News Articles
News Articles
It's official: to protect baby's brain, turn off the TVOctober 18, 2011
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Media, whether playing in the background or designed explicitly as an infant educational tool, has "potentially negative effects and no known positive effects for children younger than 2 years,” concluded the AAP’s report, released Oct. 18 at the Academy’s annual meeting in Boston and scheduled for November publication in the journal Pediatrics. “Although infant/toddler programming might be entertaining, it should not be marketed as or presumed by parents to be educational.”
Researchers trace the roots of Europe's Black Death plagueBy Elizabeth Weise, USA TODAY
That's the finding of researchers who have sequenced the genome, or genetic blueprint, of plague bacteria and found that the strain arose no more than 140 years before the bubonic plague's start in 1347. 10 great places to see science in the worksLarry Bleiberg for USA TODAY
School's out forever for 'unschoolers'September 4, 2011 - USA Today
Reliable data is hard to come by, but estimates of children and teens home-schooled in the U.S. range from 1.5 million to 2 million. Of those, as many as one-third could be considered unschoolers like Zoe, meaning their parents are "facilitators," available with materials and other resources, rather than topdown "teachers." Unschoolers operate under state laws governing home-schooling, which is legal in all 50 states. Such regulations vary tremendously by state, with some requiring standardized tests or adherence to a set curriculum and others nothing more than a letter from parents describing what their kids are up to. Unschoolers said they have no trouble meeting their states' requirements. New Drug Cures Multiple Viruses in Human CellsBy Christine Dell'Amore of National Geographic News
The new drug, called DRACO, works by searching for cells in the body that contain long double-stranded RNA—a surefire sign of a virus. If the drug finds a viral infection, it tells the cell to self-destruct. Colleges hand out abundance of As
Further, by comparing historical data to contemporary figures, the authors charge that there has been an increase of 28 percentage points since 1960 and 12 percentage points since 1988 in the percentage of As awarded in higher education. |
'Flipped' classrooms take advantage of technologyBy Greg Toppo, USA TODAY
Sitting in pairs, students poke at their iPads waiting for class to begin. But in place of a long-winded lecture there's Roshan, a petite brunette with a broad smile, moving through the room, urging students to take out their homework. In a word, Roshan has "flipped" her class. Pressed for time and struggling to reach a generation raised on YouTube, Roshan, like a growing number of teachers, digitally records her lessons with a tablet computer as a virtual blackboard, then uploads them to iTunes and assigns them as homework. In class the following day, she helps students work out exercises and answer knotty questions. Online gamers crack AIDS enzyme puzzleBy AFP | Plugged In – Mon, Sep 19, 2011
This is where Foldit comes in. Developed in 2008 by the University of Washington, it is a fun-for-purpose video game in which gamers, divided into competing groups, compete to unfold chains of amino acids -- the building blocks of proteins -- using a set of online tools. Why Are Grades Highest at the Most Prestigious Schools?Published on August 27, 2011 by Ilan Shrira in The Narcissus in All of Us
This is what I mean: Instructors don't just assign grades based on how students in their class compare to one another, they also base their grades on how each student compares to other students at other universities. This second comparison causes grades to be awarded differently at prestigious vs. non-prestigious schools. NASA: DNA Found on Meteorites Indicates Life May Have Originated in Space
"People have been discovering components of DNA in meteorites since the 1960s, but researchers were unsure whether they were really created in space or if instead they came from contamination by terrestrial life," said Dr. Michael Callahan, lead researcher of the discovery. "For the first time, we have three lines of evidence that together give us confidence these DNA building blocks actually were created in space." Night owls' poor sleep habits can hurt gradesBy Kathleen Doheny HealthDay of USA Today
At the end of the freshman year, the night owls' grade point average (GPA) was 2.84, just below a B average, the study authors reported. The [morning] larks and regular robins had an average GPA of 3.18, Peszka noted. "It's only a third of a letter grade," she said of the difference. "But a third of a letter grade could, particularly at that place on the scale of GPA, be critical to keeping a scholarship or staying on a sports scholarship or keeping your parents satisfied." |
The Black Death of the medieval era, far from being just a more dangerous form of an already-occurring disease, was a newly evolved variant of a harmless bacteria that quickly began its death march across the globe.
What do zombie fashion shows, crime lab tours and Rubik's cube contests have in common? You'll find them all at a science festival. These events function in the same way art and food festivals do - through public demonstrations and activities, most of them free. Science festivals started in England in the 1990s, says Ben Wiehe , manager of the Science Festival Alliance. "Each one is a tremendous amount of fun."
Unschooling has been around for several decades, but advocates say there has been an uptick as more families turn to home-schooling overall.
A new drug can scout out and kill numerous types of viruses infecting human and animal cells, researchers have announced. It's the first time a single drug has been shown to work against a range of viruses, from those that cause seasonal sniffles to more fatal diseases.
Two critics of grade inflation have published a new analysis finding that the most common grade at four-year colleges and universities is the A (43 percent of all grades) -- and that Ds and Fs are few and far between.
Step into Stacey Roshan's Advanced Placement calculus class some morning and two things become apparent: The students don't seem stressed-out, as AP students often do. And the teacher is barely teaching.
Online gamers have achieved a feat beyond the realm of Second Life or Dungeons and Dragons: they have deciphered the structure of an enzyme of an AIDS-like virus that had thwarted scientists for a decade.
Any explanation for grade inflation needs to account for why it's strong at prestigious schools but weak or absent at 2nd-tier schools, and I have yet to hear one that's convincing. So to join the throng of theories, I'll add my own: Grades are higher at prestigious schools because instructors there use different standards than instructors at less prestigious schools.
NASA researchers have found the building blocks for life in meteorites, indicating that the components for life on Earth may have originated in outer space.
Students who are night owls have worse grades in high school and the beginning years of college, research has shown. 