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According to BigThink, a publication focused on education, what consciousness is and where it comes from has absorbed great minds for thousands of years. In today's world, it's a question posed by physicists, cognitive scientists, and neuroscientists. There are a few prevailing theories.

The first is known as materialism. This is the idea that consciousness emanates from matter. In the case of people, by the firing of neurons inside the brain. If you take the brain out of the equation, then consciousness doesn't exist at all.

The second theory is mind-body dualism. This is perhaps more often recognized in religion. Here, consciousness is separate from matter. It is a part of another aspect of the individual, which in religious terms we might call the soul.

The third option, which is gaining ground in some scientific circles, is called panpsychism. In this view, everything material, however small, has an element of individual consciousness. A handful of scientists are starting to embrace this theory. Aspects of Shinto, Buddhist and Hindu religions also support panpsychism. But, it's still a matter of great debate.

In popular culture, Marie Kondo embraces a kind of panpsychism. For instance when faced with a pile of old books, she will take each one and slap it to "wake it up."

According to National Geographic, the remains of two white giraffes were found in a nature conservancy in northeastern Kenya. The giraffes likely had a rare genetic condition called leucism, which inhibits skin cells from producing pigment. It is believed that they were killed by poachers.

The animals had been well-known since 2017, after rangers spotted them in the conservancy and posted a video to YouTube, which then went viral.

This highlights a modern-day paradox: social media allows people to experience the joy and wonder of the planet’s rarest creatures while simultaneously putting animals at increased risk. Rarity and exclusivity are among the driving factors of the illegal wildlife trade, so unusual animals are more likely to be targeted by poachers.

National Geographic concluded that navigating how to report on unique animals without helping to put a target on their backs is a delicate process. 

Over the past 20 years, American television entered a Golden Age. Before the turn of the millennium, most TV shows followed familiar patterns: crime shows and situational comedies—also known as sitcoms—consisted of self-contained episodes with little plot development through a season or the run of the show.

Then, in 1999, a network called HBO took a huge risk by investing $2 million per episode in The Sopranos, a show that broke with the familiar pattern of television productions. The Sopranos invested in character development and took its time to tell a compelling story. It was a massive success that showed that audiences were willing to sit through drawn-out shows as long as they were good. HBO reproduced that early success with Six Feet Under and The Wire.

As the years passed, other networks such as AMC and FX got on the bandwagon of high-quality, high-cost productions. The streaming giant Netflix then began producing binge-worthy television. With a per-episode cost of $15 million, the last season of Game of Thrones held the record as the most expensive ever produced. This was later dwarfed by Disney and Marvel TV spin-offs of movies, with a cost upwards of $25 million per episode.

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reported in 2018 that a private zoo in Alberta, Canada, was charged after a bear from the facility was taken through a Dairy Queen drive-thru in a pickup truck and fed ice cream through the vehicle's window.

A video of the feeding was posted to Twitter and Facebook by Discovery Wildlife Park, but the posts were later deleted. It showed a one-year-old chained bear leaning out of a truck's window and being fed ice cream by the owner of the local Dairy Queen. Another video posted by the zoo around the same time showed the bear licking frosting off an ice cream cake.

A trainer at Discovery Wildlife Park said there was no safety concern at the Dairy Queen because the bear was on a chain in the truck the entire time.

Wildlife officers charged the zoo with one offence relating to the bear being taken for ice cream, and another for incidents where the bear left the facility on multiple occasions without the proper authorities being notified.

The novel coronavirus COVID-19 has impacted the consulting industry in ways that seem potentially ruinous. But do not lose hope. Yes, consultants are used to traveling a lot, and widespread travel restrictions make that impossible. And much of consultancy work is done face-to-face in internal and client meetings, which can’t be done when gatherings are prohibited. There is also the fear that businesses will suspend contracts in the economic downturn.

But we have an advantage this time that we haven't had in past catastrophes. We have the internet. We can have virtual meetings, share documents online and even give presentations with conference software that lets everyone be in the same “room” at the same time. So travel restrictions are less disruptive than in the past—people can do much of what’s needed almost as well from home.

And, with so many employees now working from home, many businesses need to upgrade their systems without delay. This creates a demand for consultants to help them make those changes efficiently and effectively.

So although the pandemic is horrible, and we all feel anxious about our future, consultants can be confident that the industry will survive. And inventive survival strategies might just become lasting improvements.

This simple equation is at the heart of the global economy: One person’s spending = another person’s income.

It’s referred to as “supply and demand”—producers will supply as much as consumers demand. So if consumers aren’t buying anything, producers won’t be able to sell anything. In other words, whenever you buy something, you pay someone else’s wages.

So the current COVID-19 pandemic is not just a global health crisis but also an economic one. When people are told to stay at home, they stop going to restaurants, bars, and movies. They can’t travel, so they don’t spend money on gas or airfare, and they don’t stay at hotels. And when no more than 10 people can be together in one place, everything from birthday parties to music festivals to major world sports events are canceled.

COVID-19 has already had a serious impact on the hospitality, entertainment, sports, energy, and transportation industries, and the pandemic isn’t over yet. In some places, it’s just getting started. No one knows when it will end or how long it will take to recover.

The Japan Times published an opinion piece arguing that the issue of people hoarding surgical masks has served to show people’s true nature. It notes that the outbreak has resulted in the spread of fake news and racism, and some unscrupulous people have been reselling face masks and even toilet paper at highly inflated prices on sites such as Mercari.

The author says that social media has also become a tool for shaming those engaged in bad behavior in Japan. Sites such as Twitter have made it simpler to spread footage of morally dubious activity. For instance, users uncovered truly ridiculous posts, including one in which 35 packs of masks were being sold for ¥75,000 by someone who claimed to have risked their health getting them.

The opinion piece concludes that this issue has revealed the fractured moral impulse of the Japanese internet at large, split between those taking advantage of a horrible situation for profit and those operating for the greater public good.

For nearly a century, Kowloon Walled City stood out as a rare modern example of an ungoverned territory. When Great Britain took Hong Kong from the Chinese, they left a Chinese enclave in Kowloon, near Hong Kong island. As the 20th century unfolded, consecutive Chinese governments neglected the governance of the enclave, the British refused to get involved, and it took on a life of its own.

By the 1980s, nearly 50,000 people lived in 300 illegally built structures connected together by an interconnecting maze of passageways and staircases. Drugs and prostitution were common in the walled city, and people from nearby neighborhoods would come to visit cheap unlicensed doctors and dentists. Residents cooked and baked goods that they sold to vendors outside the enclave.

Kowloon Walled City was demolished in 1993, a few years before Hong Kong was returned to China, and is now a public park. Its residents were moved to public housing, and they have said that they remember a tough life in the walled city, but that they were mostly happy. 

California has been trying to ban the delicacy foie gras for quite some time. The French dish is well-known in fine dining, but it is made from the liver of a duck or goose that has been force-fed to increase the fat content. Many have said the process constitutes animal cruelty.

The ban was passed into law back in 2004, but it was phased in gradually. It finally went into full effect in 2012, at which time foie gras producers promptly sued the state government. Fast forward to 2015, and a federal judge overturned the ban, stating that it was unconstitutional and went against federal poultry law.

Two years after that, the higher Ninth Circuit court ruled 3-0 that the federal judge had made an error, and allowed California to keep the ban. Again, foie gras producers appealed, this time to the U.S. Supreme Court. But the Supreme Court declined to hear the case, making the previous Ninth Circuit ruling final. 

Foie gras producers say that the consumer should be able to make the choice about what they do and don't want to eat. Restaurants, for their part, have tried to find loop-holes. For example, some have given away foie gras for "free" when other expensive dishes were purchased. 

Animal rights advocates are happy about the ban. Some celebrities have publicly denounced the food, though it has gained popularity in places like the Middle East.