At first glance, Quiet Time – a stress reduction strategy used in several San Francisco middle and high schools, as well as in scattered schools around the Bay Area – looks like something out of the om-chanting 1960s. Twice daily, a gong sounds in the classroom and rowdy adolescents, who normally can’t sit still for 10 seconds, shut their eyes and try to clear their minds. I’ve spent lots of time in urban schools and have never seen anything like it.

This practice – meditation rebranded – deserves serious attention from parents and policymakers. An impressive array of studies shows that integrating meditation into a school’s daily routine can markedly improve the lives of students. If San Francisco schools Superintendent Richard Carranza has his way, Quiet Time could well spread citywide.

What’s happening at Visitacion Valley Middle School, which in 2007 became the first public school nationwide to adopt the program, shows why the superintendent is so enthusiastic. In this neighborhood, gunfire is as common as birdsong – nine shootings have been recorded in the past month – and most students know someone who’s been shot or did the shooting. Murders are so frequent that the school employs a full-time grief counselor.

In […]

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You’ve probably heard politicians or pundits say that ‘metadata doesn’t matter.” They argue that police and intelligence agencies shouldn’t need probable cause warrants to collect information about our communications. Metadata isn’t all that revealing, they say, it’s just numbers.

But the digital metadata trails you leave behind every day say more about you than you can imagine. Now, thanks to two MIT students, you don’t have to imagine-at least with respect to your email.

Deepak Jagdish and Daniel Smilkov’s Immersion program maps your life, using your email account. After you give the researchers access to your email metadata-not the content, just the time and date stamps, and ‘To” and ‘Cc” fields-they’ll return to you a series of maps and graphs that will blow your mind. The program will remind you of former loves, illustrate the changing dynamics of your professional and personal networks over time, mark deaths and transitions in your life, and more. You’ll probably learn something new about yourself, if you study it closely enough. (The students say they delete your data on your command.)

Whether or not you grant the program access to your data, watch the video embedded below to see Jagdish and Smilkov show illustrations from Immersion and […]

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CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — North Carolina has been in an academic crisis mode for more than three years.

An NCAA investigation into the football program in 2010 expanded into a probe of how the nation’s first public university provides academic help to athletes. It led to a discovery of fraud in a department with classes featuring significant athlete enrollments.

Now, the debate of balancing academics and big-time sports at the university has been reignited by comments from a reading specialist about the reading levels of football and basketball players.

“It really has just been like we’ve been under siege for the past three years,” said Lissa Lamkin Broome, a banking law professor and UNC’s faculty athletic representative. “Now to the extent that we’ve uncovered problems during this siege, that’s a good thing – to find those problems and weed them out and to try to put processes in place to hopefully ensure … that some of this stuff doesn’t happen again.”

In a CNN story this week, Mary Willingham said her research of 183 football or basketball players at UNC from 2004-12 found 60 percent reading at fourth- to eighth-grade levels and roughly 10 percent below a third-grade level. She said she worked with […]

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Europe’s temporary ban on neonicotinoids was a welcome sign that authorities are beginning to take widespread bee deaths seriously.

But we shouldn’t allow ourselves to relax just yet.

A new study into honeybee pollination supply and demand, published in the journal PLoS One, suggests that there are 13 million fewer colonies than are actually needed to pollinate Europe’s agricultural crops. As a result, honeybees are pollinating only two thirds of crops across Europe, but in Britain, the situation is particularly serious-with researchers suggesting that there are only enough honeybees to meet 25% of demand for pollination. For now, the only reason Europe isn’t facing worse consequences for its honeybee deficit is the fact wild pollinators are picking up the slack. That’s not, however, something we should rely on-at least according to lead researcher Professor Potts. Here’s how he described the honeybee crisis to The Guardian:

“We face a catastrophe in future years unless we act now,” said Professor Simon Potts, at the University of Reading, who led the research. “Wild pollinators need greater protection. They are the unsung heroes of the countryside, providing a critical link in the food chain for humans and doing work for free that would […]

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Supreme Court justices on Monday hammered President Barack Obama’s expansive use of the recess appointment power to sidestep Senate Republican obstructionism and temporarily staff government agencies. A ruling against the president would substantially alter the balance of power between the executive and legislative branches.

The justices broadly voiced strong skepticism that recess appointments during pro forma sessions — when the Senate technically gavels in and out of session but doesn’t conduct business — were constitutional as they did not technically constitute the “recess” to which the Constitution refers.

Justice Antonin Scalia, as he often does, led the charge against the Obama administration’s position. He argued that the president’s use of the recess appointments to fill empty slots on the National Labor Relations Board “flatly contradicts the clear text of the Constitution.” When U.S. Solicitor General Donald Verrilli defended the decision by saying the Constitution is ambiguous on that question, Scalia retorted, “It’s been assumed to be ambiguous by self-interested presidents,” to gasps and laughs in the chamber.

The Senate, argued Chief Justice John Roberts, has “an absolute right not to confirm nominees that the president submits.”

Even Obama-appointed Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor did not appear convinced that pro forma sessions were fair […]

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