
Released for Syndication:
02/14/2025
All organisms in an ecosystem are interconnected, and any imbalance in this complex relationship can have irreversible consequences for both humans and nonhumans. Numerous examples illustrate how the destruction of one species can lead to unforeseen and devastating impacts on others.
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Released for Syndication:
02/14/2025
During Donald Trump’s first presidential term and the Joe Biden presidential administration, proponents of education reform declared their movement dead. Their well-funded campaign to blame teachers for low scores on standardized tests, threaten public schools with closures, and ramp up market competition from charter schools...
Released for Syndication:
02/13/2025
On February 4, 2025, Chicago’s business community pushed back against Mayor Brandon Johnson’s proposal to raise real estate transfer taxes, adding to the city’s ongoing economic struggles.
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Released for Syndication:
02/13/2025
Authoritarianism, white male supremacy, and wealth supremacy are key catalysts for racial inequity, wealth inequality, restrictions on reproductive rights, and many other problems of the modern era. With these values embedded in our culture, even well-meaning people can unintentionally propagate unhealthy attitudes and...
Released for Syndication:
02/13/2025
Power in human societies is often viewed as hierarchical, meaning that it’s tiered and ranked. This view doesn’t fully capture the complexity of how power is managed in different cultures. Some societies are not strictly hierarchical but heterarchical, where power is distributed among various groups...
Released for Syndication:
02/12/2025
Birdsongs have inspired poets and lovers, becoming one of the philosophical focal points in ancient Greece and Rome. They have also led to several long-ago debates about the relationship between birdsong and human language.
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Released for Syndication:
02/07/2025
How do we organize elements in a system? One way is through the lens of hierarchy, which presupposes levels, a top-down ranking of elements. Another is homoarchy, which permits one (and only one) ordering. Both terms, while useful to characterize a stable formation, do not...
Released for Syndication:
02/07/2025
The popularity of support animals attests to the mental health benefits of bonding with a pet, such as decreased stress, anxiety, and loneliness. According to the Mayo Clinic, having pets may also positively impact cardiovascular health and blood pressure control.
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Released for Syndication:
02/07/2025
Editor’s note: This article, “Spontaneous Revolutions: Darwin’s Diagrams of Plant Movement,” was originally published in The Public Domain Review under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0. If you wish to reuse it, please see https://publicdomainreview.org/reusing-material/. It was republished for the Observatory by
Released for Syndication:
02/06/2025
For the nonhuman animal cause, the 19th century’s end would bring to a close a defining period—a transformative 30-year era beginning in 1866, with the founding of the first animal welfare society. It is a story of activism and activists like George Thorndike Angell,...