Ideas

A Texan in England has 3 harsh truths for Americans eyeing the exit

You’ll miss home most in the cereal aisle.

Ashley Jackson had a plan. After twenty years in Texas, she packed up her family and moved to South Manchester for affordable healthcare, a walkable neighborhood, and proximity to her British husband's family. What she didn't have was a heads-up about everything else.

As Adam Albright-Hanna reports, Jackson has been filing dispatches from her adjustment period on TikTok, and her "3 harsh truths" video has struck a nerve. Two of them you might expect from any American landing in England. The third involves the cereal aisle, and it's somehow the one that hits hardest.

She's adapted in ways she didn't anticipate. The things she thought would be hardest weren't. The thing she thought was a loss turned out to be a gain. And nearly half of all Americans say they believe life is better somewhere else. Jackson is one of the ones who actually went to find out.

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Previous Results

Yesterday, we shared the buzz about the 5+ million bees that have moved into a cemetery.

Do GOOD readers know how many flaps of a wing it takes to keep a bee in the air each second? That’s about three times as many as a hummingbird, which clocks in at a relatively paltry 60 to 80.

• 50 (11.6%)

• 200 (34.7%) ✅

• 1,000 (35.4%)

• 3,000 (18.4%)

Science

Scientists are tired of honey bees getting blamed for something they didn't do

The real pollinator crisis has a different culprit entirely.

Apologies to those of you with melissophobia for this, our second bee story of the week! It's a subject that's got a lot of buzz at the moment. (ahem). The big story we've all been hearing about bees for years has been their decline, and, specifically, the finger-pointing at honey bees for crowding out their native cousins. It's a tidy villain story. And according to bee researchers Christina Grozinger, Andony Melathopoulos, and their colleagues, it's basically wrong.

Honey bees and native bees aren't really competing with each other at all. Where one thrives, the other tends to as well. The two groups are five times more likely to coexist peacefully than to crowd each other out. The honey bee, it seems, has been taking heat for a crime it didn't commit.

The real culprit? The land. Or more precisely, what we've done to it. Habitat loss, pesticide use, and rising temperatures are the actual drivers of pollinator decline, and they're hitting every species hard. Which means the fix isn't about managing which bees go where. It's about how we treat the places bees live.

The good news: there are some easy things you can do about that right now.

Environment

Molars keep a diary, and scientists just read one that's 4 million years old

What Lucy's teeth just told scientists about the world she was born into.

Teeth are tougher than you think. Long after bones break down and landscapes become unrecognizable, tooth enamel holds its shape and its secrets. Every bite an animal takes in its youth leaves a permanent chemical signature in the enamel, one that can survive for millions of years underground without changing.

Paleoanthropologist Zelalem Bedaso drills deep (ahem) into this toothsome story, taking us from fossil beds in Ethiopia's Afar region, the stretch of the East African Rift Valley commonly called the cradle of humanity, to a portrait of an ancient world that looks nothing like the barren landscape you'd find there today. Four million years ago, this place was alive with rivers, forests, wetlands, and grassy plains.

And the early human ancestors who lived there, including the famous "Lucy," weren't eating what scientists expected. What their teeth reveal about diet, survival, and some of the most pivotal leaps in human evolution is all in the story.

On April 21, 753 BC, a man named Romulus grabbed a plow, carved a line into a hill above the Tiber River, and declared that everything inside it was a city. Whether you take the origin story literally or not, you have to appreciate the confidence.

The details are wonderfully messy. Romulus had just killed his twin brother in an argument over where, exactly, to put the city. His founding population was largely composed of exiles, runaways, and wanted men, because he had declared the new settlement an official sanctuary for anyone on the run. Rome, essentially, started as a city of people who had nowhere else to go.

The city that those refugees built eventually produced the calendar you use, the roads under your feet, and about half the words in your mouth. Two thousand seven hundred and seventy-nine years later, Rome marks the occasion every April 21 as Natale di Roma, with gladiator reenactments, free museum days, and a parade that draws thousands of costumed participants from across Europe.

Today, that parade marches past the Colosseum, past the Forum, past the ruins of everything that came after that first furrow in the dirt.

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A boy from Alabama and his British father. Careful, the contrast is both jarring and adorable!

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