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Mr. Bishop said Americans now choose “in their neighborhoods and their churches, to be around others who live like they do and think like they do — and, every four years, vote like they do.”

All this adds up to a kind of political echo chamber, in which like-minded thinkers reinforce one other.

He tested his thesis with an examination of the shifting geography of presidential politics, beginning in 1976, when Jimmy Carter won the presidency by the slimmest of margins, with 50.1 percent of the vote. That year, 26.8 percent of Americans lived in “landslide counties,” which voted either Democratic or Republican by 20 percentage points or more. By 2000, when Al Gore and George W. Bush split the popular vote, 45.3 percent of Americans lived in landslide counties. In 2008, the figure was 47.6 percent.

In 1980, Democrats and Republicans attended church at roughly the same rates. But Robert Putnam, a professor of public policy at Harvard who explores “the God gap” in his book “American Grace,” finds attendance has since gone up markedly for Republicans and declined among Democrats — a sign, he said, that “people are changing their involvement with religion as a function of their politics.”

Political clustering is reflected in religious participation and even shopping choices. David Wasserman, of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, recently calculated that 89 percent of the Whole Foods stores in the United States were in counties carried by Barack Obama in 2008, while 62 percent of Cracker Barrel restaurants were in counties carried by John McCain.

“Political activism is much easier when you’re surrounded by like-minded others,” said Diana Mutz, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania and author of “Hearing the Other Side.” “The very kind of environment that might be more likely to increase people’s exposures to different viewpoints and convince them that compromise is necessary is not the kind of environment that encourages them to speak out politically or get involved.”

Marketers, though, offer another explanation. Americans, they say, may profess an interest in compromise, as an abstract goal or principle. But they don’t want to make the trade-offs necessary to cut a deal. Daniel Yankelovich, a market researcher, developed what he called the “mushiness index” to assess whether people truly understand the costs associated with the principles they express.

Today, people can buy all sorts of products — from Converse sneakers to Dell computers — designed exactly as they want them. If Americans don’t want to compromise in buying sneakers, he reasons, why would they make trade-offs in politics?

It seems to poke fun at us for being such hotheads, and it uses the rules of probability -- the mathematical likeliness that something will occur -- to support itself.

In short, learning what did happen impedes you from retrieving what you thought would happen.

In 2002, psychologists asked nearly 1,000 Americans to recall how likely they had expected terrorism-related incidents—and other risky events—to be in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001. After a year in which fears had mostly subsided, they remembered being much less pessimistic than they had been at the time.

“We’re biased to see ourselves in a positive light,” says Deborah Small, a psychologist at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. “We want to believe that we’re rational and smart. We’ll recall our past actions as more sensible than they were. We also give ourselves too much credit and don’t remember our mistakes as well as we do our successes.”

take what psychologist Daniel Kahneman calls “the outside view.” Rather than try to figure out exactly how bad this crisis will be, look at the broader set of historical precedents.

Since 1929, the S&P 500 has suffered 14 bear markets, defined by S&P Dow Jones Indices as losses of at least 20%. The shortest and shallowest was the 20% drop that lasted less than three months in late 1990. The deepest was the 86.2% collapse from September 1929 to June 1932; the longest, the 60% plunge from March 1937 to April 1942. On average, bear markets lasted 19 months and dealt a 39% loss.

Recreating these and other features without LCDM’s titular ingredient, Spergel showed, requires the finest of theoretical needle threading. “We haven’t disproven the existence of all these [modified-gravity theories],” he says. “But any alternative theory has to jump through these hoops.”

Złosnik and Skordis believe they’ve done just that—although in a way that might surprise MOND skeptics and fans alike. They managed to construct a theory of gravity that contains an ingredient that acts exactly like an invisible form of matter on cosmic scales, blurring the line between the dark matter and MOND paradigms.

Their theory, dubbed RelMOND, adds to the equations of general relativity an omnipresent field that behaves differently in different arenas. On the grandest scales, where the universe noticeably stretches as it expands, the field acts like invisible matter. In this mode, which Złosnik calls “dark dust,” the field could have shaped the visible universe just as dark matter would

RelMOND “cannot do worse than LCDM,” says Złosnik, who notes that it very closely mimics that theory for the universe as a whole.

But if we zoom in on a galaxy, where the fabric of space holds rather still, the field acts in a way that’s true to its MOND roots: It entwines itself with the standard gravitational field, beefing it up just enough to hold a galaxy together without extra matter

(The researchers aren’t yet sure how the field acts for larger clusters of galaxies, a perennial MOND sore spot. They suggest that this intermediate scale might be a good place to look for observational clues that could set the theory apart.)

Despite this mathematical achievement by Złosnik and Skordis, dark matter remains the simpler theory. Constructing the new field takes four new moving mathematical parts, while LCDM handles dark matter with just one. Hooper likens the situation to a detective debating whether a person at a murder scene is the murderer or has been framed by the CIA. Even if the available evidence matches both theories, one requires less of a leap.

The girls who came to us had many comorbidities: depression, anxiety, ADHD, eating disorders, obesity. Many were diagnosed with autism, or had autism-like symptoms. A report last year on a British pediatric transgender center found that about one-third of the patients referred there were on the autism spectrum.

This concerned me, but didn’t feel I was in the position to sound some kind of alarm back then. There was a team of about eight of us, and only one other person brought up the kinds of questions I had. Anyone who raised doubts ran the risk of being called a transphobe. 

I certainly saw this at the center. One of my jobs was to do intake for new patients and their families. When I started there were probably 10 such calls a month. When I left there were 50, and about 70 percent of the new patients were girls. Sometimes clusters of girls arrived from the same high school. 

There are no reliable studies showing this. Indeed, the experiences of many of the center’s patients prove how false these assertions are. 

The doctors privately recognized these false self-diagnoses as a manifestation of social contagion. They even acknowledged that suicide has an element of social contagion. But when I said the clusters of girls streaming into our service looked as if their gender issues might be a manifestation of social contagion, the doctors said gender identity reflected something innate.

To begin transitioning, the girls needed a letter of support from a therapist—usually one we recommended—who they had to see only once or twice for the green light. To make it more efficient for the therapists, we offered them a template for how to write a letter in support of transition. The next stop was a single visit to the endocrinologist for a testosterone prescription. 

When a female takes testosterone, the profound and permanent effects of the hormone can be seen in a matter of months. Voices drop, beards sprout, body fat is redistributed. Sexual interest explodes, aggression increases, and mood can be unpredictable. Our patients were told about some side effects, including sterility. But after working at the center, I came to believe that teenagers are simply not capable of fully grasping what it means to make the decision to become infertile while still a minor.

Many encounters with patients emphasized to me how little these young people understood the profound impacts changing gender would have on their bodies and minds. But the center downplayed the negative consequences, and emphasized the need for transition. As the center’s website said, “Left untreated, gender dysphoria has any number of consequences, from self-harm to suicide. But when you take away the gender dysphoria by allowing a child to be who he or she is, we’re noticing that goes away. The studies we have show these kids often wind up functioning psychosocially as well as or better than their peers.” 

Frequently, our patients declared they had disorders that no one believed they had. We had patients who said they had Tourette syndrome (but they didn’t); that they had tic disorders (but they didn’t); that they had multiple personalities (but they didn’t).

Here’s an example. On Friday, May 1, 2020, a colleague emailed me about a 15-year-old male patient: “Oh dear. I am concerned that [the patient] does not understand what Bicalutamide does.” I responded: “I don’t think that we start anything honestly right now.”

Bicalutamide is a medication used to treat metastatic prostate cancer, and one of its side effects is that it feminizes the bodies of men who take it, including the appearance of breasts. The center prescribed this cancer drug as a puberty blocker and feminizing agent for boys. As with most cancer drugs, bicalutamide has a long list of side effects, and this patient experienced one of them: liver toxicity. He was sent to another unit of the hospital for evaluation and immediately taken off the drug. Afterward, his mother sent an electronic message to the Transgender Center saying that we were lucky her family was not the type to sue.

How little patients understood what they were getting into was illustrated by a call we received at the center in 2020 from a 17-year-old biological female patient who was on testosterone. She said she was bleeding from the vagina. In less than an hour she had soaked through an extra heavy pad, her jeans, and a towel she had wrapped around her waist. The nurse at the center told her to go to the emergency room right away.

when there was a dispute between the parents, it seemed the center always took the side of the affirming parent.

Other girls were disturbed by the effects of testosterone on their clitoris, which enlarges and grows into what looks like a microphallus, or a tiny penis. I counseled one patient whose enlarged clitoris now extended below her vulva, and it chafed and rubbed painfully in her jeans. I advised her to get the kind of compression undergarments worn by biological men who dress to pass as female. At the end of the call I thought to myself, “Wow, we hurt this kid.”

There are rare conditions in which babies are born with atypical genitalia—cases that call for sophisticated care and compassion. But clinics like the one where I worked are creating a whole cohort of kids with atypical genitals—and most of these teens haven’t even had sex yet. They had no idea who they were going to be as adults. Yet all it took for them to permanently transform themselves was one or two short conversations with a therapist.

Being put on powerful doses of testosterone or estrogen—enough to try to trick your body into mimicking the opposite sex—-affects the rest of the body. I doubt that any parent who's ever consented to give their kid testosterone (a lifelong treatment) knows that they’re also possibly signing their kid up for blood pressure medication, cholesterol medication, and perhaps sleep apnea and diabetes. 

Besides teenage girls, another new group was referred to us: young people from the inpatient psychiatric unit, or the emergency department, of St. Louis Children’s Hospital. The mental health of these kids was deeply concerning—there were diagnoses like schizophrenia, PTSD, bipolar disorder, and more. Often they were already on a fistful of pharmaceuticals.

no matter how much suffering or pain a child had endured, or how little treatment and love they had received, our doctors viewed gender transition—even with all the expense and hardship it entailed—as the solution.

Another disturbing aspect of the center was its lack of regard for the rights of parents—and the extent to which doctors saw themselves as more informed decision-makers over the fate of these children.

We found out later this girl had had intercourse, and because testosterone thins the vaginal tissues, her vaginal canal had ripped open. She had to be sedated and given surgery to repair the damage. She wasn’t the only vaginal laceration case we heard about.

During the four years I worked at the clinic as a case manager—I was responsible for patient intake and oversight—around a thousand distressed young people came through our doors. The majority of them received hormone prescriptions that can have life-altering consequences—including sterility. 

I left the clinic in November of last year because I could no longer participate in what was happening there. By the time I departed, I was certain that the way the American medical system is treating these patients is the opposite of the promise we make to “do no harm.” Instead, we are permanently harming the vulnerable patients in our care.

Today I am speaking out. I am doing so knowing how toxic the public conversation is around this highly contentious issue—and the ways that my testimony might be misused. I am doing so knowing that I am putting myself at serious personal and professional risk.

Almost everyone in my life advised me to keep my head down. But I cannot in good conscience do so. Because what is happening to scores of children is far more important than my comfort. And what is happening to them is morally and medically appalling.

For almost four years, I worked at The Washington University School of Medicine Division of Infectious Diseases with teens and young adults who were HIV positive. Many of them were trans or otherwise gender nonconforming, and I could relate: Through childhood and adolescence, I did a lot of gender questioning myself. I’m now married to a transman, and together we are raising my two biological children from a previous marriage and three foster children we hope to adopt. 

The center’s working assumption was that the earlier you treat kids with gender dysphoria, the more anguish you can prevent later on. This premise was shared by the center’s doctors and therapists. Given their expertise, I assumed that abundant evidence backed this consensus. 

All that led me to a job in 2018 as a case manager at The Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children's Hospital, which had been established a year earlier. 

“And one of the things we want is to spend more time with people who think like us and less with people who are different,” Haidt added. “The Facebook effect isn’t trivial. But it’s catalyzing or amplifying a tendency that was already there.”

prevalent for many users are the posts we see from friends and from other people and groups we follow on the network, and this information is utterly contingent on choices we ourselves make

The Internet isn’t rigged to give us right or left, conservative or liberal — at least not until we rig it that way. It’s designed to give us more of the same, whatever that same is

So it goes with the fiction we read, the movies we watch, the music we listen to and, scarily, the ideas we subscribe to. They’re not challenged. They’re validated and reinforced.

this colors our days, or rather bleeds them of color, reducing them to a single hue.

Facebook, along with other social media, definitely conspires in this. Haidt noted that it often discourages dissent within a cluster of friends by accelerating shaming. He pointed to the enforced political correctness among students at many colleges.

Carnival barkers, conspiracy theories, willful bias and nasty partisanship aren’t anything new, and they haven’t reached unprecedented heights today. But what’s remarkable and sort of heartbreaking is the way they’re fed by what should be strides in our ability to educate ourselves.

The proliferation of cable television networks and growth of the Internet promised to expand our worlds, not shrink them. Instead they’ve enhanced the speed and thoroughness with which we retreat into enclaves of the like-minded.

there’s no argument that in an era that teems with choice, brims with niche marketing and exalts individualism to the extent that ours does, we’re sorting ourselves with a chillingly ruthless efficiency. We’ve surrendered universal points of reference. We’ve lost common ground.

Marc Dunkelman, adding that it also makes it easier for us to avoid “face-to-face interactions with diverse ideas.” He touched on this in an incisive 2014 book, “The Vanishing Neighbor,” which belongs with Haidt’s work and with “Bowling Alone,” “Coming Apart” and “The Fractured Republic” in the literature of modern American fragmentation, a booming genre all its own.

We’re less committed to, and trustful of, large institutions than we were at times in the past. We question their wisdom and substitute it with the groupthink of micro-communities, many of which we’ve formed online, and their sensibilities can be more peculiar and unforgiving.

We construct precisely contoured echo chambers of affirmation that turn conviction into zeal, passion into fury, disagreements with the other side into the demonization of it

It’s not about some sorcerer’s algorithm. It’s about a tribalism that has existed for as long as humankind has and is now rooted in the fertile soil of the Internet, which is coaxing it toward a full and insidious flower

If replication is what separates the rigor of science from the squishiness of pseudoscience, where do we put all these rigorously validated findings that can no longer be proved? Which results should we believe?

Schooler demonstrated that subjects shown a face and asked to describe it were much less likely to recognize the face when shown it later than those who had simply looked at it. Schooler called the phenomenon “verbal overshadowing.”

The most likely explanation for the decline is an obvious one: regression to the mean. As the experiment is repeated, that is, an early statistical fluke gets cancelled out. The extrasensory powers of Schooler’s subjects didn’t decline—they were simply an illusion that vanished over time.

yet Schooler has noticed that many of the data sets that end up declining seem statistically solid—that is, they contain enough data that any regression to the mean shouldn’t be dramatic. “These are the results that pass all the tests,” he says. “The odds of them being random are typically quite remote, like one in a million. This means that the decline effect should almost never happen. But it happens all the time!

this is why Schooler believes that the decline effect deserves more attention: its ubiquity seems to violate the laws of statistics

In 2001, Michael Jennions, a biologist at the Australian National University, set out to analyze “temporal trends” across a wide range of subjects in ecology and evolutionary biology. He looked at hundreds of papers and forty-four meta-analyses (that is, statistical syntheses of related studies), and discovered a consistent decline effect over time, as many of the theories seemed to fade into irrelevance.

Jennions admits that his findings are troubling, but expresses a reluctance to talk about them

publicly. “This is a very sensitive issue for scientists,” he says. “You know, we’re supposed to be dealing with hard facts, the stuff that’s supposed to stand the test of time. But when you see these trends you become a little more skeptical of things.”

While publication bias almost certainly plays a role in the decline effect, it remains an incomplete explanation. For one thing, it fails to account for the initial prevalence of positive results among studies that never even get submitted to journals. It also fails to explain the experience of people like Schooler, who have been unable to replicate their initial data despite their best efforts.

Jennions, similarly, argues that the decline effect is largely a product of publication bias, or the tendency of scientists and scientific journals to prefer positive data over null results, which is what happens when no effect is found. The bias was first identified by the statistician Theodore Sterling, in 1959, after he noticed that ninety-seven per cent of all published psychological studies with statistically significant data found the effect they were looking for

Sterling saw that if ninety-seven per cent of psychology studies were proving their hypotheses, either psychologists were extraordinarily lucky or they published only the outcomes of successful experiments.

One of his most cited papers has a deliberately provocative title: “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.”

suspects that an equally significant issue is the selective reporting of results—the data that scientists choose to document in the first place. Palmer’s most convincing evidence relies on a statistical tool known as a funnel graph. When a large number of studies have been done on a single subject, the data should follow a pattern: studies with a large sample size should all cluster around a common value—the true result—whereas those with a smaller sample size should exhibit a random scattering, since they’re subject to greater sampling error. This pattern gives the graph its name, since the distribution resembles a funnel.

after Palmer plotted every study of fluctuating asymmetry, he noticed that the distribution of results with smaller sample sizes wasn’t random at all but instead skewed heavily toward positive results. Palmer has since documented a similar problem in several other contested subject areas. “Once I realized that selective reporting is everywhere in science, I got quite depressed,” Palmer told me. “As a researcher, you’re always aware that there might be some nonrandom patterns, but I had no idea how widespread it is.”

Palmer summarized the impact of selective reporting on his field: “We cannot escape the troubling conclusion that some—perhaps many—cherished generalities are at best exaggerated in their biological significance and at worst a collective illusion nurtured by strong a-priori beliefs often repeated.”

Palmer emphasizes that selective reporting is not the same as scientific fraud. Rather, the problem seems to be one of subtle omissions and unconscious misperceptions, as researchers struggle to make sense of their results. Stephen Jay Gould referred to this as the “sho

horning” process.

“A lot of scientific measurement is really hard,” Simmons told me. “If you’re talking about fluctuating asymmetry, then it’s a matter of minuscule differences between the right and left sides of an animal. It’s millimetres of a tail feather. And so maybe a researcher knows that he’s measuring a good male”—an animal that has successfully mated—“and he knows that it’s supposed to be symmetrical. Well, that act of measurement is going to be vulnerable to all sorts of perception biases. That’s not a cynical statement. That’s just the way human beings work.”

For Simmons, the steep rise and slow fall of fluctuating asymmetry is a clear example of a scientific paradigm, one of those intellectual fads that both guide and constrain research: after a new paradigm is proposed, the peer-review process is tilted toward positive results. But then, after a few years, the academic incentives shift—the paradigm has become entrenched—so that the most notable results are now those that disprove the theory.

John Ioannidis, an epidemiologist at Stanford University, argues that such distortions are a serious issue in biomedical research. “These exaggerations are why the decline has become so common,” he says. “It’d be really great if the initial studies gave us an accurate summary of things. But they don’t. And so what happens is we waste a lot of money treating millions of patients and doing lots of follow-up studies on other themes based on results that are misleading.”

In 2005, Ioannidis published an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association that looked at the forty-nine most cited clinical-research studies in three major medical journals.

the data Ioannidis found were disturbing: of the thirty-four claims that had been subject to replication, forty-one per cent had either been directly contradicted or had their effect sizes significantly downgraded.

the most troubling fact emerged when he looked at the test of replication: out of four hundred and thirty-two claims, only a single one was consistently replicable. “This doesn’t mean that none of these claims will turn out to be true,” he says. “But, given that most of them were done badly, I wouldn’t hold my breath.”

According to Ioannidis, the main problem is that too many researchers engage in what he calls “significance chasing,” or finding ways to interpret the data so that it passes the statistical test of significance—the ninety-five-per-cent boundary invented by Ronald Fisher.

One of the classic examples of selective reporting concerns the testing of acupuncture in different countries. While acupuncture is widely accepted as a medical treatment in various Asian countries, its use is much more contested in the West. These cultural differences have profoundly influenced the results of clinical trials.

The problem of selective reporting is rooted in a fundamental cognitive flaw, which is that we like proving ourselves right and hate being wrong.

“It feels good to validate a hypothesis,” Ioannidis said. “It feels even better when you’ve got a financial interest in the idea or your career depends upon it. And that’s why, even after a claim has been systematically disproven”—he cites, for instance, the early work on hormone replacement therapy, or claims involving various vitamins—“you still see some stubborn researchers citing the first few studies

That’s why Schooler argues that scientists need to become more rigorous about data collection before they publish. “We’re wasting too much time chasing after bad studies and underpowered experiments,”

The current “obsession” with replicability distracts from the real problem, which is faulty design.

“Every researcher should have to spell out, in advance, how many subjects they’re going to use, and what exactly they’re testing, and what constitutes a sufficient level of proof. We have the tools to be much more transparent about our experiments.”

Schooler recommends the establishment of an open-source database, in which researchers are required to outline their planned investigations and document all their results. “I think this would provide a huge increase in access to scientific work and give us a much better way to judge the quality of an experiment,”

scientific research will always be shadowed by a force that can’t be curbed, only contained: sheer randomness. Although little research has been done on the experimental dangers of chance and happenstance, the research that exists isn’t encouraging.

The disturbing implication of the Crabbe study is that a lot of extraordinary scientific data are nothing but noise. The hyperactivity of those coked-up Edmonton mice wasn’t an interesting new fact—it was a meaningless outlier, a by-product of invisible variables we don’t understand.

The problem, of course, is that such dramatic findings are also the most likely to get published in prestigious journals, since the data are both statistically significant and entirely unexpected

This suggests that the decline effect is actually a decline of illusion. While Karl Popper imagined falsification occurring with a single, definitive experiment—Galileo refuted Aristotelian mechanics in an afternoon—the process turns out to be much messier than that.

Many scientific theories continue to be considered true even after failing numerous experimental tests.

Even the law of gravity hasn’t always been perfect at predicting real-world phenomena. (In one test, physicists measuring gravity by means of deep boreholes in the Nevada desert found a two-and-a-half-per-cent discrepancy between the theoretical predictions and the actual data.)

Such anomalies demonstrate the slipperiness of empiricism. Although many scientific ideas generate conflicting results and suffer from falling effect sizes, they continue to get cited in the textbooks and drive standard medical practice. Why? Because these ideas seem true. Because they make sense. Because we can’t bear to let them go. And this is why the decline effect is so troubling. Not because it reveals the human fallibility of science, in which data are tweaked and beliefs shape perceptions. (Such shortcomings aren’t surprising, at least for scientists.) And not because it reveals that many of our most exciting theories are fleeting fads and will soon be rejected. (That idea has been around since Thomas Kuhn.)

The decline effect is troubling because it reminds us how difficult it is to prove anything. We like to pretend that our experiments define the truth for us. But that’s often not the case. Just because an idea is true doesn’t mean it can be proved. And just because an idea can be proved doesn’t mean it’s true. When the experiments are done, we still have to choose what to believe. ♦

Students sometimes argue that their talents have improved so dramatically that they are deserving of higher grades. Past studies, however, have found little evidence of this.

While it’s true that top schools have become more selective, the overall universe of students attending college has gotten broader, reflecting a wider distribution of abilities and levels of preparation, especially at the bottom. College students today also study less and do not appear to be more literate than their predecessors were.

Plus, of course, even if students have gotten smarter, or at least more efficient at studying (hey, computers do help), grades are arguably also supposed to measure relative achievement among classmates.

Affirmative action also sometimes gets blamed for rising grades; supposedly, professors have been loath to hurt the feelings of underprepared minority students. Rojstaczer and Healy note, however, that much of the increase in minority enrollment occurred from the mid-1970s to mid-’80s, the only period in recent decades when average GPAs fell.

That first era, the researchers say, can be explained by changes in pedagogical philosophy (some professors began seeing grades as overly authoritarian and ineffective at motivating students) and mortal exigencies (male students needed higher grades to avoid the Vietnam draft).

The authors attribute today’s inflation to the consumerization of higher education. That is, students pay more in tuition, and expect more in return — better service, better facilities and better grades. Or at least a leg up in employment and graduate school admissions through stronger transcripts.

some universities have explicitly lifted their grading curves (sometimes retroactively) to make graduates more competitive in the job market, leading to a sort of grade inflation arms race

But rising tuition may not be the sole driver of students’ expectations for better grades, given that high school grades have also risen in recent decades. And rather than some top-down directive from administrators, grade inflation also seems related to a steady creep of pressure on professors to give higher grades in exchange for better teaching evaluations.

It’s unclear how the clustering of grades near the top is affecting student effort. But it certainly makes it harder to accurately measure how much students have learned. It also makes it more challenging for grad schools and employers to sort the superstars from the also-rans

Lax or at least inconsistent grading standards can also distort what students — especially women — choose to study, pushing them away from more stingily graded science, technology, engineering and math fields and into humanities, where high grades are easier to come by.

Without collective action — which means both standing up to students and publicly shaming other schools into adopting higher standards — the arms race will continue.

“Why do we have music?” Dr. Kanwisher said in an interview. “Why do we enjoy it so much and want to dance when we hear it? How early in development can we see this sensitivity to music, and is it tunable with experience? These are the really cool first-order questions we can begin to address.”

Dr. McDermott said the new method could be used to computationally dissect any scans from a functional magnetic resonance imaging device, or F.M.R.I. — the trendy workhorse of contemporary neuroscience — and so may end up divulging other hidden gems of cortical specialization. As proof of principle, the researchers showed that their analytical protocol had detected a second neural pathway in the brain for which scientists already had evidence — this one tuned to the sounds of human speech.

Importantly, the M.I.T. team demonstrated that the speech and music circuits are in different parts of the brain’s sprawling auditory cortex, where all sound signals are interpreted, and that each is largely deaf to the other’s sonic cues, although there is some overlap when it comes to responding to songs with lyrics.

In fact, Dr. Rauschecker said, music sensitivity may be more fundamental to the human brain than is speech perception. “There are theories that music is older than speech or language,” he said. “Some even argue that speech evolved from music.”

And though the survival value that music held for our ancestors may not be as immediately obvious as the power to recognize words, Dr. Rauschecker added, “music works as a group cohesive. Music-making with other people in your tribe is a very ancient, human thing to do.”

when previous neuroscientists failed to find any anatomically distinct music center in the brain, they came up with any number of rationales to explain the results.“The story was, oh, what’s special about music perception is how it recruits areas from all over the brain, how it draws on the motor system, speech circuitry, social understanding, and brings it all together,” she said. Some researchers dismissed music as “auditory cheesecake,” a pastime that co-opted other essential communicative urges. “This paper says, no, when you peer below the cruder level seen with some methodologies, you find very specific circuitry that responds to music over speech.”

The researchers wondered if the auditory system might be similarly organized to make sense of the soundscape through a categorical screen. If so, what would the salient categories be? What are the aural equivalents of a human face or a human leg — sounds or sound elements so essential the brain assigns a bit of gray matter to the task of detecting them?

Focusing on the brain’s auditory region — located, appropriately enough, in the temporal lobes right above the ears — the scientists analyzed voxels, or three-dimensional pixels, of the images mathematically to detect similar patterns of neuronal excitement or quietude.“The strength of our method is that it’s hypothesis-neutral,” Dr. McDermott said. “We just present a bunch of sounds and let the data do the talking.”

Matching sound clips to activation patterns, the researchers determined that four of the patterns were linked to general physical properties of sound, like pitch and frequency. The fifth traced the brain’s perception of speech, and for the sixth the data turned operatic, disclosing a neuronal hot spot in the major crevice, or sulcus, of the auditory cortex that attended to every music clip the researchers had played.

“The sound of a solo drummer, whistling, pop songs, rap, almost everything that has a musical quality to it, melodic or rhythmic, would activate it,” Dr. Norman-Haignere said. “That’s one reason the result surprised us. The signals of speech are so much more homogeneous.”

The researchers have yet to determine exactly which acoustic features of music stimulate its dedicated pathway. The relative constancy of a musical note’s pitch? Its harmonic overlays? Even saying what music is can be tricky.

This kind of modeling is already in use to study individual cellular processes like metabolism. But Dr. Covert said: “Where I think our work is different is that we explicitly include all of the genes and every known gene function. There’s no one else out there who has been able to include more than a handful of functions or more than, say, one-third of the genes.”

The simulation, which runs on a cluster of 128 computers, models the complete life span of the cell at the molecular level, charting the interactions of 28 categories of molecules — including DNA, RNA, proteins and small molecules known as metabolites, which are generated by cell processes.

They called the simulation an important advance in the new field of computational biology, which has recently yielded such achievements as the creation of a synthetic life form — an entire bacterial genome created by a team led by the genome pioneer J. Craig Venter. The scientists used it to take over an existing cell.

A decade ago, scientists developed simulations of metabolism that are now being used to study a wide array of cells, including bacteria, yeast and photosynthetic organisms. Other models exist for processes like protein synthesis.

“Right now, running a simulation for a single cell to divide only one time takes around 10 hours and generates half a gigabyte of data,” Dr. Covert wrote. “I find this fact completely fascinating, because I don’t know that anyone has ever asked how much data a living thing truly holds. We often think of the DNA as the storage medium, but clearly there is more to it than that.”

scientists chose an approach called object-oriented programming, which parallels the design of modern software systems. Software designers organize their programs in modules, which communicate with one another by passing data and instructions back and forth.

“The major modeling insight we had a few years ago was to break up the functionality of the cell into subgroups, which we could model individually, each with its own mathematics, and then to integrate these submodels together into a whole,”

“Our consumption of content isn’t synchronous,” he said. “Things are interesting to a small group, a cluster of friends or on Reddit — then they die.” He continued: “Then they pick up and go massive. There are these little ripple effects all around the Web, little waves that converge in a pool and make big waves.”

THERE are other signs to indicate a replay aesthetic is coming to the Web. For example, the latest version of the iPhone’s mobile software will include the ability to capture video in slow motion.

The way we use technology could be reshaping our sense of time and urgency. Douglas Rushkoff, the author of “Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now,” describes present shock as the stupefaction that overtakes people as they try to keep up with the never-ending onslaught of status updates, photo feeds and looping videos constantly refreshing before their eyes.

present shock keeps us suspended in a state of constant disarray, and causes us to prioritize the recent over the relevant and the new instead of the most important.

the medium of the loop — either in a GIF, a short clip posted to Vine, or Instagram photo- and video-sharing applications — has become a crucial framework for transmitting information. It mimics the way we remember — by repetition — and future tools could make use of that to understand not only how we transmit information but also how we retain it.

Perhaps the replay Web, by allowing us to constantly revisit and reconsider the recent past, can help us find new meaning in it.

This is one key feature of the faith-based presidency: open dialogue, based on facts, is not seen as something of inherent value. It may, in fact, create doubt, which undercuts faith. It could result in a loss of confidence in the decision-maker and, just as important, by the decision-maker.

has spent a lot of time trying to size up the president. ''Most successful people are good at identifying, very early, their strengths and weaknesses, at knowing themselves,'' he told me not long ago. ''For most of us average Joes, that meant we've relied on strengths but had to work on our weakness -- to lift them to adequacy -- otherwise they might bring us down. I don't think the president really had to do that, because he always had someone there -- his family or friends -- to bail him out. I don't think, on balance, that has served him well for the moment he's in now as president. He never seems to have worked on his weaknesses.''

Details vary, but here's the gist of what I understand took place. George W., drunk at a party, crudely insulted a friend of his mother's. George senior and Barbara blew up. Words were exchanged along the lines of something having to be done. George senior, then the vice president, dialed up his friend, Billy Graham, who came to the compound and spent several days with George W. in probing exchanges and walks on the beach. George W. was soon born again. He stopped drinking, attended Bible study and wrestled with issues of fervent faith. A man who was lost was saved.

Rubenstein described that time to a convention of pension managers in Los Angeles last year, recalling that Malek approached him and said: ''There is a guy who would like to be on the board. He's kind of down on his luck a bit. Needs a job. . . . Needs some board positions.'' Though Rubenstein didn't think George W. Bush, then in his mid-40's, ''added much value,'' he put him on the Caterair board. ''Came to all the meetings,'' Rubenstein told the conventioneers. ''Told a lot of jokes. Not that many clean ones. And after a while I kind of said to him, after about three years: 'You know, I'm not sure this is really for you. Maybe you should do something else. Because I don't think you're adding that much value to the board. You don't know that much about the company.' He said: 'Well, I think I'm getting out of this business anyway. And I don't really like it that much. So I'm probably going to resign from the board.' And I said thanks. Didn't think I'd ever see him again.''

challenges -- from either Powell or his opposite number as the top official in domestic policy, Paul O'Neill -- were trials that Bush had less and less patience for as the months passed. He made that clear to his top lieutenants. Gradually, Bush lost what Richard Perle, who would later head a largely private-sector group under Bush called the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee, had described as his open posture during foreign-policy tutorials prior to the 2000 campaign. (''He had the confidence to ask questions that revealed he didn't know very much,'' Perle said.) By midyear 2001, a stand-and-deliver rhythm was established. Meetings, large and small, started to take on a scripted quality.

That a deep Christian faith illuminated the personal journey of George W. Bush is common knowledge. But faith has also shaped his presidency in profound, nonreligious ways. The president has demanded unquestioning faith from his followers, his staff, his senior aides and his kindred in the Republican Party. Once he makes a decision -- often swiftly, based on a creed or moral position -- he expects complete faith in its rightness.

A cluster of particularly vivid qualities was shaping George W. Bush's White House through the summer of 2001: a disdain for contemplation or deliberation, an embrace of decisiveness, a retreat from empiricism, a sometimes bullying impatience with doubters and even friendly questioners.

By summer's end that first year, Vice President Dick Cheney had stopped talking in meetings he attended with Bush. They would talk privately, or at their weekly lunch. The president was spending a lot of time outside the White House, often at the ranch, in the presence of only the most trustworthy confidants.

''When I was first with Bush in Austin, what I saw was a self-help Methodist, very open, seeking,'' Wallis says now. ''What I started to see at this point was the man that would emerge over the next year -- a messianic American Calvinist. He doesn't want to hear from anyone who doubts him.''

, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

''If you operate in a certain way -- by saying this is how I want to justify what I've already decided to do, and I don't care how you pull it off -- you guarantee that you'll get faulty, one-sided information,'' Paul O'Neill, who was asked to resign his post of treasury secretary in December 2002, said when we had dinner a few weeks ago. ''You don't have to issue an edict, or twist arms, or be overt.''

George W. Bush and his team have constructed a high-performance electoral engine. The soul of this new machine is the support of millions of likely voters, who judge his worth based on intangibles -- character, certainty, fortitude and godliness -- rather than on what he says or does.

Fortna finds that terror “is a cheap way to inflict pain on the other side, and terrorist groups are hard to eliminate completely, but it is useless for taking or holding territory.”

Non-terrorist movements are far more likely to win a settlement or an outright victory, while terrorist movements tend to lose, fizzle out, or drag on

What terrorism does do well is prolong wars—as the heavy clustering around the “low activity” and “ongoing” categories in the chart illustrates. This appears to demonstrate why groups might turn to terror and why the strategy falters. Since deploying terrorism makes wars longer, it also lengthens the lifespans of the groups that are engaging in it. One reason for this is that it’s hard for authorities to stamp out a terror campaign. But it’s also very hard for terrorist groups to capture and hold territory, an essential goal in a civil war.

Empowered by their own sources of information and their own interpretations of research, doubters have declared war on the consensus of experts.

Our lives are permeated by science and technology as never before. For many of us this new world is wondrous, comfortable, and rich in rewards—but also more complicated and sometimes unnerving. We now face risks we can’t easily analyze.

The world crackles with real and imaginary hazards, and distinguishing the former from the latter isn’t easy.

In this bewildering world we have to decide what to believe and how to act on that. In principle that’s what science is for.

“Science is not a body of facts,” says geophysicist Marcia McNutt,

“Science is a method for deciding whether what we choose to believe has a basis in the laws of nature or not.”

The scientific method leads us to truths that are less than self-evident, often mind-blowing, and sometimes hard to swallow.

We don’t believe you.

Galileo was put on trial and forced to recant. Two centuries later Charles Darwin escaped that fate. But his idea that all life on Earth evolved from a primordial ancestor and that we humans are distant cousins of apes, whales, and even deep-sea mollusks is still a big ask for a lot of people. So is another 19th-century notion: that carbon dioxide, an invisible gas that we all exhale all the time and that makes up less than a tenth of one percent of the atmosphere, could be affecting Earth’s climate.

we intellectually accept these precepts of science, we subconsciously cling to our intuitions

Shtulman’s research indicates that as we become scientifically literate, we repress our naive beliefs but never eliminate them entirely. They lurk in our brains, chirping at us as we try to make sense of the world.

Most of us do that by relying on personal experience and anecdotes, on stories rather than statistics.

We have trouble digesting randomness; our brains crave pattern and meaning.

we can deceive ourselves.

Even for scientists, the scientific method is a hard discipline. Like the rest of us, they’re vulnerable to what they call confirmation bias—the tendency to look for and see only evidence that confirms what they already believe. But unlike the rest of us, they submit their ideas to formal peer review before publishing them

other scientists will try to reproduce them

Scientific results are always provisional, susceptible to being overturned by some future experiment or observation. Scientists rarely proclaim an absolute truth or absolute certainty. Uncertainty is inevitable at the frontiers of knowledge.

Many people in the United States—a far greater percentage than in other countries—retain doubts about that consensus or believe that climate activists are using the threat of global warming to attack the free market and industrial society generally.

news media give abundant attention to such mavericks, naysayers, professional controversialists, and table thumpers. The media would also have you believe that science is full of shocking discoveries made by lone geniuses

science tells us the truth rather than what we’d like the truth to be. Scientists can be as dogmatic as anyone else—but their dogma is always wilting in the hot glare of new research.

But industry PR, however misleading, isn’t enough to explain why only 40 percent of Americans, according to the most recent poll from the Pew Research Center, accept that human activity is the dominant cause of global warming.

“science communication problem,”

yielded abundant new research into how people decide what to believe—and why they so often don’t accept the scientific consensus.

higher literacy was associated with stronger views—at both ends of the spectrum. Science literacy promoted polarization on climate, not consensus. According to Kahan, that’s because people tend to use scientific knowledge to reinforce beliefs that have already been shaped by their worldview.

“egalitarian” and “communitarian” mind-set are generally suspicious of industry and apt to think it’s up to something dangerous that calls for government regulation; they’re likely to see the risks of climate change.

“hierarchical” and “individualistic” mind-set respect leaders of industry and don’t like government interfering in their affairs; they’re apt to reject warnings about climate change, because they know what accepting them could lead to—some kind of tax or regulation to limit emissions.

For a hierarchical individualist, Kahan says, it’s not irrational to reject established climate science: Accepting it wouldn’t change the world, but it might get him thrown out of his tribe.

Science appeals to our rational brain, but our beliefs are motivated largely by emotion, and the biggest motivation is remaining tight with our peers.

organizations funded in part by the fossil fuel industry have deliberately tried to undermine the public’s understanding of the scientific consensus by promoting a few skeptics.

Internet makes it easier than ever for climate skeptics and doubters of all kinds to find their own information and experts

Internet has democratized information, which is a good thing. But along with cable TV, it has made it possible to live in a “filter bubble” that lets in only the information with which you already agree.

How to convert climate skeptics? Throwing more facts at them doesn’t help.

people need to hear from believers they can trust, who share their fundamental values.

We believe in scientific ideas not because we have truly evaluated all the evidence but because we feel an affinity for the scientific community.

“Believing in evolution is just a description about you. It’s not an account of how you reason.”

evolution actually happened. Biology is incomprehensible without it. There aren’t really two sides to all these issues. Climate change is happening. Vaccines really do save lives. Being right does matter—and the science tribe has a long track record of getting things right in the end. Modern society is built on things it got right.

Doubting science also has consequences.

In the climate debate the consequences of doubt are likely global and enduring. In the U.S., climate change skeptics have achieved their fundamental goal of halting legislative action to combat global warming.

“That line between science communication and advocacy is very hard to step back from,”

It’s their very detachment, what you might call the cold-bloodedness of science, that makes science the killer app.

that need to fit in is so strong that local values and local opinions are always trumping science.

not a sin to change your mind when the evidence demands it.

for the best scientists, the truth is more important than the tribe.

Students come away thinking of science as a collection of facts, not a method.

Shtulman’s research has shown that even many college students don’t really understand what evidence is.

“Everybody should be questioning,” says McNutt. “That’s a hallmark of a scientist. But then they should use the scientific method, or trust people using the scientific method, to decide which way they fall on those questions.”

science has made us the dominant organisms,

incredibly rapid change, and it’s scary sometimes. It’s not all progress.

For years, the form had been ignored by many Pakistani artists. I found it ripe with potential — to change its status and its narrative and to deconstruct its stereotypes. What others saw as enslavement to tradition, I recognized as a path to expanding the medium from within, embracing the complexities of craft and rigor in order to open up possibilities for dialogue.

My interest in juxtaposing hip-hop and Indo-Persian miniature painting, the primary medium through which I have told stories, is in taking these two disparate narrative forms and letting the dissonance find a detour.

Much in the way that hip-hop’s place in popular culture was diminishing by the time Nas took it up in the early 1990s, Indo-Persian miniature painting fell from relevance in Pakistani culture. The practice shifted so dramatically after the fall of the Mughal Empire and the rise of colonial rule in South Asia during the 19th century that when I began engaging with the miniature in my work in the late 1980s and early ’90s at the National College of Arts in Lahore, it was regarded as tourist kitsch and derided as a craft technique.

My work over the past 20 years has both borrowed and departed from traditional modes of miniature painting. One of these elements, the hair of Gopis — the female consorts of the Hindu god Krishna — appears in this painting, circling around the central axis. Over the past 15 years, I have been experimenting by divorcing their signature hairstyles from the rest of their bodies as a means of identifying them. The Gopi hair, in its many transformed and recontextualized iterations, takes on the appearance of bats, particles or elements of a moving mass. In this painting, the Gopis swirl around Africa and move outward. In their clusters around the central glowing orb of Africa, the Gopis coalesce and overlap, suggesting a symbol that became ubiquitous in 2014: the biohazard sign.

My process is driven by my interest in exploring and rediscovering cultural and political boundaries, and using that space to create new frameworks for dialogue and visual narrative. Contemporaneity is about remaining relevant by challenging the status quo, not by clinging to past successes. This is at odds with the standards set up in the worlds of commercial art and music, which are more interested in branding and often hold an artist hostage to one idea or form.

the number of advanced-placement classes that local students feel compelled to take and the number of hospitalizations for depression rise in tandem.

They reflect a status consciousness that bedevils Americans at all income levels, and they underscore an economic trepidation that is sadly widespread and is seemingly intensified by the gaping divide between the haves and have-nots.

According to a 2013 survey by the C.D.C., 17 percent of American high school students had considered suicide in the previous year. Eight percent said they’d attempted it.

“There’s something about childhood itself in Palo Alto and in communities like Palo Alto that undermines the mental health and wellness of our children,

It reflects on the shortfalls of some modern parenting, which, in her view, can be not only overprotective but overbearing, micromanaging the lives of children, pointing them toward specific mile markers of achievement and denying them any time to flail or room to fail. They wind up simultaneously frazzled and fragile

“The suicides are tragic, but they are at the pointy head of the pyramid, the tippy top,” she said. “Beneath them is a larger number of kids who are really struggling and beneath them is an even larger number of kids who feel an amount of stress and pressure that they shouldn’t be made to and that’s untenable.”

while many Palo Alto parents are “wealthy and secure beyond imagining,” they’re consumed by fear of losing that perch or failing to bequeath it to their kids. “Maintaining and advancing insidiously high educational standards in our children is a way to soothe this anxiety,” he said

He recommended lightening children’s schedules, limiting the number of times that they take the SAT, lessening the message that it’s Stanford or bust.

“I will never be neutral on this issue,” he wrote. “The ‘Koala Dad’ is the far better parent than the ‘Tiger Mom.’ ”

“Want the best for your child, not for your child to be the best.”

Cornflowers are always the first to bloom in the pollinator meadow of Marsha P. Johnson State Park, a welcome sign to bees and people that things are beginning to thaw.

If New York City has a warm spring, the cornflowers may open up by late April, eventually followed by orange frills of butterfly milkweed, purple spindly bee balm and yolk-yellow, black-eyed Susans that also inhabit the meadow — hardy species that can weather the salty spray that confronts life on the waterfront.

Not all of these flowers are native to New York, or even North America, but they have sustained themselves long enough to become naturalized

These species pose little threat to native wildlife, unlike more domineering introduced species such as mugwort, an herb with an intrepid rhizome system.

A wildflower can refer to any flowering plant that was not cultivated, intentionally planted or given human aid, yet it still managed to grow and bloom.

This is one of several definitions offered by the plant ecologist Donald J. Leopold in Andrew Garn’s new photo book “Wildflowers of New York City,” and one that feels particularly suited to the city and its many transplants.

Scarlet bee balm.

Ms. Lopez, who grew up on the Upper West Side near a sooty smokestack, has always longed for more green spaces in the city.

In February of 2020, Gov. Andrew Cuomo renamed the park after the activist Marsha P. Johnson, one of the central figures of the Stonewall riots and a co-founder of Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries with the activist Sylvia Rivera. Ms. Johnson, who died in 1992 of undetermined causes, would have turned 75 in August 2020.

Mr. Garn did not intend for “Wildflowers of New York City” to be a traditional field guide for identifying flowers. Rather, his reverent portraits invite us to delight in the beauty of flowers that we more often encounter in a sidewalk crack than in a bouquet.

Marsha P. Johnson, a central figure of the Stonewall riots and a co-founder of Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries

Ms. Johnson was known for wearing crowns of fresh flowers that she would arrange from leftover blooms and discarded daffodils from the flower district in Manhattan, where she often slept.

In one photo, Ms. Johnson wears a crown of roses, carnations, chrysanthemums, frilly tulips, statice and baby’s breath.

Although cumulous clusters of baby’s breath are now a staple of floral arrangements, the species is a wildflower native to central and Eastern Europe.

Ms. Lopez and STARR have criticized a proposal for a new $70 million beach scheduled to be built on Gansevoort Peninsula, near waterfronts where Ms. Rivera once lived and Ms. Johnson died. In its place, she suggests a memorial garden for Ms. Johnson, Ms. Rivera and other transgender people

“We will never feed enough people, we will never plant enough flowers, never be good enough to honor Sylvia and Marsha,” Ms. Lopez said. “They cared too much, even when no one cared for them.”

“I have candles lit always for Marsha and Sylvia, but I’m praying especially hard now that we get a plan that includes lots of flowers,” said Mariah Lopez, the executive director of Strategic Trans Alliance for Radical Reform, or STARR, an advocacy group.

Her dream of the park includes a range of verdant and functional spaces: a paved area where people can vogue and hold rallies, a flower garden in tribute to Ms. Johnson, a greenhouse and an apiary for bees.

Tansy.

The redesign of the park will add a new fence around the meadow, as well as interpretive signs about the pollinators who depend on its wildflowers. “What would happen if there were no bees in the world?”

“We have to protect them. That’s what the function of this sweet little meadow is.”

The quality of mathematics research in the United States today is the envy of the scientific world. This is a direct result of the openness and inclusivity of the profession.

Can Americans maintain this unmatched excellence in the future? There are worrisome signs that suggest not.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development compares mathematical proficiency among 15-year-olds by country worldwide. According to its 2018 report, America ranked 37th while China, America’s main competitor for world leadership, came in first.

This is despite the fact that the United States is the fifth-highest spender per pupil among the 37 developed OECD nations

This massive failure of our K-12 education system trickles through the STEM pipeline.

At the undergraduate level, too few American students are prepared for higher-level mathematics courses. These students are then unprepared for rigorous graduate-level work

According to our own experiences at the universities where we teach, an overwhelming majority of American students with strong math backgrounds are either foreign-born or first-generation students who have additional support from their education-conscious families. At all levels, STEM disciplines are more and more dependent on a constant flow of foreign talent.

There are many reasons for this failure, but the way that we educate and prepare teachers is particularly influential. The vast majority of K-12 math teachers are graduates of teacher-preparation programs that teach very little substantive mathematics

This has led to a constant stream of ill-advised and dumbed-down reforms. One of the latest fads is anti-racist mathematics. Promoted in several states, the bizarre doctrine threatens to further degrade the teaching of mathematics.

Another major concern is the twisted interpretation of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).

Under the banner of DEI, universities are abandoning the use of standardized tests like the SAT and GRE in admissions, and cities are considering scrapping academic tracking and various gifted programs in schools, which they deem “inequitable.”

such programs are particularly effective, when properly implemented, at discovering and encouraging talented children from disadvantaged backgrounds.

The new 2021 Mathematics Framework, currently under consideration by California’s Department of Education, does away “with all tracking, acceleration, gifted programs, or any instruction that involves clustering by individual differences, without expressing any awareness of the impact these drastic alterations would have in preparing STEM-ready candidates.”

These measures will not only hinder the progress of the generations of our future STEM workforce but also contribute to structural inequalities, as they are uniquely detrimental to students whose parents cannot send them to private schools or effective enrichment programs.

These are just a few examples of an unprecedented fervor for revolutionary change in the name of Critical Race Theory (CRT), a doctrine that views the world as a fierce battleground for the narratives of various identity groups.

This will only lead to a further widening of racial disparities in educational outcomes while lowering American children’s rankings in education internationally.

Ill-conceived DEI policies, often informed by CRT, and the declining standards of K-12 math education feed each other in a vicious circle

Regarding minorities, in particular, public K-12 education all too often produces students unprepared to compete, thus leading to large disparities in admissions at universities, graduate programs, and faculty positions. This disparity is then condemned as a manifestation of structural racism, resulting in administrative measures to lower the evaluation criteria. Lowering standards at all levels leads eventually to even worse outcomes and larger disparities, and so on in a downward spiral.

A case in point is the recent report by the American Mathematical Society that accuses the entire mathematics community, with the thinnest of specific evidence, of systemic racial discrimination. A major justification put forward for such a grave accusation is the lack of sufficient representation of Black mathematicians in the professio

the report, while raising awareness of several ugly facts from the long-ago past, makes little effort to address the real reasons for this, mainly the catastrophic failure of the K-12 mathematical educational system.

The National Science Foundation, a federal institution meant to support fundamental research, is now diverting some of its limited funding to various DEI initiatives of questionable benefit.

Meanwhile, other countries, especially China, are doing precisely the opposite, following the model of our past dedication to objective measures of excellence. How long before we will see a reverse exodus, away from the United States?

The present crisis can still be reversed by focusing on a few concrete actions:

Improve schools in urban areas and inner-city neighborhoods by following the most promising education programs. These programs demonstrate that inner-city children benefit if they are challenged by high standards and a nurturing environment.

Follow the lead of other highly successful rigorous programs such as BASIS schools and Math for America, which focus on rigorous STEM curricula, combined with 21st-century teaching methods, and recruit talented teachers to help them build on their STEM knowledge and teaching methods.

Increase, rather than eliminate, tailored instruction, both for accelerated and remedial math courses.

Reject the soft bigotry of low expectations, that Black children cannot do well in competitive mathematics programs and need dumbed-down ethnocentric versions of mathematics.

Uphold the objective selection process based on merit at all levels of education and research.

hippocampus,

Electrodes implanted in these patients' brains help their surgeons precisely identify the seizure foci and also provide valuable information on the brain's inner workings, Lega says.

What the team found was exciting: Not only did they identify a robust population of time cells, but the firing of these cells predicted how well individuals were able to link words together in time (a phenomenon called temporal clustering). Finally, these cells appear to exhibit phase precession in humans, as predicted.

In addition, while rats are actively exploring an environment, place cells are further organized into "mini-sequences" that represent a virtual sweep of locations ahead of the rat. These radar-like sweeps happen roughly 8-10 times per second and are thought to be a brain mechanism for predicting immediately upcoming events or outcomes.

it was unclear how the hippocampus was able to produce such sequences.

hocolate milk

However, taking a closer look at the data, the researchers found something new: As the rats moved through these spaces, their neurons not only exhibited forward, predictive mini-sequences, but also backward, retrospective mini-sequences. The forward and backward sequences alternated with each other, each taking only a few dozen milliseconds to complete.

"In the past few decades, there's been an explosion in new findings about memory,"