announcing “come on, we’re going to the grocery store.”

But now I think I’m more like the one on the left - the clueless soul that some folk would roll their eyes at for not grasping some of the most basic aspects of modern life, but who is having great fun having his mind blown again and again as he first discovers them, which he does by assuming there’s almost always something amazing - AMAZING! - to learn about everything and everyone.

Which there is! Fight me, if you must. [assumes Queensbury rules stance]

In 2026, that’s something I intend to lean even harder into.

(And not just because I’m starting writing a book about the power of child-like enthusiasm. More on that soon.)

I’ll be back in a few days with something fun for Witching Week. But for now, here are a few things that recently grabbed my attention.

Passing through Glasgow Central train station a few days ago, my partner and I spotted this ridiculousness on top of a post box.

When I put a photo of it onto social media, replies poured in from across the UK: “YES! We have them here too!”

It’s called yarn bombing, and it seems to have started in the U.S. a few decades ago as an attempt to brighten up gloomy urban spaces, in much the same way as guerrilla gardening or the best kinds of street art.

(Another name for yarn bombing is kniffiti. So great.)

On living structures, it’s probably a bad idea: constricting growth, tangling up the wildlife, making a mess as the weather makes it fray to pieces. But for bringing a bit of colour back to our most severely monochrome urban spaces, they’re a welcome sight - so I hope knitters across the UK find a way to “hack” the new style of post boxes currently being rolled out, with solar panels blocking where the knitted caps would formerly go. I bet they’ll be up to the challenge.

And staying with Glasgow…

A thing I’ve wondered for a while: why aren’t sleeping bags solar-powered? It seems like such a no-brainer for winter hikers: mop up the sun’s energy during the day, plug a battery into your electric-blanketed sleeping bag, spend the night toasty-warm even in the iciest conditions…

It turns out this is an idea even a 12 year old could come up with - because this one just did, winning a number of awards in the process.

Glasgow electrical engineering firm Thales has now made 30 prototypes and given them out to 6 homeless charities across the city, and it’s currently working on producing another 120 more. It’s a lovely thing to see, because Glasgow has its fair share of rough sleepers and in the winter its streets can be absolutely bitter

Meanwhile, Loughborough alumni Sri Hollema won an award this year for her business Mat Zero, which makes solar-powered sleeping mats - so there’s plenty happening for the benefit of outdoorsy hobbyists like me as well. How absolutely grand.

And speaking of warm glows:

Before this month, the first conclusive signs of human beings creating fire with stone handaxes were from around 50,000 years ago, from archaeological sites in France.

Then this report from a palaeolithic site in the east of England was published in Nature on the 10th December - and that date leap backwards an absolutely staggering 350,000 years.

Putting that into context, that’s longer than we’ve existed as a distinct species (Homo sapiens). The primates wielding fire in this discovery were early members of the now-extinct species Homo neanderthalensis - our direct ancestors only via interbreeding.

To be clear, this certainly isn’t the first evidence that suggests the intentional use of fire by humans - there’s evidence of controlled burning that goes back at least a million years - but this is the first evidence that clearly points to fire-making, using specific tools, which, in the words of Prof Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum, “made [early humans] more adaptable, enlarged the range of environments they could survive in, and helped catalyse the evolution of social complexity, brain growth and probably even language itself."

The multimedia BBC article on it is an absolute treat, so please do check it out.

Finally: a planet shaped like a what?

Having spent my entire adult life assuming the world “planet” always means “spherical” (my insincere apologies to Flat Earthers), it’s a touch discombobulating to realise other planet shapes can exist - as with the exoplanet PSR J2322-2650b, which seems to have one pointed end, like an egg.

The reason is its proximity to a pulsar - a dense, highly magnetised spinning corpse of a former star. With just one million miles between exoplanet and pulsar, the gravity of the latter is tugging the former into its bizarre shape, somehow all without ripping it to shreds:

Even more surprisingly, its atmosphere seems to be filled with molecular carbon, binding mostly to itself instead of forming other carbon-containing compounds - and in the words of Margherita Bassi at Smithsonian, this suggests the presence of “floating soot clouds that can condense and turn into diamonds”. How this can even happen is currently a mystery.

In short: the more astronomers look at the wider universe, the weirder things seem to get.

If you’re looking for the right metaphor to take you into 2026, I reckon that one’s a winner.

Images: GiveMeASign; Kreisson Lisungi; NASA, ESA, CSA, Ralf Crawford (STScI).

Hello! This is Everything Is Amazing, a newsletter about science, curiosity, mind-blown wonder, and the timeless power of using stock photos of cats to lazily manipulate people’s emotions.

Subscribe now

This particular newsletter - a continuation of this series - is going to be unusually ridiculous (and not just because I’m narrating it: see audio, above). Not at all what I originally intended.

I mean - you know how it usually works by now, right? Some well-meaning plonker - that would be me - sets himself the task of investigating the latest science into a thing in the hope of discovering something quietly astonishingly, the kind of thing that has you mumbling “wow!” when you read it in a news headline on the way to work. All delivered with a level of amiable knowing amateurism, but backed up with links to people in science doing the actual work here.

That’s been my hope, in looking into the reasons why I can’t get a good night’s sleep these days, and what I can do about it. I’d stumble over some weird new thing that actually seems to work according to a number of credibly sceptical studies, and then I try it upon myself, and it works, and I get to write about it in my own excitable way.

This time I’d even hoped for a bit more, actually. Maybe I could even invent something - you know, that thing I never get to do, because I’m not a scientist and don’t have my own lab or team, and, well, I don’t know anything.

But what if I could do it this time? Not something unsafe of course, just something tap-dancing on that fine line between clever and stupid.

Say: take a 300 microgram pill of melatonin, shove it inside a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup (those things always make me sleepy), add a sprinkle of creatine and a couple of drops of Head & Shoulders anti-dandruff shampoo, and then knock the whole thing back with a mug of malted Horlicks.

Result: you get the best night’s sleep of your life, and then you tell everyone about Sowden’s Miracle Insomnia Cure™, and then I can finally occupy that apparently extremely profitable place between popular broadcasting and selling poorly studied health supplements, like a modern day John R. Brinkley, who famously made a fortune by claiming to cure men of a number of ailments by implanting them with goat testicles. I wish I was making this up, but I’m not. Anyway, my point is: a man can dream.

But alas - no. You will notice that this particular post in the series is not paywalled.

That’s because what I have ‘discovered’ - I’ll explain those inverted commas in a second - cannot in any way be patented, intellectual-copyrighted or presented to you with the merest shred of ownership stamped over it.

This miracle cure I’ve alluded to in the title of this newsletter is not sleeping in the great outdoors. At least, not yet. I’m going to keep experimenting with that one because I haven’t yet had a comfortable enough night out, thanks to various camping equipment insufficiencies/disasters which have now all been fixed. Hopefully the next night out is the charm here.

I should also add that it’s the middle of the Scottish winter and we’ve just had the first proper winter storm blow through - Storm Bram - and if I can get an unusually good night’s sleep when it’s blowing a proper hoolie outside my tent, there must be something in it. And I love this kind of wild camping - completely unnecessary, only an idiot would try it at this time of year, where do I sign up, and so on.

I’ve also had some fascinating suggestions from friends and readers by email. I’m spoiling none of them yet, but I will say, thank you to David, John, Clarissa and Jane, and for the gentleman that confidently asserted that I should try ingesting baked beans and gunpowder, I’ll be assuming you’re not a professional chemist and I’ll giving that one a miss purely based on what my imagination tells me would happen next, no offence to you, sir.

So I’m still hoping for something weird and clever, something you wouldn’t normally try, except for a bet.

Instead, I suspect I’ve already found what will work best for ridding me of chronic insomnia, and it’s been staring me in the face for years.

A few months ago, I started going to the gym. Gyms are fascinatingly weird places filled with people very earnestly doing very odd-looking things. Here’s an example:

And week later, this happened:

But since standing around gawping at people in lycra is a sure-fire way to get yourself ejected from a gym, I’ve been using the machines as well.

This hasn’t been easy. What I’ve always been is a walker. I will happily walk all day, not necessarily very fast, but in a relentless or perhaps you could say wholly unimaginative way that usually eats through about 15 or 20 miles a week on average.

Walking is great - but it’s also a low-intensity form of exercise, unless you decide to push yourself, which I don’t because, why spoil a good semi-lazy meander? And pushing yourself too hard can be a distraction from your own thoughts or from the audiobook or podcast you’re listening to, which is another reason I love walking.

At the gym, I wobble my way through all sorts of gently tortuous movements while balancing large pieces of metal on the ends of various limbs. And it’s working! I feel stronger, I can walk further, my so-called brain seems much sharper.

Also? I’m sleeping better. Much better, some nights. And all of those nights correlate with going to the gym.

Dammit.

So - my insomnia is mostly because I’ve been lazy?

Ah, look how quickly this stuff turns to self-judgement. The same would apply if I tried to present it to you as wellness advice, which is absolutely not what I’m doing here. I am not going to yell “YOU SLEEPLESS PEOPLE ARE JUST BONE-IDLE” and try to sell you a gym membership, just use the code “THEIDIOTSENTME” to get 25% off your first month.

No. The most I could say is that if you’re struggling with insomnia, if it’s possible you could try a bit more physical exercise of whatever kind is most practical to you, with no guarantee that will help in your case.

But of course everyone knows this. Deeper sleep is one of the best-known benefits of getting more active, so maybe I’m a fool for assuming I needed something else, and it was probably my reluctance to try going to the gym - ugh, all that effort - that got in the way of me trying it out.

But this is a science newsletter, not a vibes, regret and self-disgust newsletter, so what does the science say?

As luck would have it, the BMJ (the British Medical Journal) recently published a systematic review of the findings from 22 studies involving over 1,300 adults with sleep disorders, looking at the role of 13 different interventions, 7 of which were exercise-based. Their conclusion:

“Exercise is an effective treatment for improving sleep in patients with insomnia.”

Hooray! But what is surprising is that gentler exercises seem to work better, with yoga the best of all - it increased people’s sleep time by almost two hours on average, compared to the control group. Nearly as effective were Tai Chi and walking or sedate jogging.

Here’s what Grace Wade at New Scientist has to say about this:

“What is it about gentler workouts that makes them so good for catching z’s? It may have to do with the emphasis on controlled breathing and body awareness. Research shows that mindfulness-based workouts, such as yoga and tai chi, decrease activity in the sympathetic nervous system, which governs our body’s fight-or-flight response. As a result, blood pressure and heart rate drop and levels of the stress hormone cortisol decline. This, in turn, alleviates the depressive and anxiety symptoms that so often hinder sleep.”

This might be unwelcome news to the kind of gym-goer that, say, enjoys publicly showing off their muscles in pointless displays of strength, as was the fairly ludicrous sight this week at Washington D.C.’s Reagan International Airport. Perhaps US Secretary Of Health Robert F. Kennedy Jnr. would be better swapping out his manly pull ups for a few Sun Salutations and a Downward-Facing Dog, but I can’t really see him trying that for the cameras.

But look - what the study suggests is that any exercise is usually good for improving your sleep!

Upping your physical activity is usually a good bet - except maybe at airports, which for most folk are some of the strangest-feeling and most grindingly stressful spaces in modern social life and what you really want is for everything to work perfectly first time so your already jittery nervous system doesn’t explode & you can leave said airport as quickly as possible. That’s probably what needs investing in, rather than ellipticals and battle ropes. Be kind, guys.

Anyway. In my case, I’m now getting more exercise than ever before. My former gym was a ten minute walk away, and it just closed for refurbishment that will take at least a year, so I’ve had to switch to its sister gym which is all the way across town, a 45 minute walk each way.

This is a further improvement to my gym routine - I’m getting that all-important low-intensity part of my workout, I’ve got an extra 90 minutes a day I can spend listening to stuff on top of that time at the gym, and I’m sure the result is I’ll be sleeping better than ever before.

But there’s some part of me that wishes this wasn’t so obvious. Maybe this is a problem with the way we think about this life-improvement stuff: it only grabs our attention if it’s outlandish-looking enough - for example, goat testicles - while what actually works seems so ‘boring’ that we hardly ever begin with it. (This seems to me like a huge problem, and I’m glad so many smart people are starting to write about it right now.)

Why are we like this? What can be done?

No idea - but I know the perfect place to think about it.

Images: Samuel Girven; William Navarro; Kate Stone Matheson.

(There, I said it. Only time will tell if this ruins me or not.)

Subscribe now

Before we start - a quick update on a previous story.

Earlier this year I wrote about the ‘blobs of nightmarishly gargantuan proportions’ thousands of kilometres under the surface of Earth that seem to be feeding the tree-like mantle plumes responsible for some of the world’s volcanic hot-spots.

It’s been proposed, somewhat speculatively so far, that they’re remnants of Theia, a Mars-sized protoplanet slamming into the Earth some 4.5 billion years ago on our planet’s undisputed Worst Day Ever, and ejecting enough debris into orbit that it glommed together into what we know as the Moon.

This week, a fascinating update: a new study from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research looking for the fingerprints of Theia in iron isotopes from lunar & Earth samples and meteorites has concluded it must have formed in the inner Solar System - but maybe just a bit closer to the Sun than us.

(Just how much of a neighbour it was is currently unknown, and maybe even impossible to determine.).

Regarding the mind-boggling drama of a proposed Earth-Theia impact, imagine a lava lamp the size of a planet:

Thank heavens that 4.5 billion years is a surprisingly long time (as I tried to explain here).

On a very different scale, I was tickled by this tragic reminder that it’s not easy being a writer these days:

Still, on we go!

In a few days, an update on my quest for a good night’s sleep. But for today’s focus of my invalid occupation, I’m making a start on a sequel to this newsletter from late 2022…

…about how the ancient world was a lot more colourful that most folk would believe.

The implication that accompanies that argument: hey, so that means the modern world has less & less colour in it, right?

Some people think this is becoming something to worry about:

Sweeping statements like this always make me curious - and by curious, I mean enormously suspicious.

To me, they usually sound like two things:

• they’re big on vibes and emotion while being low on terribly convincing data (which, to be fair, is a charge that could be levelled at my own Trojan In Yoga Pants article)…

• they’re only a short walk from suggesting “here’s yet more evidence that modern life is rubbish, new things are objectively awful, taste is dead and young people are so dumb.” The kind of pronouncements you hear from that guy in a bar you start edging away from, when he proves himself to be a super-opinionated blowhard.

What I want to know is: what’s the measurable data for this stuff?

Or, since this is a cultural argument that’s incredibly difficult to measure (and arguably much easier to write fashionably opinionated think-pieces about), where’s a more nuanced view of all this that isn’t automatically assuming the future is becoming colourless? (Because hey, how much of this anecdotal evidence is being cherry-picked, unconsciously or otherwise, to bolster that trendy ‘Modern Life Is Rubbish’ viewpoint?)

A tiny example. It’s being suggested that cinema is turning towards a chilly monochromatic look - The Culturist explicitly says it here, using Ridley Scott’s Napoleon as a recent example.

But if we’re relying on case-by-case examples - I mean, we really shouldn’t, but if we were - here’s a still from a fascinating video that recently shared:

On the left, a still from this year’s Jurassic World Rebirth - and on the right, from The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997).

Which one of these looks more colourful to you? The difference seems stark to my eyes.

So maybe there’s a lot more to this question than an unstoppable worldwide march towards a washed-out future?

Let’s take a look!

Read more

Note: this piece is accompanied by a voiceover, read by the author. Click above to listen.

In the late 1990s, I decided my current method of pursuing a happy and successful life, which involved not putting much effort into anything except playing videogames and patiently waiting to win the National Lottery, wasn’t serving me terribly well - so I decided to go back to school.

What I really wanted was a place at university - but since I was in my late twenties at this point and my grades were profoundly limiting (top marks for English Language & Literature, a “C” for Geology and the rest a fruitless shambles), my best bet was retaking the exams I’d mostly fluffed in 1988, to make my way to the A-levels that would hopefully give me a shot at either York or Sheffield’s Archaeology undergraduate programme.

To do this: school. Not my former high school in my Yorkshire seaside home-town, which didn’t accept mature students - but a college in the nearby city of Hull.

This meant two things:

1. I, a vain and listless bespectacled young man of 27 years old, had to sit in classrooms with 16 and 17 year old, with both of us trying to pretend this felt even vaguely normal. The fact I acquired the nickname “Uncle Mike” should tell you something. But really, I think it was a lot weirder for them that it was for me - and I’m not saying there’s a firm connection here, but one of my fellow classmates later pretended he was King Arthur on American television, and that’s just one example that I know about. God knows how the rest of them are faring.

2. It meant I had to catch an incredibly early bus from the rural seaside town I live in. This meant getting up at 5 o’clock, which I was amazed to discover is a time not just in the afternoon, but also in the morning. I found this very confusing: why bother? Everyone is asleep. What’s the point in giving it a name?

In the end, I’d catch that bus at WTF-o’clock four times a week for nearly 3 years - and this is how I discovered my sleeping superpower, in an enormously unpleasant way.

One late November evening in 1998 before one of my college days, I forget to pull the only good pair of jeans I have out of the washing machine.

When I retrieve them just after Wow There’s Five In The Morning Too, I feel icy horror flood through me. They’re utterly sodden. The washing machine’s pipe has become clogged and it didn’t drain properly - and now all that trapped water has spent all night being re-absorbed by my jeans.

They’re so heavy I can barely lift them out the machine, and when I do so, each leg is a raging waterfall.

The only sane thing to do is wear other trousers. Obviously.

Only thing is, I don’t have any other trousers. Not really. I will be sitting in classrooms with Young Stylish People, and they WILL judge me harshly, and move me from the category of Cool & Weird into the unbearable hell of Extremely Uncool & Weird, if, say, I turned up wearing the moth-eaten corduroys I made a point of only going out at night in, or the flappy beige chinos I used for gardening chores because of the hideous discolouration in the crotch area (thanks for that, Weedol).

Alas, there is only one course of action available to me, and I’m not going to like it.

I desperately wring them out for a few minutes, my fingers going numb from the cold…

Then, with a series of sensations I hope never to have again, I drag the dripping and bitterly cold jeans on, peeling them up my legs and hoisting them far enough up that they reach my -

Alas. My memory has blanked this bit out. Probably for the best.

All I remember next is walking down the road in them, leaving twin trails of water on the path behind me.

A cold wind was blowing, it was 5.30am, and it was November. Any one of these could have broken me, but the combination felt like something beyond pure horror, something almost sublime in its awfulness.

I stood alone at the bus stop, in a widening pool of water.

When the bus finally arrived, I’d stopped dripping, a small mercy, but my legs had started to go numb.

Balanced atop my half-senseless anatomy, I gingerly squelched my way to the top deck of the bus, sat down with an audible splat - and almost immediately fell asleep.

This is my superpower, see. I can fall asleep on all forms of ground-based public transport. It’s not a terribly useful talent to have unless you do a lot of travelling, so maybe that’s why I became a travel writer for the best part of a decade. I’ve tested it everywhere I can think of, and it’s reliably a thing: trains, buses, trams, cable-cars, even a horse-drawn cart, I can conk out in a corner of all of them, and I’m always looking for other places to try. (I can’t sleep on planes - yet. One day, one day. I’m working on it)

But in this case, what I should have done was absolutely anything to keep my legs moving. Perhaps I could have generated a little heat to help with the process of drying my jeans out, or at least warming the gallon or so of water they were holding against my legs.

But - no. Superhero that I am, I bloody well fell asleep instead.

When I awoke around 45 minutes later, I discovered my legs and feet had gone. Oh, they were still there, I could see them, but when I poked at them? Nothing. I could sent motor-commands to them - like stand up, you wretched bastards, don’t let me down now - but it was like watching a film of my legs doing random things, with a weary ache from my knees emanating out of the middle of that vast, deadened fleshy nothingness.

But if I concentrated, I could move. And since I’d awoken when the bus stopped at the place I needed to get off, I had to move. I leapt to my feet, ready to depart - and my jeans shattered.

It wasn’t the material itself, of course. Marvellous stuff, denim, it’ll handle anything. All those gold-miners it kept alive. Terrific. But it doesn’t dry very quickly. If you go bad-weather hiking in standard jeans, you end up regretting it.

A lot of the washing-machine water soaking my jeans had now turned to ice. Great big sheets of ice, crusting my legs like invisible armour.

And when I stand up, it breaks. Great plates of ice splintering and falling off my legs, crashing onto the metal stairs as I pound my way down them in what I discover is a largely uncontrollable run - until I explode out the bus doors in much the same way Tom Cruise or Jean-Claude Van Damme wouldn’t, and sprawl face-first onto the tarmac, watched bemusedly by about 50 people, who also presumably noticed the faint outline of ice fragments I left behind me when I got up, shaped like my trousers.

The rest of the morning is a blur. I remember having my between-lessons coffee break outside, because it was windy, and I hoped that would help dry my jeans, which were now only dry in certain places, and the damp patches would be extremely difficult to explain.

But I remember this: the feeling in my legs started to return around an hour after lunch, when I was in a class - and it was so painful I had to pretend I was having a coughing fit, when in fact I was trying to not shriek in agony. You don’t forget something like that. I’ve tried. I’ve tried really hard. But, um - here we are.

I say all this not to appall you - although, that’s a fair reaction, I can’t fault your judgment there. But I’m aiming at the core question of this new series on getting a better night’s sleep: what are the conditions that make us able to sleep?

I was thinking this the other night in a tent on the beach here in Scotland. I was drifting off quite nicely, and then I noticed my back was getting unpleasantly cold, and that was because my inflatable mattress had punctured. I can tell you this: what I need for a good night’s sleep is not to be feeling the immensity of Scotland beaming its sub-zero temperatures right up my fundament. That does not make for a good night’s sleep.

But what about the psychological factors? What about our need to feel safe and secure, usually equating to having four walls around us or some equivalent? What are the privacy requirements for most of us, and why can I - an introvert - fall asleep in a public place where most folk would be on high alert?

Am I just…an idiot?

I mean it might be that, but for the sake of scientific curiosity, let’s assume it isn’t.

What are the most extreme places that people can fall asleep in - and is this a skill that anyone can learn?

That’s what we’ll be looking at next time.

This is part of a new between-seasons series on what science says about getting a good night’s sleep, as I introduced here.

This one is free, but the rest of the series is for paid supporters.

Want to read it when it’s published? Please sign up below:

Subscribe now

Image: Marc Pell

This iPhone photo taken by certainly qualifies!

Except, no - it’s true I have James to thank here, but this picture is actually the work of Peder Mørk Mønsted, who definitely didn’t use an iPhone because he died in 1941.

Mønsted, a Danish painter of just the most staggering realistic landscape paintings I think I’ve ever seen, er - well, just, just how on earth did his eyes see so perfectly how the light, how the light, ghaghrlnarrg {*incoherent gibbering}.

HE PAINTED OVER A HUNDRED OF THESE okay, keep it together, Mike. Deep breaths. Deeper. Good man.

Anyway. How on earth? is what I’m saying here. Just that. How - on - earth.

Secondly, as a nice companion to the great scone pronunciation map of the UK I wrote about a while back, author Tom Cox, whose newsletter (formerly on Substack, now on Ghost) is wonderful and indescribable in equal measure, shared this a few days ago:

So if you’ve ever wondered if Britain really is so British, I can confirm that yes it absolutely is, and we’re really not sure what can be done about it at this point. Thanks for asking.

Lastly, and staying with Impressively Unhinged, a while back I contacted :

ME: Oh hey Anna, any chance I could get you know like a ‘testimonial’ from you about my newsletter or something like that to help with my marketing?

ANNA: yeah sure I have just the thing

*email arrives*

ME: uh…that wasn’t exactly what I…right. Okay then.

Thanks, Anna.

*stares at the wall for a while*

Anyway!

In a few days I’ll be sharing the results of my first attempts to get a good night’s sleep in the Scottish outdoors, as promised here - but for today’s main topic, we’re returning to the subject matter of a previous season: the bathymetric wonders hidden by our oceans.

Ever since I wrote about the ancient Zanclean megaflood, I’ve assumed nothing like it exists in today’s world. I mean, of course it doesn’t - surely we’d all notice the decidedly non-trivial matter of hundred of millions of cubic metres of water thundering about the place?

Today’s piece is about how wrong I was - and it starts on top of the tallest building in the world.

Read more