TOK real-world situations
A real-world situation is a specific thing that happened, described plainly enough that a student can read it cold and argue about it. It is where a TOK lesson starts: the class works out what is actually in dispute, and lifts a knowledge question clear of the case. Every situation here is tagged with the TOK concepts it raises, the parts of the knowledge framework it puts under strain, and the IA prompts it connects to, so you can find one that fits the lesson you are already teaching.
- Southeast Asia
Perpetrators, re-enacting
The Act of Killing invited men who carried out Indonesia's 1960s massacres to restage their killings in the film genres they loved, and the perpetrators' own…
Enduring · History · The arts
- Truth
- Interpretation
- Africa
When a government doubted the virus
South Africa's government under Mbeki gave platform to AIDS-dissident scientists and delayed antiretroviral rollout, and later epidemiological studies…
Enduring · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Power
- Responsibility
- East Asia
Recognised as indigenous, at last
Japan legally recognised the Ainu as indigenous only in 2019, after generations of assimilation policy that had suppressed language and practice while…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Power
- Culture
- India
Restoring murals nobody saw painted
Every intervention on the Ajanta cave paintings, from colonial-era varnishes that darkened them to modern cleaning that removes those very varnishes, embodies…
Enduring · The arts
- Interpretation
- Objectivity
- The Middle East and North Africa
The book that named algebra
Al-Khwarizmi's ninth-century treatise systematised equation-solving for inheritance shares and trade, and its title gave algebra its name while his own gave us…
Enduring · Mathematics
- Culture
- Explanation
- East Asia
Move 37
In its 2016 match against Lee Sedol, AlphaGo played a move professional commentators initially called a mistake and later called beautiful, a line no human…
Enduring · Mathematics
- Interpretation
- Explanation
- Southeast Asia
The city the lasers found under the jungle
Airborne laser scanning over Angkor stripped away the canopy digitally and revealed a vast low-density urban sprawl around the temples, overturning estimates…
Enduring · History
- Evidence
- Interpretation
- Southeast Asia
The divers evolution equipped
The Bajau of Southeast Asia free-dive to remarkable depths, and genetic studies found enlarged spleens consistent with selection for diving over generations.…
Enduring · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Culture
- Southeast Asia
Batik and the question of whose heritage
UNESCO's recognition of Indonesian batik sharpened a recurring dispute with Malaysia, where related techniques also have deep roots, over who may claim the…
Enduring · The arts
- Power
- Culture
- India
A dance banned, then rebuilt
Colonial-era campaigns pushed hereditary temple dancers out of practice, and Bharatanatyam was later revived largely by urban reformers who reshaped its…
Enduring · History · The arts
- Power
- Culture
- India
Counting Bhopal's victims
Official, judicial and activist counts of deaths from the 1984 gas leak differ by tens of thousands, diverging on time windows, causation standards and whose…
Enduring · The human sciences · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Power
- Responsibility
- South Asia
Measuring national happiness
Bhutan reports Gross National Happiness through surveys spanning psychological wellbeing, culture and ecology, making a value system into an official…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Values
- Culture
- East Asia
The hand that knows the stroke
Chinese and Islamic calligraphic traditions both train through years of copying masters, and both hold that a stroke's quality reveals the writer's state of…
Enduring · The arts
- Interpretation
- Culture
- East Asia
Simplifying the characters
Mainland China's simplified characters raised literacy while severing visual links to older texts that Taiwan and Hong Kong retain, so the same classical…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Power
- Culture
- India
What the Chipko villagers knew
In the 1970s, Himalayan villagers, many of them women, embraced trees to stop commercial felling, arguing the forests' real yield was soil, water and air…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Values
- Culture
- India
Evacuating a million people on a forecast
Before Cyclone Fani struck Odisha in 2019, forecasts triggered the evacuation of over a million people, and the death toll stayed in double digits where a…
Enduring · The natural sciences
- Certainty
- Responsibility
- India
Demonetisation and the missing counterfactual
India's 2016 note ban was declared a success and a failure by credentialled economists looking at the same aftermath. With no parallel India that kept its…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Evidence
- Power
- Values
- Africa
Two names for one ancestor
The fossil skeleton found in Ethiopia in 1974 is Lucy to the world, after a Beatles song playing in the researchers' camp, and Dinkinesh, meaning you are…
Enduring · The natural sciences
- Interpretation
- Culture
- Oceania
The painting that hides what it shows
When Central Australian artists began painting for outside markets in the 1970s, senior custodians adapted designs so that restricted ceremonial content was…
Enduring · The arts
- Power
- Culture
- South Asia
The third umpire and the ball that never arrived
A batter is given not out. The fielding side reviews. On the big screen, a tracking system reconstructs the ball's flight, and then continues it past the point…
Enduring · The natural sciences · Mathematics
- Evidence
- Interpretation
- Certainty
- Southeast Asia
Counting the drug war
Government figures and independent tallies of deaths in the Philippine drug war differed by tens of thousands, depending on which killings were classified as…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Evidence
- Power
- East Asia
Restoring what you cannot see
The Mogao cave paintings at Dunhuang have been repainted, damaged, removed to foreign museums and digitally reconstructed across centuries. Conservators must…
Enduring · The arts
- Interpretation
- Objectivity
- India
The night the exit polls were wrong
Ahead of India's 2024 general election results, exit polls converged on a sweeping majority for the incumbent alliance; the counted votes delivered something…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Evidence
- Certainty
- Africa
A song as a political argument
Fela Kuti's long-form Afrobeat pieces named institutions, described mechanisms and accused specific powers, and the Nigerian state responded with raids and…
Enduring · The arts
- Power
- Justification
- Southeast Asia
The small skeleton that split palaeoanthropology
The metre-tall skeleton found on Flores in 2003 was declared a new human species by some researchers and a diseased modern human by others, with both camps…
Enduring · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Interpretation
- Latin America
Bones as witnesses
Forensic teams exhuming mass graves in Guatemala and Argentina matched skeletal evidence to survivor accounts, converting disputed atrocities into documented…
Enduring · History · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Responsibility
- Global
The proof no human has read
The 1976 proof of the four colour theorem relied on computer checking of hundreds of case configurations that no mathematician could verify by hand, and parts…
Enduring · Mathematics
- Justification
- Certainty
- Southeast Asia
The orchestra with no score
Javanese gamelan is learned by sitting in the ensemble and absorbing it, with written notation used as a reminder rather than a source. A player knows their…
Enduring · The arts
- Interpretation
- Culture
- India
Rewriting yesterday's growth rate
When India moved to a new GDP methodology, recalculated back-series produced growth figures for earlier governments that differed sharply from the numbers…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Power
- Objectivity
- Global
The economy that does not count the household
National accounts exclude most unpaid household and care work by definitional choice, leaving activity that sustains every economy outside its headline…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Values
- Objectivity
- South Asia
Does microcredit work? Ask which study
Microcredit spread from Bangladesh on powerful anecdotes of transformation; later randomised trials found modest average effects and few of the promised…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Evidence
- Certainty
- Africa
The ruins colonialism refused to attribute
Colonial administrations in Rhodesia promoted foreign builders, Phoenicians, Arabs, anyone but Africans, for Great Zimbabwe, and at times pressured…
Enduring · History
- Evidence
- Perspective
- Power
- India
The Green Revolution's two ledgers
High-yield wheat varieties helped end famine-scale scarcity in India, and decades later the same programme is cited for depleted aquifers, soil damage and…
Enduring · The human sciences · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Values
- Africa
Historians without paper
West African griots have carried genealogies, epics and political history across centuries through trained recitation, with lineages of transmitters…
Enduring · History
- Evidence
- Culture
- India
Music that lives in a lineage
Indian classical music passes from guru to disciple through years of imitation, correction and presence, with notation treated as a skeleton at best. A raga's…
Enduring · The arts
- Interpretation
- Culture
- East Asia
An alphabet designed for everyone
King Sejong's fifteenth-century promulgation of Hangul gave Korean a script learnable in days, against the years Chinese characters demanded, and literate…
Enduring · History
- Power
- Culture
- East Asia
Grams of asteroid, years of travel
Japan's Hayabusa2 spent years travelling to asteroid Ryugu to bring back a few grams of material, though telescopes and spectra had already characterised it…
Enduring · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Justification
- Oceania
Sailing to Tahiti without instruments
Scholars long argued Polynesian settlement was accidental drift, doubting deliberate navigation across such distances was possible. In 1976 the Hokulea sailed…
Enduring · The natural sciences
- Justification
- Culture
- Africa
The appetite plant and the patent
South African researchers patented an appetite-suppressing compound from hoodia, a plant the San had long used on hunts, without initial benefit-sharing;…
Enduring · The natural sciences
- Power
- Values
- The Middle East and North Africa
Baghdad's translation century
Abbasid Baghdad funded the translation of Greek, Persian and Indian works into Arabic, and scholars there corrected, extended and argued with what they…
Enduring · History
- Truth
- Culture
- East Asia
The cloning papers that unravelled
Hwang Woo-suk's celebrated human cloning results, published in a top journal and backed by national pride, were exposed as fabricated partly through anonymous…
Enduring · The natural sciences
- Responsibility
- Objectivity
- The Middle East and North Africa
Testing vision instead of theorising it
Ibn al-Haytham's eleventh-century optics rejected the reigning theory that eyes emit rays, arguing from designed experiments with dark chambers and controlled…
Enduring · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Justification
- Latin America
The inflation statistic nobody believed
After Argentina's government intervened in its statistics institute in 2007, official inflation ran far below every independent estimate for years, private…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Power
- Objectivity
- India
The script nobody can read
Thousands of short inscriptions survive from the Indus Valley civilisation, yet after a century of attempts, no decipherment commands consensus, and scholars…
Enduring · History
- Interpretation
- Certainty
- Latin America
The satellite data that cost a director his job
In 2019 Brazil's space agency published satellite figures showing sharply rising Amazon deforestation; the president called the numbers lies and the agency's…
Enduring · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Power
- Objectivity
- India
When a region goes offline
India records among the world's highest counts of regional internet shutdowns, imposed on public-order grounds. During each one, journalism, schooling,…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Power
- India
Jantar Mantar: architecture as instrument
In the 1720s Jai Singh II built enormous masonry instruments in Jaipur and Delhi, sundials and sextants the size of buildings, to sharpen astronomical tables.…
Enduring · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Explanation
- East Asia
Inheriting an actor's name
In kabuki, actors inherit stage names through lineages stretching back centuries, and taking the name signals that the performance knowledge of that line now…
Enduring · The arts
- Truth
- Culture
- Africa
Cloth you can read
Akan kente patterns carry names, proverbs and histories, so a cloth worn to a funeral says something specific to those who can read it. Sold internationally as…
Enduring · The arts
- Interpretation
- Culture
- India
Calculus before Newton, in Kerala
Mathematicians of the Kerala school, beginning with Madhava in the fourteenth century, derived infinite series for pi and trigonometric functions centuries…
Enduring · History · Mathematics
- Truth
- Perspective
- Oceania
The raft, the genes, and Pacific origins
Heyerdahl's 1947 Kon-Tiki voyage showed a raft could drift from South America into Polynesia, and the spectacle carried his settlement theory for decades.…
Enduring · History · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Justification
- The Middle East and North Africa
Freedom inside a system
An Arabic maqam performance improvises within a modal system with defined pathways, and a knowledgeable listener can tell when a player has gone somewhere they…
Enduring · The arts
- Justification
- Culture
- Latin America
Twenty-seven books, one afternoon
Diego de Landa burned Maya codices in 1562 as works of the devil, and only a handful of pre-conquest Maya books survive anywhere today. Much of what…
Enduring · History
- Power
- Culture
- Global
The map that inflated the north
The Mercator projection, ideal for navigation, wildly inflates land near the poles, so generations of classroom maps showed Greenland rivalling Africa, which…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Perspective
- Interpretation
- East Asia
Why did the treasure fleets stop?
Zheng He's fifteenth-century fleets dwarfed anything Europe would float for centuries, then the voyages ceased and records were neglected or destroyed.…
Enduring · History
- Evidence
- Explanation
- Global
The first woman to win the Fields Medal
Maryam Mirzakhani, Iranian-born and educated through Tehran's olympiad system, became in 2014 the first woman awarded mathematics' highest honour, in a…
Enduring · Mathematics
- Perspective
- Culture
- India
Two forecasts of the same monsoon
Farmers across India read bird behaviour, flowering patterns and wind for the monsoon's arrival, while the meteorological department runs ensemble models, and…
Enduring · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Culture
- India
The library that burned for months
Nalanda drew scholars from across Asia for centuries until its destruction around 1200, its manuscript collections reportedly burning for months. What survives…
Enduring · History
- Power
- Culture
- Latin America
Drawings meant for no one on the ground
The Nazca lines have been read as astronomical calendars, ritual pathways, water markers and stranger things, with each era's favourite explanation tracking…
Enduring · History · The arts
- Evidence
- Interpretation
- Africa
The economy that grew 89 percent overnight
In 2014 Nigeria rebased its GDP calculation to include sectors like Nollywood and telecoms that the old 1990 framework barely saw, and the economy became…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Certainty
- Objectivity
- Africa
A film industry the textbooks missed
Nollywood grew into one of the world's most prolific film industries through straight-to-video economics, informal distribution and stories tuned to local…
Enduring · The arts
- Truth
- Values
- Culture
- Global
When oral tradition entered the courtroom
In the Delgamuukw case, Canada's Supreme Court held that Indigenous oral histories must be admitted as evidence of land rights on their own terms rather than…
Enduring · History
- Evidence
- Culture
- India
A film, a queen, and a fight over the past
Protests over the film Padmaavat turned on a figure known mainly from a sixteenth-century epic poem rather than contemporary chronicles. Crowds defended the…
Enduring · History · The arts
- Truth
- Interpretation
- South Asia
Was this flood climate change?
After Pakistan's 2022 floods displaced millions, attribution scientists estimated how much more likely warming had made the rainfall, and the numbers entered…
Enduring · The natural sciences
- Certainty
- Responsibility
- East Asia
One singer, eight hours, no script
Korean pansori transmits epic narratives through a single singer and drummer over many hours, with each master's version differing in wording, ornament and…
Enduring · The arts
- Interpretation
- Culture
- The Middle East and North Africa
Paintings that refuse the vanishing point
Persian and Mughal miniatures show multiple viewpoints at once and scale figures by importance rather than distance. European art history long described this…
Enduring · The arts
- Perspective
- Interpretation
- India
Binary patterns in Sanskrit prosody
Pingala's ancient treatise on Sanskrit poetic metre enumerates syllable patterns in ways that parallel binary representation and combinatorial rules formalised…
Enduring · Mathematics
- Culture
- Explanation
- India
Reading Ashoka after two thousand years
When James Prinsep deciphered the Brahmi script in the 1830s, rock inscriptions across the subcontinent suddenly spoke, and Ashoka re-entered history after…
Enduring · History
- Power
- Interpretation
- The Middle East and North Africa
Finding the direction of prayer
Determining the qibla from any city is a problem in spherical trigonometry, and medieval Islamic mathematicians developed sophisticated solutions and…
Enduring · Mathematics
- Culture
- Explanation
- Latin America
Records tied in knots
Inca administration ran on quipus, cords whose knots encoded census and tribute data and possibly narrative, and Spanish authorities destroyed many precisely…
Enduring · History · Mathematics
- Interpretation
- Culture
- The Middle East and North Africa
The music the state could not stop
Algerian rai emerged from working-class Oran singing frankly about desire, alcohol and constraint, and was suppressed at different times by state broadcasters…
Enduring · The arts
- Power
- Values
- India
Ramanujan's unproven theorems
Srinivasa Ramanujan filled notebooks with thousands of results, many stated without proof and attributed by him to intuition or the goddess Namagiri.…
Enduring · Mathematics
- Justification
- Interpretation
- India
The ancient theory of why art moves us
The Natyashastra's rasa theory, some two thousand years old, systematically explains how performance transforms depicted emotion into felt aesthetic experience…
Enduring · The arts
- Interpretation
- Explanation
- Global
The textbook findings that would not repeat
Large replication projects in psychology found that many celebrated effects shrank or vanished on rerun, implicating flexible analysis, publication bias and…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Justification
- Certainty
- The Middle East and North Africa
Cracking hieroglyphs against a bilingual stone
Champollion's decipherment of hieroglyphs leaned on the Rosetta Stone's parallel texts and his knowledge of Coptic, and the proof was predictive: readings…
Enduring · History
- Justification
- Interpretation
- India
The right to ask the state what it knows
India's Right to Information Act lets any citizen demand documents from public authorities, and activists have used it to surface everything from ration fraud…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Power
- Responsibility
- The Middle East and North Africa
The scrolls only a committee could read
For decades after their discovery, many Dead Sea Scrolls could be studied only by a small editorial team, while outside scholars waited on official publication…
Enduring · History
- Power
- East Asia
Mountains that were never seen
Classical Chinese shan shui painters often worked from memory, canonical models and philosophical principle rather than from a particular view, producing…
Enduring · The arts
- Truth
- Interpretation
- Oceania
Maps you must sing
Aboriginal songlines encode routes, water sources, law and cosmology in song cycles tied to travel across country, with fuller layers restricted to those with…
Enduring · History · The arts
- Interpretation
- Culture
- South Asia
A nationwide experiment with no pilot
In 2021 Sri Lanka banned synthetic fertiliser imports almost overnight, aiming for fully organic agriculture; harvests collapsed and the decision was reversed…
Enduring · The human sciences · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Responsibility
- India
Reading the colonial archive against itself
The Subaltern Studies historians argued that South Asia's archives, largely produced by colonial administration, recorded peasants and rebels only at the…
Enduring · History
- Perspective
- Objectivity
- India
Reconstruction surgery in an ancient compendium
The Sushruta Samhita describes surgical techniques including nasal reconstruction, and European surgeons in the colonial period documented Indian practitioners…
Enduring · History · The natural sciences
- Truth
- Culture
- India
Drumming you can speak
Tabla players learn compositions as spoken syllables, bols, before ever touching the drum, and can recite an entire piece aloud. The syllable is the unit of…
Enduring · The arts
- Culture
- Explanation
- India
Who designed the Taj Mahal?
The Taj Mahal's architect is credited variously to several named figures, with the documentary record thin and contested, while the thousands of craftsmen who…
Enduring · History · The arts
- Evidence
- Power
- East Asia
One event, two national textbooks
Japanese and Chinese school treatments of the 1937 Nanjing atrocities have differed for decades in wording, casualty figures and space allotted, and textbook…
Enduring · History
- Perspective
- Power
- Southeast Asia
Thirteen lives and competing expertise
The 2018 Tham Luang cave rescue forced a live arbitration between cave divers, military planners, medics and engineers whose recommendations conflicted, under…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Evidence
- Responsibility
- South Asia
Painting by prescribed proportion
Tibetan thangka painters work to iconometric grids specifying proportions for each figure, deviation from which makes the image religiously ineffective rather…
Enduring · The arts
- Truth
- Culture
- India
How do you count wild tigers?
India's tiger estimates moved from pugmark tracing to camera traps and stripe-pattern recognition, and the headline number rose partly because the method…
Enduring · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Certainty
- Africa
Smuggling a library to safety
When militants occupied Timbuktu in 2012, families and archivists smuggled hundreds of thousands of medieval manuscripts out in trunks and boats, hiding a…
Enduring · History
- Responsibility
- Culture
- Africa
Truth commission, plural truths
South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission explicitly distinguished kinds of truth, factual, personal, social, restorative, and accepted survivor…
Enduring · History
- Evidence
- Interpretation
- East Asia
A malaria cure found in a fourth-century text
Screening traditional remedies, Tu Youyou found a fourth-century Chinese text describing cold extraction of sweet wormwood, adjusted her method accordingly,…
Enduring · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Culture
- India
The turmeric patent and the grandmother's proof
In 1995 a US patent was granted for using turmeric to heal wounds, a practice Indian households had relied on for generations. India's research council…
Enduring · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Power
- Africa
A person is a person through other persons
Ubuntu, articulated across southern African thought, treats personhood and understanding as constituted through relations with others rather than achieved…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Perspective
- Culture
- East Asia
Who influenced whom
Japanese woodblock prints reshaped late nineteenth-century European painting, and the story is usually told as European artists discovering Japan. Told from…
Enduring · History · The arts
- Perspective
- Power
- Global
The purest mathematics, weaponised for privacy
Number theorists studied primes for centuries as the discipline's most ornamental corner, celebrated precisely for uselessness, until public-key cryptography…
Enduring · Mathematics
- Values
- Explanation
- India
The textbook called Vedic Mathematics
The calculation shortcuts published in the twentieth century as Vedic Mathematics are useful and teachable, but historians of mathematics find no source for…
Enduring · History · Mathematics
- Power
- Justification
- Southeast Asia
A language that changed its alphabet
Vietnam's shift to the Latin-based quoc ngu under colonial influence enabled mass literacy campaigns, and within generations most Vietnamese could no longer…
Enduring · History
- Power
- Culture
- Southeast Asia
When the platform is the public square
In several Southeast Asian countries, a single social platform effectively is the internet for much of the population, and investigations after episodes of…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Evidence
- Responsibility
- Southeast Asia
History taught by shadow puppets
Javanese wayang kulit performances retell epics through the night, with dalangs weaving in contemporary politics and local commentary as they go. Audiences…
Enduring · History · The arts
- Power
- Interpretation
- Culture
- East Asia
The instrument that felt distant earthquakes
Zhang Heng's second-century seismoscope reportedly indicated an earthquake in a distant province before messengers arrived to confirm it, using a mechanism…
Enduring · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Explanation
- India
A billion identities in one database
Aadhaar links welfare, banking and identity to biometric records for over a billion people, and when a fingerprint fails to match or a record misfires, the…
Current · The human sciences
- Power
- Responsibility
- Global
A museum for art with no artist
A museum devoted entirely to AI-generated art opened in Los Angeles in 2026, while courts have held that copyright protects works of human authorship, leaving…
Current · The arts
- Interpretation
- Responsibility
- Latin America
Telescopes on other people's mountains
The Atacama's dry altitude makes it ideal for observatories, and the same plateaus carry deep significance for Indigenous communities who were rarely central…
Current · The natural sciences
- Power
- Values
- Latin America
The vine, the lab, and the elders
As clinical interest in ayahuasca-derived compounds accelerates, Amazonian communities that developed and ritually govern the brew's use are often absent from…
Current · The natural sciences
- Power
- Values
- India
Ayurveda meets the randomised trial
India funds research ministries for both biomedicine and traditional systems like Ayurveda, and disputes recur over whether centuries of documented clinical…
Current · The human sciences · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Culture
- Africa
The bronzes and the museums
Thousands of Benin bronzes, seized in the 1897 British expedition, sit in Western museums that long defended holding them as universal stewardship, while…
Current · The arts
- Power
- Values
- India
Counting caste for the first time since 1931
India's 2027 census, its first fully digital one, will enumerate caste across all communities for the first time in nearly a century. Every design choice,…
Current · The human sciences
- Power
- Interpretation
- Oceania
Fire knowledge, re-admitted
After Australia's catastrophic 2019 to 2020 bushfires, agencies expanded engagement with Aboriginal cultural burning, low-intensity fire practices refined over…
Current · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Culture
- India
Whose air quality number is right?
On a smoggy Delhi morning, official monitors, embassy sensors and cheap home devices can disagree by wide margins, and the choice of averaging window changes…
Current · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Objectivity
- Global
Ninety seconds to midnight
The Doomsday Clock compresses expert judgment about nuclear and climate risk into a single metaphorical time, set each year by a board and reported worldwide.…
Current · The human sciences
- Interpretation
- Responsibility
- Global
The crash test body was a man
Vehicle safety testing standardised for decades on dummies modelled on an average male body, and injury statistics show women faring worse in comparable…
Current · The human sciences · The natural sciences
- Values
- Objectivity
- East Asia
A national border for information
China's filtering infrastructure produces an internet where searches, encyclopedias and archives return different results than elsewhere, and a generation has…
Current · The human sciences
- Power
- India
Mapping rights onto a forest
India's Forest Rights Act asks communities to document customary use of land their ancestors never surveyed, converting remembered practice into GPS points and…
Current · The human sciences
- Power
- Culture
- East Asia
The exam that defines what counts
China's gaokao channels millions of students' entire schooling toward one sitting, and whatever the exam rewards, memorisation, speed, model essays, becomes…
Current · The human sciences
- Power
- Values
- The Middle East and North Africa
Measuring heat where people must work
Gulf states ban outdoor work during set summer hours, defined by clock and calendar rather than by measured heat stress on given sites, while researchers argue…
Current · The human sciences · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Responsibility
- Global
Manufacturing consensus, in the good sense
IPCC reports pass through nested drafting, expert review and line-by-line governmental approval of summaries, producing calibrated language about confidence…
Current · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Objectivity
- Global
Languages the machines skip
Machine translation is strong between data-rich languages and weak or absent for thousands of others, so speakers of low-resource languages get worse search,…
Current · The human sciences
- Power
- Culture
- Oceania
Ancestors in the storeroom
Museums worldwide hold Maori and Moriori ancestral remains collected in the colonial era, and New Zealand runs a standing programme negotiating their return…
Current · History
- Power
- Values
- India
Editing the national textbook
Successive revisions of India's national school textbooks have added, trimmed and removed episodes, with each round defended as correction and attacked as…
Current · History
- Perspective
- Power
- Global
Origins, evidence and access
Investigations into COVID-19's origins produced assessments hedged at low confidence and split between agencies, with early data incomplete and access to sites…
Current · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Certainty
- Europe
One temple, two national stories
Britain and Greece have argued for two centuries over the Parthenon sculptures, with legality, preservation and access marshalled on both sides of an unmoved…
Current · The arts
- Values
- Interpretation
- Global
The pirate library of science
Sci-Hub, built by a Kazakhstani graduate student, serves paywalled research papers free and is heavily used in countries whose universities cannot afford…
Current · The human sciences
- Power
- Responsibility
- Global
The encyclopedia's uneven world
Wikipedia's English edition dwarfs most others, and topics rich in one language sit as stubs or absences in another, so the same person consulting the same…
Current · The human sciences
- Power
- Culture