By Alex Ford,University of Portsmouth

Demon vs killer shrimp sounds like the latest CGI movie to come out of Hollywood. But in fact these are two particularly pernicious crustaceans that have been making their way westward across Europe from countries surrounding the Black Sea, eradicating native freshwater rivals en route.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.