Posted:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVOtm9I-GOM
Baakiyalakshmi | 4th to 6th June 2025 - Promo
Bigg Boss 19: daily Discussion Thread- 27th Oct 2025.
PHATHAKHEE 27.10
Yeh Rishta Kya Kehlata Hai - 27 Oct 2025 EDT
Mannat Har Khushi Paane Ki: Episode Discussion Thread - 31
BIGHDE BACHCHE 28.10
Previous Season favourites
Bigg Boss 19: Daily Discussion Thread - 28th Oct 2025
Male r*pe yuckkkk ??????
Yeh Rishta Kya Kehlata Hai Oct. 28, 2025 Episode Discussion Thread
Thamma crashes on Monday,EDKD emerges a hit
Third person: Mihir jaanbujh kar Anjaan bewakoof insaan
25 years of Mohabbatein
KSBKB2 Oct 27 written episode with pics attached.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVOtm9I-GOM
Baakiyalakshmi | 4th to 6th June 2025 - Promo
What Do We Owe the Dead?
International human rights law only recognizes the rights of the living.
By Tyler McBrien
In 2020, Tishiko King returned to her native Masig Island in Australia’s Torres Strait to survey the damage wrought by climate change. In the 20 years since she last lived there, warming waters had diminished traditional fishing grounds and made life hard for indigenous Kulkalaig. Rising sea levels also threatened the home of future generations. But King’s homecoming forced her to confront how the climate crisis had ravaged another group: the dead.
Walking along a familiar beach, she noticed that the shifting tides had eroded burial grounds and exposed the remains of her ancestors. “We actually picked up the bones of one of my grandmas, like seashells on the beach,” King said in a talk at the University of Sydney last year.
What could King do about this, legally speaking? Could the law have protected her grandmother from such indignity in death, or protected King from this disturbing discovery? Did her grandmother’s rights as a human being die with her?
These are unsettled questions. Debates about what we owe the dead have persisted for millennia, yet the law offers incomplete and unsatisfying answers. “Universally, human beings care deeply about respecting the dead, and, universally, we violate the rights of the dead,” said Anjli Parrin, director of the Global Human Rights Clinic at the University of Chicago Law School. “These two truths sit uncomfortably next to each other.”
Despite a shared belief that the dead deserve dignity, there are huge gaps in the protections that international law offers them. “In international human rights law in particular, there's nothing, virtually nothing,” Morris Tidball-Binz, the United Nations special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, told me. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which serves as the foundation of international human rights law, applies only to the living; there is no equivalent for the dead.
Nor is there legal consensus that international law could or should mandate human rights for the dead, outside of wartime. (International humanitarian law, the body of law that lays out protections during armed conflict for certain categories of people, such as prisoners of war and civilians, does recognize the dead as having rights.) In a 2020 article called “What Remains? Human Rights After Death,” Claire Moon, a sociologist at the London School of Economics and Political Science, describes asking international lawyers and forensic scientists two questions: Do the dead have human rights? And if so, which rights do they have? The responses she received were “wildly varying,” ranging from “What a ridiculous question! Only the living can have human rights!” to “What a ridiculous question! Of course, the dead have human rights!”
Debates about what we owe the dead have persisted for millennia, yet the law offers incomplete and unsatisfying answers. “Universally, human beings care deeply about respecting the dead, and, universally, we violate the rights of the dead,” said Anjli Parrin.
If the jury is still out, however, there are signs that the deliberation is making progress. The world’s foremost international legal institutions, chief among them the U.N., are seriously grappling with the question of what we owe the dead, as legal scholars and forensic anthropologists develop standards and guidelines for their protection. Sometimes called “soft law documents,” these include a U.N. text that gives guidance on how to put into practice the duty to protect life and investigate potentially unlawful deaths, and a similar text developed in association with the International Commission on Missing Persons that sets out rules and practices for protecting and investigating mass grave sites. International and regional human rights courts have also recently affirmed various rights of the dead in countries including Guatemala and Colombia.
Developing international laws that explicitly protect the dead outside of war — rather than leaving it to individual nations to determine their own protections, or to international laws that refer to the dead implicitly — is crucial work. Such protections allow international courts to prosecute national governments within their jurisdiction for violations. They also establish a standard that can guide nations as they develop their own laws. The current lack of universal rights and protections for the dead is particularly harmful for marginalized groups, such as migrants and LGBTQ people. As Tidball-Binz wrote in a U.N. report last summer, “Many of the inequities, discrimination and injustices that occur in life continue to persist in death.”
Luis Fondebrider knows where the bodies are buried. A pioneer of the field of forensic anthropology, in 1984 he founded the Equipo Argentino de Arqueología Forense, a group of students that applied innovative forensic scientific techniques to recover and identify “the disappeared” and other victims of Argentina’s military dictatorship. Since then, his work has taken him to international tribunals and other inquiries into the missing in more than 60 countries.
Fondebrider believes that every culture observes rituals around at least four stages: birth, entering adulthood, marriage, and finally, death. “It’s a human need not related to a specific religion, culture, or ideology,” he told me over Zoom from The Gambia, where he was training members of the government on how to look for missing persons. “When someone, as a consequence of a violent death, cannot recover the body, cannot see the dead, cannot bury them properly according to their rituals, it's an alteration of reality for that person, for that family, for that village.” He has countless stories to back this up. “After 20 or 30 years, when you give back the body to the family, it's like the person died that day,” he said. “Around the world, I go to the houses of the families [of the missing] and they have the room of the boy or the girl in the same condition when they disappeared 20 years ago.” Once when returning a body to a family, a mother kept touching Fondebrider’s hands, so he asked why. Because you were touching the body of my son, she replied.
Parrin, in her work reviewing legal frameworks on the protection of the dead around the world, likewise struggled to find a single community that lacked reverence for the dead. It’s this universality that makes protections for the dead better suited to international law, rather than simply national laws, she believes.
This same logic, in part, underpinned the development of international humanitarian law’s protections for the dead during war. Most of the international rights and protections for the dead that currently exist belong to this older, more codified body of law.
Today, requirements to identify the war dead in accordance with international humanitarian law and return them to their families are often the only things warring rivals can agree on. This past November, Russia returned the bodies of 563 members of the Ukrainian military who were killed in Donetsk or Bakhmut, or had been in morgues on Russian territory. In return, Ukraine sent home the bodies of 37 Russian soldiers.
The history of war is full of stories of identifying or returning the war dead, which can happen even decades after the guns go quiet. In 1982, the United Kingdom and Argentina went to war over a cluster of islands about 300 miles from the east coast of Argentina that are known in the U.K. as the Falklands and in Argentina as the Malvinas. The British took control of the islands after 10 weeks, and the fighting came at the price of hundreds of lives on both sides. After the hostilities ended, a British army captain named Geoffrey Cardozo spent six weeks helping build a cemetery for the dozens of fallen Argentinian soldiers that British forces found scattered — sometimes half-buried — throughout the islands. Before burying the bodies, Cardozo recorded any identifying markings, as well as where each body had been found, and where it was buried. “I am an army officer, I am a soldier,” Cardozo said, “but before everything else I am a human being.”
Once when returning a body to a family, a mother kept touching Fondebrider’s hands, so he asked why. Because you were touching the body of my son, she replied.
To be sure, warring sides often ignore international humanitarian law, and the obligations toward the dead that it demands. In the past year, for example, there have been reports of the Israeli military desecrating cemeteries in Gaza, as well as corpses left in the streets for stray dogs to scavenge.
Even so, the existing baseline for how the dead should be treated during wartime, set out in international humanitarian law, is essential. Militaries base their manuals on these legal obligations, and international courts can bring cases against countries or individuals who fail to live up to them. Extending or strengthening international rights for the dead in times of peace, too, might likewise push countries to bolster their national protections.
“Having peacetime principles isn’t going to prevent violations — just as me saying that there's an absolute prohibition of torture is not preventing torture — but it's at least admitting that there is a role [for human rights of the dead],” said Parrin.
Though international human rights law contains no explicit rights that protect a dead body, rights for the dead can sometimes be inferred from broader rights that exist for the living. For example, the rights to life and to be protected from enforced disappearance oblige states to protect and preserve the remains of someone killed unlawfully or buried in an unmarked mass grave. In fact, as Tidball-Binz’s U.N. report points out, investigating a possible unlawful killing is part of a state’s duty to uphold the right to life, under international human rights law.
Who counts as family? The law doesn’t have good answers. “It's thought of largely as biological families, but that leads to discrimination of LGBTQ folks and other social families,” said Parrin. And many of the dead, namely the unclaimed or unidentified, have no families at all to fight for those rights.
International human rights law, and national laws, also recognize rights held by the family of the dead. Most jurisdictions, for example, uphold some form of a family’s right to a dignified burial for loved ones. This is true at the international level too. In two cases from Nepal, initiated in 2012 and 2014, the U.N. Human Rights Committee — an independent body that monitors compliance with international human rights law — found that cruel, inhuman treatment of human remains amounted to cruel, inhuman treatment of the family of the deceased. Regional courts such as the Inter-American Court of Human Rights have reaffirmed these protections and the rights of family members.
But this legal framework, which relies on inferring human rights of the dead from the rights of the living, is insufficient. In thinking of the rights of families of the dead, there’s a significant snag: Who counts as family? The law doesn’t have good answers. “It's thought of largely as biological families, but that leads to discrimination of LGBTQ folks and other social families,” said Parrin. And many of the dead, namely the unclaimed or unidentified, have no families at all to fight for those rights. In other cases, governments lack either the capacity or the will to track down the deceased’s next of kin, especially for the remains of people deemed unworthy or undeserving of protection to begin with.
This is why some scholars, such as Ximena Londoño, a legal adviser at the International Committee of the Red Cross, argue that a fundamental aspect of existing wartime protections for the dead, in international humanitarian law, is that “treatment of the dead is related to the dead themselves and not to the relatives [of the dead].” In other words, someone who dies during an armed conflict has the same rights whether or not they have family who miss them, and whether or not their identity is known. Scholars such as Parrin hope to establish the same kind of equality under international human rights law.
The lack of explicit protections for the dead in international human rights law creates difficulties beyond defining familial boundaries. Consider one investigation from 2020 that found that 39,000 unidentified and unclaimed bodies languished in Mexico’s morgues after the government started to deploy the military to crack down on organized crime and drug traffickers in 2006. As the militarized response created power vacuums and turf wars, murder rates soared, and morgues grew overwhelmed. In 2018, a trailer parked in a suburban neighborhood of Guadalajara was only discovered by the stench of the 273 bodies decomposing inside of it. Other bodies were buried in unmarked graves without proper postmortems or given to medical schools with no consideration for the wishes of the deceased. The federal government only began its first real effort to identify the dead and the missing a few years ago — an undertaking that some estimate could take forensic scientists 120 years to complete.
The discovery of the mass graves in Tunisia, as well as the country’s other apparent mistreatment of the dead, made global headlines. Despite the moral outrage, however, it wasn’t clear that a crime had been committed: There’s no agreed upon definition of a mass grave in international human rights law.
Or consider the thousands of migrants who die before reaching their destination. After civil war broke out in Libya in 2011, Tunisia threw open its gates to more than 1 million refugees and other migrants, earning praise from advocacy groups. However, that generosity waned over the years, and drowned migrants began to wash up on Tunisia’s shores. In 2019, human rights groups criticized Tunisia for reports of unidentified migrant corpses carried in garbage trucks and then dumped in concealed mass graves after officials refused to allow their burial in local cemeteries.
The discovery of the mass graves in Tunisia, as well as the country’s other apparent mistreatment of the dead, made global headlines. Despite the moral outrage, however, it wasn’t clear that a crime had been committed: There’s no agreed upon definition of a mass grave in international human rights law. In 2023, one migration researcher told The Guardian that even when Tunisian coroners conduct autopsies on the bodies of asylum seekers, in order to determine a cause of death, they make no attempt to establish the dead person’s identity, because they have no legal obligation to try to do so. If “there are no family members who report a disappearance,” he said, “the identification becomes ‘irrelevant’ for the authorities.”
What happened in Tunisia perfectly illustrates the connection between injustice and discrimination in life and in death. It’s an insight that motivates the recommendation in Tidball-Binz’s U.N. report to establish “guiding principles for protection of the dead through a human rights lens” — essentially, something akin to the Universal Declaration on Human Rights: a Universal Declaration on the Dignity of the Dead. Only universal rights, applied without prejudice or regard to categories of people, can fill the gaps in protection through which migrants and other marginalized groups often fall, in both life and death.
TYLER MCBRIEN is the managing editor of Lawfare and a 2024-25 Law & Justice Journalism Project Fellow. He has written for The Atlantic, Washington Post, Slate, Foreign Policy, Mother Jones, The New Republic, Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere.
A Missing Link Between Concussion and Alzheimer’s
Viruses may play a surprising part
By Katharine Gammon
Today more than 55 million people around the world have Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias, which ravage the minds of those who suffer from them and have devastating impacts on their family members. In spite of decades of research, the precise origins of these diseases continue to elude scientists, though numerous factors have been found to be associated with higher risk, including genetics and various lifestyle and environmental factors.
The quest has recently taken a turn to a newer model for studying the brain: brain organoids. These three-dimensional clumps of neuronal tissue derived from human stem cells have been used to study everything from epilepsy to the origins of consciousness. And now, researchers in Massachusetts are slamming them with miniature metal pistons to test out whether they can lend credence to a controversial hypothesis: that concussions might reactivate a common virus in the brain, increasing dementia risk.
A decade of research suggests traumatic brain injury, whether from accidents or high-contact sports, is a standout risk factor for Alzheimer’s and other forms of neurodegenerative decline. Some estimates suggest that up to 10 percent of cases could be attributed to at least one prior head injury, but why is not fully understood. Separately, a growing body of research proposes that viral infection, including a common virus known as herpes simplex one, can also increase susceptibility to these diseases. But all three things—head trauma, viral infection, and dementia—have not been directly connected in experimental research, until now.
One of the challenges in getting to the roots of dementia is that humans lead complex, messy lives. In the soup of risk factors—from high blood pressure to loneliness to genetic inheritance—it can be hard to filter out the most impactful forces that have contributed to the onset of any one dementia case. There are no ethical ways to test these questions on humans, of course, while using lab animals presents its own ethical and cost challenges. Animals are never a perfect match for humans anyway, and dementia-related findings in animals have so far not translated well to human patients.
Enter the organoids.
In lab-grown brain organoids, scientists have been able to model some of the same hallmarks of neurodegenerative disease found in the autopsied brains of humans who suffered these diseases while they were alive. These include accumulations of beta amyloid protein, a metabolic waste product, into structures known as plaques, which disrupt signaling between nerve cells.
The more blows these tiny organoids took, the more abnormal structures the scientists found.
For the new lab study, a team of researchers grew a series of brain organoids. Some of the organoids had a dormant form of herpes simplex virus—which exists in 80 percent of people by age 60—while others were virus-free. Then they jolted all of the brain organoids with two different kinds of tiny metal pistons, a model that has been used by other scientists to mimic head trauma in brain organoids.
“We think what we found in the 3-D model applies in the living brain,” says Ruth Itzhaki, a visiting professorial fellow at the University of Oxford and co-author on the new study, which was published this month in the journal Science Signaling. “You get a reactivation of the virus after each blow, and each time damage is done. It all accumulates until, eventually, you get Alzheimer’s.”
In the model organoids that were infected with the virus, after repeated blows to the brain tissue, the dormant viruses woke up and started replicating again. Later, some of the signatures of Alzheimer’s and other dementias began to appear, including proliferation of beta-amyloid protein and neuroinflammation. The more blows these tiny organoids took, the more inflammation, beta amyloid and other Alzheimer’s-like features the scientists found.
The organoids without any dormant virus only showed a few minor changes after they were hit with the piston, such as an increase over 10 days in the number of glial cells, which act like scar tissue in the brain after an injury. The researchers concluded that repeated blows to the head may contribute to dementia by reactivating latent herpes simplex virus in the brain.
Itzhaki started investigating the role of herpes simplex virus in Alzheimer’s disease more than 30 years ago. She was part of a team who first discovered herpes simplex virus in the autopsied brain tissue of elderly people, both with and without Alzheimer’s disease. At the time, brain tissue was considered sterile, or microbe-free.
Her team went on to discover that in cell culture, the virus could lead to key Alzheimer’s features—amyloid plaques and protein tangles inside nerve cells, which also disrupt signaling—particularly in people who carried the heritable APOE4 gene. The researchers also found that these same features could be reduced with antivirals. They later found that the varicella zoster virus, responsible for chicken pox and shingles, can also reactivate latent herpes simplex virus in a three-dimensional brain model.
Itzhaki says that despite decades of hostility against the idea that Alzheimer’s could be caused by a virus, support for the link has grown in recent years. Viruses cause not only direct damage, but also inflammation—which switches on other latent viruses. “It becomes a vicious cycle with inflammation,” she says.
David Corry, a professor of pathology and immunology and medicine at Baylor College in Houston, Texas, says the findings are the first to show that repetitive head injury is a convincing trigger for reactivating latent herpes simplex virus and promoting brain changes associated with dementias. Based on the data presented, he agrees with the conclusions Itzhaki and her team made.
“This study suggests that a unifying feature of these [neurodegenerative] disorders might be the reactivation of herpes simplex virus one, but possibly also other brain infections that are only now coming to light,” says Corry. Of course, a brain organoid is not a brain, says Corry, so it does not have an immune system or other reparative processes available to it that might help to mitigate damage done by head trauma or virus re-activation.
And there are likely many paths to the development of these complex diseases of the brain. When doctors autopsy the brains of people who were diagnosed, they often see many different types of pathologies in various regions of their brains, which may indicate different potential causes, such as genetics, lifestyle factors, and age-related brain changes, says Brian Balin, a neuroscientist at the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine. But collecting a complete history of patients’ injuries and infections could help doctors diagnose dementia or Alzheimer’s disease and lead to earlier interventions, he says.
Itzhaki says in the future she wants to look into how to interrupt the damaging processes that unfold following traumatic brain injuries, such as those suffered in soccer, boxing, and football. She is aiming to test antivirals and other medications to reduce the inflammation caused by viruses that could be reactivated after a brain injury.
Though they are far from a perfect proxy, brain organoids will help her and others to continue this work.
Katharine Gammon is a freelance science writer based in Santa Monica, California, who writes about environment, science, and parenting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTWONZMLxuQ
Baakiyalakshmi | Episode Promo | 6th June 2025
Uncertainty is stressful, but here’s why we need to feel it
by Jessica Alquist, experimental psychologist
As much as people struggle with not knowing, we live in an uncertain world – and there are advantages to embracing that
Think of the last time you felt uncertain about something important. Maybe you were concerned about the future of a relationship, about a confusing new medical symptom, or even about the future of the free world. As you likely experienced first-hand, the sense of not knowing, or of being unable to make a clear prediction, is often anxiety-provoking and attention-grabbing – and for that reason, many people think of uncertainty as an unpleasant state. But I hope to change how you think about uncertainty – and help you see that, if you never experienced it, you’d be ill equipped to cope in an uncertain world.
It’s important to recognise that not all uncertainty is the same, and how people respond to uncertainty depends in part on the type of uncertainty they experience. There are situations in which we may not know what is happening because the outcome of the event hasn’t been determined yet (for instance, your boss hasn’t decided who to lay off yet, or election votes are still being cast). But uncertainty can also occur when we don’t yet know what an outcome is, even though it has been determined (the people being laid off have been chosen, but you don’t know who they are yet; the vote has been collected, but the results have not been announced). Our responses to both these types of uncertainty illustrate the unexpected usefulness of experiencing uncertainty
When the thing hasn’t happened yet
The difference between situations in which the outcome has or has not been determined is critical: after all, when the thing hasn’t happened yet, it could still be possible to influence it. Experiencing uncertainty in this context prompts us to see the situations where we can act to move undecided circumstances in a desired direction. If the boss hasn’t decided who to lay off yet, the sense of anticipation might be unpleasant, but it also means you may still be able to act in ways that decrease the likelihood that it is you.
One domain in which uncertainty can increase effort in this way is romantic relationships. For example, in one study, people desiring a romantic relationship with a particular person were asked to think about a time when they were worried their crush wasn’t interested in them – inducing uncertainty in this way led these participants to say they’d be more willing to exert effort in the relationship than a comparison group who thought about something less likely to trigger feelings of uncertainty (such as what their crush might do on a typical day).
Research confirms that people prefer to watch undetermined events live rather than recorded later
Other research has shown that on days when people in a dating relationship feel more uncertain about their partner’s feelings, they tend to post more about their relationship on social media, potentially as a way to invest in the relationship. Similarly, you might find that when you feel less certain about a desired or current relationship, you are more likely to plan a date, buy flowers, or at least post something sweet on social media. In short, uncertainty might be uncomfortable, but it can motivate us to put in the work for a desired outcome that hasn’t finished unfolding yet.
The motivational power of uncertainty is so entrenched that in some contexts people tend to prefer undetermined uncertain situations over determined ones, even when there is no way they could affect the outcome. You probably know a sports fan who will only watch ‘the big game’ live – and research confirms that people prefer to watch undetermined events live rather than recorded later. In one study, participants reported being most interested in watching a Bachelorette-style reality TV show if the show was both unscripted and shown live (providing maximum uncertainty about the outcome).
We often view undetermined situations as more desirable than situations in which an (unknown) outcome has been determined, in part because we feel some amount of (irrational) control over even objectively uncontrollable undetermined events. Imagine guessing the roll of a die. Would you prefer to guess before the die is rolled or after it is rolled (but before the result is revealed)? Most people prefer to guess before the die is rolled. This preference for predicting before the outcome is known is stronger in people with a greater belief that they can affect outcomes in life more generally. Are you this kind of person? If so, it could affect your attitude to uncertainty. For instance, say a committee is deciding whether you will be accepted to graduate school – you may prefer hearing they haven’t met yet, as opposed to being told they’ve met and decided but haven’t announced their decisions. This is because outcomes that are not yet determined may feel like they can still be influenced, even if this feeling is often irrational.
The thing has happened, but you don’t know how it went
Even if the thing has happened and the outcome has been determined, experiencing uncertainty can serve as a signal that you could benefit from acquiring more information.
To help us gain more information about uncertain situations, our attention is attracted to uncertainty. In one study, participants viewed a series of pictures, each one being paired with an aversive sound either all of the time, never, or half of the time (this last group of pictures therefore had the most uncertain association with the sounds). Only some of the participants learned to recognise these different probabilities and they were the ones who spent longer staring at the 50/50 pictures. In other words, participants whose attention was attracted to the pictures with uncertain probabilities were the ones who learned more about the picture-sound contingencies. This is an example of how paying more attention to the things we can’t reliably predict (yet) can focus our energy on potentially making better predictions in the future. For a real-life equivalent, consider how figuring out the predictors of your boss’s seemingly unpredictable moods could allow you to choose the best moment to make requests.
Uncertainty can sometimes prompt us to seek out useless and harmful information
Even the stress triggered by less predictable situations can help us to learn. In one study, participants were asked to make a long series of choices between two rocks, one of which always delivered a safe but unpleasant electric shock. The probabilities of which rock (the one on the left or right) was more likely to deliver a shock stayed the same for a series of trials, and then switched. Physiological stress (measured by the sweat on participants’ fingers and the dilation of their pupils) and their subjective feelings of stress were highest for trials where the probability of one or other rock being electrified was closest to 50/50. More importantly, participants who experienced more stress when the rocks were more uncertain (closer to 50/50) were more likely to correctly guess the non-shocking rock than people whose arousal did not track the uncertainty of the situation, suggesting they’d done a better job of tracking the probabilities.
Outside of the lab, you can imagine how the increased stress you experience from interacting with a touchy, erratic family member, as uncomfortable as it is, could actually help you learn what conversation topics will be best received (thus avoiding the ‘shock’ of interpersonal conflict).
A word of caution
Although there is a function to uncertainty’s effect on attention and stress, there are also downsides. Uncertainty’s ability to capture our attention and increase stress is part of the reason why uncertainty over potentially devastating events can be so debilitating – for instance when waiting for a medical diagnosis.
Another caveat to uncertainty’s usefulness is that it can sometimes prompt us to seek out useless and harmful information. For example, interviews with private investigators found that 92 per cent of their clients had asked to see pictures of a partner cheating (in addition to receiving the information about the cheating), even though this was likely to only deepen their distress. Similarly, many of us have experienced succumbing to click-bait headlines (eg, ‘The Secret Killer in Our Waters’), even though we know at a rational level that hearing more about it is unlikely to benefit either our mental health or our decision-making. In other research, participants chose to see transcripts of an interaction partner’s criticisms, even though the participants admitted that reading them would do them more harm than good.
In a similar vein, people say they would advise a friend to avoid certain unpleasant information (eg, regarding whether a former romantic partner had cheated on them). Yet, if people are asked if they themselves would like to know this information, they say they would want to know.
The case for embracing uncertainty
These sorts of scenarios, where we would be better off without additional information, show how it can be beneficial to learn to sit with the uncertainty – rather than always seeking to remove it. There are other ways that we pay a price when we rush to avoid the experience of uncertainty. Consider research showing that people (and pigeons!) will often choose a suboptimal bet – where they will learn the outcome sooner – over a more advantageous wager, for which they will have to wait to learn the outcome. This is despite the timing of the delivery of the reward itself being held constant across both choices.
People who experience discomfort with uncertainty about information are also more likely to accept misinformation as true and claim familiarity with made-up concepts than those who are more comfortable with uncertainty. Impatience to resolve uncertainty could also result in settling for a less-good job, relationship or information than you could obtain if you could be patient in uncertainty.
Those who had to wait to find out which of two preferred gifts they’d won were happier for longer
Finally, discomfort with uncertainty has costs for mental health. People who are generally intolerant of uncertainty are more likely to experience depression, anxiety and suicide ideation than people who are less intolerant of uncertainty. For optimal mental health and decision-making, establishing some comfort with uncertainty is a huge benefit. One technique used in therapy designed to reduce intolerance of uncertainty encourages people to engage with relatively low-risk uncertain situations. Popping into a new exercise class, testing out a new technology, or introducing yourself to a stranger may build your tolerance of uncertainty.
If you decide to pursue experiences of uncertainty to increase your comfort with them, you may notice some unexpected benefits. Uncertainty can actually enhance positive experiences. Multiple studies have shown that uncertainty increases the duration of positive emotions. In one, participants were told they’d won a prize or even two. Crucially, those who had to wait to find out which of their two preferred gifts they’d won remained happier for longer compared with participants who were told right away which preferred gift they would get. Those participants who had to wait were even happier compared with others told right away that they’d actually receive both their preferred gifts.
It’s for this reason that Halloween ‘boo bags’ – where neighbours drop off gifts without saying who they are from – and ‘blind bag’ toys – where the exact toy inside is uncertain until it is opened – may brighten your (or your child’s) day a little longer compared with their less-uncertain versions. The attention-grabbing nature of uncertainty can work in our favour when it surrounds what we know will be some kind of positive outcome.
If you did not experience uncertainty in this uncertain world, you would be at a tremendous disadvantage. You would fail to give increased attention to your teenager’s recent erratic behaviour, vague construction detour signs, or that suspicious-looking mole, potentially leading to negative consequences. Uncertainty is also what allows us to get an extra spark of enjoyment out of secret admirers, wrapped gifts and suspenseful novels. Although uncertainty in the world is not always welcome, it is likely you will benefit if you can learn to be more aware of it and comfortable with it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rr7hzIYCXs0
Baakiyalakshmi | 9th to 13th June 2025 - Promo
Fidgeting at your desk? Your body may be trying to tell you something
By Marielle Segarra, Margaret Cirin
Ever wonder why you bounce your leg, drum your fingers or click and unclick your pen until your colleagues beg you to stop?
Don't fight the fidget! It may be your body's way of telling you that "for whatever reason, you need movement right now," says Katy Bowman, a biomechanist and the author of the books Rethink Your Position and Movement Matters. So get up, switch positions, stretch or do some physical activity.
Scientific support shows it's good for our health. Fidgeting increases blood flow to our limbs, helps regulate blood sugar and reduces the risk of mortality from prolonged sitting. It can relieve stress and anxiety and improve attention, especially for some people with ADHD or other neurodivergent identities.
But as many of us know, it can be a challenge to tear away from our computers in the middle of a workday. Physical therapists and researchers break down our urge to fidget and offer office-friendly ways to satisfy the need for movement.
Change your position (and don't worry too much about the "right posture")
Fidgeting is a sign you need to break out of a stagnant posture, says Bowman. Even a position that feels comfortable at first can begin causing back pain, headaches or stiffness if you hold it long enough.
So listen to your body and mix things up. Alternate between sitting, standing, reclining and moving. That might mean opting to stand in the back of a conference room during a big staff meeting, taking a call while going on a walk or reading a report with your feet propped up in the break room. You might also try a hybrid sit-stand desk. Studies have shown such desks can reduce discomfort in your lower back, neck, shoulder and more.
The goal is to put yourself in configurations that contort your body in different ways. They should be "adaptive and dynamic" and easy to "change in and out of," says Leada Malek, a physical therapist and author of the book Science of Stretch.
Don't worry too much about what is "good" and "bad" posture. Both Malek and Bowman agree on a common phrase among physical therapists: "Your best posture is your next posture."
Anticipate your need for movement
Regardless of how you fidget or move throughout the day, Bowman wants to dispel the idea that movement shouldn't belong in our workplaces.
"There's a big assumption that if people are moving and taking care of their bodies' physical needs, they can't possibly address their mental needs," she says.
In fact, there's ample evidence to the contrary: "If you are someone who needs to move, moving can really help you regulate yourself." And that allows you to do the best work possible.
Schedule "exercise snacks"
Get ahead of your fidgeting by taking a movement break after every task. Do 10 squats at the top of every hour or some jumping jacks every time you cross something off your to-do list or finish up a meeting, says Malek.
Sitting at a desk all day puts stress on your spine, shoulders and hips. Eventually, that can lead to chronic pain. A sedentary lifestyle also increases our risks of cardiovascular disease, cancer and metabolic disorders.
"Doing a three-minute workout, walking or doing lunges up and down your room could help a lot" with any physical discomfort, says Malek.
Done regularly, these short bursts of intermittent exercise, called "exercise snacks," can also increase your metabolism and help you live longer, says Jayne Morgan, a cardiologist and vice president of medical affairs at Hello Heart, a cardiovascular-health tracking app.
Go for a five-minute walk (every half hour to be precise)
If you are averse to getting in your exercise snacks in a crowded office, you could also check that box with short, frequent walks.
Researcher Keith Diaz and his team at Columbia University Medical Center, in partnership with our colleagues at Body Electric, set out to find the least amount of movement you need to counteract the dangers of prolonged sitting.
"We found that a five-minute walk every half hour offset a lot of the harms of sitting," Diaz says. With just five minutes of leisurely walking, study participants saw blood sugar spikes after a meal reduced by almost 60%.
And you don't need to be booking it, either. "Any pace of walking provides some cardiovascular benefit," says Morgan. So take a few minutes to get up and pace around your office or complete a loop around the block.
What about fidget toys?
You might have fidget toys like stress balls, fidget spinners and pop-its at your desk. What role do they play in our impulse to bounce and tap?
The research on these toys is conflicting. Some studies on fidget toys among children and college students in the classroom have shown that these gadgets can negatively affect attention, memory and the ability to focus on tasks.
Other studies suggest they can help regulate emotions or reduce anxiety among children, especially among active fidgeters. They may also be a useful tool for some children and adults with autism who do similar stimming, or repeated self-regulating movements.
So if you want an outlet to help you meet more of your sensory or movement needs, you could try keeping some fidget toys on your desk. But take care — they might be a little distracting.
Some Dead Sea Scrolls are older than researchers thought, AI analysis suggests
But overall, machine learning approach closely matches what human scholars had long suspected about ancient documents
By Kristin Romey
Since the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls some 8 decades ago, researchers have relied on the vast trove of Hebrew and Aramaic writings to tease out how Jewish communities lived more than 2000 years ago. Combined, the thousands of scraps of parchment and animal skin contain everything from some of the oldest known books of the Hebrew Bible to laws that governed the communities during centuries of turmoil.
But as informative as these fragments are—some contain a few lines of text on a brittle scrap the size of a thumbnail, preserved and protected for millennia in the desert caves of what is now the West Bank—most of the scrolls lack something important: timestamps that securely confirm their age, such as mentions of a particular monarch’s reign. So for decades, researchers have relied on handwriting style and radiocarbon dating. Now, scientists have harnessed artificial intelligence (AI) to create a new way to date the scrolls, revealing that some may be up to a century older than previously thought.
The new technique, announced today in PLOS ONE, uses machine learning, an algorithmic approach that teaches computers to “read” the Dead Sea Scrolls, to cross-reference two kinds of data: carbon-14 dates from a selection of scrolls, as well as geometric data on the fragments’ words and letterforms. About 80% of the time, the resulting AI model—called Enoch, after the Hebrew prophet and early scientist—came up with median age estimates earlier than those of human paleographers, scholars who decipher and interpret the properties of ancient texts. These discrepancies may make scholars re-evaluate how ideas and literacy spread across the ancient Near East.
But Enoch won’t put human paleographers out of business anytime soon, says the study’s lead study author, Mladen Popović, head of the Qumran Institute at the University of Groningen. “AI needs human beings, especially in its development,” he says. “It’s a tool like the microscope is a tool for a biologist.”
By itself, the use of machine learning in analyzing ancient texts is nothing new. In 2021, Popović and his colleagues used machine learning to show the Great Isaiah Scroll—among the largest and best preserved Dead Sea Scrolls—was the product of two scribes working together, rather than a single scribe’s handwriting. More recently, carbonized scrolls from the Roman town Herculaneum have been digitally “unwrapped” to reveal 2000-year-old Latin poems and philosophical treatises.
Popović and his colleagues sought to extend these techniques to dating the Dead Sea Scrolls. They hoped the fragments’ algorithmically tuned dates could shed further light on their creators, who lived in and around Jerusalem between the fourth century B.C.E. and the second century C.E.—a place and time of enormous turmoil. In 332 B.C.E., Alexander the Great brought the area under pagan control. Less than 2 centuries later, in 160 B.C.E., the Greek state descended from Alexander’s conquest faced a Jewish rebellion now known as the Maccabee uprising. In 70 C.E., another 2 centuries later, Roman forces laid siege to Jerusalem and destroyed the Jewish temple for a second time.
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“Because none of the scrolls really have dates, we’re just kind of left to fill in the gaps,” says Drew Longacre, a research associate at the Duke Divinity School who also wasn’t associated with the study. “We kind of create this story, this picture—this metanarrative—about how the script works.”
According to previous paleographic analyses of the Dead Sea Scrolls, many of the fragments’ particular script styles mapped to different periods within this fractious political history. The “Hasmonean” script used on some Aramaic fragments, named for the Jewish Hasmonean dynasty, was thought to span roughly 100 B.C.E. to the first century C.E. The later “Herodian” Hebrew script, by contrast, was standardized by the time of Herod, the notorious Roman ruler who reigned over Judea at the time of Jesus Christ’s birth.
The Enoch AI model sees things differently. The new study finds the transition between Hasmonean and Herodian script is a bit messier than previously thought, with “Herodian” scripts that predate the existence of King Herod by as much as 50 years.
However, Enoch also delivers a vindication of old-school paleography, in the form of new dates for scroll 4Q114, which contains three chapters of the Book of Daniel. According to paleographer Christopher Rollston, a professor of Northwest Semitic languages and literatures at George Washington University, paleographers had placed 4Q114’s creation around 165 B.C.E. because the scroll describes events that place it around the Maccabee uprising, including the desecration of the temple in Jerusalem. Enoch predicts a range between 230–160 B.C.E., within Rollston’s estimates.
Rollston adds that the study’s results come as little surprise. “Initially, [the study] sort of seemed to criticize paleography as entirely subjective, you know?” he says. “Nonpaleographers will often do that … and I’ll sometimes remind them that what I do with scripts, they do with pots.”
Researchers not affiliated with the work say that whether the scroll analysis is done by humans or AI, handwriting alone can only date a document so precisely. Longacre, for one, says paleography isn’t well-suited in general for high-precision dating, especially when there’s not a lot of well-labeled data. And Rollston emphasizes that new AI techniques like Enoch can be useful tools—but they should never be the only tools a scholar uses to understand the writing of a manuscript.
“After all,” he says, “human handwriting—and all of its variations and idiosyncratic features—is a deeply human thing.”
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