It happens all the time during basketball games. Two players are going for the ball. They touch it at the same time but neither controls it, and it flies out of bounds.

At that point, tempers rise — both are certain that the other player was the last to touch it, which should earn their own team a chance to control the ball.

Are the players just pretending to be so sure it’s out on their opponent? Or could there actually be a difference in how they experience the event that has them pointing a finger at the other player?

Those are the questions that scientists from Arizona State University tackled in a paper published in Science Advances.

“It’s very possible that people experience two different orders of events, two different experiences of reality, even though they experienced the same event,” Ty Tang, a cognitive science doctorate student at ASU, tells NPR.

In the experiments, the researchers found that people tend to think that their own actions happened before near-simultaneous actions close by. They found that on average, people perceive their own actions as happening about 50 milliseconds before the other motion. That’s why the basketball players would be so convinced they tapped the ball before their opponent.

Tang says that generally, there’s a lot of evidence that “sometimes the things that some people experience are different than others.”

To test this, Tang ran three different experiments with ASU students. In the first experiment, two students sat across from each other. A divider between them had slots for their hands. When a simultaneous light flashed, they each tapped a sensor on the other person’s right hand, then indicated which of them they think tapped first.

“We did find a very strong effect for participants to think that their touch happened before the other person’s touch,” Tang says.

This wasn’t a race — people were not told to try to beat the other person. Still, in more than two-thirds of the cases, the study subjects each said they were the first ones to tap.

Tang got similar results when he replaced the second human with a mechanical switch. In a third experiment, he used a clicking sound instead of a switch. “Even when we removed that touch and just replaced it with a click, they still thought their touch happened before that sound,” he says.

It’s not clear why many people have this bias. Tang says it might support the theory that we’re “constantly predicting the world and trying to create this mental model of what’s going to happen.” But they don’t know whether there is actually a sensory difference in when things register in the brain, he says.

And it’s worth noting that people don’t always think their action happened first when two things happen nearly simultaneously — it’s simply a significant bias. Some people are more susceptible to it than others. And, he said, other factors are likely to play into it. For example, “if it’s a competitive situation, you’re probably more likely to bias whatever decision is going to be more favorable to you.”

Which brings us back to elite athletes. Are they more or less likely to have this bias toward their own actions?

“It’s a little difficult to say and it can go either way,” Tang says. Athletes deal with these quick reaction times all the time, so he is wondering whether this is a bias that can be trained away. “If you have all of these close temporal events that they have to discriminate between, then they might be better at telling which one actually happened first or second,” he says.

But on the other hand, athletes are constantly in competitive situations — which, as he has noted, may exacerbate the bias.

Ultimately, though, “we really just want people to be more understanding of other people’s perspectives,” Tang says.

He adds: “Sometimes people actually do have different experiences of what happened and they’re not lying — they might have actually just experienced it that way.”

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The singer Kate Smith’s recording of “God Bless America” has been a cherished part of sports tradition in the U.S. for decades. But in the aftermath of a discovery that the singer also recorded at least two songs with racist content in the 1930s, two major American sports teams, baseball’s New York Yankees and ice hockey’s Philadelphia Flyers, have announced that they will stop playing Smith’s rendition of the Irving Berlin patriotic classic. On Sunday, the Flyers also took down a statue of Smith that had stood in front of their stadium since 1987.

A fan alerted the Yankees last week that Smith had recorded at least two problematic songs — 1931’s “That’s Why Darkies Were Born” and 1933’s “Pickaninny Heaven,” from the film Hello, Everybody! — the New York Daily News reported on Thursday.

On Sunday, the Philadelphia Flyers removed a statue of Smith that had stood outside the team’s arena since 1987, first at the Spectrum and later at the Xfinity Live! venue. Smith sang “God Bless America” live for the Flyers before Game 6 of the 1974 Stanley Cup finals — after which the Flyers beat the Boston Bruins. Since then, the Flyers had treated Smith’s rendition as a talisman for the team.

In a statement published Sunday, Flyers President Paul Holmgren said, “The NHL principle ‘Hockey is for Everyone’ is at the heart of everything the Flyers stand for. As a result, we cannot stand idle while material from another era gets in the way of who we are today.”

The statement also said: “While Kate Smith’s performance of ‘God Bless America’ cannot be erased from its place in Flyers history, that rendition will no longer be featured in our game presentations.”

On Friday, the Philadelphia team had covered the statue with black cloth. A spokesman for the Flyers told NBC10 in Philadelphia on Friday, “We have recently become aware that several songs performed by Kate Smith contain offensive lyrics that do not reflect our values as an organization.” The spokesman added, “As we continue to look into this serious matter, we are removing Kate Smith’s recording of ‘God Bless America’ from our library and covering up the statue that stands outside of our arena.”

Smith’s career spanned more than five decades and encompassed radio, multiple television shows under her name, commercials and over two dozen albums and hundreds of singles. But it seems that no official working for either team was aware of these two songs.

The Yankees had played Smith’s recording of “God Bless America” during the seventh-inning stretch since shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. A spokesperson told the Daily News last Thursday, “The Yankees have been made aware of a recording that had been previously unknown to us and decided to immediately and carefully review this new information. The Yankees take social, racial and cultural insensitivities very seriously. And while no final conclusions have been made, we are erring on the side of sensitivity.”

Smith, who died in 1986 at age 79, received the Presidential Medal of Freedom — the United States’ highest civilian honor — from President Ronald Reagan in 1982 in honor of her artistic and patriotic contributions. In his remarks, Reagan said: “It’s been truly said that one of the most inspiring things our GIs in World War II, Europe and the Pacific, and later in Korea and Vietnam, ever heard was the voice of Kate Smith — and the same is true for all of us. … Those simple but deeply moving words, ‘God bless America,’ have taken on added meaning for all of us because of the way Kate Smith sang them. Thanks to her, they have become a cherished part of all our lives, an undying reminder of the beauty, the courage and the heart of this great land of ours.”

Smith was a foundational figure in pop culture during World War II and used her fame to raise hundreds of millions of dollars for the U.S. government’s war efforts. During one 18-hour broadcast on the CBS radio network alone, she helped raise more than $100 million in war bonds. (That would amount to more than $1.4 billion in 2019 dollars.)

In the 1933 film, Smith said that she was singing “Pickaninny Heaven” for “a lot of little colored children, who are listening in at an orphanage in New York City.” The sequence includes shots of unkempt black children, while Smith sings of a “pickaninny heaven” where “Mammy” is waiting for them as well as “great big watermelons.”

“That’s Why Darkies Were Born” was written for a 1931 Broadway revue called “George White’s Scandals,” a show that featured such stars of the time as Rudy Vallee and Ethel Barrymore.

Some critics have argued that the “Darkies” song was meant to be a satire of white supremacist ideas — and it was famous enough in its day to be referenced in the Marx Brothers film Duck Soup. But modern-day audiences inevitably cringe at lines like “Someone had to pick the cotton / Someone had to plant the corn / Someone had to slave and be able to sing / That’s why darkies were born.”

“That’s Why Darkies Were Born” was also recorded by the pioneering and revered black bass baritone Paul Robeson — who, in his contract for EMI between 1928 and 1939, recorded quite a few songs that many contemporary listeners will find very problematic, including “De Li’l Pickaninny’s Gone to Sleep,” Stephen Foster’s plantation songs and “Poor Old Joe” (aka “Old Black Joe”).

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In 1995, Sports Illustrated likened Larry Kahn and David Lockwood to the Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier of Tiddlywinks. A fearsome metaphor for two men who, in the parlance of their game, spend their time squopping and potting, rather than bobbing and weaving.

Kahn has won 114 national and world Tiddlywinks titles. Lockwood has won 41. “Larry is the Ali,” Lockwood concedes.

But their rivalry is a friendly one, and when they’re not competing against one another, they make a formidable pair. As a duo, they’ve won five international titles together.

On Friday, they’ll look to snap a 21-year drought when they try for their sixth title together at the annual Tiddlywinks World Championships at the University of Cambridge.

On a recent afternoon in a simply remodeled basement located in the Virginia suburbs, Lockwood paces the perimeter of a regulation 6-by-3-foot table in gym socks and red track pants, calculating his best move.

Colorful, dime-sized discs, or winks, dot the felt-matted surface. In the center lies a traditional plastic red cup no bigger than a shot glass. Kahn, wearing Tevas over his socks, is playing in shorts, as usual, lest he gets too warm circling the tabletop.

Tiddlywinks has a startlingly simple premise: Shoot the most winks into the cup. For all its academic fandom, the very name of the game and its companion slang evokes the lexicon of a nursery rhyme. But Lockwood is quick to blast the game’s reputation as a bygone children’s pastime.

“Tiddlywinks is not what you did when you were 5 years old,” he says. “Tournament tiddlywinks is a fascinating combination of physical skill at a micro level and positional strategy.”

What began as a 19th century adult parlor game in England, first patented in 1888, reemerged in university circles across the United Kingdom and the United States as a tournament game held at Cambridge University in 1955.

Over time, professional winkers, largely recruited from Cambridge, Oxford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, helped heighten its complexity and strategy.

Probability, physics and dexterity rule the game.

Offensively, potting — or sinking a wink in the cup — depends on how much pressure a player exerts on the squidger, a larger disc used to flick smaller discs, or winks, into the cup. To gauge your potting chances, competitors know that pressure equals distance, Lockwood explains.

To keep opponents from scoring, players use their winks for another purpose: squopping. Translation: they flick their winks on top of their opponent’s discs to effectively take them out of play.

“You need to defend the ones that you’ve got and/or attack the ones that they’ve got,” Lockwood explains.

These days, there’s hardly a market for the niche sport. Several companies don’t even make the equipment anymore.

So committed winkers have had to get creative. Lockwood and Kahn have procured orthopedic felt for their playing surface. They make their own squidgers by sanding down plastic discs molded from spice jar lids. They’re banking on 3-D printing becoming more affordable in the near future to help streamline the process.

It’s not something they could have imagined when they started playing Tiddlywinks during their freshman year at MIT, when Kahn and Lockwood each signed themselves up on a whim. Kahn thought the game sounded fun to learn. Lockwood checked “Tiddlywinks” as a joke, he says, after perusing the list of activities offered in the student handbook.

“I was the last person to make the eight-player team in 1972,” he says.

Today, Lockwood says the game has changed his life. “I’ve been to Britain more than 100 times since then, mostly to play Tiddlywinks.”

It’s a sentiment shared by Kahn, who says the game has “enriched my life.”

Kahn and Lockwood both say that one of the best parts of belonging to the winking community has been the friendships they’ve gained.

“Immediately you have a bond with people I’ve never met and it’s continued on, through today. For whatever reason, the game has sort of kept people together to some extent.”

Of course, when talk turns to this week’s tournament, they turn less sentimental.

“It’d be nice to you know, as old as we are compared to the other players, be able to to go in and win a match,” Kahn says. “To show the old guys can still do it.”

Lockwood is blunter. “I really want this,” he says. For him, the victories are addicting.

“If you get a modicum of success, you’re more frequently willing to continue to play, but it’s also a very frustrating game because you miss these things that you’ve made so many times in the past,” he says.

“But only the past is certain.”

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On a bright Sunday afternoon in early March, the Tamir River in the steppes of Mongola becomes a bowling alley. Two dozen Mongolian herdsmen have gathered to play musun shagai, known as “ice shooting.” Right now, the ice on the river is perfect. Clear and smooth. The players are cheerful and focused.

Their goal? To send a small copper puck called a zakh down a 93-yard stretch of ice and knock over several cow ankle bones, painted red, none bigger than a golf ball, at the other end. Extra points for hitting the biggest target, made of cow skin.

Together, the targets form a line of tiny red dots that are difficult to see, let alone hit. When that happens, players know because the spectators raise a boisterous cheer.

“You have to spin it,” says Gurvantamir Jamts, 47, a newcomer to the game. He is the mayor of Tsetserleg, the capital of Arkhangai province, where musun shagai was invented.

He cradles a copper puck between his thumb, index and middle fingers. He shakes it. Metal balls rattle inside. Thrown properly, the puck glides forward with the sound of an ice-skating blade on a freshly resurfaced rink.

“The main technique,” Gurvantamir says, “is how you hold it.”

And how you release it. The players assume a static lunge, digging their back feet into a tiny divet in the ice. They release their zakhs with a throw, and a hopeful look. All squint down the river to see if a red target was hit.

Musun shagai is a homegrown game, created in the 19th century as a way to pass the time. This is the final game of the season before the river melts, the last opportunity to wile away the winter hours before the mayhem of spring, when the goats, sheep, horses and cows give birth.

Only men play ice shooting competitively, though the event brings whole families together. Children scuttle around the ice in their boots, bundled up for the 20-degree weather. One group of teenagers cobbles together their own game, using a flat rock to topple over food packages, practicing their technique.

This competition, originally scheduled for mid-March, was bumped up by two weeks. “The river was already melting,” Gurvantamir said.

The frozen surfaces that makes this game possible are harder to come by in a warming world. According to data from Mongolia’s Institute for Meteorology, Hydrology and Environment, the country’s annual mean temperature has increased by 2.2 degrees Celsius (nearly 4 degrees Fahrenheit) since data collection began in 1940. (The global temperature increase since 1880 has been 0.8 degrees Celsius or 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit).

When the musun shagai competition ends, bowls of vodka are passed around. The local government even brought medals for the winners. They were made of clear plastic. Mayor Gurvantamir held them up, demonstrating how the sunlight glinted through — just like ice.

Emily Kwong (@emilykwong1234) spent nine weeks reporting in Mongolia as NPR’s Above the Fray fellow. The fellowship is sponsored by the John Alexander Project, which supports foreign reporting in undercovered parts of the world.

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After more than three decades, University of North Carolina women’s basketball coach Sylvia Hatchell has resigned from leading the celebrated program. Her resignation followed an external review that found she made “racially insensitive” remarks, exercised “undue influence” on athletes to play while injured and lacked a connection with her players.

The university announced the move Thursday night, citing the conclusions of an 18-day investigation that was initiated after players and parents raised concerns about the women’s experiences and overall culture of the program.

“The University commissioned a review of our women’s basketball program, which found issues that led us to conclude that the program needed to be taken in a new direction. It is in the best interests of our University and student-athletes for us to do so,” UNC Director of Athletics Bubba Cunningham said.

“Coach Hatchell agrees, and she offered her resignation today. I accepted it. We appreciate her 33 years of service to Carolina and to the community, and we wish her the best. Our focus now is on conducting a search for a new head coach who will build on our great Carolina traditions and promote a culture of excellence.”

The review, which included interviews with 28 current players and personnel, determined that the 67-year-old “is not viewed as a racist, but her comments and subsequent response caused many in the program to believe she lacked awareness and appreciation for the effect her remarks had on those who heard them.”

And, when confronted by players and staff about comments that were racially insensitive, Hatchell “did not respond in a timely or appropriate manner,” the investigation found.

According to a report by The Washington Post, Hatchell was accused of making alarming references to lynching, telling players they could be “hanged from trees with nooses” if they performed poorly at an upcoming game.

The story was also the first to publicize allegations that Hatchell and the team’s physician tried to downplay serious injuries in order to pressure players into continuing to compete. As a result, one player said, she was forced to have corrective shoulder surgery. Another said she had played with a torn tendon in her knee.

But the investigation cleared the team’s medical staff of wrongdoing while acknowledging that Hatchell questioned player care and readiness. “The medical staff did not surrender to pressure to clear players before they were medically ready,” according to the report.

Finally, the probe identified a “breakdown of connectivity” between Hatchell and the players.

Hatchell, who had been on paid administrative leave since the launch of the investigation, did not address the allegations against her in a farewell statement included in the university’s announcement.

“The game of basketball has given me so much, but now it is time for me to step away,” she wrote, adding that the team is ready for new leadership after wrapping up a successful season.

Hatchell has led the Tar Heels since 1986. Her team won the NCAA championship in 1994 and she was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 2013.

Calling it a “bittersweet day,” Hatchell said, “I’ve been fortunate to coach more than 200 young women, and it has been a joy to see them grow into successful teachers, doctors, lawyers, mothers, high school and college basketball coaches, and WNBA players.”

She added that she has been considering retirement since recovering from leukemia in 2014.

Her attorney, Wade Smith, told NPR’s Newscast that she denies the claims.

“There was really nothing else for her to accomplish as a basketball coach,” Smith. “I mean, hooray for her. She won a national championship. She’s in the Naismith Hall of Fame. She’s a thousand-game winner. She went to the NCAA tournament Elite Eight a number of times. What more was there for her to do?”

Hatchell is among the most revered figures in women’s basketball. She became the third women’s coach in Division I with 1,000 career victories in 2017 and last month’s NCAA Tournament marked her 23rd appearance in the competition.

Reporter Rebecca Martinez from member station WUNC contributed to this story.

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Three of the world’s most elite climbers are missing and presumed dead by park officials after an avalanche in Alberta, Canada.

Jess Roskelley, a U.S. citizen, and David Lama and Hansjörg Auer, who are both Austrian, had been attempting to climb the east face of Howse Peak in Banff National Park. They were reported overdue on Wednesday, according to the park.

“Based on an assessment of the scene, all three members of the party are presumed to be deceased,” the park said.

A statement from Parks Canada said that responders “observed signs of multiple avalanches and debris containing climbing equipment.”

“Search and recovery efforts are not currently possible due to weather and dangerous avalanche conditions,” it said. The avalanche hazard is expected to continue, Parks Canada said, because of more strong winds and precipitation.

Washington native Roskelley, 36, was the youngest American to summit Mount Everest. He accomplished the feat when he was 20 with his father. John, who is also a well-known climber.

Jess Roskelley has been called “one of America’s boldest alpinists,” Men’s Journal wrote. The Spokesman-Review said he made first ascents in Alaska and in northeast Pakistan.

“It’s how he lived, really. He took life by the horns,” his father told the newspaper. “When you’re climbing mountains, danger is not too far away. It’s terrible for my wife and I. But it’s even worse for his wife.”

David Lama, the 28-year-old son of a Nepali mountain guide and an Austrian nurse, made waves early in his career. According to the trio’s sponsor, The North Face, “at age 12, David became the youngest climber in the history of the sport to complete an 8b+,” an extremely difficult rock climbing grade.

Lama made the first free ascent of the southeast ridge of Cerro Torre in Patagonia, which was documented in a film called Cerro Torre: A Snowball’s Chance in Hell.

Auer, 35, who grew up in the mountains of Austria, was known as “one of the world’s top solo climbers,” as Outside reported. In 2007, he famously free-soloed “The Fish,” a legendary route on the south face of Italy’s Marmolada.

“All three of them, they had in common this similar goal of going and doing remote climbs on big mountains in a very pure, alpine way,” Gripped magazine Editor-in-Chief Brandon Pullan told CBC. The difficult route that the group was on had only been climbed once, according to the broadcaster.

Parks Canada described the route as a “remote and an exceptionally difficult objective, with mixed rock and ice routes requiring advanced alpine mountaineering skills.”

The Howse Peak area has been closed to all traffic and travel until further notice. The area generally sees “few travelers,” according to the park service, and was used by the First Nations “as a route through the mountains to bison.”

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