Students' performance on annual math and science assessments improved in almost every age group when their schools were involved in a program that partners K-12 teachers with their colleagues in higher education.

While an earlier study tracked schools that began work in the first year of the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Math and Science Partnership program (MSP), the most recent study followed more than 300 schools participating in partnerships that began to be funded during the program's second year.

Participating school districts found that a significantly higher proportion of students scored at the "proficient" level or higher on state math and science assessments in the 2004-2005 school year than they had in 2003-2004.

The link between alcohol and aggression is well known. What’s not so clear is just why drunks get belligerent. What is it about the brain-on-alcohol that makes fighting seem like a good idea" And do all intoxicated people get more aggressive" Or does it depend on the circumstances"

University of Kentucky psychologist Peter Giancola and his student Michelle Corman decided to explore these questions in the laboratory. One theory about alcohol and aggression is that drinking impairs the part of the brain involved in allocating our limited mental resources—specifically attention and working memory.

Taking part in group psychotherapy can help men who have erectile dysfunction to overcome their problem, and adding sildenafil to group therapy was more effective that sildenafil alone. In addition, group psychotherapy was more effective than taking sildenafil on its own, a Cochrane Systematic Review has found.

Normal sexual function relies on the coordination of psychological, endocrine, vascular and neurological factor. Recent research has increased attention on the role of psychological issues. In particular, depression, low self-esteem, anxiety and other psychosocial stresses can play a large role in erectile dysfunction.

Engineers at the University of Pennsylvania have taken a step toward simplifying the creation of nanostructures by identifying the first inorganic material to phase separate with near-perfect order at the nanometer scale.

The finding provides an atomically tuneable nanocomposite “workbench” that is cheap and easy to produce and provides a super-lattice foundation potentially suitable for building nanostructures.

Alerted by an unusual diffraction effect of a common ceramic material, researchers used imaging to identify a two-phase structural pattern ideal as the first step towards nanodevice construction.

A thumb’s up for “I’m good.” The rubbing of a pointed forefinger at another for “shame on you.” The infamous and ubiquitous middle finger salute for—well, you know. Such gestures that convey meaning without speech are used and recognized by nearly everyone in our society, but to someone from a foreign country, they may be incomprehensible.

The opposite is true as well. Plop an American in a foreign land and he or she may be clueless to the common gestures of that particular culture. This raises a provocative question—does culture influence the brain"

A new method which will allow more effective voice discrimination has been developed by researchers at the University of Hertfordshire.

Dr Aladdin Ariyaeeinia at the University’s School of Electronic Communication & Electrical Engineering and his team have been conducting research into voice biometrics (speaker recognition) for over 10 years. The process has various potential applications such as verifying individuals’ identities when they try to access cash machines or try to bank or shop online.

The team’s most recent development is a new approach to speaker change detection, a process which captures when speakers change in a given conversational audio stream which could have very useful applications in criminal investigations and in managing audio-visual recordings.