TOK Friends

Nearly anywhere you go, it’s easy to find children and adults alike transfixed by their phones, and while texting and social media certainly claim a big part of that attention, increasingly it’s gaming that’s drawing us in.

Last year, the WHO voted to include gaming disorder as an official condition in the draft version of its latest International Classification of Diseases (ICD); the vote finalizes that decision. The WHO’s ICD, currently in its 11th edition, serves as the international standard for diagnosing and treating health conditions.

According to the WHO experts who analyzed studies on gaming behavior, people’s use of gaming is different from their use of the internet, social media, online gambling and online shopping. There isn’t sufficient data, they say, to indicate that people’s reliance on those is a “behavioral addiction” the way gaming can be.

Lying is, for better or worse, a behavior humans take part in at some point in their lives. On average, Americans tell one to two lies a day, multiple studies have suggested. But it’s where some people are fibbing that might come as a surprise.

Laura is far from alone. In a comprehensive 2015 study published by the American Psychological Association book Secrets and Lies in Psychotherapy, 93% of respondents admitted they had lied during therapy at least once.

The 2015 study found 61% of participants cited embarrassment as the main reason for dishonesty with their therapist.

Conspiracy theories, both powerful and enduring, can wreak havoc on society. In recent years, fringe ideas prompted a gunman to storm a Washington, D.C. pizzeria and may have motivated another to fatally shoot 11 worshippers inside a Pittsburgh synagogue. They are also largely to blame for a worldwide surge in measles cases that has sickened more people in the U.S. in the first half of 2019 than in any full year since 1994.

“very likely” inspire domestic terrorists to commit criminal and sometimes violent acts and “very likely will emerge, spread and evolve” on internet platforms, according to an intelligence bulletin obtained by Yahoo News.

“It’s increasingly becoming clear that lots and lots of people believe in them, and they have negative outcomes,” says Viren Swami, a social psychology professor at Anglia Ruskin University in the U.K., who has published several studies on conspiracy theories.

For years, we’ve been told how detrimental a lack of sleep can be for our mental and physical health.

But is it bad to get too much sleep — and if so, how much is too much?

“It’s important to remember that not everyone’s ‘too much sleep’ is the same,” sleep psychologist Jade Wu, a researcher at the Duke University School of Medicine, told HuffPost. “And sleep needs change over the lifetime. For example, a teenager or young adult may very well need nine or more hours per night, whereas a retiree likely doesn’t.”

The COVID-19 vaccination rollout is well underway in the United States. Millions of people have already been vaccinated, and states are beginning to widely expand eligibility.

At this point, the conversation on the need for booster shots for COVID-19 is still slightly hypothetical, although vaccine manufacturers and researchers are already preparing for the possibility by testing boosters and vaccines adjusting for known coronavirus variants.

Though experts are hopeful that we’ll reach herd immunity by the fall if vaccinations continue at our current pace, there are questions about the need for booster shots and how long our current immunizations will last.

President Joe Biden also said in an address on Thursday that all Americans would be eligible for a COVID-19 vaccine by May 1

Now, this does not necessarily mean everyone in the country will be rolling up their sleeves on that day. The general public may start scheduling appointments in early May, but it’s probably going to take a few months to work through the general population.

So far, the vaccine rollout has been sticky — it’s difficult to secure an appointment and supply continues to be tight across the country.

Four months after her initial diagnosis, in October, Chason’s physician told her she was suffering from long COVID.

Four days after the first dose, Chason said, the symptoms — vertigo, nausea, loss of appetite, chills — hit like a lightning bolt. “I went through every single thing I had been dealing with since I had COVID,” Chason said.

Around the world, many other people with long-haul symptoms — a condition now clinically defined as post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2, or PASC — have reported similar experiences after getting a vaccine.

The possibility of coronavirus reinfection has been a concern since the first reports of people getting sick again began popping up in 2020

However, people ages 65 and older are far more likely than younger individuals to experience repeat infection.

Overall, they found that a very small percentage of the population — 0.65% — experienced reinfection.

Certain feelings have practically vanished since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic ― the most major of which is hope.

“Speaking for the U.S., I’m really hopeful that this summer will be remarkably different from last summer,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “We’re on a good path right now and I just hope that we can stay on the path that we’re on.”

“These vaccines are absolutely our way out of this pandemic,” said David Aronoff, director of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

Anyone who’s woken up at 3 a.m. with their stomach growling has probably wondered, what gives? Is it even normal to be this hungry at this hour?

Hunger levels, which are regulated in part by our circadian rhythms, generally rise throughout the day, are highest in the evening and decline throughout the night and into the morning. So if you’re getting up in the dead of night with major hunger pangs, experts say it’s worth investigating.

Waking up for a midnight snack every once in a while probably isn’t anything to be concerned about. But if nocturnal noshing has become a more regular pattern — and an annoying one at that — then you may be looking for answers.

During my first mass layoff, my manager called it an “impact.” She gathered some of us into a room and informed us that our colleagues who weren’t present had been impacted by our tech company’s latest pivot.

Sandra Sucher, a professor of management at Harvard Business School who has researched layoffs, told me the use of these discomforting metaphors has a name. What these bosses are doing is a form of moral disengagement, she said, a phenomenon first identified by Stanford psychologist Albert Bandura.

“One of the types of moral disengagement is euphemistic labeling. So instead of saying, ‘I am ending Sandra’s employment where she has worked for 15 years,' 'I am restructuring.'”

Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) on Friday was named the recipient of the 2021 John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award for his “courageous” vote to impeach former President Donald Trump for abuse of power. 

During Trump’s first impeachment trial last year, Romney became the first senator in U.S. history to vote to convict a president from his own party. 

“Senator Romney’s commitment to our Constitution makes him a worthy successor to the senators who inspired my father to write ‘Profiles in Courage,’”

Deforestation rates are significantly lower in forests protected and governed by Indigenous people, according to a new report.

found that, on average, forests in Indigenous and tribal territories have been much better conserved than other forests in the region.

Forests are huge carbon sinks and vital tools in holding back the climate crisis as well as stabilizing regional temperatures and rainfall patterns. Indigenous territories hold roughly one-third of all the carbon stored in the forests of Latin America and the Caribbean, and 14% of the carbon in tropical forests around the world. 

devising a plan to artificially cool the planet if humans fail to cut climate-changing emissions quickly enough.

a handful of techniques to reflect sunlight back into space or manipulate cloud coverage to temporarily alleviate the effects of pollution-fueled heating.

Providing governments with a global thermostat risks disincentivizing the hard work of phasing out fossil fuels and industrial meat farming. There’s conflicting research on whether the most common proposal to geoengineer the planet ― spraying reflective sulfur aerosols into the stratosphere ― might inflict worse droughts and storms in different hemispheres, potentially exacerbating inequities between rich northern countries and poorer nations south of the equator.

Democrats have turned to an obscure procedural tool in an attempt to undo the Trump administration’s rollback of an Obama-era regulation on methane, a potent greenhouse gas released by oil and gas operations.

“Methane standards are one of the most important ways to address an important source of greenhouse gas emissions that contribute significantly to climate change, and the Trump administration’s weakening of those standards was a dagger in the heart of efforts to address the climate crisis,”

The Congressional Review Act is a 1996 law that gives Congress the power to nullify any major regulation finalized within the final 60 legislative days of a president’s term.

The two species of African elephants are now both listed as endangered, thanks to a one-two punch of poaching and habitat loss, according to a new assessment.

“The forest elephants, in most cases, have been largely ignored,” Ben Okita, a conservation biologist, told The New York Times. “It’s become clear that genetically these two species are different.”

The main threats to the elephants remain poaching for their ivory, and habitat loss.

The Biden administration scrapped a controversial Trump-era legal opinion on Monday that sought to give North Dakota control over a portion of the Missouri River on Native American land.

concluding that the state of North Dakota owns mineral rights beneath the portion of the Missouri River that flows through the Fort Berthold Reservation. 

“overturned decades of existing precedent holding that the Missouri riverbed belonged to the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara (MHA) Nation,”

The world’s largest banks have funneled $3.8 trillion into the fossil fuel industry over the last five years, according to new figures published Wednesday. 

“Major banks around the world, led by U.S. banks in particular, are fueling climate chaos by dumping trillions of dollars into the fossil fuels that are causing the crisis

Though U.S. banks dominate fossil fuel financing, European banks are also big. French bank BNP Paribas, which has pledged to be a leader in climate strategy, provided $40.8 billion in fossil fuel financing in 2020, an increase of 41% from the previous year. Since 2016, the bank’s fossil fuel financing has risen 142%, according to the report.

Severe overheating can threaten cows’ health and their ability to get pregnant and carry calves to term.

Dairy farmers use fans and sprayers to cool cows in their barns, but there is a substantial need for better options. Existing systems use a lot of energy and water, which is costly for farmers. And climate change is raising temperatures and stressing California’s water supplies.

Cows are particularly sensitive to hot weather: Their body temperature is 101.5 degrees Fahrenheit, three degrees higher than humans, and they create a large amount of heat as they break down feed in their stomachs and produce milk.

About 70% of agricultural methane comes from enteric fermentation – chemical reactions in the stomachs of cows and other grazing animals as they break down plants. The animals burp out most of this methane and pass the rest as flatulence.

A 2015 study suggested that using seaweed as an additive to cattle’s normal feed could reduce methane production, but this research was done in a laboratory, not in live animals.

If these findings can be scaled up and commercialized, they could transform cattle production into a more economically and environmentally sustainable industry.