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Today, at least 10 percent of Americans regularly take fish oil supplements. But recent trials have failed to confirm that the pills prevent heart attacks or stroke. And now the story has an intriguing new twist.

he journal Science reported that the ancestors of the Inuit evolved unique genetic adaptations for metabolizing omega-3s and other fatty acids. Those gene variants had drastic effects on Inuit’s bodies, reducing their heights and weights.

the discovery raised questions about whether omega-3 fats really were protective for everyone, despite decades of health advice. “The same diet may have different effects on different people,” he said.

He is convinced that, with the Internet, kids can learn by themselves, so long as they are in small groups and have well-posed questions to answer. He now goes into schools and asks a hard question that he thinks the students will not be able to answer, such as: "How do you stop something moving?" or "Was World War II good or bad?" He gives them no clue where to start, but—crucially—he insists that the school restrict the number of Internet portals in the class to one for every four students. One child in front of a computer learns little; four discussing and debating learn a lot. What happens next is entirely up to the students. All they know is that Dr. Mitra is coming back to be told what they have found. He arrives with a second question that links the learning more closely to the curriculum, such as: "Who was Isaac Newton?" and then "What's the connection between Newton and stopping things moving?" The kids teach themselves the laws of motion. Of course, the Internet is fallible as a source, but so are teachers and textbooks. For the noncontroversial topics that make up the curriculum, even Wikipedia is pretty good.

On their own, children can get about 30% of the knowledge required to pass exams. To go further, Dr. Mitra supplements SOLE with e-mediators, or the "granny cloud" as he calls it: amateur volunteers who use Skype to help kids learn online.

plenty of people educate themselves. Is it possible for everybody to be an autodidact, now that knowledge is so accessible online?

Information access represents the tiniest fraction of what it means to be educated. As long as education is viewed as the acquisition of information, most often transmitted by a teacher or pulled from the Web, then efforts to drive down costs, cut programs, layoff teachers and privatize schools seem viable.

My colleagues and I have demonstrated that online environments focused on collaboration and action, rather than reading and test-taking, can be more social, creative, substantial and personally meaningful than traditional classes. Learning is no longer bound by artificial schedules, random teacher assignments or age segregation. Students feel more connected than in “school” where talking is the No. 1 infraction and teacher access is severely curtailed. When work is public, peers learn from it and support reciprocal growth. Everyone is a teacher and learner all of the time. The quality of work benefits from the extra time, collaboration and expertise.

Done well, online learning could supplement classroom instruction, offer experiences otherwise impossible, support 24/7 learning and break down barriers of geography, wealth or culture.

In the current issue of Wired, the technology writer Kevin Kelly says that we had all better get used to this level of predictive prowess. Kelly argues that the age of artificial intelligence is finally at hand.

the smart machines of the future won’t be humanlike geniuses like HAL 9000 in the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey.” They will be more modest machines that will drive your car, translate foreign languages, organize your photos, recommend entertainment options and maybe diagnose your illnesses. “Everything that we formerly electrified we will now cognitize,” Kelly writes. Even more than today, we’ll lead our lives enmeshed with machines that do some of our thinking tasks for us.

Two big implications flow from this. The first is sociological. If knowledge is power, we’re about to see an even greater concentration of power.

these midterms mean nothing? That can’t be right either. They seem to me to be reflecting at the very least a sour and dyspeptic mood in the country at large, a well of deepening discontent and concern, and a national funk that remains very potent as a narrative, even if it has become, in my view, close to circular and more than a little hysterical.

what is the reason for this mood – and why has Obama taken the biggest dive because of it?

Even though the economic signals in the US are stronger than anywhere else in the developed world, even as unemployment has fallen, and as energy independence has come closer than anyone recently expected, the underlying structure of the economy remains punishing for the middle class. This, in some ways, can be just as dispiriting as lower levels of growth – because it appears that even when we have a recovery, it will not make things any better for most people.

it is now obvious that income and wealth are more concentrated at the very top than they have been since the Gilded Age — and the trend shows no sign of letting up.

You really want to supplement Piketty-style analysis with a global view, and when you do, I’d argue, you get a better sense of the good, the bad and the potentially very ugly of the world we live in.

Income growth in emerging nations has produced huge gains in human welfare, lifting hundreds of millions of people out of desperate poverty and giving them a chance for a better life.

book sales have flagged. Simon & Schuster’s sales fell 11 percent in the third fiscal quarter of last year. Sales of digital content, which accounted for 28 percent of the company’s sales, were flat.

Simon & Schuster also recently announced plans to feature some of its authors on podcasts on Play.it, a new podcast network from CBS, the publisher’s parent company.

Simon & Schuster plans to release 12 to 15 more courses this year, and is focusing on writers who have established, dedicated fan bases and a well-defined philosophy or message to deliver. Eventually, the online courses, which are planned as stand-alone products rather than supplements to books, could include videos by entertainers and experts who have not yet published books.

Now no one is alive who served in the trenches or on a dreadnought, and the reliance is entirely upon documents, there can be, paradoxically, far more rigour in the analysis, as sources are tested against each other, and the unreliability of active memory ceases to intrude.

Few historians have the range of specialisms needed, at least in the depth to which each is required, to tell the whole story,

First, an understanding of the history of power, international relations since (at least) the Congress of Berlin and of European diplomacy is required to illuminate the catastrophe of August 1914.

On average, a typical working family in the anteroom of retirement — headed by somebody 55 to 64 years old — has only about $104,000 in retirement savings

more than half of all American households will not have enough retirement income to maintain the living standards they were accustomed to before retirement,

83 percent of baby boomers and Generation Xers in the bottom fourth of the income distribution will eventually run short of money.

Is it possible to give voice to experts on both sides — standard journalistic practice — without distorting the public’s perception of the level of disagreement?

critics argue that journalists too often generate “false balance,” creating an impression of disagreement when there is, in fact, a high level of consensus. One solution, adopted by news organizations such as the BBC, is “weight of evidence” reporting, in which the presentation of conflicting views is supplemented by an indication of where the bulk of expert opinion lies.

studies suggest that “weight of evidence” reporting is an imperfect remedy. It turns out that hearing from experts on both sides of an issue distorts our perception of consensus — even when we have all the information we need to correct that misperception.

KABUL, Afghanistan — Afghanistan's President Ashraf Ghani said on Sunday that the Islamic State group has been defeated in the eastern parts of the country, where it took over some remote districts.

ISIS has had a presence in Afghanistan for more than a year. Officials have said most militants calling themselves IS are disaffected Taliban fighters.

Afghan forces have claimed victory following a 21-day operation in the Achin and Shinwar districts of Nangarhar, claiming at least 200 militants killed, a provincial official told The Associated Press.

For months, worried parents in Flint, Mich., arrived at their pediatricians’ offices in droves. Holding a toddler by the hand or an infant in their arms, they all have the same question: Are their children being poisoned?

To find out, all it takes is a prick of the finger, a small letting of blood. If tests come back positive, the potentially severe consequences are far more difficult to discern.

That’s how lead works. It leaves its mark quietly, with a virtually invisible trail. But years later, when a child shows signs of a learning disability or behavioral issues, lead’s prior presence in the bloodstream suddenly becomes inescapable.

The share of Americans with jobs dropped 4.5 percentage points from 1999 to 2016 — amounting to about 6.8 million fewer workers in 2016.

Between 50 and 70 percent of that decline probably was due to an aging population.

pretty much all the missing jobs are accounted for.

If Americans were taken aback by the restrained, highly scripted President Trump that addressed Congress last month, they should recognize a lot more of the blustery, law-and-order candidate they elected in the budget blueprint the White House released on Thursday.

Trump is asking Congress for a down payment of more than $4 billion to fund his border wall, part of a $30 billion supplemental appropriations request to bolster national security. The Department of Homeland Security would see a 6 percent boost in the president’s first budget, which would also direct more money toward law enforcement and education programs promoting school choice.

Beyond the programs targeted for elimination, the Trump budget puts nearly every domestic Cabinet department on the chopping block. In the Department of Education, dozens of school and teacher grant programs would go, and the popular college work-study program would see significant cuts. In the Department of Commerce, NOAA gets slashed by billions, including the complete elimination of $250 million in grants for coastal and marine management. Funding for the National Institutes of Health—an agency with some of the most bipartisan support in Congress—would drop by nearly $6 billion, a cut 18 percent.

The Trump administration has been signaling for months that it plans to  implement conservative reforms to core federal welfare programs, including by allowing states to have work requirements for Medicaid. So it was no surprise on Thursday when the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services issued guidance for “state efforts to test incentives that make participation in work or other community engagement a requirement for continued Medicaid eligibility.”

So far, it’s unclear how widely adopted work requirements will be and how exactly states will implement them under CMS’s new guidance. On Friday, Kentucky was the first state to have its 1115 waiver creating work requirements approved by CMS. On Thursday, Verma noted that nine other states had already submitted waivers asking the federal government to approve incentives or requirements for some Medicaid beneficiaries. In addition to allowing strict job mandates, CMS will also allow requirements for “other community-engagement activities,” including volunteering, job training, and caregiving. (These rules only apply to specific adults; CMS carves out people with disabilities, the elderly, children, and pregnant women.)

Yet if states want work requirements to increase the health and self-sufficiency of Medicaid beneficiaries—their stated goal—most available data suggest they’ll fall short. As the Kaiser Family Foundation reported in 2017, most people on Medicaid who can work do work. Around 60 percent of adult enrollees have a job, and for the most part those who don’t report impediments in their ability to work. Even those who are not officially disabled often attest to having debilitating conditions—like severe back problems—that make full-time jobs difficult or impossible. Others may be in school, work as primary caretakers for loved ones, or may have retired.

Somewhere ahead is a cliff: a calamitous reversal of humanity’s fortunes. Nobody can see exactly where it is, but everyone knows that at some point the bus will have to turn. Problem is, Wizards and Prophets disagree about which way to yank the wheel. Each is certain that following the other’s ideas will send the bus over the cliff. As they squabble, the number of passengers keeps rising.

Nowadays the Prophets’ fears about industrial agriculture’s exhausting the soil seem prescient: A landmark 2011 study from the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization concluded that up to a third of the world’s cropland is degraded.

At first, reconciling the two points of view might have been possible. One can imagine Borlaugian Wizards considering manure and other natural soil inputs, and Vogtian Prophets willing to use chemicals as a supplement to good soil practice. But that didn’t happen. Hurling insults, the two sides moved further apart. They set in motion a battle that has continued into the 21st century—and become ever more intense with the ubiquity of genetically modified crops. That battle is not just between two philosophies, two approaches to technology, two ways of thinking how best to increase the food supply for a growing population. It is about whether the tools we choose will ensure the survival of the planet or hasten its destruction.

The Greenlandic Perspective Survey tells us that 90% of Greenlanders accept that climate change is happening. More than that, it’s making them anxious and depressed.

we might be well advised to take their thoughts and feelings seriously. Where they go, we may very well follow.

To many it seems we already have one foot planted in an unbearably dystopian future. How long will it be before political systems collapse and we turn against one another in a frenzy for the last scraps of sustenance? (Or any other imaginable form of mass-inflicted horror?

The Cuban Revolution inspired political awareness in almost all the writers, activists and intellectuals of my generation.

Our university professors, contemporaries of Castro, saw in him the definitive vindication of “Our America” against the other, arrogant and imperialist, America.

The literary supplements and magazines we read — by Julio Cortázar, Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes — celebrated the Revolution not only for its economic and social achievements, but also for the cultural renaissance it ushered in.

It seems to me that one thing our culture has lost is a space for “existential reckoning.” Perhaps its polar opposite is being Very Online.

forcing us into such a reckoning is what religion and brutal reality once did for many: It challenged us to assess ourselves fully, to see ourselves under the eyes of eternity, to live with the knowledge of death under a cloud of unknowing. This perspective was reinforced by modes of pre-secular thought as well as by the lived experience in previous generations of existential danger, illness, hunger, and death.

In a secular world of previously unimaginable comfort and long lives, we rarely get to access the existential fear and dread that counterintuitively can lead to serenity and perspective. Maybe in modernity, psychedelics are therefore the best alternative to traditional religion, and may begin to replace or supplement its function, as our disenchantment blocks our access to the faith of the past.

At one point this month renewable energy sources briefly supplied close to 90 percent of the power on Germany’s electric grid

Germany is giving the rest of the world a lesson in just how much can go wrong when you try to reduce carbon emissions solely by installing lots of wind and solar.

Germany’s carbon emissions rose slightly in 2015, largely because the country produces much more electricity than it needs.