Speaking to a classroom of students at his alma mater, Boston University's School of Theology, Martin Mugerwa described how being a chaplain informs his work as a counselor at a mental-health clinic, where he treats people navigating depression, unemployment, and homelessness. But the campus was whirring with talk of the Trump administration's immigration crackdown, and several international students stayed after class that February evening to ask whether Mugerwa'who is from Uganda'feared that he could be targeted. 'I'm not worried,' Mugerwa told them confidently. 'He's going after criminals.' Mugerwa told me that his outlook on the new presidency, and how it could alter his own fate, changed the next day. His family and a group of friends stopped to see Niagara Falls on their way to visit one of Mugerwa's seminary classmates. But they took a wrong turn and ended up on a bridge that led across the Canadian border. When they told an American customs officer that they wanted to turn around and remain in the United States, they were directed instead to an immigration office. Hours later, an official explained that Mugerwa and two others in the group were going to be detained for overstaying their visas, even though they had all applied for asylum and were still waiting for their cases to be decided....

Adolescence, the Netflix miniseries, presents a terrible possibility'that a seemingly 'good' kid in a normal English town, with two well-meaning parents, could be drawn so far down the poisoned well of the internet that he stabs a classmate to death. Terrible, but not unfathomable: Just last year, a 17-year-old in England stabbed several children to death after viewing violent instruction manuals online. Social media is also rife with cruelty and harassment that has led to other tragedies: In 2023, a 14-year-old in the United States died by suicide after being bullied over a TikTok video, an incident that echoed several others. Phones and screens play an important role in the show. At home, Jaime, the 13-year-old accused killer, has a computer in his room, which his middle-class father was proud to be able to give him. At school, teachers entreat students to put their phones away, mostly unsuccessfully. The teens bully one another online through emoji-dotted Instagram comments'a code that the adults in their lives struggle to crack....

Many American universities, widely seen globally as beacons of academic integrity and free speech, are giving in to demands from the Trump administration, which has been targeting academia since it took office. In one of his first acts, President Donald Trump branded diversity, equity and inclusion programs as discriminatory. His administration also launched federal investigations into more than 50 universities, from smaller regional schools such as Grand Valley State University in Michigan and the New England College of Optometry in Massachusetts to elite private universities such as Harvard and Yale. Trump ramped up the pressure by threatening university research funding and targeting specific schools. In one example, the Trump administration revoked US$400 million in grants to Columbia University over its alleged failures to curb antisemitic harassment on campus. The school later agreed to most of Trump's demands, from tightening student protest policies to placing an entire academic department under administrative oversight ' though the funding remains frozen....

Researchers enhanced the device ' known as a brain'computer interface (BCI) ' with artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms that decoded sentences as the woman thought of them, and then spoke them out loud using a synthetic voice. Unlike previous efforts, which could produce sounds only after users finished an entire sentence, the current approach can simultaneously detect words and turn them into speech within three seconds. Older speech-generating BCIs are similar to 'a WhatsApp conversation', says Christian Herff, a computational neuroscientist at Maastricht University, the Netherlands, who was not involved with the work. 'I write a sentence, you write a sentence and you need some time to write a sentence again' It just doesn't flow like a normal conversation.' The study participant, Ann, lost her ability to speak after a stroke in her brainstem in 2005. Some 18 years later, she underwent a surgery to place a paper-thin rectangle containing 253 electrodes on the surface on her brain cortex. The implant can record the combined activity of thousands of neurons at the same time....

The findings come from a study of bone tools discovered at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania and dated to around 1.5 million years ago. The discovery joins other finds ' such as a 1.4-million-year-old bone axe from Ethiopia ' that suggest the human ancestor Homo erectus often used bones as tools. Bone-tool culture is showing up in the archaeological record 'much earlier than anyone thought possible', says Michael Pante, a palaeontologist at Colorado State University in Fort Collins who was not involved with the research. 'It just speaks to this species having the ability to do things that no other species was able to do.' The findings were published1 on 5 March in Nature. Tool use is a storied tradition among hominins. Members of the genus Australopithecus ' which includes the famed fossil Lucy ' were making stone tools at least 2.6 million years ago. Bone tools appear only much later in the human story, typically at sites in Europe and Asia around 400,000 years ago. The finds at Olduvai Gorge are among discoveries challenging that narrative. The region has a long history of fossil finds: specimens for the early hominin Homo habilis were discovered there in the 1960s, and researchers have found signs of bone tools in the area for years. Famed palaeoanthropologist Mary Leakey wrote about some of these findings but only partially published her results. This is, in part, because most bone tools were found outside their original context and so couldn't be accurately dated....

I have noticed, in recent flights, that before boarding there is usually an announcement that there is going to be too much luggage for the overhead bins and the airline is therefor offering to check your bag through to your destination for free. So if you have a bag small enough to meet the requirement for overhead storage you can usually save the checked bag charge, typically $35-$50 a bag, by bringing the bag to the gate and checking it there for free. What are the costs' There is some risk that you will actually have to carry the bag on and stow it. You will have to run the bag through security so cannot use it for a pocket knife or something else that is allowed in checked luggage but not on the flight. You will have to take the bag to the gate. But you still get the benefit of not having to deal with the bag in the plane or transport it from one flight to the connecting flight. This suggests two things. First, the fact that there are too many carry-on bags to fit in the bins may be a result of the policy of checking bags in for free, with passengers choosing to carry bags on instead of checking them to take advantage of the policy. Second, it might pay the airline to accept checked bags that fit the carry-on size limit for free, thus eliminating or at least reducing the problem of too many bags for the overhead storage and the hassle of dealing with it....

This choice comes to mind when I think about the 47th president's frequent comments recently about incorporating Greenland and Canada into the United States. A few cases in point: Before delivering an inaugural address in which he vaguely but forcefully expressed a desire for the U.S. to expand its territory, Trump raised the issue on a confrontational phone call with the prime minister of Denmark, which handles Greenland's international affairs. More recently, he spoke of Canada becoming a U.S. state to reporters on Air Force One. But as an economic historian, I believe that thought experiments can be a useful way of understanding truths about the world. And one such truth is that Greenland and Canada play a key role in the global economy. If the U.S. were to absorb either or both, it would be a strategic, economic and political game changer. So, for a moment, let's take Trump both seriously and literally. Below, I've laid out some very rough measures of how a reconstituted megastate including the U.S., Canada or Greenland would look in comparison to other leading countries and blocs....

Donald Trump promised his supporters that if he won the presidency again, he would pardon at least some of the January 6 rioters who have been prosecuted. 'Tonight I'm going to be signing on the J6 hostages pardons to get them out,' he told the crowd at Capital One Arena on Monday night. 'And as soon as I leave, I'm going to the Oval Office, and will be signing pardons for a lot of people.' Many prominent Republicans seem to agree with Trump's view that the January 6 insurrectionists, including men convicted of assaulting police officers, are government 'hostages.' The view seems to be that Democrats are using the events of January 6 as an excuse to carry out what Trump calls a 'witch hunt.' Prominent Republicans weren't always blase about January 6. Immediately following the attack on the Capitol, and even into the following year, many leading Republicans condemned the attack on the Capitol and the police officers assigned to protect it. As an antidote to amnesia, here is an incomplete compilation of remarks about the January 6 violence made by Republicans who now are seeking Cabinet-level positions in the new Trump administration, or are otherwise in Trump's inner circle....