Education is in something a Catch-22. If they have standards, there will be dropouts among people who don't want to do the work to reach the minimum levels. If they don't have standards, they are just an assembly line and that is bad for teacher morale.

Because who is going to get blamed if students don't succeed? Teachers.

A new assay is inexpensive, simple, and can tell whether or not one of the primary drugs being used to treat malaria is genuine – an enormous and deadly problem in the developing world.

The World Health Organization has estimated that up to 200,000 lives a year may be lost due to the use of counterfeit anti-malarial drugs. When commercialized, the new technology may be able to help address that problem by testing drugs for efficacy at a cost of a few cents.

Teenage boys are often considered aloof and distant by parents and driven by desire by teenage girls, but they are not so simple, say scholars at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. 

Teenage boys desire intimacy and sex in the context of a meaningful relationship and value trust in their partnerships, providing a contradictory snapshot of masculine values in adolescence.

For nearly four decades, some have suspected that persistent organic pollutants -  a large group of man-made chemicals that, as their name indicates, persist in the environment - contributed to a green turtle's susceptibility to the virus that causes fibropapilomatosis, a disease that forms large benign tumors that can inhibit the animal's sight, mobility and feeding ability. 

A new paper by researchers from the Hollings Marine Laboratory (HML) and university and federal collaborators in Hawaii demonstrated these man-made chemicals are not a co-factor linked to the increasing number of green sea turtles afflicted with fibropapilomatosis.

Over 5 million people in the U.S. have Alzheimer's disease. It is the most common form of dementia and is the sixth leading cause of death in the U.S. Desperate families latch onto just about any possible treatment, including supplements. Do they work? Not so far.

But in a retrospective study, older adults involved in the 
Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI)
study were assessed with neuropsychological tests and brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) every six months.  The group included 229 older adults who were cognitively normal; 397 who were diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment; and 193 with AD.

If your baby is allergic to milk, your choices might get a little more narrow, if the European Society for Paediatric Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Nutrition (ESPGHAN) and the North American Society for Pediatric Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Nutrition have their way.

In a commentary in the Journal of Pediatric Gastroenterology and Nutrition, they say that the inorganic arsenic levels of dietary products used by children should be regulated, and make the recommendation that "Rice drinks should not be used in infants and young children."

George Dyson. Credit: edge.org

If you read about Big Data for very long, a quote from science historian George Dyson is sure to come up: "Big data is what happened when the cost of keeping information became less than the cost of throwing it away." 

That will be a platform to talk about the challenges, etc.

But there is a bigger problem that shows the challenges of Big Data - that isn't what Dyson said. But like with Einstein quotes about bees, in a Google world, where accuracy is measured by how often you are repeated and thus make it to the top of search engines, the Big Data problem is accuracy, not volume.

Birdsnap is an iPhone and web based app that uses many of the techniques of facial recognition software to identify 500 of the most common North American birds. The web based version of Birdsnap is actually very easy to use: upload your picture, click on the bird’s eye, click on the bird’s tail, enter your location along with the date the picture was taken, and click submit. I’ll demonstrate how to use Birdsnap even though it was unable to identify the bird I submitted.

Last Wednesday I played golf at South Grove Golf course and my cousin snapped the following picture near the 9th hole tee:

Much of what we know about Öetzi - the 'Tyrolean Iceman’ – such as what he looked like and that he suffered from lactose intolerance, stems from a tiny bone sample which allowed the decoding of his genetic make-up.

A team of scientists have examined the part of the sample consisting of non-human DNA. In the DNA mixture, they detected a sizeable presence of a particular bacterium: Treponema denticola, an opportunistic pathogen involved in the development of periodontitis. The finding supports the computer tomography based diagnosis that the Iceman suffered from periodontitis.

Liquid water is essential for almost every biological process so understanding liquid water is crucial for understanding biology - including some of its exceptional behavior.  

According to classical understanding, when water contacts other water, it will spread out and finally both mix together, i.e., water always completely wets water due to the hydrogen bonds formed among water molecules.