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February 28, 2013

Reading, Writing, Arithmetic, and Aerobics – Evaluating the New “R” in Academic Performance

Although the long-term consequences of childhood obesity are well documented, some school districts have reduced physical education classes to devote more time to the 3 Rs in education—reading, writing, and arithmetic.

However, there is new evidence that leaving out an important fourth R—aerobics—could actually be counterproductive for increasing test scores. A new study scheduled for publication in The Journal of Pediatrics studied the associations between aerobic fitness, body mass index (BMI), and passing scores on standardized math and reading tests.

Although obesity is a concern for children, this study shows that aerobic fitness can have a greater effect on academic performance than weight. The authors found that both aerobic fitness and socioeconomic status have a similar impact on academic performance. Because aerobic fitness can be easier to improve than socioeconomic status, and it is easy to implement in a school setting, schools should think twice before taking minutes from physical education classes and recess. According to Dr. Rauner, “Schools sacrificing physical education and physical activity time in search of more seat time for math and reading instruction could potentially be pursuing a counterproductive approach.”

Action Video Games Boost Reading Skills, Study of Children With Dyslexia Suggests

Much to the chagrin of parents who think their kids should spend less time playing video games and more time studying, time spent playing action video games can actually make dyslexic children read better.

In fact, 12 hours of video game play did more for reading skills than is normally achieved with a year of spontaneous reading development or demanding traditional reading treatments.

The evidence, appearing in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on February 28, follows from earlier work by the same team linking dyslexia to early problems with visual attention rather than language skills.

"Action video games enhance many aspects of visual attention, mainly improving the extraction of information from the environment"...

Kirtland Peterson

February 27, 2013

First grade math skills set foundation for later math ability

Children who failed to acquire a basic math skill in first grade scored far behind their peers by seventh grade on a test of the mathematical abilities needed to function in adult life, according to researchers supported by the National Institutes of Health.

The basic math skill, number system knowledge, is the ability to relate a quantity to the numerical symbol that represents it, and to manipulate quantities and make calculations. This skill is the basis for all other mathematics abilities, including those necessary for functioning as an adult member of society, a concept called numeracy.

The researchers reported that early efforts to help children overcome difficulty in acquiring number system knowledge could have significant long-term benefits. They noted that more than 20 percent of U.S. adults do not have the eighth grade math skills needed to function in the workplace.

“An early grasp of quantities and numbers appears to be the foundation on which we build more complex understandings of numbers and calculations..."

Praising Children for Their Personal Qualities May Backfire

Praising children... for their personal qualities rather than their efforts may make them feel more ashamed when they fail, according to new research published by the American Psychological Association.

“This type of personal praise may backfire. What may seem like common sense can sometimes lead adults astray in their attempts to help children with low self-esteem feel better about themselves."

The study found that children with low self-esteem often received praise for their personal qualities, and that type of praise can trigger greater feelings of shame from failure and may lead to a diminished sense of self-worth.

FOR KIDS: Cool Jobs: Museum science

When deadly virus outbreaks occur, scientists want to know where the disease is coming from and how to stop it. In their search for answers, some will pay a visit to their local museum.

They are not trying to take their minds off the outbreak. Instead, they come to sift through the museum’s historic collections, looking for clues that might help them save lives. 

In fact, researchers in a broad range of fields have been looking to museum specimens for solutions to new questions in science. Here we get to know three teams using old samples to solve science-based puzzles.

February 26, 2013

Sleep Reinforces Learning — Especially for Children

During sleep, our brains store what we have learned during the day ‒ a process even more effective in children than in adults It is important for children to get enough sleep.

Children’s brains transform subconsciously learned material into active knowledge while they sleep – even more effectively than adult brains do.

Children sleep longer and deeper, and they must take on enormous amounts of information every day.

In the current study, the researchers examined the ability to form explicit knowledge via an implicitly-learned motor task. Children between 8 and 11, and young adults, learned to guess the predetermined series of actions – without being aware of the existence of the series itself.

Following a night of sleep or a day awake, the subjects’ memories were tested. The result: after a night’s sleep, both age groups could remember a larger number of elements from the row of numbers than those who had remained awake in the interim.

And the children were much better at it than the adults.

February 25, 2013

Girls perform as well as boys in math competitions

Supposed gender gap just a product of first-round nerves 

The idea that boys are better at math and in competitions has persisted for a long time, and now we know why: Nobody bothered to schedule the rematch.

Most school math contests are one-shot events where girls underperform relative to their male classmates. But a new study by a Brigham Young University economist presents a different picture.

Twenty-four local elementary schools changed the format to go across five different rounds. Once the first round was over, girls performed as well or better than boys for the rest of the contest.

“It’s really encouraging that seemingly large gaps disappear just by keeping them in the game longer."

Boys’ Lack of Effort in School Tied to College Gender Gap

“The world has changed around boys, and they have not adapted as well as girls,” said Claudia Buchmann, a professor of sociology at Ohio State University and co-author of The Rise of Women: The Growing Gender Gap in Education and What it Means for American Schools (Russell Sage Foundation, 2013).

Some commentators blame schools and argue that schools have become too “feminized” and don’t support the way that boys learn. Some have asserted that single-sex education is the best way to help improve boys’ academic achievement.

[T]here’s little evidence to support these arguments

“But what is striking is that at every level of cognitive ability, boys are getting lower grades than girls. It is not about ability – it is about effort and engagement,” Buchmann said.

“Success in academics, like success in sports, requires time and effort. Because boys put forth less effort and are less engaged, they get lower grades and are less likely to get through college,” Buchmann said.

February 21, 2013

FOR KIDS: Meteor explodes over Russia

Mother Nature provided a surprise light show over Russia early on February 14. That’s when a major meteor entered Earth’s atmosphere.

The object was originally 17 meters (55 feet) in diameter. That’s as wide as a 5-story building is high. It had also weighed a whopping 10,000 metric tons, according to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration NASA).

The meteor was traveling about 65,000 kilometers (40,000 miles) per hour. It created a brilliant streak as it traveled across the sky for nearly 33 seconds. The meteor then exploded about 20 to 25 kilometers (12 to 15 miles) above Earth’s surface.

FOR KIDS: Fancy feather gene

What a difference a gene makes! For pigeons, one gene can make or break the appearance of fancy feathers.

Many pigeons have crests or collars, tufts of feathers on the head or neck that appear to go the wrong way. They point up toward the head instead of down toward the tail.

This funny feature decorates many different pigeon breeds, but all of those birds have one thing in common: a genetic change.

February 20, 2013

Bilingual children have a better “working memory” than monolingual children

A study conducted at the University of Granada and the University of York in Toronto, Canada, has revealed that bilingual children develop a better working memory – which holds, processes and updates information over short periods of time– than monolingual children.

The working memory plays a major role in the execution of a wide range of activities, such as mental calculation (since we have to remember numbers and operate with them) or reading comprehension (given that it requires associating the successive concepts in a text).

Can Breakfast Make Kids Smarter?

New research from the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing has found that children who regularly have breakfast on a near-daily basis had significantly higher full scale, verbal, and performance IQ test scores.

In one of the first studies to examine IQ and breakfast consumption, researchers examined data from 1,269 children six years old in China, where breakfast is highly valued, and concluded that children who did not eat breakfast regularly had 5.58 points lower verbal, 2.50 points lower performance, and 4.6 points lower total IQ scores than children who often or always ate breakfast after adjusting for seven sociodemographic confounders.

 “Childhood is a critical period in which dietary and lifestyle patterns are initiated, and these habits can have important immediate and long-term implications,” said lead author Jianghong Liu, PhD, RN, FAAN, associate professor at Penn Nursing.

“Breakfast habits appear to be no exception, and irregular breakfast eating has already been associated with a number of unhealthy behaviors, such as smoking, frequent alcohol use, and infrequent exercise.”

At age 6, a child’s cognitive ability as both the verbal and performance levels is rapidly developing. Both the nutritional and social aspects of breakfast play a role.

'Language Gene' More Active in Young Girls Than Boys

Despite recent progress toward sexual equality, it's still a man's world in many ways. But numerous studies show that when it comes to language, girls start off with better skills than boys.

Now, scientists studying a gene linked to the evolution of vocalizations and language have for the first time found clear sex differences in its activity in both rodents and humans, with the gene making more of its protein in girls.

But some researchers caution against drawing too many conclusions about the gene's role in human and animal communication from this study.

February 19, 2013

Researchers discover a biological marker of dyslexia

Ability to consistently encode sound undergirds the reading process 

Though learning to read proceeds smoothly for most children, as many as one in 10 is estimated to suffer from dyslexia, a constellation of impairments unrelated to intelligence, hearing or vision that make learning to read a struggle. Now, Northwestern University researchers report they have found a biological mechanism that appears to play an important role in the reading process.

"We discovered a systematic relationship between reading ability and the consistency with which the brain encodes sounds," says Nina Kraus, Hugh Knowles Professor of Neurobiology, Physiology and Communication. "Unstable Representation of Sound: A Biological Marker of Dyslexia," co-authored by Jane Hornickel, will appear in the Feb. 20 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience.

Recording the automatic brain wave responses of 100 school-aged children to speech sounds, the Northwestern researchers found that the very best readers encoded the sound most consistently while the poorest readers encoded it with the greatest inconsistency.

Presumably, the brain's response to sound stabilizes when children learn to successfully connect sounds with their meanings.

Is there a link between childhood obesity and ADHD, learning disabilities?

A University of Illinois study has established a possible link between high-fat diets and such childhood brain-based conditions as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and memory-dependent learning disabilities
 
“We found that a high-fat diet rapidly affected dopamine metabolism in the brains of juvenile mice, triggering anxious behaviors and learning deficiencies. Interestingly, when methylphenidate (Ritalin) was administered, the learning and memory problems went away,” said Gregory Freund, a professor in the U of I College of Medicine and a member of the university’s Division of Nutritional Sciences.
 
The research was published in Psychoneuroendocrinology and is available pre-publication online at http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.psyneuen.2013.01.004. 

Children with auditory processing disorder may now have more treatment options

Several Kansas State University faculty members are helping children with auditory processing disorder receive better treatment.

Auditory processing disorder affects how the brain processes language. Children and adults with auditory processing disorder have normal hearing sensitivity and will pass a hearing test, but their brains do not appropriately process what they hear.

"A lot of therapy targets these skills," Burnett said. "It's almost like relaying the road in the brain that deals with auditory information. For whatever reason, it didn't develop properly, so the therapy is about reworking these skills."

February 18, 2013

Excessive TV in childhood linked to long-term antisocial behaviour

Children and adolescents who watch a lot of television are more likely to manifest antisocial and criminal behaviour when they become adults, according to a new University of Otago, New Zealand, study published online in the US journal Pediatrics.

The study followed a group of around 1000 children born in the New Zealand city of Dunedin in 1972-73. Every two years between the ages of 5 and 15, they were asked how much television they watched.

Those who watched more television were more likely to have a criminal conviction and were also more likely to have antisocial personality traits in adulthood.

Study co-author Associate Professor Bob Hancox of the University's Department of Preventive and Social Medicine says he and colleagues found that the risk of having a criminal conviction by early adulthood increased by about 30% with every hour that children spent watching TV on an average weeknight.

It may be educational, but what is that TV show really teaching your preschooler?

Most parents carefully select what television programs and movies their children can watch. But a study in the latest Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology found that even educational shows could come with an added lesson that influences a child’s behavior.

“Children who spent more time watching educational programs increased their relational aggression toward other children over initial levels. This study shows that children can learn more than one lesson out of a given program. They can learn the educational lesson that was intended, but they’re also learning other things along the way.”

This unintended impact has to do with the portrayal of conflict in media and how preschool-age children comprehend that conflict.

Excessive TV in childhood linked to long-term antisocial behaviour

Children and adolescents who watch a lot of television are more likely to manifest antisocial and criminal behaviour when they become adults, according to a new University of Otago, New Zealand, study published online in the US journal Pediatrics.

The study followed a group of around 1000 children born in the New Zealand city of Dunedin in 1972-73. Every two years between the ages of 5 and 15, they were asked how much television they watched. Those who watched more television were more likely to have a criminal conviction and were also more likely to have antisocial personality traits in adulthood.

Study co-author Associate Professor Bob Hancox of the University's Department of Preventive and Social Medicine says he and colleagues found that the risk of having a criminal conviction by early adulthood increased by about 30% with every hour that children spent watching TV on an average weeknight.

The study also found that watching more television in childhood was associated, in adulthood, with aggressive personality traits, an increased tendency to experience negative emotions, and an increased risk of antisocial personality disorder; a psychiatric disorder characterised by persistent patterns of aggressive and antisocial behaviour.

The researchers found that the relationship between TV viewing and antisocial behaviour was not explained by socio-economic status, aggressive or antisocial behaviour in early childhood, or parenting factors.

A study co-author, Lindsay Robertson, says it is not that children who were already antisocial watched more television. "Rather, children who watched a lot of television were likely to go on to manifest antisocial behaviour and personality traits."

Other studies have suggested a link between television viewing and antisocial behaviour, though very few have been able to demonstrate a cause-and-effect sequence. This is the first 'real-life' study that has asked about TV viewing throughout the whole childhood period, and has looked at a range of antisocial outcomes in adulthood. As an observational study, it cannot prove that watching too much television caused the antisocial outcomes, but the findings are consistent with most of the research and provides further evidence that excessive television can have long-term consequences for behaviour.

"Antisocial behaviour is a major problem for society. While we're not saying that television causes all antisocial behaviour, our findings do suggest that reducing TV viewing could go some way towards reducing rates of antisocial behaviour in society," says Associate Professor Hancox.

The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that children should watch no more than 1 to 2 hours of quality television programming each day. The researchers say their findings support the idea that parents should try to limit their children's television use.

February 15, 2013

Hearing Music as Beautiful Is a Learned Trait

Why does the music that to some people is lovely, even transcendent, sound to others like a lot of noise?

The ability to identify tones and thus enjoy harmonies was positively correlated with musical training. Said study co-author Sarah Wilson, "This showed us that even the ability to hear a musical pitch (or note) is learned."

From a practical standpoint, the results seem to suggest that we can train ourselves to better appreciate music. This includes that of unfamiliar traditions, which, assuming this is not just a clever way of promoting the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, is great news for those who've been wanting to get into jazz.

And in fact, the researchers conducted a second experiment to test the validity of that theory...

February 14, 2013

Love of musical harmony is not nature but nurture

Our love of music and appreciation of musical harmony is learnt and not based on natural ability – a new study by University of Melbourne researchers has found.

“Our study shows that musical harmony can be learnt and it is a matter of training the brain to hear the sounds,” Associate Professor McLachlan said.


“So if you thought that the music of some exotic culture (or Jazz) sounded like the wailing of cats, it’s simply because you haven’t learnt to listen by their rules.”


Bilingual babies know their grammar by 7 months

PRESS RELEASE

Babies as young as seven months can distinguish between, and begin to learn, two languages with vastly different grammatical structures, according to new research.

The study shows that infants in bilingual environments use pitch and duration cues to discriminate between languages – such as English and Japanese – with opposite word orders.

In English, a function word comes before a content word (the dog, his hat, with friends, for example) and the duration of the content word is longer, while in Japanese or Hindi, the order is reversed, and the pitch of the content word higher.

"By as early as seven months, babies are sensitive to these differences and use these as cues to tell the languages apart."

"For example, in English the words 'the' and 'with' come up a lot more frequently than other words – they're essentially learning by counting. But babies growing up bilingual need more than that, so they develop new strategies that monolingual babies don't necessarily need to use."

"If you speak two languages at home, don't be afraid, it's not a zero-sum game. Your baby is very equipped to keep these languages separate and they do so in remarkable ways."

February 13, 2013

Why Some People Don't Learn Well: EEG Shows Insufficient Processing of Information to Be Learned

The reason why some people are worse at learning than others has been revealed by a research team from Berlin, Bochum, and Leipzig.

They have discovered that the main problem is not that learning processes are inefficient per se, but that the brain insufficiently processes the information to be learned.

How well we learn depends on genetic aspects, the individual brain anatomy, and, not least, on attention. "In recent years we have established a procedure with which we trigger learning processes in people that do not require attention," says Hubert Dinse. The researchers were, therefore, able to exclude attention as a factor.

February 12, 2013

Early music lessons boost brain development

Montreal researchers find that music lessons before age seven create stronger connections in the brain
If you started piano lessons in grade one, or played the recorder in kindergarten, thank your parents and teachers. Those lessons you dreaded – or loved – helped develop your brain. The younger you started music lessons, the stronger the connections in your brain.

A study published last month in the Journal of Neuroscience suggests that musical training before the age of seven has a significant effect on the development of the brain, showing that those who began early had stronger connections between motor regions – the parts of the brain that help you plan and carry out movements.

Differential parenting found to affect whole family

Parents act differently with different children—for example, being more positive with one child and more negative with another.

A new longitudinal study has found that this behavior negatively affects not only the child who receives more negative feedback, but all the children in the family.

The study also found that the more risks experienced by parents, the more likely they will treat their children differentially.

"Past studies have looked at the effects of differential parenting on the children who get more negative feedback, but our study focused on this as a dynamic operating at two levels of the family system: one that affects all children in the family as well as being specific to the child at the receiving end of the negativity"...

Differential parenting had a stronger effect at the family level than in the way it affected individual children, the study found.

When siblings in families were parented very differently, all children in those families showed more mental health problems. "

In all likelihood, this occurred because differential parenting sets up a dynamic that is very divisive," Jenkins notes.

Kirtland Peterson

Negative stereotypes about boys hinder their academic achievement

Negative stereotypes about boys may hinder their achievement, while assuring them that girls and boys are equally academic may help them achieve.

From a very young age, children think boys are academically inferior to girls, and they believe adults think so, too. Even at these very young ages, boys' performance on an academic task is affected by messages that suggest that girls will do better than they will.

Those are the conclusions of new research published in the journal Child Development and conducted at the University of Kent. The research sought to determine the causes of boys' underachievement at school.

"People's performance suffers when they think others may see them through the lens of negative expectations for specific racial, class, and other social stereotypes—such as those related to gender—and so expect them to do poorly," explains Bonny L. Hartley, a PhD student at the University of Kent, who led the study. "

This effect, known as stereotype threat, grants stereotypes a self-fulfilling power."

In three studies of primarily White schoolchildren in Britain, Hartley and her colleague investigated the role of gender stereotypes. They found that from a very young age, children think boys are academically inferior to girls, and they believe that adults think so, too.

The first study looked at children's stereotypes about boys' and girls' conduct, ability, and motivation. Researchers gave 238 children ages 4 to 10 a series of scenarios that showed a child with either good behavior or performance (such as "This child really wants to learn and do well at school") or poor behavior or performance (such as "This child doesn't do very well at school"), then asked the children to indicate to whom the story referred by pointing to a picture, in silhouette, of a boy or a girl. From an early age—girls from 4 and boys from 7—children matched girls to positive stories and boys to negative ones. This suggests that the children thought girls behaved better, performed better, and understood their work more than boys, despite the fact that boys are members of a nonstigmatized, high-status gender group that is substantially advantaged in society. Follow-up questions showed that children thought adults shared these stereotypes.

Researchers then did two experiments to determine whether stereotype threat hindered boys' academic performance. In one, involving 162 children ages 7 and 8, telling children that boys did worse than girls at school caused boys' performance in a test of reading, writing, and math to decline (compared to a control group that got no such information). In the other experiment, involving 184 children ages 6 to 9, telling children that boys and girls were expected to do equally well caused boys' performance on a scholastic aptitude test to improve (compared to a control group). Girls' performance wasn't affected.

"In many countries, boys lag behind girls at school," according to Hartley. "These studies suggest that negative academic stereotypes about boys are acquired in children's earliest years of primary education and have self-fulfilling consequences. They also suggest that it is possible to improve boys' performance, and so close the gender gap, by conveying egalitarian messages and refraining from such practices as dividing classes by gender."

Kirtland Peterson

Negative Stereotypes About Boys Hinder Their Academic Achievement

Negative stereotypes about boys may hinder their achievement, while assuring them that girls and boys are equally academic may help them achieve. From a very young age, children think boys are academically inferior to girls, and they believe adults think so, too. Even at these very young ages, boys' performance on an academic task is affected by messages that suggest that girls will do better than they will.

"People's performance suffers when they think others may see them through the lens of negative expectations for specific racial, class, and other social stereotypes -- such as those related to gender -- and so expect them to do poorly," explains Bonny L. Hartley, a PhD student at the University of Kent, who led the study. "This effect, known as stereotype threat, grants stereotypes a self-fulfilling power."

Kids Teach Parents to Respect the Environment

A child can directly influence the attitude and behaviour of their parents towards the environment without them even knowing it.

This is according to a group at Imperial College London who have, for the first time, provided quantitative support for the suggestion that environmental education can be transferred between generations and that it can actually affect behaviour.

February 11, 2013

Noisy classroom simulation aids comprehension in hearing-impaired children

Children with hearing loss struggle to hear in noisy school classrooms, even with the help of hearing aids and other devices to amplify their teacher’s voice.

Training the brain to filter out background noise and thus understand spoken words could help the academic performance and quality of life for children who struggle to hear, but there’s been little evidence that such noise training works in youngsters.

A new report showed about a 50 percent increase in speech comprehension in background noise when children with hearing impairments followed a three-week auditory training regimen. The effect was still evident when the children were tested three months after the training ended.

The findings are among the first to demonstrate that auditory training with noise can work in children.

ADHD Symptoms Persist for Most Young Children Despite Treatment

Nine out of 10 young children with moderate to severe attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) continue to experience serious, often severe symptoms and impairment long after their original diagnoses and, in many cases, despite treatment, according to a federally funded multi-center study led by investigators at Johns Hopkins Children's Center.

"ADHD is becoming a more common diagnosis in early childhood, so understanding how the disorder progresses in this age group is critical," says lead investigator Mark Riddle, M.D., a pediatric psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins Children's Center.

"We found that ADHD in preschoolers is a chronic and rather persistent condition, one that requires better long-term behavioral and pharmacological treatments than we currently have."

February 8, 2013

New insight on relationship between parents, preschoolers and obesity

While sugary drinks, lack of exercise and genetics contribute to a growing number of overweight American children, new research from Washington State University reveals how a mom’s eating habits and behavior at the dinner table can influence her preschooler’s obesity risk.

"The problem is no longer food scarcity, but too much food,” Morrison said. "It doesn’t cost families extra to change their behavior.”

Morrison found that moms who eat when they are already full and also show a high level of control when feeding their kids - for example, by pushing children to finish what’s on their plate or withholding food until the next meal - tend to produce picky eaters.

Meanwhile, moms who eat in response to their emotions or who are easily tempted by the sight, scent or taste of food had children with a strong desire to eat.

"Like mother, like child"...

Kirtland Peterson

February 7, 2013

FOR KIDS: Engineering: The route to problem-solving

The delicate egg hatched some heavy discussion among the five young scientists inspecting a pile of squishy packing materials. “So, bubble wrap?” asked Samuel Coulson, 14, of West Platte High School in Weston, Mo.

The team, working with only the materials at hand, had to devise a way of protecting a raw egg from a series of increasingly higher drops.

The challenge pit these students against five other teams at the second annual Broadcom MASTERS competition. It was  held in Washington, D.C., from Sept. 28 through Oct. 3.

As the team pondered its options, some plastic wrap burst with a satisfying sound. “Stop popping it,” said Maria Elena Grimmett, 13, from Oxbridge Academy of the Palm Beaches in West Palm Beach, Fla.

Kirtland Peterson

February 6, 2013

Why Can Some Kids Handle Pressure While Others Fall Apart?

Never before has the pressure to perform on high-stakes tests been so intense or meant so much for a child’s academic future. As more school districts strive for accountability, standardized tests have proliferated. The pressure to do well on achievement tests for college is filtering its way down to lower grades, so that even third graders feel as if they are on trial. 

Students get the message that class work isn’t what counts, and that the standardized exam is the truer measure. Sure, you did your homework and wrote a great history report — but this test is going to find out how smart you really are. 

Critics argue that all this test-taking is churning out sleep-deprived, overworked, miserable children.

But some children actually do better under competitive, stressful circumstances...

February 4, 2013

Girls Lead in Science Exam, but Not in the United States

For years — and especially since 2005, when Lawrence H. Summers, then president of Harvard, made his notorious comments about women’s aptitude — researchers have been searching for ways to explain why there are so many more men than women in the top ranks of science.

Now comes an intriguing clue, in the form of a test given in 65 developed countries by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

It finds that among a representative sample of 15-year-olds around the world, girls generally outperform boys in science — but not in the United States.

Kirtland Peterson

February 1, 2013

FOR KIDS: Piercing a buried polar lake

Researchers in Antarctica drilled through a half-mile of ice to reach water that hasn’t had contact with the atmosphere for thousands of years.

Three research teams from around the world have been drilling deep into the ice that covers Antarctica in search of liquid water.

It’s not because they’re thirsty.

These scientists have been hoping instead to find what types of life may be able to survive extreme conditions. Any aquatic life in a buried lake would exist in the cold and dark — and without access to Earth’s atmosphere for at least thousands (and maybe millions) of years.

On January 28, the American team became the first to reach one of those buried lakes and to retrieve very clean samples of its water for testing.

And the bonanza: They found living cells in this Lake Whillans.

Kirtland Peterson