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Top home-school texts dismiss Darwin, evolution - Yahoo! News - 1 views
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Christian-based materials dominate a growing home-school education market that encompasses more than 1.5 million students in the U.S. And for most home-school parents, a Bible-based version of the Earth's creation is exactly what they want. Federal statistics from 2007 show 83 percent of home-schooling parents want to give their children "religious or moral instruction." "The majority of home-schoolers self-identify as evangelical Christians," said Ian Slatter, a spokesman for the Home School Legal Defense Association. "Most home-schoolers will definitely have a sort of creationist component to their home-school program." Those who don't, however, often feel isolated and frustrated from trying to find a textbook that fits their beliefs. Two of the best-selling biology textbooks stack the deck against evolution, said some science educators who reviewed sections of the books at the request of The Associated Press. "I feel fairly strongly about this. These books are promulgating lies to kids," said Jerry Coyne, an ecology and evolution professor at the University of Chicago. The textbook publishers defend their books as well-rounded lessons on evolution and its shortcomings. One of the books doesn't attempt to mask disdain for Darwin and evolutionary science. "Those who do not believe that the Bible is the inspired, inerrant Word of God will find many points in this book puzzling," says the introduction to "Biology: Third Edition" from Bob Jones University Press. "This book was not written for them." The textbook delivers a religious ultimatum to young readers and parents, warning in its "History of Life" chapter that a "Christian worldview ... is the only correct view of reality; anyone who rejects it will not only fail to reach heaven but also fail to see the world as it truly is."
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Home-school mom Susan Mule wishes she hadn't taken a friend's advice and tried a textbook from a popular Christian publisher for her 10-year-old's biology lessons. Mule's precocious daughter Elizabeth excels at science and has been studying tarantulas since she was 5. But she watched Elizabeth's excitement turn to confusion when they reached the evolution section of the book from Apologia Educational Ministries, which disputed Charles Darwin's theory. "I thought she was going to have a coronary," Mule said of her daughter, who is now 16 and taking college courses in Houston. "She's like, 'This is not true!'"
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Home Fooling.
Naps May Improve Performance Later In The Day : NPR - 0 views
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"In the study, researchers took two groups of healthy young adults. Each group completed two learning sessions. The difference was that between the first and second sessions, one group got to take a 90-minute nap. The group that got the nap improved in their ability to learn by 10 percent, while the non-napping group did 10 percent worse."
Technology Review: Mapping the Malicious Web - 0 views
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Now a researcher at Websense, a security firm based in San Diego, has developed a way to monitor such malicious activity automatically. Speaking at the RSA Security Conference in San Francisco last week, Stephan Chenette, a principal security researcher at Websense, detailed an experimental system that crawls the Web, identifying the source of content embedded in Web pages and determining whether any code on a site is acting maliciously. Chenette's software, called FireShark, creates a map of interconnected websites and highlights potentially malicious content. Every day, the software maps the connections between nearly a million websites and the servers that provide content to those sites. "When you graph multiple sites, you can see their communities of content," Chenette says. While some of the content hubs that connect different communities could be legitimate--such as the servers that provide ads to many different sites--other sources of content could indicate that an attacker is serving up malicious code, he says. According to a study published by Websense, online attackers' use of legitimate sites to spread malicious software has increased 225 percent over the past year.
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Over the past couple of years, cybercriminals have increasingly focused on finding ways to inject malicious code into legitimate websites. Typically they've done this by embedding code in an editable part of a page and using this code to serve up harmful content from another part of the Web. But this activity can be difficult to spot because websites also increasingly pull in legitimate content, such as ads, videos, or snippets of code, from outside sites.
Life in the Third Realm - Opinionator Blog - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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It's that time of the month again. Yes: it's time for Life-form of the Month. In case you've forgotten, this coming Saturday is International Day for Biological Diversity, a day of celebrations and parties to appreciate the other occupants of the planet. So if you do nothing else this weekend, drink a toast to "Other Life-forms!" In honor of this event, my nomination for Life-form of the Month: May is a group of abundant and fascinating beings that are undeservedly obscure: the archaea.
Short Sharp Science: Smallpox finding prompts HIV 'whodunnit' - 0 views
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People keep blaming the emergence of HIV on science, or at least medicine. For the longest time this came in the form of the claim that it was all due to contaminated polio vaccine. That turned out to be factually groundless. Now a group of scientists in the US thinks it may all be down to the greatest medical intervention of all: the eradication of smallpox.
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"A more potentially useful observation about HIV and viruses comes from Jennifer Smith of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and colleagues in the 1 June issue of the Journal of Infectious Diseases, in which they report that men with HPV infection on their penis are nearly twice as likely to catch HIV than men without. They suspect the virus - which causes cervical cancer in women, and genital warts in men and women - attracts lymphocytes to the skin of the penis for HIV to infect, or creates micro-lesions where it can enter. That's good news, because we have a vaccine for HPV that appears to be completely safe. The team calculates that vaccinating men against HPV could prevent as many cases of HIV as more widely hailed circumcision efforts. It just goes to show that vaccination - already one of the biggest success stories of medicine - can continue to throw up unexpected benefits."
Everything We Knew About Human Vision is Wrong: Author Mark Changizi Tells Us... - 0 views
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Our funny primate variety of color vision turns out to be optimized for seeing the physiological modulations in the blood in the skin that underlies our primate color signals.
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For theoretical neurobiologist and author Mark Changizi, "why" has always been more interesting than "how." While many scientists focus on the mechanics of how we do what we do, his research aims to grasp the ultimate foundations underlying why we think, feel and see as we do. Guided by this philosophy, he has made important discoveries on why we see in color, why we see illusions, why we have forward-facing eyes, why letters are shaped as they are, why the brain is organized as it is, why animals have as many limbs and fingers as they do, and why the dictionary is organized as it is.
Parenting Style Plays Key Role In Teen Drinking : NPR - 0 views
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For teenagers, friends play a big role in the decision to take that first drink. And by the 12th grade, more than 65 percent of teens have at least experimented with alcohol. But what parents do during the high school years can also influence whether teens go on to binge drink or abuse alcohol. Researchers at Brigham Young University have found that teenagers who grow up with parents who are either too strict or too indulgent tend to binge drink more than their peers.
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For some adults, there is a tendency to go beyond the call of duty. Particularly, when they are faced with choosing to allow or not allow. Maybe the scientific explanation is to do or not to do. And the reaction isn't always the most appropriate but it is better to be safe than sorry. What is the scientific explanation for adults that don't react or react inappropriately even when it's involves saving a teenager? What is the scientific solution for those in the center of difficult situations, who are not strict or liberal? What does a mind do when it is present many times in a teenage situation and it is not the parent?
World's oldest human remains claimed in Israel - 0 views
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"Israeli archaeologists have discovered human remains dating from 400,000 years ago, challenging conventional wisdom that Homo sapiens originated in Africa, the leader of excavations in Israel said on Tuesday."
Key information about breast cancer risk and development is found in 'junk' DNA - 0 views
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"A new genetic biomarker that indicates an increased risk for developing breast cancer can be found in an individual's "junk" (non-coding) DNA, according to a new study featuring work from researchers at the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute (VBI) at Virginia Tech and their colleagues."
Politics and eye movement: Liberals focus their attention on 'gaze cues' much different... - 0 views
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In a new study, researchers measured both liberals' and conservatives' reaction to "gaze cues" -- a person's tendency to shift attention in a direction consistent with another person's eye movements. Liberals responded strongly to the prompts, consistently moving their attention in the direction suggested to them by a face on a computer screen. Conservatives, on the other hand, did not
Testing the hypothesis of a holographic universe - 1 views
Neuroscience: Settling the great glia debate : Nature News - 0 views
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For many years, neurons were thought to be alone in executing this task, and glia were consigned to a supporting role regulating a neuron's environment, helping it to grow, and even providing physical scaffolding (glia is Greek for 'glue'). In the past couple of decades, however, this picture has been changing.
Schizophrenia: The making of a troubled mind : Nature News - 0 views
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That's how it is with the early flickers of paranoia, confusion, hypersensitivity and hallucination in people who develop schizophrenia. They often emerge exactly when adolescence is throwing the body and brain for a loop, and years before the disease manifests itself fully.
Is it now or never for dark matter WIMPs? - 0 views
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For several decades, astronomers and cosmologists have been piling up data that indicates most of the matter in the Universe is dark, interacting only via gravity. As modified theories of gravity failed to account for observation, candidates for dark mater were winnowed down until one remained in favor: the weakly interactive massive particle, or WIMP. Over the past several years, potential signals of WIMPs have appeared in space and on Earth; that, combined with the startup of the LHC, has given the research community the sense that it's close to pinning down the identity of the WIMPs. But a review in this week's Nature considers what might happen if we fail.
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