American children learn the meanings of number words gradually: First they understand "one," then they add "two, "three," and "four," in sequence. At that point, however, a dramatic shift in understanding takes place, and children grasp the meanings of not only "five" and "six," but all of the number words they know.

Though everyone recognizes there is a problem, during a generation when lots of efforts were made to increase diversity, the science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) pipeline in academia remains primarily liberal white men.

That's not to say there haven't been efforts. Women and minorities are well-represented, though groups with less advocacy, like handicapped people and political conservatives, are routinely dismissed when they note that.

In the many hypotheses surrounding autism, one posits it is the consequence of abnormal cell communication.

Researchers at the U.C. San Diego recently did a study using a drug from 1916, suramin, which was approved for treating sleeping sickness. The findings in Translational Psychiatry were that it
restored normal cellular signaling in a mouse model of autism, reversing symptoms of the neurological disorder in animals that were the human biological age equivalent of 30 years old. 

A group of archaeologists, mathematicians, chemists and physicists, has shed new light on the use of mollusc shells as personal adornments by Bronze Age people. 

The research team used amino acid racemisation analysis, light microscopy, scanning electron microscopy and Raman spectroscopy to identify the raw materials used to make beads in a complex necklace discovered at an Early Bronze Age burial site at Great Cornard in Suffolk, UK.

They discovered that Bronze Age craftspeople used species like dog whelk and tusk shells, both of which were likely to have been sourced and worked locally, to fashion tiny disc-shaped beads in the necklace. 

The number of deaths involving commonly prescribed painkillers is far higher than the number of deaths by overdose from heroin and cocaine.

In fact, the deaths due to overdose of opiods - legal painkillers - is higher than cocaine and heroin combined, according to a new paper. In a first-of-its-kind review of existing research, the McGill team has put the spotlight on a major public health problem: the dramatic increase in deaths due to prescribed painkillers, which were involved in more than 16,000 deaths in 2010 in the U.S. alone. Currently, the US and Canada rank #1 and #2 in per capita opioid consumption.