There’s an arms race happening at your local wing joint. According to QSR, it’s because Americans have strayed from eating traditional fare and are embracing spicier ethnic foods such as Mexican and Asian cuisine. A 2013 Consumer Flavor Trend Report found that a majority of Americans (54 percent) prefer hot or spicy foods, including sauces, condiments, and dips, commpared with 48 percent in 2011 and 46 percent in 2009. Now, a new report out of China shows that this new trend in American eating habits could prolong our life spans.
Researchers discovered the connection between spicy food and longevity after studying the results of a survey of 500,000 Chinese people taken from 2004 to 2008. The survey asked people about their dietary habits, including the amount of chili they consumed on a weekly basis. When researchers checked back in with respondents seven years later, those who consumed spicy foods once a week had a 10 percent lesser chance of death. And those who ate spicy foods three to seven times a week had a 14 percent lesser chance of death.
“We know something about the beneficial effects of spicy foods basically from animal studies and very small-sized human studies,” Lu Qi, associate professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, told Time. Studies have shown that that capsaicin, the active ingredient in spicy foods, is linked to a lower risk of cancer as well as heart and respiratory diseases. It also has a positive effect on metabolism, weight, and gut bacteria.
“It appears that increasing your intake moderately, just to one to two or three to five times a week, shows a very similar protective effect,” Qi said. “Just increase moderately. That’s maybe enough.” So, if you want an extra dab of Tabasco on your tacos, go for it. But you might not want to eat a dozen fried, greasy buffalo wings every night—that will probably cancel out the positive effects of the chili.
Under pressure to provide water for drinking and irrigation, people around the globe are trying to figure out how to save, conserve and reuse water in a variety of ways, including reusing treated sewage wastewater and removing valuable salts from seawater.
But for all the clean water they may produce, those processes, as well as water-intensive industries like mining, manufacturing and energy production, inevitably leave behind a type of liquid called brine: water that contains high concentrations of salt, metals and other contaminants. I’m working on getting the water out of that potential source, too.
However, most of these methods require strict environmental protections and monitoring strategies to reduce harm to the environment.
For instance, the extremely high salt content in brine from desalination plants can kill fish or drive them away, as has happened increasingly since the 1980s off the coast of Bahrain.
Brine injected into the earth in Oklahoma, including into wells used for hydraulic fracking of oil and natural gas, was one of several factors that led to a 40-fold increase in earthquake activity in the five-year period from 2008 to 2013, as compared to the preceding 31 years. And wastewater has been documented to leak from the underground wells up to the surface as well.
Researchers like me are increasingly exploring brine’s potential not as waste but as a source of water – and of valuable materials, such as sodium, lithium, magnesium and calcium.
Currently, the most effective brine reclamation methods use heat and pressure to boil the water out of brine, capturing the water as vapor and leaving the metals and salts behind as solids. But those systems are expensive to build, energy-intensive to run and physically large.
Other treatment methods come with unique trade-offs. Electrodialysis uses electricity to pull salt and charged particles out of water through special membranes, separating cleaner water from a more concentrated salty stream. This process works best when the water is already relatively clean, because dirt, oils and minerals can quickly clog or damage the membranes, reducing the performance of the equipment.
Membrane distillation, in contrast, heats water so that only water vapor passes through a water-repelling membrane, leaving salts and other contaminants behind. While effective in principle, this approach can be slow, energy-intensive and expensive, limiting its use at larger scale.
A trailer containing a small water reclamation system. Mervin XuYang Lim, CC BY-SA
A look at smaller, decentralized systems
Smaller systems can be effective, with lower initial costs and quicker start-up processes.
At the University of Arizona, I am leading the testing of a six-step brine reclamation system known as STREAM – for Separation, Treatment, Recovery via Electrochemistry and Membrane – to continuously reclaim municipal brine, which is salty water left over from sewage treatment.
The system combines conventional methods such as ultrafiltration, which removes particles and microbes using fine filters, and reverse osmosis, which removes dissolved salts by forcing water through a dense membrane, alongside an electrolytic cell – a method not typically employed in water treatment.
Our previous study showed that we can recover usable quantities of chemicals such as sodium hydroxide and hydrochloric acid at one-sixth the cost of purchasing them commercially. And our initial calculations indicated the integrated system can reclaim as much as 90% of the water, greatly reducing the volume of what remains to be disposed. The cleaned water in turn is suitable for drinking after final disinfection using ultraviolet or chlorine.
We are currently building a larger pilot system in Tucson for further study by researchers. We hope to learn if we can use this system to reclaim other sources of brine and study its efficacy in eliminating viruses and bacteria for human consumption.
When Maria looked at herself in the mirror for the first time after her mastectomy, she stood very still.
One hand rested on the bathroom counter. The other hovered near the flat space where her breast had been. The scar was raw and angry. The loss was quiet but enormous. Her body felt foreign.
In moments like these, people are often urged to be resilient – which can feel like being told to show no weakness, to push through no matter what. Or they imagine resilience as bouncing back: returning somehow unscathed to be the person you were before.
But standing in that bathroom, Maria knew there was no going back. And toughness wouldn’t change what had happened. The real question was how she could move forward, carrying this experience into her new reality.
Maria’s story, one I came to know personally, is far from unique. Loss, trauma and illness often bring the same wrenching questions of identity and the painful uncertainty of what comes next.
Moments like Maria’s reveal something important: The way people tend to talk about resilience often doesn’t match how people actually live through adversity.
But across research, clinical practice and lived experience, resilience is something far more nuanced, raw and human.
It’s not a personality trait that some people simply have and others lack. Decades of research show resilience is a dynamic process. It’s shaped by the small, everyday decisions and adjustments individuals make as they adapt to significant adversity while maintaining, or gradually regaining, their psychological and physical footing over time.
And importantly, resilience does not mean the absence of distress.
Research on people facing serious life disruptions shows that distress and resilience often coexist. For example, in my study of adolescent and young adult cancer survivors, participants reported being upset about finances, body image and disrupted life plans, while simultaneously highlighting positive changes, such as strengthened relationships and a greater sense of purpose.
Resilience, in other words, is not about erasing pain and suffering. It is about learning how to integrate difficult experiences into a life that continues forward.
How resilience really works
At one point, Maria told me she had started avoiding mirrors, intimacy, even conversations that made others uncomfortable.
“Well, you’re strong,” people would tell her. “Just stay positive. This too shall pass.”
But strength, she said, felt like a performance.
What ultimately shifted for Maria was not an increase in toughness. It was permission to grieve.
She began speaking openly about the loss of her breast; not just as a medical procedure but as a symbolic loss tied to identity, sexuality and womanhood. She joined a support group. She allowed herself to feel anger alongside gratitude for survival.
This kind of emotional processing turns out to be central to resilience.
My colleagues and I have found that people who actively process loss, rather than suppress it, demonstrate better long-term adjustment. Tamping down negative feelings may provide short-term relief, but over time it is associated with greater stress on your body and more difficulty adapting.
In other words, resilience is not about sealing the wound and pretending it no longer aches. It is about learning how to carry the wound without letting it consume your entire story.
Neuroscience supports this integration model. When people engage in meaning-making – reflecting on their experiences and incorporating them into a coherent life narrative – brain networks associated with emotional regulation and cognitive flexibility become more active. The brain, quite literally, reorganizes as you adapt to new realities.
Maria described the change simply.
“I don’t like what happened,” she told me. “But I’m not at war with my body anymore.”
If resilience is about integration rather than toughness and bouncing back, how can you cultivate it? Research across psychology, neuroscience and chronic illness points to several evidence-based strategies:
Allow emotional complexity: Resilient people are not relentlessly positive. They allow space for the full range of emotions, such as gratitude and grief, hope and fear. Paying attention to your feelings through strategies such as reflective writing or psychotherapy have been linked to improved psychological adaptation.
Build a coherent narrative: Human beings are storytellers. Trauma can shatter one’s sense of self, but constructing a narrative that acknowledges loss while identifying continuity and growth supports adaptation. The goal is not to spin suffering into silver linings, but to situate it within a broader life story. For example, someone might say, “Cancer derailed my plans and changed my body, but it also clarified what matters to me and how I want to move forward.”
Lean into connection: Isolation magnifies suffering. Social support is one of the strongest predictors of how well people are able to cope and move forward after illness or trauma. For Maria, connection with other women who had had mastectomies normalized her experience and reduced shame.
Practice deliberate pauses: Intentionally give yourself some time to breathe. Mindfulness and contemplative solitude can strengthen your ability to regulate emotions and recover from stress. Pausing allows experience to be processed rather than avoided.
Expand identity: Illness, loss and trauma reshape how you think of yourself. Rather than clinging to who you were, resilience often involves expanding who you are becoming. Research on post-traumatic growth shows that people often report deeper relationships, clarified priorities and renewed purpose – not because trauma was good, but because it forced reevaluation. Maria no longer describes herself simply as a breast cancer patient. She is a survivor, yes, but also an advocate, a mentor, a woman whose sense of femininity is self-defined rather than dictated by her anatomy.
Resilience is not about returning to who you were before illness, loss or trauma. It is about becoming someone new: someone who carries the scar, remembers the loss and still chooses to engage with life.
Maria still pauses when she sees her reflection. But she no longer turns away.
“This is my body,” she told me recently. “This is my story.”
Resilience is not forged in the denial of vulnerability, but in its acceptance. Not in bouncing back, but in integrating what has happened into who you are becoming.
And that, I believe, is where real strength lives.
Photo credit: SDI Productions/E+ Collection/via Getty Images – When someone is badly hurt, their potential for survival often depends on what happens in the first minutes after they arrive at the hospital.
When a trauma patient enters the emergency department, their potential for survival often depends on what happens within the first minutes after their arrival. After studying trauma resuscitation teams at UPMC Presbyterian in Pittsburgh, the largest major trauma center in Pennsylvania, it’s clear that trauma teams aren’t organized ahead of time – they’re formed on the fly. Some team members may have worked together many times before, while others may be meeting for the first time.
Those minutes can be chaotic, fast-paced and high-stakes. The patient is usually rolled in on a stretcher, bleeding, barely breathing and surrounded by alarms and shouting. At the bedside are emergency physicians, anesthesiologists, surgeons, nurses and respiratory therapists – a large team of dedicated health care providers. Everyone has a job. Everyone is moving fast. When it works well, it looks almost effortless. When it doesn’t, small delays can have big consequences.
This knowledge gap motivated us to get together to study this issue. One of us is an intensive care unit physician and the other is an organizational scientist who studies teams in a variety of settings. We based our approach on a classic concept from behavioral science called transactive memory systems.
Traumatic injuries, such as car crashes, falls and gunshot wounds, are the leading cause of death for young people worldwide. Across all ages, trauma is one of the top killers. Because trauma is widespread, even small adjustments to how emergency teams coordinate can help save lives and shorten recovery periods for patients.
This is where transactive memory systems, TMS, come in. TMS are a shared understanding within a team of who knows what and who is good at what. A team doesn’t succeed because everyone knows everything, but because people rely on one another’s expertise. The team works best when each person knows what they are responsible for, what other team members are experts in, and whom to turn to when a specific problem comes up.
Team familiarity shapes outcomes
Think of a group of friends playing basketball. The best basketball teams aren’t the ones where everyone has the same skills. They’re the ones where one person is great at rebounding, one person can shoot from a long distance, and another is good at dribbling the ball up the floor. Importantly, everyone knows each other’s skills, so when a certain skill is needed, they know whom to go to.
In trauma care, this kind of knowledge could save lives. When seconds matter, the team needs to instantly know who would be best at placing a breathing tube and who would be best at reading the ultrasound. Strong TMS means fewer questions, less hesitation and smoother coordination.
For each trauma patient, we measured three things: shared team experience, transactive memory systems and patient outcomes, based on how long patients stayed in the ICU and in the hospital overall. We were looking for teamwork that showed good coordination, trust in expertise and clear division of responsibility.
The science behind ‘who knows what’
Our results were striking. First, teams with more shared experience had stronger transactive memory systems. The more often people had worked together before, the better they seemed to know each other’s skills and coordinate their tasks. If you add up how many times two team members had worked together on a previous resuscitation and divide by the number of dyads, or pairs, on the team, the average in our study was 10 times. As that number increased, transactive memory systems became stronger.
Second, stronger transactive memory systems were linked to better patient outcomes. These improvements were substantial: Patients cared for by teams that were well above average in their transactive memory systems stayed in the hospital about three fewer days and spent nearly two fewer days in the ICU.
Third, TMS explained why shared experience mattered. It wasn’t just that experienced teams were better, but that shared experience helped teams build a clearer mental “map” of each other’s expertise. That map is what helped patients get better faster.
Trauma care is unpredictable – you can’t always control who is on a team or how often people work together. But it may be possible to design training procedures and work schedules that help teams build transactive memory faster.
More broadly, our study suggests that improving health care isn’t just about developing new technology or training better doctors. It’s about leveraging the power of teams, helping people quickly understand and trust each other’s strengths when it matters most. For us, one coming from the bedside and the other from organizational science, that’s the exciting next step: turning the science of teamwork into practical tools that help trauma teams save lives.
