Five ways particle accelerators have changed the world (without a Higgs boson in sight)

The Large Hadron Collider is probably the world’s most famous science experiment. The 27km-long ring-shaped particle accelerator beneath the edge of the Alps grabbed the world’s attention in 2013 when it proved the existence of the Higgs boson particle. This helped physicists confirm that one of their key theories about the way the universe worked was correct – a huge step for science. But particle accelerators also have a big impact on our real lives. Even Christmas wouldn’t be the same without them.

Particle accelerators accelerate the tiny building blocks of matter by using electric fields to speed them up to high velocity/energy. These electric fields are the invisible force field created by charged objects, like static electricity or high voltage equipment.

These devices were initially invented to study what happens when particles collide with each other or with targets. These experiments allowed us to understand the particles themselves, the world around us, and nuclear physics (the study of the atomic nucleus). In itself this knowledge has been vital to the development of many technologies such as MRI scanners in hospitals and nuclear power stations.

There are also medium-sized accelerators that produce intense light or neutrons to allow physicists, biologists and pharmacologists to study materials, viruses, proteins and medicines, leading to countless Nobel prizes and new drugs and vaccines. They are even used by chocolate and ice cream makers to study how to make the tastiest products by using X-rays to look at the formation of different crystal structures and how to avoiding icy or chalky parts.

However, the most common type of particle accelerators are not the big 27km giants but the small industrial and medical accelerators that are all around us.

Why Reading the Same Book Repeatedly Is Good for Kids

(Even If It Drives You Nuts)

Does your child have a favorite book they want to read over and over again? Or worse, wants you to read over and over again? I bet you’ve memorized every word. You loved its adorable illustrations and clever text when you first brought it home, but now you’ve grown to hate it. You might even wish it would disappear forever. I feel your pain. I know it can be maddening, but before you toss this particular book, you may want to reconsider. Despite its annoyances, repetitive reading — whether you’re reading to your child or they’re reading to you — offers a surprising number of benefits for new readers.

Vocabulary and Word Recognition

The more a child reads, the larger their vocabulary becomes. When a child reads or hears the same book multiple times, they become familiar and comfortable with a greater number of words. That text you’ve memorized? Chances are your child has too, and that’s a good thing.

Pattern and Rhythm

Hearing favorite stories read aloud helps children become aware of the pattern and rhythm of text. Language is more than just words — it’s how words sound and connect to each other. Parents can model the rhythms of reading for children who are just learning how language works.

Fluency

Fluency is the ability to read text “accurately, quickly, and with expression.” Repetitive reading allows a child to read without stumbling or stopping, and reading time becomes more pleasant for everyone. Once a child masters one book, it makes moving on to another more appealing.

How to teach ... Chinese year of the monkey

From exploring our simian relations to creating Chinese art and learning Mandarin, here’s our guide to teaching this festival.

Are you a rat? A tiger? Maybe you’re a dragon? Don’t worry, we’re not talking about your staff room persona – although we can all probably think of a snake or two – but rather the signs of the Chinese zodiac. The Chinese lunar new year and the beginning of the year of the monkey starts on 8 February. It’s a time of celebration and new beginnings, and a great way to introduce your students to another culture. So how best to bring a bit of monkey business to your classes?

Primary

This comprehensive year of the monkey education pack from the British Council is an excellent place to start. It includes detailed lesson plans and resources looking at the history of the festival, creative tasks such as making indoor kites and Chinese opera masks, and a research project on the endangered snub-nosed monkey.

For more background on the celebrations, this simple video will give your students an understanding of the Chinese calendar and its roots in the legend of a swimming race between animals of every species. And once your pupils have got to grips with that story, they can create their own tales with this simple monkey-themed story starter from PrimaryLeap. This comprehension activity uses a character called Marcus the Monkey to present a series of monkey facts before asking pupils to demonstrate their understanding with a quiz.

This Chinese new year-themed worksheet from TeachIt takes the traditional colour of the festival, red, and uses it as the basis for games and poetry-writing. Sticking with tradition, Twinkl has this resource that asks pupils to imagine how they would make use of the envelope of money given out for the festival, as well as a series of writing frames based on the animals of the Chinese zodiac.

Twinkl also offers these Chinese zodiac-themeddecorative borders for writing tasks and animal-adorned posters of numbers for a numeracy reminder. If you want to go further in decorating your room for the festival, these resources from the British Council will show your students how to make Chinese hand scrolls and traditional lanterns.

The Musical Brain: Novel Study of Jazz Players Shows Common Brain Circuitry Processes Both Music and Language

Researchers scanned brains while musicians “traded fours"

The brains of jazz musicians engrossed in spontaneous, improvisational musical conversation showed robust activation of brain areas traditionally associated with spoken language and syntax, which are used to interpret the structure of phrases and sentences. But this musical conversation shut down brain areas linked to semantics - those that process the meaning of spoken language, according to results of a study by Johns Hopkins researchers.

The study used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to track the brain activity of jazz musicians in the act of "trading fours," a process in which musicians participate in spontaneous back and forth instrumental exchanges, usually four bars in duration. The musicians introduce new melodies in response to each other's musical ideas, elaborating and modifying them over the course of a performance.

The results of the study suggest that the brain regions that process syntax aren't limited to spoken language, according to Charles Limb, M.D., an associate professor in the Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Rather, he says, the brain uses the syntactic areas to process communication in general, whether through language or through music.

Limb, who is himself a musician and holds a faculty appointment at the Peabody Conservatory, says the work sheds important new light on the complex relationship between music and language.

Recreating medieval towns – an example of why Minecraft is a great learning tool

I recently told a room full of academics interested in using videogames as a teaching tool that “to play is the biggest freedom we can have as a child, or as an adult”. The popular world-building game, Minecraft, provides that opportunity at every twist and turn – something Microsoft has emphasised when announcing the release of Minecraft Education Edition.

After buying Minecraft in 2014, Microsoft also recently acquired MinecraftEDU, a modified version of Minecraft developed by Teacher Gaming to help teachers use it more easily in the classroom. The latest edition will make this even easier – but what makes this game such a great tool for teachers?

Minecraft is a creative “sandbox” game where the players dig up blocks in a landscape, craft them in to new materials, then use them to create whatever they wish. It allows players complete freedom to explore, build and experiment and is often referred to as “virtual Lego”.

The key to success in the classroom, as any good teacher will tell you, is keeping students engaged. Motivated and enthused teachers are more likely to motivate and enthuse their pupils, who in turn are more receptive and willing to explore, experiment, test and – most importantly – fail, as part of the learning process.

Building the past in blocks

In a recent archaeology undergraduate class, we explored the site of the deserted medieval village of Wharrem Percy in East Yorkshire. We did so without leaving the classroom – we recreated in MinecraftEDU using shuttle radar topography mission data available from space shuttle missions, combined with DEM software for viewing 3D models to create a 1:1 scale map of the region, imported into Minecraft using WorldPainter. From there, landscape detail including ruins, ponds, rivers and forests can easily be added in.

Why Do Most Languages Have So Few Words for Smells?

And why do these two hunter-gatherer groups have so many?

Describe a banana. It's yellow, perhaps with some green edges. When peeled, it has a smooth, soft, mushy texture. It tastes sweet, maybe a little creamy.

And it smells like... well, it smells like a banana. 

Every sense has its own “lexical field,” a vast palette of dedicated descriptive words for colors, sounds, tastes, and textures. But smell? In English, there are only three dedicated smell words—stinky, fragrant, and musty—and the first two are more about the smeller's subjective experience than about the smelly thing itself.

All of our other scent descriptors are really descriptions of sources: We say that things smell like cinnamon, or roses, or teen spirit, or napalm in the morning. The other senses don't need these linguistic workarounds. We don't need to say that a banana “looks like lemon;” we can just say that it's yellow. Experts who work in perfume or wine-tasting industries may use more metaphorical terms likedecadent or unctuous, but good luck explaining them to a non-expert who's not familiar with the jargon.

Some scientists have taken this as evidence that humans have relegated smell to the sensory sidelines, while vision has taken center-field. It's a B-list sense, deemed by Darwin to be “of extremely slight service.” Others have suggested that smells are inherently indescribable, and that “olfactory abstraction is impossible.” Kant wrote that “Smell does not allow itself to be described, but only compared through similarity with another sense.” Indeed, when Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, the protagonist of Perfume: The Story of a Murderer can unerringly identify smells, remember them, and mix and match them in his head, he seems disconcerting and supernatural to us, precisely because we suck so badly at those tasks.

But not all of us. In Southeast Asia, there are at least two groups of hunter-gatherers who would turn their noses up at this textbook view. Asifa Majid from Radboud University in the Netherlands has found that the Jahai people of Malaysia and the Maniq of Thailand use between 12 and 15 dedicated smell words.

Want to learn faster? Stop multitasking and start daydreaming

Neuroscientist Daniel Levitin explains how students can avoid letting social media and multitasking ruin their study time.

Information is being created and disseminated faster than any of us can absorb it. Google estimates that humans have created more information in the past five years than in all of human history - 300 exabytes of information (300,000,000,000,000,000,000) to be precise. If all that information were written on 3x5 index cards, your personal share of it would wrap around the earth twice. The pile of cards would reach to the moon three times.

Social media, emails, texts, WhatsApp messsages and phone calls take up an increasing amount of time. Our to-do lists are so full that we can’t hope to complete every item on them. So what do we do? We multitask, juggling several things at once, trying to keep up by keeping busy.

Research by Earl Miller of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and others however shows that multitasking doesn’t work - simply because the brain doesn’t work that way. If you’re studying from a book and trying to listen in on a conversation at the same time, those are two separate projects, each started and maintained by distinct circuits in the brain. Pay more attention to one for a moment and you’re automatically paying less attention to the other. 

To make matters worse, learning information while multitasking causes the new information to go to the wrong part of the brain, as shown by Russ Poldrack of Stanford. If students study and watch TV at the same time, for example, the information from their course work goes into the striatum, a region specialised for storing new procedures and skills, not facts and ideas. Without the distraction of TV, the information goes into the hippocampus, where it is organised and categorised, making it easier to retrieve it. 

“People can’t do [multitasking] very well, and when they say they can, they’re deluding themselves,” says Miller. And it turns out the brain is very good at this deluding business.

How to teach ... cold and flu

From making cuddly bacteria to lessons on Louis Pasteur, here’s our guide for teaching your students the basics of avoiding the dreaded lurgy.

Winter brings lots of wonderful things – a new year, snow, the chance to break out your scarf collection. But they are all doomed to arrive during the most disgusting time of the year: cold and flu season. For those in schools, each day brings a chorus of other people’s coughs and sneezes, and a gauntlet of germs to dodge. So how can you teach your students the basics of staying healthy?

Primary

For key stage 1 pupils, this three-lesson module – linked to the science and personal, social and health education (PSHE) curriculum – from Share Good Times Not Flu offers a simple overview of what it means to be healthy and how exercise, diet and hygiene can help your young charges stay that way. A key stage 2 version, also made up of three lessons , goes into greater detail about how germs enter the body through coughs, sneezes and unwashed hands, and how good hygiene practices can keep them out.

This resource pack from e-Bug offers a variety of fun ways to look at germs and microbes, including yeast races (exploring how microbes cause dough to rise), an experiment to see how far germs can spread through handshakes (using glo spray), and a toothbrushing tracker to highlight the importance of oral hygiene.

This guide to preventing the spread of bugs through handwashing, also from e-Bug, uses quizzes, colouring and a bowl of water and pepper (yep) to teach pupils the power of soap and water. And you can decorate your classroom with this accompanying poster to reinforce the message.

This US guide provides more puzzles, word searches and songs (“If you’re happy and you know it, scrub your hands!”) to ensure your little ones remember to clean their mitts, whileHygiene4Health offers a variety of resources on the topic, including this poster explaining the principles of good hand hygiene.

The eco guide to packaging

Make your zero tolerance stance on unecessary packaging known: it's the best way to stop it.

In the mid-noughties my inbox was full of images of shrinkwrapped fruit and veg: readers were incensed that supermarkets wrapped coconuts (which famously provide their own husks) with layers of non-recyclable film. The debate has been repackaged for a new generation. Twitter is awash with examples of idiotic packaging from e-tailers, such as one bottle of nail varnish and a cat’s toy, each sent in a big box.

We accumulate 200kg of packaging materials a year per person, adding up to almost 13m tonnes entering the UK waste stream. Even if you drag your cardboard to the recycling plant, you’re still complicit in a system that wastes important resources on a single-use box. It’s also cheaper to have one size of box that fits neatly into a truck. Logistics companies don’t get charged for shipping air, creating more carbon emissions and traffic. The protective packaging industry that makes crumpled paper and inflatable plastic pockets is a real winner, projected to be worth $35bn by 2020.

If you want to do something practical, report outrageous over-packaging (where the product takes up less than 10% of the volume of the packaging) to your local trading standards officer. A former officer tells me that they’re particularly hot on the issue of shipping air in huge, unnecessary boxes, because part of their mandate is to keep delivery traffic to a minimum.

Amazon, though often named and shamed, seems keen to hear reports of packaging frustration and is working with German researchers to make its deliveries eco-friendly.

In the past the packaging industry avoided closer control by arguing that lavish packaging was demanded by the consumer. But it makes it harder for the industry to use this defence if we all continue to Instagram our discontent.

Who are the homeless and how do we count them?

For the thousands of people who are sleeping on the streets or are in temporary accommodation, winter is one of the hardest times of the year. Being able to provide relief during this period depends, at least in part, on understanding how many people are affected by homelessness – and who they are. Unfortunately, that’s not straightforward.

In the UK, a person is legally defined as homeless if they have accommodation but can’t reasonably be expected to occupy it, or if they don’t have any accommodation at all. This definition covers a broad range of circumstances – from those who can’t afford to pay rent, to those forced to leave home, for whatever reason. But the first thing to know is that there’s a big difference between the number of people who the state recognises as homeless and how many people actually are. This is known as the distinction between the “statutory” homeless, and the “non-statutory” or “single” homeless.

The “statutory” homeless are those who apply to local authorities as homeless, and are accepted as such. People are only accepted if the council deems that they are eligible for housing support, or can be classified as being “unintentionally homeless” or in “priority need”. Information on statutory homelessness is readily available. All local authorities are required to report on the number of statutory homelessness applications received (and “acceptances” made) to the government on a quarterly basis.

In England, between April and June 2015, 13,850 households were accepted as homeless – an increase of 5% compared with the same quarter in 2014. Few of these households will have been without a roof over their heads. Rather, their circumstances can be considered an indicator of housing stress, as a result of relationship breakdown or over-crowding, for example.

“Single” homelessness refers to individuals without dependents, who are not entitled to accommodation from local authorities. Some of these are visible on our streets – in autumn 2014, the official rough sleeping estimate was 2,744, up 14% from 2013. But most remain out of sight – “hidden” in bed and breakfasts or squats and on the floors and couches of friends and family. There is no effective or robust mechanism to monitor “single” homelessness, so these people are largely absent from government statistics. Our best estimate is that there were 2.23m single homeless people in England, in 2013.