Head Start, the nation's largest federally funded early childhood education program, which serves nearly one million low-income children, has a problem.

Women employed under the program report higher than expected levels of physical and mental health problems, according to scholars who created the first-ever survey conducted on the health of Head Start staff. 
The anonymous, online survey of staff working in 66 Pennsylvania Head Start programs. Of those who participated in the survey, the researchers focused on 2,122 female respondents, which included managers and classroom teachers of three and four year olds, as well as those making home visits to families of infants and toddlers participating in Early Head Start.

A new paper says that unpredictability is a consistent trait in the animal world, just like it is humans.

Anyone who owns a cat knows that, right?

Not really. Though animals are known to show consistent individual differences in behavior, and pet owners may refer to it as them displaying 'personality', a new paper refutes prior beliefs and says that some individual animals, just like humans, are consistently more unpredictable than others over time.

Unpredictability is a known and accepted aspect of human behavior much like we've always viewed predictable aspects of personality. However, until now it has never been studied in animals, the authors say.

A team of international scientists has isolated a very close relative of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) from horseshoe bats in China, confirming them as the origin of the virus responsible for the 2002-3 pandemi, which killed 774 people of the 8094 people infected and led to diagnosed cases across the world, impacting international travel and trade.

Wind farms can be part of our future energy mix assuming the cost of offshore turbine energy versus their efficiency can be made manageable. A new computer projection found a better way to arrange the turbines is a step in the right direction. A team from the University of Delaware found that staggering and spacing out turbines in an offshore wind farm can improve performance by as much as 33 percent. 

A team of psychologists have determined that stress eating is more of a yo-yo than a simple pattern; they say stress eaters show a dynamic pattern of eating behavior that could have benefits in non-stressful situations. 

A brain imaging study says that babies can learn lullabies while still in utero.

The paper focused on 24 women during the final trimester of their pregnancies. Half of the women played the melody of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star to their babies five days a week for the final stages of their pregnancies. 

The brains of the babies who heard the melody while in the womb reacted more strongly to the familiar melody both immediately and four months after birth when compared with the control group. The authors conclude that fetuses can recognize and remember sounds from the outside world well before they are born.