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More U.S. schools are banning students from using cell phones at school. And while some people agree that phones and classrooms don’t mix, others say kids should be allowed access to their phones. 

School officials who have limited or banned cell phone use say phones distract students. Many schools have reported that students use their phones not only in hallways and lunchrooms but also in classrooms. And their concerns have only grown in recent years. School officials who are banning phones point out that students lost a lot of time in the classroom because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, more than ever, officials say, it’s important to focus and aim to get back on track. And many parents agree with them.

Among the parents who support a ban on cell phones in classrooms is Julia Wilburn, of Nashville, Tennessee. Wilburn is the mom of a seventh grader whose school doesn’t let him carry his phone during school hours. “I definitely feel like that’s taking the right approach,” Wilburn said.

But other parents say they want their kids to be able to reach them if necessary. And that means carrying a cell phone all day. 

“We used to get in touch with our kids when we wanted to,” Louise Boll told the Associated Press. Boll is president of the parent-teacher association at Forest Meadow Junior High in Dallas, Texas. Forest Meadow requires students to put their phones away during the day.

At the Brush School District in Colorado, parents spoke out against a ban on taking cell phones to school. After a community meeting, a compromise was reached. Now, students can take their phones to school, but the phones must be turned off and not in sight. 

“There’s not an intention to say cell phones are evil,” Bill Wilson, the district superintendent, told the Associated Press. “It’s a reset to say, ‘How do we manage this in a way that makes sense for everybody?’”

Bella Rasmussen has loved football since she was 3 years old. And for nearly as long, the senior at Laguna Beach High School in Laguna Beach, California, has dreamed of scoring a touchdown. On October 14, Rasmussen made her dream come true—twice. 

That night, Rasmussen became the first female high school football player in the state of California to score two touchdowns in a varsity game. Her touchdowns contributed to a 48–0 victory against the Godinez Grizzlies of Santa Ana, California.

“I’m looking at coach, I’m like, Nah, man, I got it. I can do it,” Rasmussen said in an interview with Today. “I’m saying this to myself over and over and over again. [Then] I’m in the end zone [where a player runs to score a touchdown]. And I remember I just stood up and I was like, “Did anybody see? This actually happened?”

That was the first touchdown. To be able to score a second one—in the same game—was unexpected, she said.

“I was in disbelief. [I thought] there’s no way that just happened,” Rasmussen told the Los Angeles Times. 

Rasmussen has been playing football at her high school for four years as a running back and defensive end. At 5 feet, 9 inches (175.3 centimeters) tall and 135 pounds (61.2 kilograms), she’s smaller than most of her teammates, who are all boys. Her opponents are bigger than she is, too. But she said her teammates had been encouraging her before the game, telling her they were sure she’d score a touchdown.

They knew she could reach the end zone, and so did she.

“To be able to do it was something I had been dreaming about since I was 6 years old,” Rasmussen told the Los Angeles Times. “I ran to my mom [and said], ‘I did it.’”

Every night at 7 p.m., a siren goes off in a village in India. The siren signals the start of the village’s nightly “digital detox,” a 90-minute period when residents are strongly encouraged to turn off their phones and TVs. 

Officials in the village of Mohityanche Vadgaon say they decided on the digital detox initiative because of concerns that people were too attached to their screens. Like almost everywhere, people in the village spend a lot of time watching TV and looking at their phones. During the COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020, the problem got worse among kids and teens. No longer able to attend school, students started attending classes online and spending more time on their phones. Adults got worried. 

“Surfing on the Internet—that is, multi-tasking—deprives students of their ability to concentrate for longer periods when they need to study,” Dr. J.R. Ram, a clinical psychiatrist, told Voice of America. “They get used to scrolling on social media, watching videos, and exchanging text messages during classes. Such a situation can have negative consequences on one’s cognition or thinking ability.”

Sure enough, teachers noticed that all that screen time was affecting students’ ability to concentrate. They took their concerns to Vijay Mohite, the sarpanch, or head of the village government. Mohite came up with the idea for the nightly digital detox period. 

It’s not only kids who are encouraged to stay off their phones for 90 minutes a night. Adults are supposed to follow the rules as well. Residents are encouraged to read, study, or just talk to each other, instead of scrolling. The period lasts until 8:30 p.m., when another siren signals that phones and TVs can be used again.

The idea has gone over so well that five other villages in India are taking similar steps.

Running 100 meters in 24.73 seconds isn’t especially impressive for a human who’s in good shape. But for a bipedal (two-footed) robot, it’s extraordinary. In September, a robot called Cassie achieved this running time, establishing a Guinness World Record.

Cassie, which was developed at the Oregon State University (OSU) College of Engineering, set the record on an outdoor running track. During the run, the robot ran an average speed of a little over 13 feet (4 meters) per second. More significantly, it started and ended the run in a standing position. Project collaborator Alan Fern says this poses a challenge to a running bipedal robot.

“Starting and stopping in a standing position are more difficult than the running part, similar to how taking off and landing are harder than actually flying a plane,” Fern, an OSU artificial intelligence professor, told The Robot Report. 

Cassie is the first bipedal robot to use machine learning to control a running pace outdoors. In 2021, the robot ran 3.1 miles (5 kilometers) outdoors in just over 53 minutes. The robot is designed for running. Its “legs” bend like the legs of an ostrich, a non-flying bird that can run at speeds of up to 43 miles (69.2 kilometers) per hour. 

OSU robotics professor Jonathan Hurst, who is directing Cassie’s development, said making robots more agile opens many possibilities for what these machines might be able to do in the future.

“This may be the first bipedal robot to learn to run, but it won’t be the last,” he said. “I believe control approaches like this are going to be a huge part of the future of robotics. The exciting part of this race is the potential…. I think progress is going to accelerate from here.”

In October, a fire swept through the Pacific island of Rapa Nui (also called Easter Island). The blaze caused permanent damage to the moai—the massive, iconic statues that have been fixtures on the island for hundreds of years. 

The flames spread across 250 acres of the island, which is located about 2,200 miles (3,540 kilometers) west of Chile. Some of the moai were left charred and cracked, and a few toppled over.

There are around 1,000 statues on Rapa Nui. The statues, most of which look like giant heads, range from 6 to 30 feet (1.8 to 9.1 meters) tall. The statues were carved out of volcanic rock, mostly between about 1050 and 1680 CE. The sculptors were Polynesian people whose ancestors first arrived on the island in about 400 CE and whose descendants live on the island today. Archaeologists believe that the statues had a religious purpose.

The statues are culturally important, and they’re also important to the economy of Rapa Nui. Each year, about 160,000 tourists visit the island to see them. After the fire, officials stopped allowing visitors so that they could measure the damage. One thing they do know is that at least some of the statues will never look the same.

“The damage caused by the fire can’t be undone,” Pedro Edmunds Paoa, the island’s mayor, told Smithsonian magazine. “The cracking of an original and emblematic stone cannot be recovered.”

What’s the best way to tell whether food is still fresh enough to eat? Experts say the “best by” date on prepackaged foods isn’t it. In fact, these labels are contributing to a big problem: food waste. 

“Best by” or “Best before” dates are different from “Use by” dates because they have nothing to do with safety. If a food is past its “Best by” date, it might still be perfectly safe—and tasty. 

“Date labels usually indicate when food will be at its optimal freshness,” Nina Sevilla of the Natural Resources Defense Council told USA Today. “If you have food a couple of days past that date, it likely means it’s still OK to consume.”

In the U.S., there are no federal rules about how a “Best by” date should be set. Instead, food manufacturers decide when they think their products will be freshest. The dates lead a lot of people to think that the food in their fridge has gone bad—and they throw it away. 

Between 30 and 40 percent of the food supply in the United States is wasted, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. It’s not just the food that’s wasted. The resources it takes to produce the food—like water and land—also go to waste. And when food ends up in landfills, it produces greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change.

In the U.S. and Europe, there’s a push to do away with “Best by” dates. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration recommends that food makers switch to a “Best if used by” label. They say this makes it clearer that food can be eaten past the recommended date. But this label is not required by federal law. Currently, the U.S. Congress is considering a law to require all food makers to use the same language so that it’s clear when a date on a food package is just a suggestion.

The universe is full of mysteries. Is there life on other planets? Is there more than one universe? And why does Saturn have those rings? Scientists have found a possible answer to that last question. The rings may be what’s left of a satellite that was destroyed by Saturn’s gravity.

Saturn is more than 4.5 billion years old, and for most of that time, it probably didn’t have rings. In a recent study, scientists theorized that about 160 million years ago, one of Saturn’s moons got too close to the giant planet and was ripped apart by Saturn’s gravitational pull. Most pieces of the shattered moon got sucked into Saturn’s atmosphere. But about 1 percent of them remained in orbit, eventually forming the beautiful rings that still surround the planet.

Scientists named this theoretical moon Chrysalis.

“As a butterfly emerges from a chrysalis, the rings of Saturn emerged from the primordial satellite Chrysalis,” Jack Wisdom, a professor of planetary science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and lead author of the study, told Reuters.

Saturn isn’t the only planet in our solar system that has rings. Rings surround Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune, though they’re not as large and bright as Saturn’s. Saturn’s rings are made up mostly of particles of water ice, which suggests that Chrysalis would have been composed mainly of water ice.

Saturn is slowly losing its rings. The particles, which range from the size of a grain of sand to the size of a mountain, are being sucked in by Saturn’s gravity. But they won’t all go away in our lifetime. Scientists estimate that Saturn will be a ringless planet about 300 million years from now.