Free The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014 by Deborah Blum Page B

We’re constantly trying to hunt down that sweet spot between too much challenge and too little.
    â€œThat’s a really important part of this: to an extent that immunologists and psychologists rarely appreciate, we are architects of our own experience. Your subjective experience carries more power than your objective situation. If you feel like you’re alone even when you’re in a room filled with the people closest to you, you’re going to have problems. If you feel like you’re well supported even though there’s nobody else in sight; if you carry relationships in your head; if you come at the world with a sense that people care about you, that you’re valuable, that you’re okay; then your body is going to act as if you’re okay—even if you’re wrong about all that.”
    Cole was channeling John Milton: “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”
    Of course I did not realize that at the moment. My reaction was more prosaic.
    â€œSo environment and experience aren’t the same,” I offered.
    â€œExactly. Two people may share the same environment but not the same experience. The experience is what you make of the environment. It appears you and I are both enjoying ourselves here, for instance, and I think we are. But if one of us didn’t like being one-on-one at a table for three hours, that person could get quite stressed out. We might have much different experiences. And you can shape all this by how you frame things. You can shape both your environment and yourself by how you act. It’s really an opportunity.”
    Cole often puts it differently at the end of his talks about this line of work. “Your experiences today will influence the molecular composition of your body for the next two to three months,” he tells his audience, “or, perhaps, for the rest of your life. Plan your day accordingly.”

PIPPA GOLDSCHMIDT
What Our Telescopes Couldn’t See
    FROM
The New York Times
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    E DINBURGH —To avoid light pollution and bad weather, professional astronomers have to be prepared to travel long distances to use telescopes on mountaintops far away from towns or cities. Astronomers from Britain, which is not generally well known for its clear skies, are particularly used to traveling. When I was an astronomer in the 1990s, working at the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh and at Imperial College London, I made regular trips to observatories around the world, especially in Chile.
    Back home all I could usually see were a few lonely stars fighting against the clouds lit up by a flat dull wash of reflected streetlight. Looking up from the Andes was a fundamentally different experience—the sky was so bright with stars that there were scarcely any dark gaps between them. To make the experience even more striking, in the Southern Hemisphere you can see phenomena like the Magellanic Clouds, the crowded heart of the Milky Way, and the jewel-like constellation of the Southern Cross.
    I was studying quasars, some of the most distant known objects in the universe, which are understood to be the bright centers of galaxies containing supermassive black holes. At a superficial glance, quasars don’t look particularly interesting. All you can see is a starlike point of light, because the extraordinarily bright center dwarfs the rest of the galaxy. But detailed measurements of quasars reveal their vast distances and the amazingly high speeds of the gases that spin around the invisible black holes.
    When I first went to Chile’s Atacama Desert in 1990—the year Augusto Pinochet finally stepped down after nearly sixteen years in power—I found that the terrestrial landscape was almost as extraordinary as the objects I studied in the sky. In some parts of the desert it rains only once every few years. During the day there is nothing to see but rocks and sand and the dazzling