Making and Making Things Happen

Apollo’s Wardrobe - Houston, Texas - 1978

Even before any election happens, it’s pretty easy to predict where the demographic fault lines will be: whites tend to vote more Republican than non-whites. Women tend to vote more Democratic than men. This year, it became clear that there was a growing gap between white voters with college degrees, who tend to vote more Democratic, and those without degrees, who vote more Republican.

Here’s another divide that started to get more attention this election: the rural-urban gap. Rural voters vote more Republican, while urban voters vote more Democratic, and that divide grew this year from where it was in 2012 and 2008. It’s a nuanced divide, too; strikingly, as counties get progressively more rural, they more or less steadily grow more Republican. And it’s possible that living in a rural area caused people to vote more Republican this election.

Exit polls show that the rural-urban divide grew from 2008 to 2012, and again this election. What’s particularly interesting is that the rural vote seems to have moved more than the urban or suburban votes.

Rural Voters Played A Big Part In Helping Trump Defeat Clinton

Scientists have pinpointed the ticklish bit of a rat’s brain.

The results, published in the journal Science, are another step toward understanding the origins of ticklishness, and its purpose in social animals.

Although virtually every human being on the planet has been tickled, scientists really don’t understand why people are ticklish. The idea that a certain kind of touching could easily lead to laughter is confusing to a neuroscientist, says Shimpei Ishiyama, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin, Germany.

“Just a physical touch inducing such an emotional output — this is very mysterious,” Ishiyama says. “This is weird.”

To try and get a handle on how tickling works, Ishiyama studied rats, who seem to enjoy being tickled, according to previous research. He inserted electrodes into the rats’ brains, in a region called their somatosensory cortex.

Brain Scientists Trace Rat Ticklishness To Play Behavior

The dust is starting to settle in Washington and around the country after an election that stunned political watchers and pollsters.

Here are seven things we’ve learned about Donald Trump’s path to victory Tuesday night:

1. Hillary Clinton now has a wider popular vote lead than Al Gore in 2000, but the Electoral College picks presidents.

As vote continues to be counted, Hillary Clinton has now surpassed Al Gore’s 2000 popular vote margin. Clinton’s popular-vote lead is 668,171 over President-elect Donald Trump, according to the latest totals compiled by the U.S. Election Atlas. Gore got 547,398 more votes than George W. Bush in 2000.

Clinton’s lead will only likely grow as votes continue to be finalized. Democrats have now won the popular vote in six of the last seven presidential elections, but lost the Electoral College in two of them. This takes place as Democrats continue to migrate to cities and the coasts where their population is more concentrated.

The constitution mandates the Electoral College picks presidents. The founders created that system in part to avoid the largest states picking “favorite sons” and having outsize influence.

2. Overall turnout will be about the same as 2012.

It may even surpass it when all the vote is counted. These figures represent only about half of all eligible voters in the U.S.. But, as explained below, Clinton earned a lower share than Obama and more voters chose third party candidates.

3. A significant chunk of voters were dissatisfied with their choice of candidates.

The number of people electing not to vote for the Republican or Democratic nominee went up by 4.5 million votes, nearly tripling from 2012

7 Reasons Donald Trump Won The Presidential Election

Two very different schools. Two very different classrooms, both exploring the idea that children learn best through firsthand exploration — choosing their own assignments and working at their own pace.

Both of these schools are considered cutting-edge, but learning by doing, of course, is a very old concept.

Freedom To Explore: 2 Schools Where The Students Call The Shots

In two short days America will elect its next president and a woman’s right to choose hangs in the balance. The Supreme Court is the last line of defense for safe, legal, and accessible abortion, and the next president will determine the court’s makeup for decades to come.

Before you vote, make sure you understand the issues. Our friends at Refinery29 (@refinery29) gathered a panel of healthcare policy experts and doctors to answer questions about abortion access and reproductive rights.

Sweet infographics!