Science Education & Policy

CLAREMONT, California, January 24 /PRNewswire/ -- - FAWE Increases Educational Access, Retention and Performance for Girls in 33 African Nations Claremont McKenna College and the Kravis Leadership Institute announced today the selection of The Forum for African Women Educationalists (FAWE), to receive the third annual Henry R. Kravis Prize in Leadership. The Kravis Prize, which carries a US$250,000 award designated to the honoree organization, recognizes extraordinary leadership in the nonprofit sector. FAWE was selected for its outstanding record providing an estimated 12 million girls and…

HEERLEN, The Netherlands, January 24 /PRNewswire/ -- - EUR 170 Billion Available for Balanced Energy Mix The government should use the revenues from the sale of natural gas to speed up the changeover to clean, renewable forms of energy. In doing so it will choose even more explicitly in favour of reducing CO2 emissions. The transition to sustainable energy will also make the Netherlands less dependent on politically unstable regions such as Russia and the Middle East, which are currently the key suppliers of oil and gas. This was the assertion of Gosse Boxhoorn, CEO of Solland Solar, the…

LONDON, January 24 /PRNewswire/ -- Playhouse Disney today announced it is joining forces with the Pre-school Learning Alliance on the biggest ever trial of educational materials to teach preschoolers about the environment through play. The trial will see 7,300 nurseries receive a free pack as part of Playhouse Disney's Playing for the Planet campaign launched earlier last year. The move follows new independent research(i), which found that 3 out of 4 parents (74%) believe the subject of the environment should be included on the preschool curriculum. Nurseries will be invited to share their…

In discussions about the quality and equity of our educational system, one thing lost in political arguments about unions and ideological bias and No Child Left Behind is empirical data of what difference teachers make in actual education. A special issue of Public Finance Review tackles the impact of teachers, focusing especially on the hiring and retention of qualified teachers, including in disadvantaged districts. Some of the topics addressed: Is there a link between out-of-field teachers and student achievement Does the No Child Left Behind testing mandate affect teacher turnover? How…

Researchers today closed out the inaugural season on an unprecedented, multi-year effort to retrieve the most detailed record of greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere over the last 100,000 years. The dust, chemicals, and air trapped in the two-mile-long ice core will provide critical information for scientists working to predict the extent to which human activity will alter Earth’s climate, according to the chief scientist for the project, Kendrick Taylor of the Desert Research Institute of the Nevada System of Higher Education. Working as part of the National Science Foundation’s West…

BERLIN, January 23 /PRNewswire/ -- - Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates and Slovenian government hail the agreement as a milestone for regional cooperation and development. Today at The Government Leaders Forum-Europe, Slovenian Minister for Growth Dr Ziga Turk and Microsoft Corp Chairman Bill Gates announced a major public-private partnership between Southeastern European governments, nongovernmental organisations and leading technology companies to create a centre for eGovernance in the region. Sited in Slovenia and supported by a broad network of stakeholders throughout the region, the…

Researchers at the University of Sheffield writing in Proceedings of the Royal Society B have shown that mothers are choosing to have fewer children in order to give their children the best start in life, but by doing so are going against millenia of human evolution. The research sheds new light on the decline of modern day fertility. Researchers Duncan Gillespie, Dr Virpi Lummaa and Dr Andrew Russell, all from the University’s Department of Animal and Plant Sciences, studied Finnish church records from the 18th and 19th centuries and traced the reproductive histories of 437 women, their 2888…

Cognitive insight, those flashes of brilliance when a mental breakthrough happens, are widely recognized but very little is known about their constituent cognitive components and underlying neural mechanisms. It is also unclear why trying too hard does more harm than good. In a study published in PLoS ONE, researchers at Goldsmiths College, London, investigated brain rhythms and their dynamics while human volunteers solved verbal problems. Often, the participants reached a state of mental block and could not progress further. An excessive amount of gamma brain rhythm (the same rhythm gets…

More giving information and less giving direction is the advice of a group at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University mid-way to the drafting of the 2010 nutrition guidelines. For nearly three decades, Americans have become accustomed to hearing about the latest dietary guidelines, which are required by federal regulation to be revised and reissued at five-year intervals. The researchers, led by Paul Marantz, M.D., MPH, associate dean for clinical research education at Einstein, raise questions about the benefits of federal dietary guidelines and urge that guideline…

HIV and AIDS are huge threats to human health. Each day in 2005 around 7,600 people died from HIV-related causes and a further 38.6 million people were living with the disease. Two million of these were living in the high-income countries of North America and Western and Central Europe. Estimates suggest that that year 4.1 million people contracted the virus. Estimates also suggest that 70% of HIV-infected people stay sexually active, with a substantial proportion continuing to participate in unprotected sex. On top of this there is a rising prevalence of other sexually transmitted…