Technology

A twisty molecule and a strange fix for solar’s biggest flaw

Scientists say they can “bottle the sun” with a weird new liquid battery.

Solar has the unfortunate habit of providing power when we need it least. Fortunately, there are batteries. Less fortunately, they’re bulky, expensive, and not exactly ideal for long-term storage.

Now scientists at UC Santa Barbara say they may have found a strange workaround: a molecule that absorbs sunlight, shifts into a higher-energy form, and stores that energy until it can be released later as heat. As Mark Wales reports, it’s an early but fascinating attempt to solve one of clean energy’s biggest headaches without leaning so heavily on giant battery systems.

It is still firmly in the “promising science” phase, not the “coming soon to your neighborhood” phase. But the idea is intriguing enough to make you look twice, mostly because it sounds a little absurd and a little brilliant at the same time.

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Well-being

A Harvard love expert says the couples who last do one thing really well

Movies have it easy; they only have to make relationships work for a few hours.

Most of us study love in college in the messy, chaotic, highly unofficial sense. Arthur Brooks studied it for real, academically, with receipts. And what he found could change the way you think about marriage: the couples who go the distance are usually not the ones clinging to nonstop passion. They are the ones who are real friends.

That might sound a little less cinematic than soulmates and sparks flying in the rain, but it makes a lot of sense once real life enters the group chat. Kids grow up. Stress happens. Routines get repetitive. And at some point, as Elyssa Goodman reports, you need more than chemistry. You need someone you actually want to talk to when the house is quiet, and the to-do list is loud.

Brooks is not alone here. Relationship researcher John Gottman has argued something similar for years, and longtime couples seem to keep landing on the same advice: marry the person you love, sure, but also marry the person you like. A lot. Preferably someone whose entrance into the room still feels like a tiny win.

Yesterday’s Results

Yesterday, we shared four tips for breaking the habit of distracting yourself, perhaps the worst of which is modern scrolling apps.

How often do GOOD readers find themselves scrolling in a given day? Well more than half of you scroll a few times today and claim you can stop whenever you want. But… can you?

• I scroll constantly, I'm hooked, you gotta help me! (21.7%)

• A couple times a day. I can stop whenever I want to. (56.5%)

• I'll scroll socially, or for a special occasion. (8.7%)

• Never touch the stuff. It's the modern smoke break. (13.0%)

GOOD reader G. S. Blakey says the quiet part out loud for the majority: “A couple of times per day is about right, but it’s probably a stretch to say that I can stop whenever I want to.”

Science

Why your first love still lives rent-free in your brain

It might be for the best that the one that got away got away.

Have you ever revisited a favorite childhood candy only to recoil at the obscene sweetness, or rewatched a beloved childhood movie only to realize your treasured masterpiece was, in fact, kind of a mess? Keep that in mind if you ever feel tempted to look up your first crush.

There is a decent chance they were lovely. There is also a decent chance your adolescent brain was doing what adolescent brains do best: flooding the zone, ignoring red flags, and turning one semi-decent smile into a full-blown myth. As Cecily Knobler explains, scientists say early romantic love can light up the brain’s reward and craving systems in ways that make those feelings feel enormous, intoxicating, and very hard to forget.

Which means your first love may not haunt you because it was objectively better than everyone who came after. It may just be that you met them at the exact moment your brain was most willing to mistake intensity for destiny. Beautiful, devastating, and a little rude, honestly.

On March 24, 1882, German physician Robert Koch stepped before the Physiological Society of Berlin and announced that he had identified the bacterium that causes tuberculosis. At the time, TB was one of the world’s deadliest diseases, often called “consumption” for the way it seemed to slowly steal life away. Koch’s finding turned a mysterious killer into a solvable scientific problem.

By showing that tuberculosis had a specific microbial cause, Koch helped strengthen the case for germ theory at a moment when modern medicine was still taking shape. Suddenly, prevention, diagnosis, sanitation, and treatment could be built on evidence instead of guesswork. A disease that had inspired fear, folklore, and fatalism could now be studied under a microscope.

The ripple effects are still with us. March 24 is now observed as World Tuberculosis Day, a reminder that one laboratory breakthrough in 1882 helped change how humanity fights infectious disease.

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💬 From the group text…

Technology has empowered a sort of time travel and I love it! The man in this video was born 170 years ago. Meet Otto “Pop” Carter.

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