For all the current emphasis on standardized testing and teaching requirements, the quality of elementary school instruction is mediocre at best, according to a study from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development study published in the March 30 issue of Science magazine.

"Any given child has less than a 20 percent chance of having a rich classroom experience consistently through elementary school," says Robert C. Pianta, lead researcher and Novartis US Foundation Professor of Education in the University of Virginia Curry School of Education. And for low-income children, the percentage is even less.

Crumpled kitchen foil that lays flat for reuse. Bent bumpers that straighten overnight. Dents in car doors that disappear when heated with a hairdryer. These and other physical feats may become possible with a technique to make memory metals discovered by researchers at the University of Illinois.

Normally, when a piece of metal – such as a paperclip – is bent, the change in shape becomes permanent. But, when heat is added to bent metal films having the right microstructure, the researchers found, the films return to their original shapes. The higher the temperature, the sooner the metal films revert. "It’s as though the metal has a memory of where it came from," said Taher A.

Scientists from Cardiff University have revealed new clinical data showing that Cod Liver Oil really is effective in slowing the destruction of joint cartilage in patients with osteoarthritis.

The groundbreaking clinical study was led by Professor Bruce Caterson and Professor John Harwood of the School of Biosciences, and Professor Colin Dent, Orthopaedic Consultant, University of Wales College of Medicine.

For the first time, the clinical study provides unique human evidence (in vivo) of the effectiveness of Cod Liver Oil in the management of osteoarthritis.

Scientists at the University of Illinois have fabricated the world’s smallest chain-mail fabric. Combined with existing processing techniques, the flexible, metallic fabric holds promise for fully engineered smart textiles.

"The miniature fabric is an important step toward creating textiles where structure and electronics can be designed, integrated and controlled from the ground up," said Chang Liu, a Willett Scholar and a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Illinois.

DNA testing carried out by University of Leicester geneticists and funded by The Wellcome Trust has thrown new light on the ancestry of one of the USA’s most revered figures, the third President, Thomas Jefferson.

Almost 10 years ago, the University of Leicester team, led by Professor Mark Jobling, together with international collaborators, showed that Thomas Jefferson had fathered at least one of the sons of Sally Hemings, a slave of Jefferson’s.

The work was done using the Y chromosome, a male-specific part of our DNA that passes down from father to son.

Scientists at the Naval Research Laboratory - Stennis Space Center (NRL-SSC) have directly derived the air-sea momentum exchange at the ocean interface using observed ocean currents under Hurricane Ivan and determined that it decreases when winds exceed 32 meters per second. This is the first time that momentum exchange at the air-sea interface has been directly calculated from ocean current observations under extreme winds generated by a major tropical cyclone.