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Here are three of the most prominent rumors that have spread on online platforms such as Twitter, Gab, 4chan and Reddit.

Among their unfounded claims were that the shooting had been orchestrated to draw local law enforcement away from the border, allowing criminals and drugs to cross into the United States, and that gun-control advocates had organized the tragedy to stoke public outrage.

he conspiracy theorist and broadcaster Alex Jones of Infowars has lied for years that the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., was staged by the federal government, with people pretending to be survivors and victims’ parents. Last year, Mr. Jones lost four defamation lawsuits filed by victims’ families, many of whom have been harassed by his believers.

Mermaids, the UK charity for, in their own words, ‘gender variant and transgender children’ is under the spotlight. Following investigations by the Telegraph and Mail newspapers, as well as demands from critics concerned about child safeguarding, the Charity Commission has launched a regulatory compliance case and have said that they have written to the organisation’s trustees

The investigations found that Mermaids has been offering breast binders to girls reportedly as young as 13, and despite children saying their parents opposed the practice. Binding can often cause breathing difficulties, back pain and broken ribs. It was also uncovered that kids have been ‘congratulated’ online for identifying as transgender by staff and volunteers on the charity’s online help centre, with teenagers being advised that puberty blockers are safe and ‘totally reversible’.

Mermaids has been given half a million pounds in total from the National Lottery, and lauded by the likes of Emma Watson, Jameela Jamil and even Harry and Meghan. In other words, the charity has had powerful supporters and been like Teflon for a very long time. Starbucks did a fundraiser for them, more than 40 schools invited them in to educate teachers and kids about ‘gender identity’, and a number of corporates sponsor the charity.

So you’re happily tweeting away as your Google self-driving car crosses a bridge, its speed precisely synced to the 50 m.p.h. limit. A group of frisky schoolchildren is also heading across the bridge, on the pedestrian walkway. Suddenly, there’s a tussle, and three of the kids are pushed into the road, right in your vehicle’s path. Your self-driving car has a fraction of a second to make a choice: Either it swerves off the bridge, possibly killing you, or it runs over the children. What does the Google algorithm tell it to do?

As we begin to have computer-controlled cars, robots, and other machines operating autonomously out in the chaotic human world, situations will inevitably arise in which the software has to choose between a set of bad, even horrible, alternatives. How do you program a computer to choose the lesser of two evils? What are the criteria, and how do you weigh them?

Since we humans aren’t very good at codifying responses to moral dilemmas ourselves, particularly when the precise contours of a dilemma can’t be predicted ahead of its occurrence, programmers will find themselves in an extraordinarily difficult situation. And one assumes that they will carry a moral, not to mention a legal, burden for the code they write.

an approach developed at Stanford's Graduate School of Education that's rapidly gaining adherents across the country

trial studies of the Stanford program demonstrated that when high school students engage regularly with challenging primary source documents, they not only make significant gains learning and retaining historical material, they also markedly improve their reading comprehension and critical thinking.

Colglazier builds his thought-provoking classes using an online tool called Reading Like a Historian. Designed by the Stanford History Education Group under Professor Sam Wineburg, the website offers 87 flexible lesson plans featuring documents from the Library of Congress

To what extent is this reflecting people's need for balance between scientific fact and religious reassurance?

There is some sort of desire to make a synthesis of both spiritual ideas and also science. And you can trace that back to theosophy at the turn of the last century. So I think there is a synthesis here of both science and spirituality which in our age is something that people want. They want to somehow be able to cross that great divide -- what [British scientist and novelist] C.P. Snow called 'the two cultures' -- and try to find meaning in both worlds.

Ekman had traveled the globe with photographs that showed faces experiencing six basic emotions—happiness, sadness, fear, disgust, anger, and surprise. Everywhere he went, from Japan to Brazil to the remotest village of Papua New Guinea, he asked subjects to look at those faces and then to identify the emotions they saw on them. To do so, they had to pick from a set list of options presented to them by Ekman. The results were impressive. Everybody, it turned out, even preliterate Fore tribesmen in New Guinea who’d never seen a foreigner before in their lives, matched the same emotions to the same faces. Darwin, it seemed, had been right.

Ekman’s findings energized the previously marginal field of emotion science. Suddenly, researchers had an objective way to measure and compare human emotions—by reading the universal language of feeling written on the face. In the years that followed, Ekman would develop this idea, arguing that each emotion is like a reflex, with its own circuit in the brain and its own unique pattern of effects on the face and the body. He and his peers came to refer to it as the Basic Emotion model—and it had significant practical applications

What if he’s wrong?

Almost one in seven children worldwide live in areas with high levels of outdoor air pollution, mostly in South Asia, and their growing bodies are most vulnerable to damage

air pollution was a “major contributing factor in the deaths of around 600,000 children under five every year”, causing illnesses such as pneumonia.

“Pollutants don’t only harm children’s developing lungs - they can actually cross the blood-brain barrier and permanently damage their developing brains

it’s time to cross another bridge — into a world without facts. Or, more precisely, where facts do not matter a whit.

“There’s no such thing, unfortunately, anymore, of facts,” she declared on “The Diane Rehm Show”

Hughes, a frequent surrogate for President-elect Donald Trump and a paid commentator for CNN during the campaign, kept on defending that assertion at length

Douglas Hofstadter, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Gödel, Escher, Bach, thinks we've lost sight of what artificial intelligence really means. His stubborn quest to replicate the human mind.

“If somebody meant by artificial intelligence the attempt to understand the mind, or to create something human-like, they might say—maybe they wouldn’t go this far—but they might say this is some of the only good work that’s ever been done

Their operating premise is simple: the mind is a very unusual piece of software, and the best way to understand how a piece of software works is to write it yourself.

they write that eye contact actually "disrupts resources available to cognitive control processes during verb generation." In other words, when you need to come up with certain words under certain circumstances, maintaining eye contact depletes the very brain resources you need to find the word.

but Scientific American suggests that if looking away while thinking is cross-cultural, "perhaps cultures with less emphasis on eye contact enable deeper thinking during a given conversation."

the performance of presidents, especially on foreign policy, is shaped by how leaders attach to problems. Some leaders are like dogs: They want to bound right in and make things happen. Some are more like cats: They want to detach and maybe look for a pressure point here or there.

we should be asking them a different set of questions:

How much do you think a president can change the flow of world events? President Obama, for example, has a limited or, if you want to put it that way, realistic view of the extent of American influence. He subscribes to a series of propositions that frequently push him toward nonintervention: The world “is a tough, complicated, messy, mean place and full of hardship and tragedy,” he told Goldberg. You can’t fix everything. Sometimes you can only shine a spotlight.

Trump would be not be in consideration for our endorsement if one of the Republicans with a modicum of qualification, dignity and serious purpose — think John Kasich, Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio — were still in contention

Instead, Clinton’s California appearances have been limited to rallies, photo opportunities, perfunctory interviews and fundraisers, fundraisers and more fundraisers. Her double-cross on the debate pledge only feeds into the perception (established through the years) of the Clintons’ sense of entitlement, and their presumption that they can set their own rules

Sanders has had a profound impact on the debate, moved Clinton to the left, and, admirably, he has inspired young people to engage in politics. The 74-year-old senator has tapped the legitimate anxieties of generations who see the promise of opportunity that has defined this nation slipping away.

few would have guessed that the economic order built upon Mr. Reagan’s and Mrs. Thatcher’s common faith in unfettered global markets (and largely accepted by their more liberal successors Bill Clinton and Tony Blair) would be brought down by right-wing populists riding the anger of a working class that has been cast aside in the globalized economy that the two leaders trumpeted 40 years ago.

The so-called Brexit vote was driven by an inchoate sense among older white workers with modest education that they have been passed over, condemned by forces beyond their control to an uncertain job for little pay in a world where their livelihoods are challenged not just by cheap Asian workers halfway around the world, but closer to home by waves of immigrants of different faiths and skin tones.

It is the same frustration that has buoyed proto-fascist political parties across Europe. It is the same anger fueling the candidacy of Mr. Trump in the United States.

called for a ban on the entry of Muslims into the United States, much of the rest of the world on Tuesday looked at the American presidential election with a mix of befuddlement and despair.

ignited widespread condemnation that crossed ideological and social lines in many countries.

Mr. Trump, like others, fuels hatred,” and “Our only enemy is radical Islamism.”

GEORGE Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984 has had “doublegood” sales this week after one of Trump’s advisers used the phrase “alternative facts” in an interview.

Orwell's novel 1984 is a bleak portrayal of Great Britain re-imagined as a dystopian superstate governed by a dictatorial regime.

Many concepts of the novel have crossed over to popular culture or have entered common use in everyday life - the repressive regime is overseen by Big Brother, and the government's invented language "newspeak" was designed to limit freedom of thought. The term "doublethink" - where a person can accept two contradicting beliefs as both being correct - first emerged in the dystopian landscape of Airstrip One.

researchers at Harvard Medical School said it was time to ponder a startling new prospect: synthetic embryos.

They are starting to assemble stem cells that can organize themselves into embryolike structures.

But in the future, they may develop into far more complex forms, the researchers said, such as a beating human heart connected to a rudimentary brain, all created from stem cells

Cohen outlined a vision of 'Net-enabled scholarly publishing that I can only think to call the aggregation model: editorial committees scanning the 'Net to find the most interesting scholarly content in a given field or discipline, and highlighting it through websites and e-mail blasts that hearken back to the early days when weblogs were literally just collections of links with one- or two-sentence summaries attached. (An example, edited by Cohen and some of his associates: Digital Humanities Now.) Some of that work consists of traditional books and articles, but much of it consists of blog posts, online debates, etc. This model gives us scholarly work from the bottom up, instead of generating published scholarly work by tossing a piece into the random crapshoot of putatively blind peer-review and crossing your fingers to see what happens. It also gives us scholarly work that can be certified as such by the collective deliberation of the community, which "votes" for pieces and ideas by reading them, recirculating them, linking to them, and other signs of interest and approval that can be easily tracked with traffic-tracing tools. And then, on top of that editorial aggregation -- Cohen made a great point that this kind of aggregation shouldn't be fully automated, because automated tools reward "loudmouths" and popular voices that just get retweeted a lot; human editors can do a lot to surface novel insights and new voices -- an open-access journal that curates the best of those linked items into published pieces, perhaps with some revisions and peer review/commentary.

“Life is tragic simply because the earth turns, and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.

It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death – ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life.

We fall in love with our technology. That’s how we talk about our gadgets — with the language of emotional attachment, with irrational expectations about happily ever after.

I loved what was possible with it. Even though I wasn’t able to actually make it do anything, I knew that someone could. And that was enough, the mere idea of a machine, one that anyone could have in their home, that would take strings of symbols and turn them into music, into movement, into something else out there in the world.

We’re certainly into the magic zone — and yet, the magic is somehow fading for me. Technology has crossed the uncanny valley; it is simply too good at representing our real world.