Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

The cultural practices and locales that define the hundreds of Native communities dotting the North American landscape are grounded in languages. Each is unique, with distinct dialects, accents, and slang. There are words, phrases, and concepts that do not exist in the American English lexicon, that confounding colonizer speech that Native Americans were forced to adopt and master. And nearly all of them are in danger of going extinct. In 1998, there were 175 Indigenous languages still in use within the United States. Today, there are 115. With each passing year, as elders are laid to rest and new babies are born, Native people lose their tongue.

Learning a Native language is not only about knowledge or authenticity; it extends a symbol of a thriving and unique culture to the rising generation. It’s the cadence of survival. And if it goes silent, a great tradition is broken.

The latest version of the bill, coming at the tail end of what the United Nations has dubbed the Year of Indigenous Language, will seek to lower the bill’s previous class-size restrictions, which were preventing tribes from obtaining federal grants to establish their own language programs because many smaller tribes had lower enrollment numbers than what the grant applications required.

A law that defines a crime in vague terms is likely to raise due-process issues.

a law is unconstitutionally vague when people “of common intelligence must necessarily guess at its meaning.”

Fifty years after humans first left bootprints in the lunar dust, it’s an enticing idea. The effort and the commitment of brainpower and money, and the glorious achievement itself, shine as an international example of what people can do when they set their minds to it. The spinoff technologies ended up affecting all of our lives.So why not do it all over again — but instead of going to another astronomical body and planting a flag, why not save our own planet?

But President Kennedy did not have to convince people that the moon existed. In our current political climate, the clear evidence that humans have generated greenhouse gases that are having a powerful effect on climate, and will have a greater effect into the future, has not moved the federal government to act with vigor. And a determined faction even argues that climate change is a hoax, as President Donald Trump has falsely stated at various times.

The task of reversing that accumulation of greenhouse gases is vast, and progress is painfully slow.

to assess the relationship between cognitive skills, vocabulary, factual knowledge, and exposure to certain fiction and nonfiction authors

those who read literary fiction performed better on tasks like predicting how characters would act and identifying the emotion encoded in facial expressions. These speak to the ability to understand others' mental states, which scientists call Theory of Mind.

If we engage with characters who are nuanced, unpredictable, and difficult to understand, then I think we're more likely to approach people in the real world with an interest and humility necessary for dealing with complex individuals

Most Europeans are currently living under severe restrictions, stuck at home, desperately hoping for the coronavirus pandemic to pass soon.

The huge decline in road traffic, air travel and other business activities across Europe has led to sharp reductions in pollution over several major cities, new images published by the European Space Agency show. A similar effect has been recorded across the United States and in China.

The impact of the pandemic-related restrictions on air quality is staggering. In some parts of Europe, the levels of toxic pollutants in the air have been slashed by a half.

President Donald Trump is considering measures to reopen the U.S. economy, even as the highly contagious coronavirus is spreading rapidly and hospitals are bracing for a wave of virus-related deaths.

Trump issued guidelines a week ago that he said aimed to slow the spread of the disease over 15 days, including curbing unnecessary travel. Economic activity has ground to a halt in some states.

Trump, who had hoped to build his campaign for the Nov. 3 election on a booming U.S. economy, now is looking at the potential of millions of lost jobs. Many of his Republican allies fear the toll on the economy would make it harder for him to win another four-year term.

You probably know the broad outline of the story: 66 million years ago, a giant meteorite landed in what is now the Gulf of Mexico, and ended the dinosaurs. This year, various teams of scientists, working independently, helped fill in the picture of exactly what happened on that fateful day.

An exhaustive analysis of hundreds of bird species in the United States and Canada contained a warning: The majority of bird species are in decline, many by huge numbers. The likely culprits? Habitat loss and pesticides

Quantum computing had a big year. Google claimed to have reached a long-sought breakthrough called “quantum supremacy,” allowing computers to perform calculations at inconceivable speeds.

Fake news existed long before the internet. In an essay on political lying in the early 18th century, the writer Jonathan Swift noted that "Falsehood flies and the truth comes limping after it." You have to hire a train to pull the truth, explained English pastor Charles Spurgeon in the 19th century, while a lie is "light as a feather ... a breath will carry it."

MIT researchers recently studied more than 10 years' worth of data on the most shared stories on Facebook. Their study covered conspiracy theories about the Boston bombings, misleading reports on natural disasters, unfounded business rumors and incorrect scientific claims. There is an inundation of false medical advice online, for example, that encourages people to avoid life-saving treatments such as vaccines and promotes unproven therapies. (Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop is just one example.)

The psychological research does, however, offer us a silver lining to this storm cloud, with various experiments demonstrating that people can learn to be better lie detectors with a little training in critical thinking.

Ever since Donald Trump became president, critics have worried that his rudimentary knowledge of global affairs, erratic decisions and politicized foreign policy would get people killed. It's happening now. "You are leaving us to be slaughtered," Gen. Mazloum Kobani Abdi, commander of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces told a senior US official last week. Trump's abandonment of Kurdish allies in Syria has triggered a humanitarian crisis, and as Turkey moves in, there are reports of executions and fears that ISIS members could escape in the chaos.

The President is trading on a "bring the troops home" mentality that often follows US military entanglements overseas. It's a politically palatable position because the people dying as a result of his decisions are not American. His language is the tell here: He's using stereotypes about war-mongering Middle Easterners to undermine the idea that the Kurds could be real allies deserving of loyalty -- despite the successful, years-long US-Kurdish alliance against ISIS and before that in Iraq.

'They are coming and they will take everything. May God end America'

The record 3.3 million jobless claims reported Thursday mark the beginning of an economic crisis facing American workers and businesses — a slump, experts say, that will only end when the coronavirus pandemic is contained.

Although no official figures exist yet, the unemployment rate has likely jumped to at least 5.5 percent, says economist Martha Gimbel of Schmidt Futures, a level not seen since 2015 and up from 3.5 percent in February.“The most terrifying part about this is this is likely just the beginning of the layoffs,” Gimbel said

The bill, which gives most Americans checks worth $1,200 or more and provides billions in low-cost loans to businesses, is likely to provide a lifeline to workers and companies facing devastation, but it won’t stop a severe recession nor be adequate to sustain workers if the coronavirus health crisis lasts more than a month or two.

In the age of blogging and social media, everyone wants to share their opinion. However, it has become abundantly clear to me that many people simply do not or cannot argue a point in a meaningful way

But, if you are going to disagree or debate a blog post, Facebook post or any of the other mediums we now have to share our opinions, there is a wrong way and a right way to present your ideas. I hope these 5 points will help you share your ideas in a more meaningful way. If you do not like these ideas, share your own ideas below

Someone states their opinion and it makes your blood curdle. You immediately want to attach this person. Honestly, do you think this person cares what you think of them? Do you think that others in the line of comments really care what you think of this person? That is not a way to win an argument or even how to defend your position. If you want to score points, you have to hit where it counts and that is against their position. Argue why their point is wrong and your point is right.

Images taken over the first three weeks of March show less nitrogen dioxide over parts of the United States than the same time last year. Nitrogen dioxide in the air comes primarily from the burning of fuel and forms from the emissions of cars, trucks, buses, power plants and off-road equipment, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency.

Satellite images released by NASA and the European Space Agency also show a dramatic reduction in nitrogen dioxide emissions in China as the nation implemented drastic coronavirus restrictions.

The country where the pandemic began was almost completely shut down in late January as the number of coronavirus cases mounted. The drastic measures appear to have brought the virus under control: Locally transmitted infections have plummeted, and a lockdown on most of Hubei province — ground zero of the pandemic — is being lifted this week.

But the lockdown also brought activity in much of the world's second biggest economy to a standstill for weeks on end, and is likely to result in China's first contraction in decades. Analysts at Goldman Sachs recently forecast that China's GDP may fall by 9% in the first quarter of the year, compared to the same period in 2019.

Western nations are also weighing these enormous tradeoffs while the virus remains a global threat. In the United States — where unlike China, cases have yet to peak — President Donald Trump on Monday argued the country will have to reopen for business "very soon" even though the virus is "going to be bad."