GENERATIONAL STATUS
Inspired by “The Kids Are All Right,” by Melinda Wenner Moyer, our online Discussions space asked readers, “Research has found that today’s kids and teens are doing better in many ways than previous generations. Does that ring true to your experiences?” The following response from April 8, 2026, was edited for space and clarity.
I’m a seventh grader, and I feel that people my age are better than previous generations. Lots of people at my school say that it’s not the kids bullying them; it’s the parents. There is also a lot of quiet drama—but it’s not quiet to the people it’s happening to.
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Friendship breakups are almost as bad as bullying. I lost all of my friends to a stupid fight last year, and I wrote a goodbye letter during the summer because I felt so alone. Parents also put a lot of pressure on their kids. My friend said that she doesn’t eat breakfast or dinner at home, because her mom told her she was “too fat” and “needed to lose weight.” More kids nowadays are being diagnosed with anxiety and depression, too. There’s also a lot of academic pressure at my school. I feel like teachers take the “teacher first, friend second” saying too seriously and focus only on the teacher part.
The economy is also getting worse, and kids are starting to worry about that. There’s a field trip coming up, and everyone is going, but I couldn’t go because of how expensive it is. We also wear uniforms at my school, and they are so expensive. Artificial-intelligence usage has also gone up. Kids are using AI to think for them, and it’s impacting them in ways they don’t really understand. Everyone is more emotionally aware, though. Overall, we are better, just not the best.
“SOMEBODY” VIA DISCUSSIONS
FISH NOODLING
I am confused about the use of “ziti” as a unit of measurement in “Tiny Climbers,” by Elizabeth Anne Brown [Advances; June]. Brown describes shellear fish climbing a waterfall as “ziti-size,” but nowhere in the article is there a conversion of zitis to any standard unit of measure. How many zitis are in a meter, assuming the ziti is a unit of length?
STUART R. DOLE HEALDSBURG, CALIF.
BROWN REPLIES: Dole brings up an excellent point: I did mean the length of a cut ziti noodle, which my most authoritative Internet sources pin at about 1.75 to two inches, comparable to our waterfall-climbing fish, which have a length of about 1.5 to 1.9 inches. As a creature reporter, I’m a serial offender at introducing odd units of measurement, including house cats, grains of rice and bananas, to convey the size of unfamiliar animals. While reporting this story, I had just moved to New Jersey and was mainlining The Sopranos. In hindsight, this gave me an inflated sense of how common ziti is as a shared referent.
SHRINKING FAST
In “Relativity Revealed” [March], Victoria Helm, Thomas Juffmann and Peter Schattschneider cite the Lorentz contraction, a prediction of Einstein’s special theory of relativity that holds that objects will shrink as they go faster. I was struck by a thought: If a fast-moving object shrinks (and also gains mass), there could come a point where it becomes so compressed that, according to an observer at rest, it collapses into a black hole. But in its own reference frame, nothing has changed. How is this apparent contradiction explained?
CHARLES GOODWIN DUNEDIN, NEW ZEALAND
THE AUTHORS REPLY: Indeed, the Lorentz contraction compresses a moving object, although the contraction does not appear in a snapshot of the object. It can even be measured by “reverse engineering” the snapshot, taking into account the travel time of light to the camera.
On the other hand, relativity tells us that changing the observer’s frame of reference amounts to nothing but a transformation of spacetime coordinates so as to describe an object. As an analogy, take the image of Greenland on a map centered at the North Pole and compare it with the image of the island on a Mercator projection. The latter appears much larger. But when you apply the equation for the area on a curved surface, the result is correct in both maps.
That said, the conditions for a collapse of an object into a black hole change when they are expressed in the coordinates of a moving frame. A star will collapse into a black hole only if it is massive and dense enough, independent of the reference frame.
BACTERIAL SURVIVAL
In “Can a Time Capsule Outlast Geology?” [February 2026], Peter Brannen explores what would be needed for a time capsule to survive projected geological changes in the distant future.
We already possess ancient time capsules that have survived unchanged for billions of years: segments of the most highly conserved genes in bacteria. For example, the 16S ribosomal RNA gene present in all bacteria contains highly conserved sequences and will probably endure far into the future.
So nature has already shown us a potential pathway to building a time capsule that will outlast geological changes. Should you wish to dispatch a message into the distant future, simply encode it into a sequence of DNA bases and use CRISPR to splice it into the highly conserved genes. Distribute the modified genes into a variety of marine organisms and then dump the mixture into the sea. There your messages will replicate for centuries to come, and several copies will probably survive for as long as life endures on Earth.
Long after all humans have vanished from our planet, some extragalactic visitors might land gently on an empty seashore, throw a bucket into the sea and haul up samples of bacteria. There they might be able to read the entire encoded history of the human species.
MICHAEL PHILLIPS FORT LEE, N.J.
ERRATA
In “Lost Roads of the Roman Empire,” by Tom Brughmans [June], the map of the province of Baetica in Spain should have indicated that the ancient Roman town of Iluro in this region was where the city of Álora is today. And it should have given the modern location of the Roman city of Iulia Traducta as the city of Algeciras.
“Great Lengths” [Math Puzzle; July/August] should have been credited to Heinrich Hemme.
“Tonima Tasmin Ananna,” by Emma Gometz [The Young American Scientists; July/August], should have given Ananna’s name as Tonima Tasnim Ananna.
“JianJun Jin,” by Ari Sen [The Young American Scientists; July/August], should have described GetOrganelle as a software tool.