Twins show success at school is not just down to genes

How many A*s does one family need? Andrew Milligan/PA

There is a common misconception that genes are deterministic and that human potential is fixed at birth. This could not be further from the truth. We, as behavioural geneticists, see no evidence whatsoever for genetic determinism in how, what and why children learn.
In the recent debate about genetics and education, and whether those two words even belong in the same sentence, the influence of a child’s “non-shared environment” has largely been overlooked.

To elaborate, if you cloned one child 30 times and sent them into the same class at the same school with the same teacher, the chances are you would see 30 outcomes, all at least slightly different from each other.

We see this in cloned animal litters and in identical twins. The question that behavioural geneticists ask is why. How it is possible for genetically identical organisms to develop differently? And we try to find an answer by looking at experiences which differ between identical twins.

Your memory rewrites the past and edits it with new experiences, study finds

Memory editing happens in the hippocampus, updating recollections with fragments from current experiences

Our memory is a poor way of recording events, a study has found, as it rewrites the past with current information, updating recollections with new experiences.

In the study, How your Memory Rewrites the Past, researchers looked at the exact point in time when incorrectly recalled information was implanted into an existing memory.

The team found that memory rewrites the past with current information, updating recollections with new experiences. This form of editing happens in the hippocampus, working as the memory’s version of a film editor or special effects team.

How to Close the Learning Gap for Children at All Socioeconomic Levels

The Unstoppable Power of Applying Maslow’s Laws Today

“Those who refuse to learn from the past are doomed to repeat it,” said George Santayana nearly a century ago.Yet our public school system continues to operate on the myth that what teachers do in classrooms is enough to close the gap on learning between children at all socioeconomic levels.Government policy-makers have not learned from the past or experts on children, behavior, learning, or teaching and continue down a road that leaves EVERY child behind, some much farther than others.

 In 1943, Abraham Maslow published “A Theory of Human Motivation”, the lessons of which are more critical today than at the time. Maslow taught that at any age, until a person’s basic, primal needs are met, he/she is motivated to do little more than survive.Thus, it is clear why children that do not have proper nutrition, food security, shelter, clothing, medical/dental care, support, and safety, do not arrive at school ready to learn. Bottom line: closing the gap on learning for children at risk requires commitment to whatever is necessary to ensure the fulfillment of every basic need for children AND their families.It’s a simple, elegant, highly challenging solution and one about which every responsible U.S. citizen should be concerned.

Gloomy vocabulary in books reflects poor economic climate

Economic hardship makes for blue books. Nerissa's Ring

Literature has mirrored the shifting economic climate over the past century, according to a study published today by researchers in Bristol and London. When times are tough financially, it seems, books gets miserable.

Mood expressed in English language books was measured by recording the frequency of words expressing unhappiness across a database of more than eight million digitised books published in the past 100 years.

This “literary misery index” was found to have a strong correlation to the annual US economic misery index, which is the sum of inflation and unemployment rates.

The researchers found that some periods, particularly the years following World War I, the aftermath of the Great Depression and the 1975 energy crisis, were clearly marked by “literary misery”. The results seemed to follow a pattern of Western economic history, shifted forward by a decade.

Can You Name That Smell?

Niclas Burenhult

Smell that? A native Jahai speaker describing the odor of a local plant.

Ask a group of people to describe the color of a sheet of paper, a cloud, or a glass of milk, and chances are they’ll all say “white.” But ask the same group to describe the smell of cinnamon, and you’ll likely get a potpourri of answers, ranging from “spicy” to “smoky” to “sweet,” and sometimes all three. When it comes to naming smells, humans struggle to find concise, universal terms. Indeed, scientists have long thought the ability was out of our reach. But a new study indicates that the inhabitants of a remote peninsula in Southeast Asia can depict smells as easily as the rest of us pick colors.

Reception children to face compulsory tests from 2016

Four and five-year-olds to face basic literacy and reasoning tests within weeks of starting school

 

A Whitehall source said the tests for young children would give schools a clearer idea of pupils' progress. Photograph: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian

 
Compulsory national testing for four- and five-year-olds in England from 2016 is to be introduced as part of sweeping changes being proposed to early years and primary education.

The tests will take place in the first weeks of reception class, when most children will be aged four, and will be designed to give teachers and schools a clearer idea of each child's abilities at the start of their formal schooling.

The tests are to be carefully crafted to estimate a child's "baseline" abilities in very basic literacy, reasoning and cognition, rather than testing their knowledge as in a traditional examination.
A Whitehall source said: "This has been mooted for some time and is a logical step. It will help teachers identify where each child starts from, and which children are likely to need the most help.

Carbon as a commodity: a trade in pollution could help clean up dirty economies

We pay for the product, but not the carbon cost. Kin Cheung/AP

Is it fair that China is blamed for the carbon dioxide emissions it generates to manufacture products destined for the West? Would the West do more to reduce greenhouse gases if it had to pay for the emissions caused in producing the products it imports? Welcome to the world of carbon accounting, where changes to the way the books are kept could improve our chances of driving down greenhouse gas emissions worldwide.

Carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas have soared. In 2013 they were more than 60% higher than in 1990. This is despite significant progress in global climate policy, with numerous international agreements promising emission cutbacks.

This contradiction reflects the structure of most international agreements: industrialised countries are allotted emissions targets while developing countries are not. Unsurprisingly, emissions have largely stabilised in the countries with targets to meet, and more than doubled in countries without them. China has seen the largest amount of emissions growth and now emits more carbon dioxide per person than the entire European Union.

Autistic Brains Create 42 Percent More Information During Rest

New research from Case Western Reserve University and University of Toronto neuroscientists finds that the brains of autistic children generate more information at rest -- a 42% increase on average. The study offers a scientific explanation for the most typical characteristic of autism -- withdrawal into one's own inner world. The excess production of information may explain a child's detachment from their environment.

Published at the end of December in Frontiers in Neuroinformatics, this study is a follow-up to the authors' prior finding that brain connections are different in autistic children. This paper determined that the differences account for the increased complexity within their brains.

How Do Spiders Walk Upside Down? Mystery Solved

Spiders can crawl pretty much anywhere: Glass, walls, and even ceilings are all equally accessible to the arachnids.

Now scientists have solved the long-standing mystery of their sticky success: Their secret is small hairs at the end of their legs. (See pictures of spiders up close.)

A female banana spider on her web. Photograph by Michael Hare/Alamy

 

These thousands of tiny hairs create multiple contact points between the spider and the surface that increase the spider’s ability to hang on, scientists have found.

The hairs are both small and flexible. At the molecular level, even the smoothest surfaces are rough, so if the spider’s hairs were rigid, the arachnid could make contact only with certain parts of the surface. But because the hairs are malleable, they can make contact with more of the surface, which provides additional stickiness, said Jonas Wolff, a biologist at the University of Kiel in Germany. (Also see “Watery Gecko Grip Could Lead to Stickier Tape.”)

Teachers' pay must be at the heart of global education reform

If the development community is serious about improving teaching and learning, it must address the recruitment, reward and retention of teachers

 

If current trends continue, it will take until 2072 for all the poorest young women in developing countries to become literate. Photograph: Dan Chung/The Guardian

 

Progress in global education – especially in the poorest regions of the world – remains painfully slow. The latest Unesco Education for All global monitoring report, published Wednesday, underlines how far we still are from guaranteeing a good quality education for every child. While many pupils are now attending school, the quality of the education is often so poor that they are failing to learn the most elementary skills. Around 175 million young people in poor countries – equivalent to one quarter of the youth population – cannot read all or part of a sentence.

The situation for girls is particularly dire. If current trends continue, it will take until 2072 for all the poorest young women in developing countries to become literate. In other words, it will only be the grandchildren of today's pupils in sub-Saharan Africa that can expect to learn the skills that the developed world takes for granted.