Kids with glasses were once stereotypically considered smarter - expensive prescription specs did not lend themselves to sports so it made some sense they would focus on books due to the biological hand that was dealt them

But it may be that needing glasses is an indicator of knowledge if other ways - glasses may be created by learning. A recent paper found hat attaining a higher level of education and spending more years in school were associated with a greater prevalence and severity of myopia - nearsightedness.

The authors say they are the first population-based study to demonstrate that environmental factors may outweigh genetics in the development of myopia. 

You see advertisements for fitness apps on smartphones all of the time. Apple prides itself on convincing you that you will be a better dancer and healthier if you buy their phone. The problem is that the people most likely to use a fitness app for more than a week are least likely to need it.

Or maybe they do, according to recent Scare Journalism. In the health fad culture perpetuated by mainstream media, there is now a War On Sitting. Once some crazy claim appears in the New York Times, studies are going to crop up affirming exactly what popular media claims say. 

Sorry Malcolm Gladwell, and you positive thinking book buyers at Whole Foods, you are not going to be a world-class sprinter no matter how much you practice unless you were born with exceptional speed.

A new paper by Michael Lombardo, professor of biology at Grand Valley State University, and Robert Deaner, associate professor of psychology, shows that the developmental histories of elite sprinters contradict the popular deliberate practice model of expertise. According to this deliberate model, there is no such thing as innate talent. Instead, 10 years of deliberate practice (roughly 10,000 hours) are necessary and sufficient for anyone to become an expert in any field, including sports.

Want to teach a robot to tend the garden? It will go faster if you let the crowd help. University of Washington computer scientists at the 2014 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers International Conference on Robotics and Automation in Hong Kong showed that crowdsourcing can be a quick and effective way to teach a robot how to complete tasks

Learning by imitating a human is a proven approach to teach a robot to perform tasks, but it can take a lot of time. Imagine having to teach a robot how to load the dishwasher – it might take many repetitious lessons for the robot to learn how to hold different types of cookware and cutlery and how to most efficiently fill the machine.

Do you remember the top quark asymmetry measurements of CDF and DZERO ? A few years ago they caused quite some excitement, as both experiments were observing a departure from standard model expectations. This could really be the place where one would first observe new physics associated with top quark production, so the analyses triggered quite some theoretical investigations, deeper studies, and model building.

By trapping a magnetic field with a strength of 17.6 Tesla, roughly 100 times stronger than the field generated by a typical fridge magnet, in a high temperature gadolinium barium copper oxide (GdBaCuO) superconductor, researchers not only beat the previous record by 0.4 Tesla, they harnessed  the equivalent of three tons of force inside a golf ball-sized sample of material that is normally as brittle as fine china. 

Neurons are vital to the functional organization of the central nervous system. Multiple cell types are present within any brain structure, but the rules governing their positioning, and the molecular mechanisms mediating those rules, are unknown.

A new study finds that a particular neuron, the cholinergic amacrine cell, creates a "personal space" in much the same way that people distance themselves from one another in an elevator. The study also says that this feature is heritable and identifies a genetic contributor to it, pituitary tumor-transforming gene 1 (Pttg1).

Obviously, as the creators of the four pillars of the Science 2.0 concept, we're interested in new ways to use data to make meaningful decisions, but we recognize that key breakthroughs are more likely to happen in the private sector, where money can be made filling a demand.

A paper by Aetna and GNS Healthcare Inc. in the American Journal of Managed Care demonstrates how analysis of patient records using analytics can predict future risk of metabolic syndrome.