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Yawning is one of the first things we learn to do. “Learn” may not even be quite the right word. Johanna de Vries, a professor of obstetrics at Vrije University Amsterdam, has discovered that the human fetus yawns during its first trimester in the womb. And, unless we succumb to neurodegenerative disease, yawning is something we keep doing throughout our lives. “You don’t decide to yawn,” Robert Provine, a neuroscientist and the author of “Curious Behavior: Yawning, Laughing, Hiccupping, and Beyond,” told me. “You just do it. You’re playing out a biological program.” We yawn unconsciously and we yawn spontaneously. We can’t yawn on command—and we sometimes can’t stop ourselves from letting out a big yawn, even at the most inopportune times. (Case in point: Sasha Obama’s infamous yawn during her father’s 2013 Inaugural Address.) But what, precisely, are we accomplishing with all this yawning?

Herzing’s paper proposes five indicators of intelligence that any given species or machine (she includes artificial intelligence in her assessment) might combine in its own way: first, the size of the subject’s brain (if it has one) relative to the rest of the body; second, the extent to which an entity sends and receives information; third, the degree to which individual members of a species are distinct from one another; fourth, the complexity of the being’s social life; and, fifth, the amount of interaction it has with members of other species. One way to be intelligent is to score high on all five measures, as dolphins do, for instance.

“For lie detection to be an adaptive skill, that helps us to avoid liars and befriend truth-tellers, it doesn’t have to be conscious alarm bells. It could be more subtle,” ten Brinke says. “More of a feeling that you don’t really want to lend this person twenty dollars, that you’re not excited to go on a second date with this guy.” Ten Brinke and her colleagues decided to focus their efforts on finding evidence for unconscious lie detection.

No, I’m not skeptical about the idea of universal human rights. I’m skeptical about what I call positive rights.

So I say that you can make a good case for universal human rights of a negative kind, but that you cannot make the comparable case for universal human rights of a positive kind.

As a professor in Berkeley I have certain rights, and certain obligations. But the idea of universal rights—that you have certain rights just in virtue of being a human being—is a fantastic idea. And I think, Why not extend the idea of universal rights to conscious animals? Just in virtue of being a conscious animal, you have certain rights. The fact that animals cannot undertake obligations does not imply that they cannot have rights against us who do have obligations. Babies have rights even before they are able to undertake obligations. Now I have to make a confession. I try not to think about animal rights because I fear I’d have to become a vegetarian if I worked it out consistently. But I think there is a very good case to be made for saying that if you grant the validity of universal human rights, then it looks like it would be some kind of special pleading if you said there’s no such thing as universal animal rights. I think there are animal rights.

In universities around the world, semesters end with students filling out similar surveys about their experience in the class and the quality of the teacher. Student ratings are high-stakes. They come up when faculty are being considered for tenure or promotions. In fact, they're often the only method a university uses to monitor the quality of teaching. Recently, a number of faculty members have been publishing research showing that the comment-card approach may not be the best way to measure the central function of higher education.

A puzzlement. Why, I wonder, are both these things true? There is an animal, a wee little thing, the size of a poppy seed, that lives in lakes and rivers and eats whatever flows through it; it's called a gastrotrich. It has an extremely short life. Hello, Goodbye, I'm Dead It hatches. Three days later, it's all grown up, with a fully adult body "complete with a mouth, a gut, sensory organs and a brain," says science writer Carl Zimmer. In 72 hours it's ready to make babies, and as soon as it does, it begins to shrivel, crumple ... and usually within a week, it's gone. Dead of old age. Sad, no? A seven-day life. But now comes the weird part. There's another very small animal (a little bigger than a gastrotrich) that also lives in freshwater ponds and lakes, also matures very quickly, also reproduces within three or four days. But, oh, my God, this one has a totally different life span (and when I say totally, I mean it's radically, wildly, unfathomably different) from a gastrotrich. It's a hydra. And what it does — or rather, what it doesn't do — is worthy of a motion picture. So we made one. Well, a little one. With my NPR colleague, science reporter Adam Cole, we're going to show you what science has learned about the hydra. Adam drew it, animated it, scored it, edited it. My only contribution was writing it with him, but what you are about to see is as close as science gets to a miracle.

Yes, and no. “I did this to show people that we filter and manipulate what we show on social media,” Ms. van der Born told Dutch journalists. “We create an online world which reality can no longer meet.” The ultimate goal was to “prove how easy it is to distort reality,” she said. “Everybody knows that pictures of models are manipulated. But we often overlook the fact that we manipulate reality also in our own lives.”

With so many pressing human needs, the logic goes, there's no room for compassionate action toward nonhuman animals. The underlying assumption is that being good is a zero-sum game, with gains for one cause — in this case, animal welfare — coming at the expense of another — in this case human welfare.

The zero-sum assumption may be compelling because it's buoyed by a few features of human psychology.

Doing something is better than doing nothing, even when that something is a small and imperfect step toward a tertiary goal.

In 2012, David Strayer found himself in a research lab, on the outskirts of London, observing something he hadn’t thought possible: extraordinary multitasking. For his entire career, Strayer, a professor of psychology at the University of Utah, had been studying attention—how it works and how it doesn’t. Methods had come and gone, theories had replaced theories, but one constant remained: humans couldn’t multitask. Each time someone tried to focus on more than one thing at a time, performance suffered. Most recently, Strayer had been focussing on people who drive while on the phone. Over the course of a decade, he and his colleagues had demonstrated that drivers using cell phones—even hands-free devices—were at just as high a risk of accidents as intoxicated ones. Reaction time slowed, attention decreased to the point where they’d miss more than half the things they’d otherwise see—a billboard or a child by the road, it mattered not.

Thanks to advances in technology, we may soon revisit a question raised four centuries ago: Are there things we should try not to know? That’s because the collection of data is increasing, in both scale and type, at a phenomenal rate.

“Big Brother couldn’t have imagined we’d tell him where we were, who we talk to, how we feel – and we’d pay to do it,” said Vivek Wadhwa, a tech entrepreneur and social critic. “We need an amendment in the Constitution that says you own your data.”

I banned laptops in the classroom after it became common practice to carry them to school. When I created my “electronic etiquette policy” (as I call it in my syllabus), I was acting on a gut feeling based on personal experience. I’d always figured that, for the kinds of computer-science and math classes that I generally teach, which can have a significant theoretical component, any advantage that might be gained by having a machine at the ready, or available for the primary goal of taking notes, was negligible at best. We still haven’t made it easy to type notation-laden sentences, so the potential benefits were low. Meanwhile, the temptation for distraction was high. I know that I have a hard time staying on task when the option to check out at any momentary lull is available; I assumed that this must be true for my students, as well. Over time, a wealth of studies on students’ use of computers in the classroom has accumulated to support this intuition. Among the most famous is a landmark Cornell University study from 2003 called “The Laptop and the Lecture,” wherein half of a class was allowed unfettered access to their computers during a lecture while the other half was asked to keep their laptops closed. The experiment showed that, regardless of the kind or duration of the computer use, the disconnected students performed better on a post-lecture quiz. The message of the study aligns pretty well with the evidence that multitasking degrades task performance across the board.