Spare the Rod, School the Child

In 1998, a young American biologist named Justin Brashares, now a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, went to Ghana to research antelope behavior. But, as he hiked the West African forests and savannahs, he didn’t see many antelope. He also didn’t see many hippos, leopards, duikers, or lions. What he did see were large, aggressive troops of olive baboons. They had recently begun to raid maize crops and steal chickens, causing such serious and persistent damage that many Ghanaians were keeping their young children out of school to help guard family farms.

How had baboons gained influence over the education of Ghanaian children? In search of an answer, Brashares dug into the fantastically detailed records of wildlife populations and hunting activity that Ghana has kept since its days as a British colony. He found that as populations of large mammal species had declined in the country’s national parks over the decades, baboon populations had expanded into the newly predator-free habitat. Hunting intensified by human population growth was one reason for the over-all declines, but the mammal numbers didn’t follow a straight line toward extinction: they rose, then fell, then rose again.

Brashares asked Ghanaian farmers about the pattern. “Oh, it’s the fish,” he remembers them saying dismissively. Poor fishing on the Atlantic coast, they told Brashares, drove more people into the forest to hunt for bushmeat. More hunting meant fewer large mammals, more olive baboons—and, eventually, more kids kept home from school. Brashares’ analysis of data collected by researchers from his lab and elsewhere showed that, in 2009, sixty-five per cent of school-age children in sixty-four baboon-affected villages were withdrawn from school for at least one month, and many for much longer than that.

There’s a method to the madness of the teenage brain.

Dude, Where’s My Frontal Cortex?

In the foothills of the Sierra Mountains, a few hours east of San Francisco, are the Moaning Caverns, a cave system that begins, after a narrow, twisting descent of 30-some feet, with an abrupt 180-foot drop. The Park Service has found ancient human skeletons at the bottom of the drop. Native Americans living there at the time didn’t make human sacrifices. Instead, these explorers took one step too far in the gloom. The skeletons belonged to adolescents.

No surprises there. After all, adolescence is the time of life when someone is most likely to join a cult, kill, be killed, invent an art form, help overthrow a dictator, ethnically cleanse a village, care for the needy, transform physics, adopt a hideous fashion style, commit to God, and be convinced that all the forces of history have converged to make this moment the most consequential ever, fraught with peril and promise.

For all this we can thank the teenage brain. Some have argued adolescence is a cultural construct. In traditional cultures, there is typically a single qualitative transition to puberty. After that, the individual is a young adult. Yet the progression from birth to adulthood is not smoothly linear. The teenage brain is unique. It’s not merely an adult brain that is half-cooked or a child’s brain left unrefrigerated for too long. Its distinctiveness arises from a key region, the frontal cortex, not being fully developed. This largely explains the turbulence of adolescence. It also reflects an important evolutionary pressure.

The frontal cortex is the most recently evolved part of the human brain. It’s where the sensible mature stuff happens: long-term planning, executive function, impulse control, and emotional regulation. It’s what makes you do the right thing when it’s the harder thing to do. But its neurons are not fully wired up until your mid-20s. Why?

How playing an instrument benefits your brain

When you listen to music, multiple areas of your brain become engaged and active. But when you actually play an instrument, that activity becomes more like a full-body brain workout. What's going on? Anita Collins explains the fireworks that go off in musicians' brains when they play, and examines some of the long-term positive effects of this mental workout.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0JKCYZ8hng&feature=em-subs_digest

Why children with autism often fall victim to bullies

Bullying can affect anyone at any time, but young people with autism are especially vulnerable. The results can be devastating. Not being able to keep up with the teasing banter that often takes place among groups of young people can make the social world a very daunting place for children with autism. Being at odds with their peer group can lead to social isolation, rejection, and a lack of the supportive friendships that can protect against bullying.

Autism (including Asperger syndrome) is a developmental condition that the National Autistic Society describes as affecting “how a person communicates with, and relates to, other people and the world around them”. It is on a spectrum, meaning that although there are common areas of difficulty, people with autism are affected in very different ways, with widely varying degrees of severity.

As a consequence, while approximately 30% of young people with autism spectrum conditions attend special schools, around 70% are in mainstream settings, according to the government.

Worryingly, there is a growing body of research that indicates that young people on the autism spectrum are considerably more vulnerable to bullying than their peers.

Who are more likely to be bullies – poor kids or rich kids?

Bullying is the repeated and systematic abuse of power with the aim of causing intentional harm. Examples of bullying have been found in all societies, including among modern hunter-gatherers and in ancient civilisations. But new research has shown that in the modern age, we can draw few strong conclusions about whether bullies are more likely to come from richer or poorer families. In hierarchical social settings, anybody can be at risk of bullying.

Some researchers consider bullying to be an evolutionary adaptation, designed to gain access to resources, secure survival, and allow for more mating opportunities. Bullying can also reduce stress upon bullies: by enabling them to develop a culture of fear and respect it deters others from attacking them and means they have to spend less of their time fighting.

While children diagnosed with conduct disorder or delinquency are more often found in socially disadvantaged groups, such as among families with low socioeconomic status, it is less clear whether bullies are also more likely to come from these backgrounds.

If bullies are motivated by the desire to obtain greater status and dominance, and use strategic behaviour as a means of gaining social success and romantic partners, then it is likely they will be found in similar numbers among all socioeconomic groups.

10 must see ancient greek temples

Back in Ancient Greece the temple was the most important building. The first temples to be constructed from stone began to appear in the 6th century. The Greek temples were not used as places of worship, but rather as monuments to their beloved gods and goddesses. Some of the best examples of Greek temples standing today are located not only in Greece, but in what would have been their ancient empire that stretched to various other locations including Italy, which is home to some of the most well-preserved Greek temples.

 
1 Parthenon, Acropolis

The Parthenon, located atop the Acropolis is a monument dedicated to the goddess Athena, a goddess of wisdom.

 

The Parthenon is an example of an early temple, being built in the mid 5th century and was originally constructed to replace an older temple that was destroyed by the Persians. The statue of Athena that stood in the temple was made from ivory, silver and gold but was unfortunately stolen and later destroyed. 

Better at reading than maths? Don’t blame it all on your genes

I disliked and feared maths for most of my school career and dropped it as soon as I possibly could. My mother recalls me crying as a five-year-old because: “I can’t do the people-on-the-bus sums”. If the bus has 12 passengers and three get off, how many are left? English, by contrast, was a breeze. At seven, I stood on a chair with a microphone and read my version of Sleeping Beauty aloud to the entire school. Reading and writing already ranked high among my passions.

Mine isn’t an unfamiliar tale. Many people label themselves as “not a maths person” or “not much of a reader”, often while they are still children. And yet, in a recent study published in Nature Communications, scientists showed that around half of the genes that affect how well 12-year-olds in the UK perform in maths also affect how good they are at reading. And they showed this in a new and important way.

For the first time ever, this study – led by UCL’s Oliver Davis, Chris Spencer at Oxford and Robert Plomin at King’s College London – was able to estimate genetic influences on learning abilities using DNA alone. The implications of this for future genetically sensitive research in the behavioural and social sciences are highly significant. It is certainly much easier to get hold of DNA than it is to get hold of a results from a large twin sample – another good way of researching this area.

Look out behind the bus stop, here come guerrilla gardeners digging up an urban revolution

Lurking beneath the authorities' radar is a vast, international underground movement that stretches from Africa and Europe to the Americas: guerrilla gardening, the un-permitted colonisation of land, is still a mysterious activity about which little research is undertaken.

The movement brings together students, academics, businessmen, planners, architects, chefs, community workers and many more professions making up the ranks. Would-be guerrillas can enlist in a troop online through sites such as guerrillagardening.org; a forum established by Richard Reynolds (“Britain’s 24th most influential gardener”), deemed the father of the modern guerrilla gardening movement. The movement has grown in recent years, fuelled partially by the rise of Twitter and other forms of social media which make it much easier to organise digs.

Generally speaking, guerrilla gardeners either aim to beautify a neglected patch of land or, increasingly, pursue the cultivation of space via urban agriculture by growing fruit and vegetables in a city context. A somewhat famous example of this is Incredible Edible Todmorden, a guerrilla gardening project started in 2008 where residents “adopt” areas of the town and plant without permission. Impressed by the displays and ideas, the local authority started to work with the guerrillas and the Incredible Edible Network was soon born – now an international movement promoting the idea of urban agriculture.

School libraries must be 'fit for purpose' says cross-party report from MPs

Libraries All Party Parliamentary Group says 'it is vital that all schools have a good library to ensure children develop essential literacy and digital literacy skills'.

 

 

A cross-party group of MPs and peers has called for there to be a good library in every school in the UK in a new report which says that libraries make "a huge contribution to young people's educational attainment".

The call follows a long-running campaign from authors, who believe primary and secondary schools should be required by law to have a school library and a trained librarian, and comes in the wake of new figures from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport showing a "significant decrease" in the number of adults using a library. In the year to March 2014, just 35% of adults had used a library, compared to 2005/2006, when 48% had used a library, said the DCMS's Taking Part survey .

The new report, The Beating Heart of the School, comes from the Libraries All Party Parliamentary Group, and states that "it is vital that all schools have a good library to ensure children develop essential literacy and digital literacy skills in order to fulfill their potential".
Although there are no new figures about the number of school libraries in the UK, the report says recent surveys show that 40% of primary schools with designated library space have seen their budgets reduced, and that almost a third of libraries have insufficient space. It also pointed to "one of the most concerning trends": the fall in the number of librarians in English schools, with data from the Department for Education showing a reduction of 280 librarians in two years.

30 Days of “Quantum Poetry” Celebrating the Glory of Science

From black holes to DNA to butterfly metamorphosis, bewitching verses on the magic of nature.

“The ideal scientist thinks like a poet and works like a bookkeeper,” the influential biologist E.O. Wilson said in his spectacular recent conversation with the former Poet Laureate Robert Hass, exploring the shared creative wellspring of poetry and science. A beautiful embodiment of it comes from 30 Days, an unusual and bewitching series of “quantum poetry” by xYz — the pseudonym of British biologist and poet Joanna Tilsley, who began writing poetry at the age of eight and continued, for her own pleasure, until she graduated college with a degree in biology.

 In April of 2013, while undergoing an emotional breakdown, Tilsley took a friend up on a dare and decided to participate in NaPoWriMo — an annual creative writing project inviting participants to write a poem a day for a month. Immersed in cosmology and quantum physics at the time, she found herself enchanted by the scientific poetics of nature as she strolled around her home in North London.

 Translating that enchantment in lyrical form, she produced a series of thirty poems on everything from DNA to the exoplanet Keppler-62F, a “super-Earth-sized planet orbiting a star smaller and cooler than the sun,” to holometabolism, the process by which the caterpillar metamorphoses into a butterfly, to the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, the first human being to see Earth from space.