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"Yoga is practiced by about 15 million people in the United States, for reasons almost as numerous - from the physical benefits mapped in brain scans to the less tangible rewards that New Age journals call spiritual centering. Religion, for the most part, has nothing to do with it. But a group of Indian-Americans has ignited a surprisingly fierce debate in the gentle world of yoga by mounting a campaign to acquaint Westerners with the faith that it says underlies every single yoga style followed in gyms, ashrams and spas: Hinduism. The campaign, labeled "Take Back Yoga," does not ask yoga devotees to become Hindu, or instructors to teach more about Hinduism. The small but increasingly influential group behind it, the Hindu American Foundation, suggests only that people become more aware of yoga's debt to the faith's ancient traditions. That suggestion, modest though it may seem, has drawn a flurry of strong reactions from figures far apart on the religious spectrum. Dr. Deepak Chopra, the New Age writer, has dismissed the campaign as a jumble of faulty history and Hindu nationalism. R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, has said he agrees that yoga is Hindu - and cited that as evidence that the practice imperiled the souls of Christians who engage in it. The question at the core of the debate - who owns yoga? - has become an enduring topic of chatter in yoga Web forums, Hindu American newspapers and journals catering to the many consumers of what is now a multibillion-dollar yoga industry. "

"Neil deGrasse Tyson hosts the 2010 Isaac Asimov debate at the Hayden Planetarium. He and five panelists debate whether NASA should bother going back to the moon, or just focus on Mars instead. "

"Sixty years ago, Allied forces brought an end to Adolf Hitler's dream that Germany would rule Europe and dominate the world. The death of Nazi Germany gave birth to a charge that still haunts the scientific community--what might be called "the Nazi analogy." In ethical or policy disputes about science and medicine, no argument can bring debate to a more screeching halt then the invocation of the Nazi comparison. Whether the subject is stem cell research, end-of-life care, the conduct of clinical trials in poor nations, abortion, embryo research, animal experimentation, genetic testing, or human experimentation involving vulnerable populations, references to Nazi policies or practices tumble forth from critics. "If X is done, then we are on the road to Nazi Germany" has become a commonplace claim in contemporary bioethical debates. Sadly, too often those who draw an analogy between current behavior and what the Nazis did do not know what they are talking about. The Nazi analogy is equivalent to dropping a nuclear bomb in ethical battles about science and medicine. Because its misuse diminishes the horror done by Nazi scientists and doctors to their victims, it is ethically incumbent upon those who invoke the Nazi analogy to understand what they are claiming."

"Six leading planetary scientists debate whether Pluto is a planet in a broadcast of the Hayden Planetarium's 2009 Isaac Asimov lecture. "

Last week, the highly regarded medical journal, The Lancet, retracted a much debated 1998 study that had linked the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine to autism. The study was retracted after concerns about ethical breaches by one of the study authors. In addition, 10 of the 13 co-authors have disavowed the study's conclusions. "We fully retract this paper from the published record," The Lancet editors said in a statement. But the damage has been done. The paper has fueled fears about the risks of childhood vaccinations and autism, particularly the M.M.R. vaccine, despite numerous studies showing no link.

"For years, fans of the Batman comics have puzzled over a mystery at the heart of the series: why doesn't Batman just kill his arch-nemesis, the murderous Joker? The two have engaged in a prolonged game of cat-and-mouse. The Joker commits a crime, Batman catches him, the Joker is locked up, and then invariably escapes. Wouldn't all this be much simpler if Batman just killed the Joker? What's stopping him? Enter philosopher Immanuel Kant and the deontological theory of ethics Now, philosophy professors are finding superheroes and comic books to be exceptionally useful tools in helping students think about the complex moral and ethical debates that have occupied philosophers for centuries."

Indianapolis Public Schools retained 8.4% of its kindergarten students last year, and some educators are debating the effectiveness of having students repeat kindergarten. Some say tougher standards are trickling down to the lower grades and that students need to master certain skills to move on to first grade. But others say there are few long-term benefits of holding back kindergartners and that the practice increases negative attitudes about school as well as the likelihood that a student will eventually drop out.

"When reports emerged 30 years ago that young gay men were suffering from rare forms of pneumonia and cancer, public health investigators scrambled to understand what appeared to be a deadly immune disorder: What were the symptoms? Who was most susceptible? What kinds of infections were markers of the disease? They were seeking the epidemiologist's most essential tool - an accurate case definition, a set of criteria that simultaneously include people with the illness and exclude those without it. With AIDS, investigators soon recognized that injection-drug users, hemophiliacs and other demographic groups were also at risk, and the case definition evolved over time to incorporate lab evidence of immune dysfunction and other refinements based on scientific advances. "If you recognize something is happening, you need a case definition so you can count it," said Andrew Moss, an emeritus professor of epidemiology at the University of California, San Francisco, and an early AIDS investigator. "You need to know whether the numbers are going up or down, or whether treatment and prevention work. And if you have a bad case definition, then it's very difficult to figure out what's going on." Once a disease can be diagnosed reliably through lab tests, creating an accurate case definition becomes easier. But when an ailment has no known cause and its symptoms are subjective - as with chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia and other diseases whose characteristics and even existence have been contested - competing case definitions are almost inevitable. Now a new study of chronic fatigue syndrome has highlighted how competing case definitions can lead to an epidemiologic "Rashomon" - what you see depends on who's doing the looking - and has stoked a fierce debate among researchers and patient advocates on both sides of the Atlantic. "

"Last year's GOP takeover of the U.S. House and statehouses across the country has dramatically changed the shape of the nation's abortion debate. It has also given a boost to an even more far-reaching effort: the push to legally redefine when life itself begins. The question being raised in legal terms is: When does someone become a person? The answer varies under the law. "The definition of personhood ranges if you're talking about property law, or inheritance, or how the census is taken," says Alexa Kolbi-Molinas, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union's Reproductive Freedom Project. All those differences are exactly what Keith Mason wants to change. He's president of Personhood USA, a group that's trying to rewrite the laws and constitutions of every state - and some countries - to recognize someone as a person "exactly at creation," he says. "It's fertilization; it's when the sperm meets the egg." Mason says the basic problem is that science has advanced faster than policymaking. "We know, without a shadow of a doubt, when human life begins," he says. "But our laws have not caught up to what we know." And according to his organization, those laws should recognize every fertilized egg as an individual and complete human being."

"Born without his fibulas, the long bones that span from the knees to the ankles, Pistorius relies on carbon-fiber prosthetic limbs to propel him around the track in times comparable to some of the world's top runners. And therein remains the question that has been the crux of a continuing debate: do those high-tech legs give him an unfair advantage? "

Humans have often asserted a fundamental difference between themselves and other animals. One of these assertions which has had many proponents into the twentieth century is that humans differ from animals in their use of language. In the past thirty years this assertion has been the subject of much debate as scientists have researched language use by apes. (I use the term "ape" to refer to "great ape" in this essay, as many of my sources do. There have apparently been no language experiments with gibbons or siamangs.) Extraordinary claims have been made by some researchers about the linguistic capabilities of their subjects, mostly chimpanzees. These claims have been refuted and counter-refuted many times, and the literature on the subject is extensive. In this essay I will examine the question of how much, if at all, primates are able to communicate using language. I will then examine the ethical issues surrounding the teaching of language to apes. What is language? First, what is language, and how does it differ from other forms of communication? There does not exist a universally accepted definition of language, or criteria for its use; this is one of the reasons for the disagreement among scientists about whether apes can use language. Language consists of various aspects which people believe are more or less important, for example, grammar, symbol usage, the ability to represent real-world situations, and the ability to articulate something new (Wallman 1992: 6). Duane Rumbaugh describes language as "an infinitely open system of communication" (Rumbaugh 1977b: xx). Some people say that anything an ape can do is not language; of course, if these are the same people who say that language defines us as humans, and an ape can learn sign language, then they are saying that deaf people who use sign language are not human (Patterson & Linden 1981: 119-120). One famous view of language is Charles Hockett's seven key properties: duality, productivity, arbitrariness,

"A few months after the World Trade Center attacks, a strange message appeared on a U.S. Army computer: "Your security system is crap," it read. "I am Solo. I will continue to disrupt at the highest levels." Solo scanned thousands of U.S. government machines and discovered glaring security flaws in many of them. Between February 2001 and March 2002, Solo broke into almost a hundred PCs within the Army, Navy, Air Force, NASA, and the Department of Defense. He surfed around for months, copying files and passwords. At one point he brought down the U.S. Army's entire Washington, D.C., network, taking about 2000 computers out of service for three days. U.S. attorney Paul McNulty called his campaign "the biggest military computer hack of all time." But despite his expertise, Solo didn't cover his tracks. He was soon traced to a small apartment in London. In March 2002, the United Kingdom's National Hi-Tech Crime Unit arrested Gary McKinnon, a quiet 36-year-old Scot with elfin features and Spock-like upswept eyebrows. He'd been a systems administrator, but he didn't have a job at the time of his arrest; he spent his days indulging his obsession with UFOs. In fact, McKinnon claimed that UFOs were the reason for his hack. Convinced that the government was hiding alien antigravity devices and advanced energy technologies, he planned to find and release the information for the benefit of humanity. He said his intrusion was detected just as he was downloading a photo from NASA's Johnson Space Center of what he believed to be a UFO. Despite the outlandishness of his claims, McKinnon now faces extradition to the United States under a controversial treaty that could land him in prison for years-and possibly for the rest of his life. The case has transformed McKinnon into a cause célèbre. Supporters have rallied outside Parliament with picket signs. There are "Free Gary" websites, T-shirts, posters. Rock star David Gilmour, the former guitarist for Pink Floyd, even recorded

"RESEARCHERS say they have solved a conundrum about human perception that has stumped philosophers and scientists alike for three centuries. Irish politician William Molyneux first posed the question in a letter to the great British thinker John Locke written 323 years ago. Imagine, Molyneux wrote, that a man blind from birth who has learned to identify objects - a sphere and a cube, for example - only through his sense of touch is suddenly able to see. The puzzle, he continued, is: "Whether he Could, by his Sight, and before he touch them, know which is the Globe and which the Cube?" For philosophers of the time, answering "Molyneux's question", as it became known, would resolve a fundamental uncertainty about the human mind. Empiricists believed that we are born blank slates, and become the sum total of our accumulated experience. So-called "nativists" countered that our minds are, from the outset, pre-stocked with ideas waiting to be activated by sight, sound and touch. If a blind man who miraculously recovered his sight could instantly distinguish the cube from the globe it would mean the knowledge was somehow innate, they argued. More recently, this "nurture vs. nature" debate has found its counterpart in modern neuroscience."

"And this is how the Civil War comes to life for a roomful of fourth-graders in Northern Virginia, 150 years after the nation's deadliest armed conflict began. Agner's reenactment of the landmark naval Battle of Hampton Roads - a tactile lesson the vet­eran teacher dreamed up this year - drew her Fairfax County class into a chapter of American history that has long provoked education debate. The war's sesquicentennial, starting Tuesday with the anniversary of the attack on Fort Sumter in South Carolina, provides a "teachable moment" for schools everywhere. But how and when students learn about slavery and secession, blue and gray, Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee, Bull Run (or Manassas) and Appomattox varies enormously from state to state, school to school and even teacher to teacher. This year, Virginia learned anew the sensitivity of Civil War education when the state Board of Education withdrew approval of a fourth-grade textbook - "Our Virginia: Past and Present" - that asserted thousands of African Americans fought for the South. Most historians reject that claim. Last year, the Texas State Board of Education voted to require eighth-graders to study the inaugural address of Confederate President Jefferson Davis alongside President Abraham Lincoln's first and second inaugurals and his Gettysburg Address. That was one of many controversial revisions to Texas standards. Jeremy A. Stern, a historian who reviewed state academic standards this year for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, said differences in the timing and scope of Civil War education across the United States are dramatic. Often, he said, the war is not taught systematically until middle school. "

"Imagine your city isn't as safe as it used to be. Robberies are on the rise, home invasions are increasing and murder rates have nearly doubled in the past three years. What should city officials do about it? Hire more cops to round up the thugs and lock them away in a growing network of prisons? Or design programs that promise more peace by addressing issues like a faltering economy and underperforming schools? Your answer -- and the reasoning behind it -- can hinge on the metaphor being used to describe the problem, according to new research by Stanford psychologists. Your thinking can even be swayed with just one word, they say."

Texas is reissuing US History textbooks this year with a lot of controversial additions and deletions.

Texas textbooks influence the entire US History curriculum around the country. What do you think the effect of Texas' changes will be to history as American students understand it?

The Core: College Magazine of the University of Chicago