The Ville de Montréal and McGill University today received Blue Community certification on the occasion of World Water Day. To obtain this certification, they have undertaken to recognize water and sanitation as human rights, to promote publicly managed water services and to ban or phase out the sale of bottled water in their buildings and at their events. Hence Montreal has joined some forty Blue Communities worldwide, including major cities like Paris, Berlin, Madrid and Victoria. For its part, McGill has become the fourth university in the world to obtain this certification.

Your child is in elementary school and is begging you to buy them a cell phone, an iPod and iPad.  Anything, as long as they can communicate with their friends, either by texting or through social media.  As a parent, you’re worried about cyberbullying.  Indeed, up to 30% of children and adolescents admit to cyberbullying others, while 25% of students report being victimized on electronic platforms.  You rationalize that your child has lots of friends and that they will stand up for them in a bullying situation.  Do they?  What is the role of the bystander/friend during a bullying incident?

We all know people who, seemingly incapable of living without the bright screen of their phone for more than a few minutes, are constantly texting and checking out what friends are up to on social media.

These are examples of what many consider to be the antisocial behaviour brought on by smartphone addiction, a phenomenon that has garnered media attention in the past few months and led  investors and consumers to demand that tech giants address this problem.

But what if we were looking at things the wrong way? Could smartphone addiction be hyper-social, not anti-social?

How individual police forces treat those that they suspect of being illegal immigrants varies greatly from one city to the next in the U.S. In Albuquerque, New Mexico, the police department has a policy that states clearly, “Officers shall not stop, question, detain or arrest any person on the ground that they may be undocumented and deportable foreign nationals.” But this is unusual. Local police departments across the U.S. have become increasingly involved in enforcing federal immigration laws since the mid-1990s.

Human-computer interactions, such as playing video games, can have a negative impact on the brain, says a new Canadian study published in Molecular Psychiatry. For over 10 years, scientists have told us that action video game players exhibit better visual attention, motor control abilities and short-term memory. But, could these benefits come at a cost?