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Uganda's President Yoweri Museveni has won a sixth term in office, fighting off a challenge by former singer Bobi Wine

Wine's run drew many young Ugandans to pay attention to politics.

Museveni received 58% of the vote to 34% for Wine

The Covid-19 pandemic is impacting people's mental health.

The Covid-19 pandemic is impacting people's mental health.

"On the one hand, such drastic changes to daily routines can be detrimental to mental health," explains Professor Andrew Gloster from the University of Basel, co-leader of the study now published in PLOS One. "On the other hand, because the entire population was more or less equally affected during the lockdown, it remained unclear whether this impact would occur."

Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a complex psychiatric disorder brought on by physical and/or psychological trauma

Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a complex psychiatric disorder brought on by physical and/or psychological trauma

Now, researchers using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) have found potential brain biomarkers of PTSD in people with traumatic brain injury (TBI).

As English speakers, we experience life in English. Our every thought is formulated with the English terminology available to us. But how might our experience and our thinking be different if our primary language was not English but German or Arabic?

It is this very question that has motivated linguists for hundreds of years to grapple with the validity of linguistic relativity

When we consider the theory of linguistic relativity, we must take into account that languages develop within and emerge from distinct cultures

This is widely understood to be a classic problem of aging. But as a neuroscientist, I know that the problem is not necessarily age-related.

But any distraction — a new thought, someone asking you a question, the telephone ringing — can disrupt short-term memory.

The relevant difference is not age but rather how we describe these events, the stories we tell ourselves about them. Twenty-year-olds don’t think, “Oh dear, this must be early-onset Alzheimer’s.” They think, “I’ve got a lot on my plate right now” or “I really need to get more than four hours of sleep.”

The rise of comedy-news programs, helmed by the likes of Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, John Oliver, Trevor Noah, and Samantha Bee, raised concerns over the blending of entertainment and news. But could the merging of humor and news actually help inform the public?

The rise of comedy-news programs, helmed by the likes of Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, John Oliver, Trevor Noah, and Samantha Bee, raised concerns over the blending of entertainment and news. But could the merging of humor and news actually help inform the public?

In fact, new research suggests that humor may help keep people informed about politics.

It's just the latest example of how people's lives are being upended and potentially ruined by the unprecedented flurry of disinformation this year.

As people experience their own individual Internet bubbles, it can be hard to recognize just how much misinformation exists and how the current information ecosystem compares with previous years.

NewsGuard, which vets news sources based on transparency and reliability standards, found recently that among the top 100 sources of news in the U.S., sources it deemed unreliable had four times as many interactions this year compared with 2019.

some scientists have raised questions about one of the two vaccines the country of 1.4 billion people has authorized for emergency use against COVID-19.

More than 5 million vaccine vials arrived early Wednesday at hundreds of hospitals and clinics across India.

The shipments consist of two formulas: One developed by Oxford University and the pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca, and another vaccine developed by an Indian company called Bharat Biotech

This unit of inquiry is first on the list in the Areas of Knowledge section for good reason. In its detail and specificity, it provides a benchmark for exploring all the other Areas of Knowledge. Through a series of generative meta-questions this unit allows students to explore and critique sometimes counterintuitive nuances of methodology in the Natural Sciences. 

From the TOK teacher perspective, audio selections like this one taken from a TED Radio Hour podcast, provide an interesting alternative to viewing an entire TED talk.  The format is tightly edited and combines interview interactions with relevant extracts from the original TED talk. 

Allow me to ask a wild question: What if we played games, shopped, watched Netflix and read news on our smartphones — without using apps?

the downsides of our app system — principally the control that Apple and Google, the dominant app store owners in much of the world, exert over our digital lives — are onerous enough to contemplate another path.

in recent months, Microsoft’s Xbox video gaming console, the popular game Fortnite and other game companies have moved ahead with technology that makes it possible to play video games on smartphone web browsers.

why do I so often learn things I don’t want to know? When I’m surfing the web I want to be drawn in by articles on Europe’s political history or the nature of quasars, but I end up reading trivia like a menu from Alcatraz prison. Why am I not curious about the things I want to be curious about?

if you understand what prompts curiosity, you may be able to channel it a little better.

Across evolutionary time, curious animals were more likely to survive because they learned about their environments;

Henry Ford and Thomas Edison were famous life-long tinkerers, who discovered new ways of doing things by constantly improvising, experimenting, failing, and retesting.  Above all they were voraciously inquisitive learners.

Barbara Walters, who interviewed Google founders Messrs. Page and Brin in 2004, asked if having parents who were college professors was a major factor behind their success, they instead credited their early Montessori education.  “We both went to Montessori school,” Mr. Page said, “and I think it was part of that training of not following rules and orders, and

they learned to follow their curiosity

Warren’s adoption of “Latinx” is a different example of this problem: There’s no policy here, but the rhetoric still suggests that Warren is distinctively beholden to a hermetic academic-progressive world, to a point where she doesn’t know how to talk to the less-ideological, less-woke, maybe-even-somewhat-conservative Hispanics whose votes her party needs.

a related question is whether progressivism can succeed in consolidating the larger share of the Hispanic vote that Democrats expected in 2016 and didn’t get — an 80 percent rather than close to a 70 percent share, which would tip states like Florida and Arizona and even Texas and make Trump’s Rust Belt resilience moot.

Hispanics (and African-Americans and Asians) now represent the moderate wing of the Democratic Party, the pocketbook-conscious, somewhat culturally conservative flank

economics needs rethinking in the wake of a disastrous crisis, a crisis that was neither predicted nor prevented.

it’s important to realize that the enormous intellectual failure of recent years took place at several levels. Clearly, economics as a discipline went badly astray in the years — actually decades — leading up to the crisis. But the failings of economics were greatly aggravated by the sins of economists, who far too often let partisanship or personal self-aggrandizement trump their professionalism. Last but not least, economic policy makers systematically chose to hear only what they wanted to hear. And it is this multilevel failure — not the inadequacy of economics alone — that accounts for the terrible performance of Western economies since 2008.

Hardly anyone predicted the 2008 crisis, but that in itself is arguably excusable in a complicated world.

Nussbaum’s case: That television could be great, and not because it was “novelistic” or “cinematic” but because it was, simply, television, “episodic, collaborative, writer-driven, and formulaic” by design.

According to Nussbaum, a TV show achieved greatness not despite these facts (which assumes they are limitations) but because of them (which sees them as an infrastructure that provokes creativity and beauty — “the sort that govern sonnets,”

Nussbaum’s once-iconoclastic views have become mainstream.

More than half of Americans believe “Arabic numerals” – the standard symbols used across much of the world to denote numbers – should not be taught in school, according to a survey

A survey by Civic Science, an American market research company, asked 3,624 respondents: “Should schools in America teach Arabic numerals as part of their curriculum?” The poll did not explain what the term “Arabic numerals” meant. Some 2,020 people answered “no”. Twenty-nine per cent of respondents said the numerals should be taught in US schools, and 15 per cent had no opinion.

Seventy-two per cent of Republican-supporting respondents said Arabic numerals should not be on the curriculum, compared 40 per cent of Democrats. This was despite there being no significant difference in education between the two groups.

Before the advent of Caribbean genetic studies, archaeologists provided most of the clues about the origins of people in the region. The first human residents of the Caribbean appear to have lived mostly as hunter-gatherers, catching game on the islands and fishing at sea while also maintaining small gardens of crops.

Archaeologists have discovered a few burials of those ancient people. Starting in the early 2000s, geneticists managed to fish out a few tiny bits of preserved DNA in their bones. Significant advances in recent years have made it possible to pull entire genomes from ancient skeletons.

“We went from zero full genomes two years ago to over 200 now,”

researchers re-examined evidence from 107 other graves in the Americas from roughly the same period. They were startled to discover that out of 26 graves with hunter tools, 10 belonged to women

the findings indicate that “women have always been able to hunt and have in fact hunted.” The new data calls into question an influential dogma in the field of archaeology. Nicknamed “man the hunter,” this is the notion that men and women in ancient societies had strictly defined roles: Men hunted, and women gathered. Now, this theory may be crumbling.

scientists re-examined the remains of a 10th-century Viking warrior excavated in Sweden at the end of the 19th century by Hjalmar Stolpe, an archaeologist. The skeleton had been regally buried at the top of a hill, with a sword, two shields, arrows and two horses.

Gen Z, like a youthful cavalry, will start entering the electorate in large numbers this year, and will reinforce the change that Millennials began. These young Americans, born from 1997 to 2012, are even more racially diverse than Millennials. Forty-nine percent of Gen Z are people of color, versus 45 percent of Millennials, according to a recent analysis of census data

By contrast, more than 70 percent of Baby Boomers are white.

they are rebuking Trump and the Republicans in a way we haven’t seen since the 2008 presidential” race

Our national reckoning on race has brought to the fore a loose but committed assemblage of people given to the idea that social justice must be pursued via attempts to banish from the public sphere, as much as possible, all opinions that they interpret as insufficiently opposed to power differentials.

Valid intellectual and artistic endeavor must hold the battle against white supremacy front and center, white people are to identify and expunge their complicity in this white supremacy with the assumption that this task can never be completed, and statements questioning this program constitute a form of “violence” that merits shaming and expulsion.

Another defense of sorts has been to claim that even this cancel-culture lite is not dangerous, because it has no real effect. When, for instance, 153 intellectuals signed an open letter in Harper’s arguing for the value of free speech (I was one of them), we were told that we were comfortable bigwigs chafing at mere criticism, as if all that has been happening is certain people being taken to task, as opposed to being shamed and stripped of honors.