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Modified on: Wed, 15 Feb, 2017 at 2:15 PM

What we call a ‘soft score’ is given immediately upon completion of the exam. A soft score is the number of questions you got correct on the exam. However, this is not your official course score as other factors are calculated in your final course grade. 

All courses have a participation score factored into your final course grade. Your participation score is the average of your best grade on each quiz from your first three attempts. Your participation score is worth 33% of your final grade.

300 level courses and English courses have additional projects that are worth 33% of your grade. You can learn more about these projects on the Sylllabus tab for the course, or in the first lesson of the final chapter of the course.

• If the course you are taking has additional projects, your final exam is worth 33% of your final course grade.  
• If the course you are taking does NOT have additional projects, your final exam is worth 67% of your final course grade.  

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Russian state media is posting more on TikTok ahead of the U.S. presidential election, study says

FILE - The TikTok logo is displayed on a mobile phone in front of a computer screen, Oct. 14, 2022, in Boston. Russian state-affiliated accounts have boosted their use of TikTok and are getting more engagement on the short-form video platform ahead of the U.S. presidential election, according to a new study released Thursday, May 2, 2024, by the nonprofit Brookings Institution. (AP Photo/Michael Dwyer, File)

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Russian state-affiliated accounts have boosted their use of TikTok and are getting more engagement on the short-form video platform ahead of the U.S. presidential election, according to a study published Thursday by the nonprofit Brookings Institution.

The report states that Russia is increasingly leveraging TikTok to disseminate Kremlin messages in both English and Spanish, with state-linked accounts posting far more frequently on the platform than they did two years ago.

Such accounts are also active on other social media platforms and have a larger presence on Telegram and X than on TikTok. However, the report says user engagement — such as likes, views and shares — on their posts has been much higher on TikTok than on either Telegram or X.

“The use of TikTok highlights a growing, but still not fully realized, avenue for Russia’s state-backed information apparatus to reach new, young audiences,” reads the report, which drew data from 70 different state-affiliated accounts and was authored by Valerie Wirtschafter, a Brookings fellow in foreign policy and its artificial intelligence initiative.

The study notes that most posts do not focus on U.S. politics but other issues, like the war in Ukraine and NATO. However, those that do tend to feature more divisive topics like U.S. policy on Israel and Russia, and questions around President Joe Biden’s age, the Brookings report says.

A TikTok spokesperson said the company has removed covert influence operations in the past and eliminated accounts, including 13 networks operating from Russia.

The spokesperson said TikTok also labels state-controlled media accounts and will expand that policy in the coming weeks “to further address accounts that attempt to reach communities outside their home country on current global events and affairs.”

The Brookings report comes after Biden last month signed legislation forcing TikTok’s parent company — China-based ByteDance — to sell the platform or face a ban in the U.S. The potential ban is expected to face legal challenges .

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Gas stoves increase nitrogen dioxide exposure above WHO standards – study

Science Advances report also finds people of color and low-income residents in US disproportionately affected

Using a gas stove increases nitrogen dioxide exposure to levels that exceed public health recommendations, a new study shows. The report , published Friday in Science Advances, found that people of color and low-income residents in the US were disproportionately affected.

Indoor gas and propane appliances raise average concentrations of the harmful pollutant, also known as NO 2 , to 75% of the World Health Organization’s standard for indoor and outdoor exposure.

That means even if a person avoids exposure to nitrogen dioxide from traffic exhaust, power plants, or other sources, by cooking with a gas stove they will have already breathed in three-quarters of what is considered a safe limit.

“When you’re using a gas stove, you are burning fossil fuel directly in the home,” said Yannai Kashtan, lead author of the study and a PhD candidate at Stanford University. “Ventilation does help but it’s an imperfect solution and ultimately the best way is to reduce pollution at the source.”

Nitrogen dioxide irritates the airways and can exacerbate respiratory illnesses such as asthma . The Stanford study estimates that chronic stove-based nitrogen dioxide exposure is linked to at least 50,000 cases of pediatric asthma in the United States each year. The research, which measured NO 2 in more than 100 homes before, during, and after gas stove use, found that pollution migrates to bedrooms within an hour of the stove turning on, and stays above dangerous levels for hours after use.

“It’s moving throughout our whole home much faster than we expected,” said Rob Jackson, professor of Earth system science at Stanford and co-author of the study . “You have to think about the effects of this not just in one cooking event, but multiple times a day, for lunch and dinner, across weeks and months.”

Roughly 38% of households in the US use gas stoves, according to the Energy Information Administration, but not all of them are exposed to NO 2 equally. The study suggests that size of the home is an important factor, with people living in residences less than 800 sq ft showing chronic exposure four times the rate of people living in homes with 3,000 sq ft.

“Older homes are more likely to be smaller, and more often have gas stoves which reflects the nature of our housing stock,” said Jon Samet, professor of environmental and occupational health at the Colorado School of Public Health, who was not involved in the study. “It’s good to see this work focusing attention on indoor air, particularly in our homes, because that’s where we spend most of our time.”

The results also highlight the unequal racial and socioeconomic burden of exposure. The study found that American Indians and Alaska Natives are exposed to 60% more NO 2 from gas and propane stoves than the national average. Black and Latino or Hispanic households breathe in 20% more NO 2 from their stoves.

People in households making less than $10,000 a year are breathing NO 2 at rates more than twice that of people in households making over $150,000.

“People in poorer communities are more at risk because their outdoor air is bad and and in many ways their indoor air is worse,” said Jackson. Low-income communities and communities of color are more likely to live near highways, ports, industrial sites and other polluting zones.

While this study looked at stovetop pollution from cooking, which is a relatively short period of exposure, some people who struggle to afford utility bills rely on stoves and ovens for heat during colder months.

“There’s an underlying assumption that people are only using their stove or oven to cook and to prepare meals,” said Diana Hernandez, sociologist at Columbia University who was not involved in the Stanford study. A recent survey conducted by Hernandez and her team found that over 20% of New Yorkers used stoves or ovens to heat their homes.

“That’s a less efficient and much more toxic way of providing heat, and more costly,” Hernandez said. “You’re talking about heating an entire home, or apartment, probably for hours on end, with a device and appliance that wasn’t meant for that.”

Gas stoves also emit methane, a potent greenhouse gas, and cities across the US are adopting building electrification measures that would phase out gas stoves in new homes.

Dorris Bishop, a resident of River Terrace neighborhood in Washington DC, said she recently joined a waitlist to trade her gas stove in for an electric appliance after a local advocacy group tested her home for NO 2 and found elevated levels.

“I’m hopeful that this report will push for all of the new homes to put electric stoves in,” she said.

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A Peek Inside the Brains of ‘Super-Agers’

New research explores why some octogenarians have exceptional memories.

By Dana G. Smith

When it comes to aging, we tend to assume that cognition gets worse as we get older. Our thoughts may slow down or become confused, or we may start to forget things, like the name of our high school English teacher or what we meant to buy at the grocery store.

But that’s not the case for everyone.

For a little over a decade, scientists have been studying a subset of people they call “super-agers.” These individuals are age 80 and up, but they have the memory ability of a person 20 to 30 years younger.

Most research on aging and memory focuses on the other side of the equation — people who develop dementia in their later years. But, “if we’re constantly talking about what’s going wrong in aging, it’s not capturing the full spectrum of what’s happening in the older adult population,” said Emily Rogalski, a professor of neurology at the University of Chicago, who published one of the first studies on super-agers in 2012.

A paper published Monday in the Journal of Neuroscience helps shed light on what’s so special about the brains of super-agers. The biggest takeaway, in combination with a companion study that came out last year on the same group of individuals, is that their brains have less atrophy than their peers’ do.

The research was conducted on 119 octogenarians from Spain: 64 super-agers and 55 older adults with normal memory abilities for their age. The participants completed multiple tests assessing their memory, motor and verbal skills; underwent brain scans and blood draws; and answered questions about their lifestyle and behaviors.

The scientists found that the super-agers had more volume in areas of the brain important for memory, most notably the hippocampus and entorhinal cortex. They also had better preserved connectivity between regions in the front of the brain that are involved in cognition. Both the super-agers and the control group showed minimal signs of Alzheimer’s disease in their brains.

“By having two groups that have low levels of Alzheimer’s markers, but striking cognitive differences and striking differences in their brain, then we’re really speaking to a resistance to age-related decline,” said Dr. Bryan Strange, a professor of clinical neuroscience at the Polytechnic University of Madrid, who led the studies.

These findings are backed up by Dr. Rogalski’s research , initially conducted when she was at Northwestern University, which showed that super-agers’ brains looked more like 50- or 60-year-olds’ brains than their 80-year-old peers. When followed over several years, the super-agers’ brains atrophied at a slower rate than average.

No precise numbers exist on how many super-agers there are among us, but Dr. Rogalski said they’re “relatively rare,” noting that “far less than 10 percent” of the people she sees end up meeting the criteria.

But when you meet a super-ager, you know it, Dr. Strange said. “They are really quite energetic people, you can see. Motivated, on the ball, elderly individuals.”

Experts don’t know how someone becomes a super-ager, though there were a few differences in health and lifestyle behaviors between the two groups in the Spanish study. Most notably, the super-agers had slightly better physical health, both in terms of blood pressure and glucose metabolism, and they performed better on a test of mobility . The super-agers didn’t report doing more exercise at their current age than the typical older adults, but they were more active in middle age. They also reported better mental health .

But overall, Dr. Strange said, there were a lot of similarities between the super-agers and the regular agers. “There are a lot of things that are not particularly striking about them,” he said. And, he added, “we see some surprising omissions, things that you would expect to be associated with super-agers that weren’t really there.” For example, there were no differences between the groups in terms of their diets, the amount of sleep they got, their professional backgrounds or their alcohol and tobacco use.

The behaviors of some of the Chicago super-agers were similarly a surprise. Some exercised regularly, but some never had; some stuck to a Mediterranean diet, others subsisted off TV dinners; and a few of them still smoked cigarettes. However, one consistency among the group was that they tended to have strong social relationships , Dr. Rogalski said.

“In an ideal world, you’d find out that, like, all the super-agers, you know, ate six tomatoes every day and that was the key,” said Tessa Harrison, an assistant project scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, who collaborated with Dr. Rogalski on the first Chicago super-ager study.

Instead, Dr. Harrison continued, super-agers probably have “some sort of lucky predisposition or some resistance mechanism in the brain that’s on the molecular level that we don’t understand yet,” possibly related to their genes.

While there isn’t a recipe for becoming a super-ager, scientists do know that, in general , eating healthily, staying physically active, getting enough sleep and maintaining social connections are important for healthy brain aging.

Dana G. Smith is a Times reporter covering personal health, particularly aging and brain health. More about Dana G. Smith

A Guide to Aging Well

Looking to grow old gracefully we can help..

The “car key conversation,” when it’s time for an aging driver to hit the brakes, can be painful for families to navigate . Experts say there are ways to have it with empathy and care.

Calorie restriction and intermittent fasting both increase longevity in animals, aging experts say. Here’s what that means for you .

Researchers are investigating how our biology changes as we grow older — and whether there are ways to stop it .

You need more than strength to age well — you also need power. Here’s how to measure how much power you have  and here’s how to increase yours .

Ignore the hyperbaric chambers and infrared light: These are the evidence-backed secrets to aging well .

Your body’s need for fuel shifts as you get older. Your eating habits should shift , too.

People who think positively about getting older often live longer, healthier lives. These tips can help you reconsider your perspective .