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When Arcola Elementary School reopened in person in mid-March, Barksdale's students had to adjust to a very different classroom. The reading corner was gone. The carpet squares the kids usually sat on? Packed away.

And for the first time, Barksdale had to encourage her first-graders not to share. "An aspect for social and emotional learning that they really need to gain is how to share and how to collaborate," she says. "And right now, the safest thing for them is to not share their materials."

22% of elementary students and 26% percent of middle school students are still learning completely virtually.

A recent NPR/IPSOS poll shows that 29% of parents polled are considering keeping their kids in remote learning indefinitely. This could be for a myriad of reasons, such as home being a better environment to focus in, or not having to feel the impacts of an unsupportive education system.

"This definitely is the hardest thing I've ever done... trying to teach students virtually and in person through a mask."

"Kids don't learn from someone they don't like," he explains. "I've just learned to tap into their desires, how they want to see themselves, and their interests... and that works virtually or in person."

"I feel like we've gone backwards in education," she says. "Now the desks are in rows, you know, spaced out six feet apart – it's just really sterile. With this form of in-person learning, I don't know that they're getting a good education."

Nevertheless, Higgins believes that in-person learning is better than being completely virtual when it comes to the mental health and social development of her students.

Wine is alleging that votes were rigged

Ahead of the vote, Museveni's government shut down social media outlets in Uganda

Wine said that security forces were not allowing anyone in or out of his home, and he urged Ugandans to reject the results.

called Uganda's electoral process "fundamentally flawed," citing "authorities' denial of accreditation to election observers, violence and harassment of opposition figures" and the arrest of civil service organization workers.

The election has been closely watched because of Wine's appeal to younger voters — a crucial strength in a country with one of the youngest populations in the world, where more than two-thirds of the population is under age 30.

Wine sought to replace one of Africa's longest-tenured leaders with one of its youngest, hoping to make a generational shift that would be felt across the continent.

This week, Wine said the military had killed his driver and that his home was raided.

Wine himself was arrested in November, sparking large protests during which dozens of people died.

A recent Gallup poll found that only around a third of respondents in Uganda said they're confident in the honesty of their country's elections.

"Uganda has never witnessed a peaceful transfer of power since gaining its independence in 1962."

But Wine is alleging that the vote was rigged, as election officials face questions over how results were tallied amid an Internet blackout, according to the AP.

In an interview with NPR, Wine said security forces were not allowing anyone in or out of his home, and he urged Ugandans to reject the results.

Wine became a pop star with music that blends Afrobeat with sounds borrowed from reggae and dancehall.

He then turned toward politics, winning a seat in parliament.

Museveni recently told NPR that he views pro-Wine demonstrators as "agents of foreign schemes."

This week, as ballots were being counted and the outcome of the 2021 vote hung in the balance, there were worries about what a transition of leaders might look like in the former British colony.

The tumult in the U.S. economy still pales in comparison to the damage being felt in other countries. In China, auto sales cratered 80% last month, while a plunge in tourism is expected to push Italy and perhaps France into a recession.

The U.S. Travel Association predicts that international travel to the United States will fall by 6% over the next three months. "There is a lot of uncertainty around coronavirus, and it is pretty clear that it is having an effect on travel demand — not just from China, and not just internationally, but for domestic business and leisure travel as well," the association's president, Roger Dow, said in a statement.

our whole universe could have emerged from a tiny patch of space that was stretched like a rubber band by the enormous factor of one hundred trillion trillion times (1026) in a fraction of a second. The universe we observe today fits within this stretched region, like an island in an ocean.

imagine that other portions of space, neighbors to that tiny patch that gave rise to our universe, also got stretched at different rates and at different times. We would have a universe filled with island-universes, each with its own history and possibly even types of matter, etc. This ocean of island-universes is called the multiverse.

Since

hysics is an empirical science

Cosmic inflation predicts that our universe is geometrically flat (or almost) like the surface of a table but in three dimensions; it also predicts that space should be filled with radiation with a uniform temperature, as bathwater fills a bathtub

Since we can't receive information from outside our universe (or better, from outside our "horizon", the sphere that delimits how far light travelled in 13.7 billion years), how can we possibly test the existence of other universes "out there"?

However, we can do the next best thing, and see if at least neighboring universes exist. Just as with soap bubbles that vibrate when they collide with one another without popping, if another universe collided with ours in the distant past, the radiation inside our universe would have vibrated in response to the perturbations caused by the collision.

The bad news is that the probability of a collision with another universe increases with time: we could disappear at any instant: live life to the fullest!

The good news is that, although the multiverse as a whole may not be a testable scientific hypothesis, with some luck we may at least know if one or a few other universes exist. An observational test distinguishes science from idle speculation.

students didn't want to be anywhere near the computers

pencil-and-paper creativity quiz, the so-called Remote Associates Test, which asks people to identify word associations that aren't immediately obvious. Four days into the trip, they took the test again

45 percent improvement.

hardly scientific.

researchers had already taken the test once.

Outward Bound is notoriously strict about bringing artifacts of modern life into the wilderness.

Half of the 56 hikers took the test before going backpacking in the wilderness, and the other half took the RAT test on the fourth day of their trip. The groups went into the wild in Alaska, Colorado, Maine and Washington.

took the test four days into the wilderness did 50 percent better than those who were still immersed in modern lif

exposure to nature over a number of days, which has been shown in other studies to improve thinking

exercise

abandoning electronic devices

constant texting and checking in on Facebook are not making us think more clearly.

If a brain can make crazy leaps across the cosmos and bring extra passengers along (like you when you listen to me), then in a metaphorical way, the brain is bigger than what's around it, wrote 19th century poet Emily Dickinson. The brain is wider than the sky,For, put them side by side,The one the other will includeWith ease, and you beside.

"The universe is not only queerer than we suppose," said the biologist J.B.S. Haldane, "but queerer than we can suppose." In Haldane's view, the universe is bigger than the brain. There are things we just can't know, or even conjure with the brains we've got.

If a brain can make crazy leaps across the cosmos and bring extra passengers along (like you when you listen to me), then in a metaphorical way, the brain is bigger than what's around it, wrote 19th century poet Emily Dickinson. The brain is wider than the sky,For, put them side by side,The one the other will includeWith ease, and you beside.

"The universe is not only queerer than we suppose," said the biologist J.B.S. Haldane, "but queerer than we can suppose." In Haldane's view, the universe is bigger than the brain. There are things we just can't know, or even conjure with the brains we've got.

"It's beyond our intellectual limits as a species. Put yourself into the position

"The universe is not only queerer than we suppose," said the biologist J.B.S. Haldane, "but queerer than we can suppose." In Haldane's view, the universe is bigger than the brain. There are things we just can't know, or even conjure with the brains we've got.

"The universe is not only queerer than we suppose," said the biologist J.B.S. Haldane, "but queerer than we can suppose." In Haldane's view, the universe is bigger than the brain. There are things we just can't know, or even conjure with the brains we've got.

"The universe is not only queerer than we suppose," said the biologist J.B.S. Haldane, "but queerer than we can suppose." In Haldane's view, the universe is bigger than the brain. There are things we just can't know, or even conjure with the brains we've got.

If a brain can make crazy leaps across the cosmos and bring extra passengers along (like you when you listen to me), then in a metaphorical way, the brain is bigger than what's around it, wrote 19th century poet Emily Dickinson. The brain is wider than the sky,For, put them side by side,The one the other will includeWith ease, and you beside.

"The universe is not only queerer than we suppose," said the biologist J.B.S. Haldane, "but queerer than we can suppose." In Haldane's view, the universe is bigger than the brain. There are things we just can't know, or even conjure with the brains we've got.

There are philosophers and scientists who say we will never understand the universe, we can't fathom the endless details or make good sense of the whole. We can try, but the universe is too big. The writer John Updike once explained the argument this way to reporter Jim Holt: "It's beyond our intellectual limits as a species. Put yourself into the position of a dog. A dog is responsive, shows intuition, looks at us with eyes behind which there is intelligence of a sort, and yet a dog must not understand most of the things it sees people doing. It must have no idea how they invented, say, the internal combustion engine. So maybe what we need to do is imagine that we're dogs and that there are realms that go beyond our understanding."

So does the universe get the crown?

Carl Sagan thought that we humans are good at finding patterns in nature, and if we know the rules, we can skip the details and understand the outline, the essence. It's not necessary for us to know everything. The problem is we don't know how many rules the cosmos has.

et the brain has its champions. "Consider the human brain," says physicist Sir Roger Penrose. "If you look at the entire physical cosmos, our brains are a tiny, tiny part of it. But they're the most perfectly organized part. Compared to the complexity of a brain, a galaxy is just an inert lump

my hunch is the universe will still outwit us, will still be "too wonderful" to be decoded, because we are, in the end, so much smaller than it is. And that's not a bad thing. To my mind, it's the search that matters, that sharpens us, gives us something noble to do.

Steven Weinberg famously said, "The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy."

DARPA hopes to do that with an implanted device that will take over some functions of the brain's hippocampus, an area that's important to memory. The agency has already used a device that does this in rodents, Ling said, and the goal is to move on to people quickly.

We believe that the tools and technologies that will come from this initiative will actually enable all brain scientists to do their work better, faster and with more impact,"

For several years now, people with Parkinson's have been able to reduce their tremors with a treatment known as deep brain stimulation.

But Dr. Tom Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, said it's important to remember that the immediate goal of the BRAIN Initiative isn't developing treatments, but understanding the inner workings of the most complex system in the universe.

"They're interested in the brain as a way to understand who we are, what makes us different and what is special about the human brain."

Airlines and technology companies have been working on developing technology to do so, but New York's is the first pass being made widely available to residents.

The idea is similar to mobile airline boarding passes: they can be printed or stored on smartphones, and participating businesses and venues can use a companion app to confirm patrons' health status.

rather than boost the economy and encourage vaccination, efforts like the Excelsior Pass could wind up further spread of variants. It's also still not clear that vaccinated people cannot spread the virus to people who have not been vaccinated.

Some worry that the passes might encourage fraud and increase the spread of the virus by people who claim to be vaccinated or COVID-19 negative but aren't.

"The United States was one of the countries that supported the resolution to hold the special session," the WHO said Monday in response to an NPR inquiry. "That is not to say it has committed to support the treaty yet, as the process of moving forward was only confirmed today."

"The safety of the world's people cannot rely solely on the goodwill of governments."

A treaty would make countries more accountable to one another, he said.

The lack of sharing — of information, technology, resources and data — is the COVID-19 pandemic's defining characteristic, the WHO leader said.

"a monumental error for any country to think the danger has passed."

Tedros' remarks echoed the frustrations he raised last year, when he said the pandemic was presenting humanity with a test — one that we are failing.

"Are we unable to distinguish or identify the common enemy?"

Alaska became the first state to make vaccinations available to all adults over the age of 16 earlier this month, followed by Mississippi. Several others have since followed suit, including Arizona, Utah, Indiana, Georgia and West Virginia.

Other states are moving to make more groups eligible ahead of schedule, based on age or underlying conditions.

According to a map released by the White House COVID-19 Response Team on Friday, four states have yet to confirm plans to expand eligibility ahead of the May 1 deadline: New York, Wyoming, Arkansas and South Carolina, where officials have said they are not on track to hit that threshold until May 3.

Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said at the briefing that the country has seen an uptick in case counts and hospital admissions, with the most recent 7-day averages showing about 57,000 cases and 4,700 hospitalizations per day, and hospitalizations hovering around 1,000.

The U.S. is administering 2.5 million shots a day at its current pace, Zients said, adding that vaccine makers are "setting and hitting targets." Some 27 million doses went to states, tribes and territories this week.

Johnson & Johnson has accelerated production of its single-shot vaccine and is on track to deliver 11 million doses next week.

The state population counts that determine each state's share of congressional seats and Electoral College votes for the next decade are not expected to be out until February at the earliest,

Raimondo would take over the position from Wilbur Ross, a Trump appointee who has been found in contempt of Congress by the House for defying a subpoena to turn over documents about the Trump administration's efforts to add a citizenship question to census forms.

"The mission of the Commerce Department is a very simple one — to help spur good-paying jobs, to empower entrepreneurs to innovate and grow, to come together with working families and American businesses to create new opportunities for all of us,"

"Commerce Department employees are getting a terrific new boss who will listen to them, support them, lead from the trenches, and get the very best out of them by holding them to the same high standards she holds herself,"

"And Congress will be getting a partner who is an honest broker of unquestioned integrity."

very early ages we [in America] see struggle as an indicator that you're just not very smart," Stigler says. "It's a sign of low ability — people who are smart don't struggle, they just naturally get it, that's our folk theory. Whereas in Asian cultures they tend to see struggle more as an opportunity."

For the most part in American culture, intellectual struggle in schoolchildren is seen as an indicator of weakness, while in Eastern cultures it is not only tolerated, it is often used to measure emotional strength.

to understand why these two cultures view struggle so differently, it's good to step back and examine how they think about where academic excellence comes from.

American mother is communicating to her son that the cause of his success in school is his intelligence. He's smart — which, Li says, is a common American view.

children are not creative. Our children do not have individuality. They're just robots. You hear the educators from Asian countries express that concern, a

"So the focus is on the process of persisting through it despite the challenges, not giving up, and that's what leads to success," Li says.

Obviously if struggle indicates weakness — a lack of intelligence — it makes you feel bad, and so you're less likely to put up with it. But if struggle indicates strength — an ability to face down the challenges that inevitably occur when you are trying to learn something — you're more willing to accept it.

American students "worked on it less than 30 seconds on average and then they basically looked at us and said, 'We haven't had this,'" he says.

Japanese students worked for the entire hour on the impossible problem.

Westerns tend to worry that their kids won't be able to compete against Asian kids who excel in many areas but especially in math and science. Jin Li says that educators from Asian countries have their own set of worries.

"The idea of intelligence in believed in the West as a cause," Li explains. "She is telling him that there is something in him, in his mind, that enables him to do what he does."

in the Japanese classrooms that he's studied, teachers consciously design tasks that are slightly beyond the capabilities of the students they teach, so the students can actually experience struggling with something just outside their reach. Then, once the task is mastered, the teachers actively point out that the student was able to accomplish it through the students hard work and struggle.

Yusuf Ahmad, 33, raised Muslim, is now an atheist.

The thing for me — a large part of the reason I moved away from Catholicism was because without accepting a lot of these core beliefs, I just didn't think that I could still be part of that community.

"It's a little troublesome now when people ask me. I tell them and they go, 'Oh, you're a Christian,' and I try to skirt the issue now. They go, 'What does that mean?' and it's like, "It's Latin for 'I made a mistake when I was 18.'

I don't [believe in God] but I really want to. That's the problem with questions like these is you don't have anything that clearly states, 'Yes, this is fact,' so I'm constantly struggling.

I remember growing up, in like fifth [or] sixth grade I'd hear these stories and be like, 'That's crazy! Why would this guy do this? Just because he heard a voice in his head, he went to sacrifice his son and it turned into a goat?' There's no way that this happened. I wasn't buying it.

I remember a theology test in eighth grade where there was a question about homosexuality, and the right answer was that if you are homosexual, then that is not a sin because that's how God made you, but acting upon it would be a sin. That's what I put down as the answer, but I vividly remember thinking to myself that that was not the right answer."

We didn't have a lot of money, the household wasn't very stable a lot of the time, so when something bad would happen, say a prayer, go to church. When my mom got cancer the first time, it was something that was useful at the time for me as a coping mechanism.

So at some point you start to say, 'Why does all this stuff happen to people?' And if I pray and nothing good happens, is that supposed to be I'm being tried? I find that almost kind of cruel in some ways. It's like burning ants with a magnifying glass. Eventually that gets just too hard to believe anymore."

"But since we don't have anything that works well for these individuals — that have a high risk of mortality – it warrants cautious optimism and further study."

doctors implant tiny electrodes next to a region of the brain thought to be dysfunctional. A device, similar to a heart pacemaker, then sends waves of electricity through a wire to the electrodes.

In the latest study, neurosurgeons in Toronto implanted the electrodes in the brains of six women with chronic anorexia. Five of them had been struggling with the disease for over a decade. All of them had experienced serious health problems from it, including heart attacks in some cases.

"My symptoms were so severe. I would wake up in the middle of night and run up and down the stairs for hours or go for a five-hour run," she tells Shots. "I became very isolated. I didn't want to be around anyone because they kept me from exercising."

"It was brain surgery! But I had had a heart attack at 28 and two strokes, " she says. "My mom was in the midst of planning my funeral. If I didn't take this chance, I knew my path would probably lead to death."

Rollins admits that the deep brain stimulation wasn't a magic bullet. She's had to continue her anorexia treatment to get where she is. "I still see a psychiatrist regularly and a dietitian. It [the deep brain stimulation] enables me to do the work that I need to do a lot easy."

Deep brain stimulation can cause serious side effects, Lipsman says, like seizures, and more milder ones, like pain and nausea. "This is a brain surgery – there's no sugarcoating that," he says. "The primary objective of this study was to establish that this a safe procedure for these patients who have been quite ill before the surgery. That's all we can say right now."

"The twenties were the highest peak of joy-related words that we see," he says. "They really were roaring." But then there came 1941, which, of course, marked the beginning of America's entry into World War II. It doesn't take a historian to see that peaks and valleys like these roughly mirror the major economic and social events of the century. "In 1941, sadness is at its peak," Bently says.

They weren't just novels or books about current events, Bentley says. Many were books without clear emotional content — technical manuals about plants and animals, for example, or automotive repair guides. "It's not like the change in emotion is because people are writing about the Depression, and people are writing about the war," he says. "There might be a little bit of that, but this is just, kind of, averaged over all books and it's just kind of creeping in."

Generally speaking the usage of these commonly known emotion words has been in decline over the 20th century," Bentley says. We used words that expressed our emotions less in the year 2000 than we did 100 years earlier — words about sadness, and joy, and anger, and disgust and surprise. In fact, there is only one exception that Bentley and his colleagues found: fear. "The fear-related words start to increase just before the 1980s," he says.

For psychologists, he says, there are only a handful of ways to try to understand what is actually going on with somebody emotionally. "One is what a person says," Pennebaker explains, "kind of the 'self report' of emotion. Another might be the physiological links, and the third is what slips out when they're talking to other people, when they're writing a book or something like that."

xperts say the rest of the 65 Chickasaw speakers, all of whom are bilingual, might be a big enough pool to preserve the language.

Hinson's program tries to counter further erosion of Chickasaw by offering language immersion programs — for both kids and adults. Tools, including an iPhone app and a stream of videos, make the language accessible to anyone,

Cliches can cut through claptrap like a knife through butter. We can use them as a kind of societal shorthand.

But the very fact that a word or phrase has become a cliche, "through popular use – and overuse ," the report continues, "suggests that the phrase has lost originality and ingenuity and, thus, impact."

"Avoid cliches ...like the plague," Toastmasters International, a worldwide group that works to improve communication skills, advises. Tongue-in-cheek, of course.

A cliche can be as comfortable as an old shoe, as helpful as all get out. A cliche is like a long lost friend,

Europeans, it is claimed, go for the absurd or surreal:

A German Shepherd went to the telegram office, took out a blank form, and wrote: "Woof. Woof. Woof. Woof. Woof. Woof. Woof. Woof." The clerk examined the paper and politely told the dog: "There are only nine words here. You could send another 'Woof' for the same price." "But," the dog replied, "that would make no sense at all."

what is the funniest joke in the world?

It's pretty clear that whatever Wiseman came up with, it isn't gonna be the funniest joke in the world. His website was in English; so jokes in other tongues were excluded. Or consider this: maybe the funniest joke in the world isn't something that you can write down. Maybe it needs to be told. And even more to the point: maybe jokes are necessarily specific to situations, cultures, anxieties.

t jokes have deep sources in our human needs and psychologies. Human life is complex, not simple, although we have simple needs (food, sex, safety, sleep, friendship, etc.). Humor is a response to inevitable conflict. The humor isn't in the joke; it is in the attitudes of those telling and hearing the joke

What is the funniest joke in the world, at least according to Wiseman? Are you ready? Here it is: Two hunters are out in the woods when one of them collapses. He doesn't seem to be breathing and his eyes are glazed. The other guy whips out his phone and calls the emergency services. He gasps, "My friend is dead! What can I do?". The operator says "Calm down. I can help. First, let's make sure he's dead." There is a silence, then a shot is heard. Back on the phone, the guys says "OK, now what?"