The Conversation

Are brain games mostly BS?

Written by Walter Boot, Professor of Cognitive Psychology, Florida State University

You might just be getting better at the game you're practicing.Malcolm Lightbody/Unsplash, CC BY

You’ve probably seen ads for apps promising to make you smarter in just a few minutes a day. Hundreds of so-called “brain training” programs can be purchased for download. These simple games are designed to challenge mental abilities,...

School vouchers expand despite evidence of negative effects

Written by Christopher Lubienski, Professor, Indiana University

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, center, signs a bill that creates a new voucher program for thousands of students to attend private schools using taxpayer dollars.Lynne Sladky/AP

For the past couple of decades, proponents of vouchers for private schools have been pushing the idea that vouchers work.

They assert there is a consensus among researchers that...

How the 'good guy with a gun' became a deadly American fantasy

Written by Susanna Lee, Professor of French and Comparative Literature, Georgetown University

A drawing of Philip Marlowe, an icon of hard-boiled detective fiction created by author Raymond Chandler.CHRISTO DRUMMKOPF/flickr, CC BY

At the end of May, it happened again. A mass shooter killed 12 people, this time at a municipal center in Virginia Beach. Employees had been forbidden to carry guns at work, and some lamented that this policy had...

Convicts are returning to farming – anti-immigrant policies are the reason

Written by Stian Rice, Food systems geographer, Center for Urban Environmental Research and Education, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Migrant agricultural workers kept out of the US by tough immigration laws are now being replaced by prison labor.Shutterstock

Prison inmates are picking fruits and vegetables at a rate not seen since Jim Crow.

Convict leasing for agriculture – a system that allows states to sell prison labor to private farms – became infamous in the late...

Privacy concerns don't stop people from putting their DNA on the internet to help solve crimes

Written by Sarah Esther Lageson, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Criminal Justice, Rutgers University

Home DNA testing has made it easy and affordable for millions of people to learn about their ancestry. Now, police are using this genetic information to identify suspects in unsolved crimes.Shutterstock

Americans are embracing the use of DNA databases to solve crimes.

Over the past year DNA submitted to ancestry websites have helped police in the...

Does hitting the snooze button really help you feel better?

Written by Steven Bender, Clinical Assistant Professor of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery, Texas A&M University

How many times do you hit snooze before getting out of bed?DGLimages

To sleep or to snooze? You probably know the answer, but you don’t prefer it.

Most of us probably use the snooze function on our alarm clocks at some point in our lives. Just a few more minutes under the covers, a time to gather our thoughts, right?

While such snoozing might...

What would happen to Congress if Washington, DC became the 51st state?

Written by Dudley Poston, Professor of Sociology, Texas A&M University

D.C. would likely elect Democratic representatives and senators.Fang Deng/shutterstock.com

For years, the official motto of the District of Columbia has been “Taxation without representation.”

The residents of Washington, D.C. do not have representation in the U.S. House or in the Senate. People who live in the district, on average, pay...

What the US could learn about vaccination from Nigeria

Written by Shobana Shankar, Associate Professor, History/Africana Studies, Stony Brook University (The State University of New York)

Two women sell roadside refreshments in rural Kano in 2011.Shobana Shankar, CC BY-SA

To consider that Nigeria, infamous for anti-vaxx campaigns leading to polio outbreaks, has any lessons for Americans may be shocking.

But as measles cases in the U.S. climb to an all-time high after the disease was declared eliminated in 2000, U.S. public health...

The tell-tale clue to how meteorites were made, at the birth of the solar system

Written by William Herbst, Professor of Astronomy, Wesleyan University

Geminid meteors shower downward on a December night in a remote part of Virginia. Genevieve de Messieres/Shutterstock.com

April 26, 1803 was an unusual day in the small town of L’Aigle in Normandy, France – it rained rocks.

Over 3,000 of them fell out of the sky. Fortunately no one was injured. The French Academy of Sciences investigated...

No, Americans shouldn't fear traveling abroad

Written by Jay L. Zagorsky, Senior lecturer, Boston University

Just another American abroad.AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko

As summer travel season begins, friends and relatives have asked me if it’s safe to travel outside the U.S.

I understand their fears. The news is filled with scary stories, like a tourist bus being bombed near Egypt’s pyramids, people being knifed at a bus stop in Japan and continuing...