october 2004

After 30 minutes, the rat should have been dead. Sealed in a capsule-shaped chamber, the animal was breathing pure oxygen at a pressure high enough to cause a normal rat to have a seizure in five to 10 minutes. Dominic D’Agostino, a researcher at the University of South Florida, stood by, ready to flush the chamber with fresh air and rescue the creature at the first signs of a problem. But 30 minutes became 40 minutes, and still the rat appeared unbothered. At an hour, D’Agostino could only gaze at it on a video monitor with wonder. “The rat was just kind of staring back at us and grooming itself,” he says.

Shortly before placing the rat inside the chamber, D’Agostino had injected a new, one-of-a-kind molecule down the animal’s throat. Much of D’Agostino’s work is funded by the U.S. Department of Defense’s Office of Naval Research, and this experiment, which he conducted in mid-2011, was his first test of whether the new molecule could help a rat withstand an onslaught of oxygen. The hope was to one day do the same for Navy divers, who can experience devastating oxygen-toxicity seizures on deep dives.

In the pursuit of new knowledge, some scientists explore other worlds, discover new species, and develop cures for disease. Others film themselves being robbed by a colleague in a King Kong suit, to address a debate that’s been raging for more than 40 years.

Bedecked in ape cosplay, Satoshi Hirata from Kyoto University would grab a stone from his uncostumed colleague, Fumihiro Kano, and hide it under one of two boxes, all while Kano watched in mock indignation. Then, after Kano ducked behind a door, “Kong” would surreptitiously move the stolen stone to the second box. The duo filmed these shenanigans and then showed the videos to several chimpanzees, bonobos, and orangutans. They wanted to know how what the apes made of the scene. Specifically, when Kano returned and began looking for his stone, which box did the apes think he’d search first?

Remember these numbers. You’ll be asked about them at the end of the test: 70, 73, 76, and 78.

These are the ages of the leading candidates in the 2020 presidential election: Elizabeth Warren, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and Bernie Sanders, respectively. In most any other line of work, people in their eighth decade are usually retired. For most of human history—and still in most of the world today—people of this age were usually dead.

Last month, Jimmy Carter, the 95-year-old former U.S. president, said that the office requires a person “to be very flexible with [one’s] mind,” and that by age 80 he wouldn’t have felt able to do the job. He joined the growing ranks of those suggesting they would support an upper age limit for the office, either for purposes of breaking up the gerontocracy or to ensure a person has the physical and cognitive capacity. “You have to be able to go from one subject to another and concentrate on each one adequately and then put them together in a comprehensive way,” Carter said.

Democracy depends on the consent of the losers. For most of the 20th century, parties and candidates in the United States have competed in elections with the understanding that electoral defeats are neither permanent nor intolerable. The losers could accept the result, adjust their ideas and coalitions, and move on to fight in the next election. Ideas and policies would be contested, sometimes viciously, but however heated the rhetoric got, defeat was not generally equated with political annihilation. The stakes could feel high, but rarely existential. In recent years, however, beginning before the election of Donald Trump and accelerating since, that has changed.

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It is a strategy that President Donald Trump has deployed throughout his life, as instinctive and natural to him as the act of breathing: Villainize whoever is blocking his way.

Distasteful as Trump’s taunts might be, ridiculing adversaries has been the blunt-force instrument that propelled his political rise, with the president turning people into targets of scorn. As the impeachment fight enters its public phase, though, Trump faces a quandary. His go-to move may be inadequate in this moment for the very same reason the impeachment threat is so grave. There may be too many accusers who believe he shook down Ukraine, too many people who find fault with his behavior for the president to smack with a rhetorical mallet.