A new report by the National Research Council offers guidance to schools on necessary steps for putting the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) into practice over the next decade.

Next Generation Science Standards were drawn from A Framework for K-12 Science Education: Practices, Crosscutting Concepts, and Core Ideas, a 2011 Research Council report. Next Generation Science Standards. The standards are based on the ideas that science and engineering involve both knowing and doing; that developing rich, conceptual understanding is more productive for future learning than simply memorizing discrete facts; and learning experiences should be designed with coherent progressions over multiple years.

David Pope's cartoon posted on Twitter. David Pope

By Robert Phiddian, Flinders University

Cartoonists and satirists in “the West” are confronted with the risks of their expressive freedom today as a consequence of the assassinations at Charlie Hebdo in Paris.

You may feel safe working at the coffee house because you are not using their public Wi-Fi connection. Think again.

And that smartphone is even more vulnerable to snooping.

The new breed of coffee shop hackers can see what you're doing by analyzing the low-power electronic signals your laptop or smartphone emits - even when it's not connected to the Internet. 

The race is on to plug these information 'leaks' but the first challenge is finding out where they originate. To help, Georgia Institute of Technology engineers have developed a metric for measuring the strength of the leaks - known technically as "side-channel signal" - to help prioritize security efforts. 

Dogs successfully migrated to the Americas about 10,000 years ago, according to a new study. That's a long time ago but still thousands of years after the first human migrants crossed the land bridge from Siberia to North America. Dogs have been associated with humans in findings from 11,000 to 16,000 years ago. 

Whether you are a a hipster in Montreal or a Pygmy in the Congolese rainforest, certain aspects of music will touch you the same way.

That applies to scores we associates with very different films, and therefore tones, like Psycho, Star Wars, and Schindler's List, according to a team of scholars who arrived at this conclusion after traveling deep into the rainforest to play music to a very isolated group of people, the Mbenzélé Pygmies, who live without access to radio, television or electricity.

Is artificial super-intelligence lurking nearby, under wraps? eugenia_loli, CC BYBy Tony Prescott, University of Sheffield

A study of circadian rhythms in skin stem cells finds that this biological clock plays a key role in coordinating daily metabolic cycles and cell division. The paper shows how the body's intrinsic day-night cycles protect and nurture stem cell differentiation and provides insights into a mechanism whereby an out-of-synch circadian clock can contribute to accelerated skin aging and cancers.

Bogi Andersen, professor of biological chemistry and medicine at University of California - Irvine, and Enrico Gratton, professor of biomedical engineering, focused their efforts on the epidermis, the outermost protective layer of the skin that is maintained and healed by long-lived stem cells.

Rock soil droplets formed by heating are part of the evidence used to content that a disastrous cosmic impact 12,900 years ago triggered the Younger Dryas cold period but they most likely instead came from Stone Age house fires, according to new research of soil from Syria.

The Younger Dryas lasted a thousand years and coincided with the extinction of mammoths and other great beasts and the disappearance of the Paleo-Indian Clovis people.

In the 1980s, some researchers put forward the idea that the cool period, which fell between two major glaciations, began when a comet or meteorite struck North America.

The way we relate to other people shapes our moral life – and that's something that requires imagination. David Galindo/Flickr

By Matthew Beard, University of Notre Dame Australia

Creativity and imagination - it’s impossible to discuss one without reference to the other - are often discussed with regard to the great artists, thinkers, and visionaries of our world. Those are the people who are able to visualize things in a way that others simply aren’t able to.

Noninvasive brain scans, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging, have led to basic science discoveries about the human brain and have also been wildly misused, claiming to correlate everything from the biology of voting to ideas like that people with messy offices are racist.

Though fMRI-based claims get lots of mainstream media attention, along with most weak observational studies, the actual value for society hasn't been there.

But it could be, according to a review of other studies in Neuron. They even believe brain imaging can help predict an individual's future learning, criminality, health-related behaviors, and response to drug or behavioral treatments.