Intuitively, it is tempting to think that a child who has an elder brother or sister will grow up in a stimulating linguistic environment and will develop their language skills faster than the family's firstborn. However, several studies have shown the contrary: the acquisition of language in a child with an elder sibling is reported to be slower than a child who has none.

More than 1000 children have been followed from birth to five and a half years old in the mother-child cohort EDEN.* Their language skills were evaluated at 2, 3 and 5.5 years old by tests measuring several aspects of language, such as vocabulary, syntax and verbal reasoning

Children who have an elder brother had on average a two-month delay in language development compared with children with an elder sister.

People have a tendency to interpret new information in a way that supports their pre-existing beliefs, a phenomenon known as confirmation bias.

Now, researchers reporting in Current Biology on September 13 have shown that people will do the same thing even when the decision they've made pertains to a choice that is rather less consequential: which direction a series of dots is moving and whether the average of a series of numbers is greater or less than 50.

"Confirmation biases have previously only been established in the domains of higher cognition or subjective preferences," for example in individuals' preferences for one consumer product or another, says Tobias Donner from University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf (UKE), Germany. "It was rather striking for us to see that people displayed clear signs of confirmation bias when judging on sensory input that we expected to be subjectively neutral to them."

This is the first large-scale and in-depth study testing not only whether adolescents who report more social media use have lower life satisfaction but also whether the reverse is true. Before this study scientists had little means of disentangling whether adolescents with lower life satisfaction use more social media or whether social media use leads to lower life satisfaction.

Yet there were some bidirectional effects: Lower life satisfaction led to increased social media use and vice versa. These bidirectional effects were more consistent for females than for males, but again, these were modest trends.

'Given the rapid pace of technological advancement in recent years, the question of how our increasing use of technology to interact with each other affects our wellbeing has become increasingly important.

So the Mueller Report is finally out. President Trump has called it a “total exoneration,” but we don’t have to take his word for it. After special counsel Robert Mueller’s comprehensive, two-year investigation into serious allegations of Russian electoral interference, conspiracy, and obstruction of justice, we’re free to read what the special counsel’s findings actually are, if we so choose—albeit with a number of careful redactions from William Barr that along with his four-page summary, framed public conversations about the report in important ways.

It can persuade us one way or another by using certain rhetorical or linguistic means. What’s more, a particular framing doesn’t just arise spontaneously to the top of the public consciousness from its own legitimate merits, because it happens to be the neutral truth. We would be naive to think so, yet many people do. When it comes to the power of states, in sociologist Christopher A. Bail’s view, it has to be knowingly crafted, with two realities. One is a front stage presentation for public consumption and the other a secret collective coordination behind the scenes. Their reality becomes your reality, one way or another.

To Dwight Bolinger, “literal truth—the kind one swears to tell on the witness stand—permits any amount of evasion.” He explains: “The most insidious of all concepts of truth is that of literalness. The California prune-growers tell us that prunes, pound for pound, offer several times more vitamins and minerals than fresh fruit; literally true. The oil industry advertises that no heat costs less than oil heat, which has to be true because no heat costs nothing at all.” Those savvy enough to see through it will simply eat fewer prunes and heat their homes differently to those who fall for it. But declaring that you didn’t lie but told the literal truth in this way seems a kind of hollow ethic, a careful weaselling around the words that some lawyers seem particularly adept at.

In an extensive 2012 literature review, the psychologist Matthew Merced notes that, even though nobody knows for certain why we dream, advances in the technology and techniques of brain research have at least helped explain how we dream. Humans, at least, dream a lot, multiple times a night, and the brain is very active during dream periods. Dreaming must be important, even if it remains mysterious.

Early dreaming studies were, frankly, pretty primitive. Researchers would wait for the Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep to begin, then wake the subject up and ask about any dreams. Dreaming occurs during non-REM (NREM) sleep as well, but those dreams tend to be less vivid. Now, thanks to PET scans, it is known that large areas of the brain, covering such functions as motor control and sensory processing, all become active during dreams. Chemical changes occur as well, especially during REM: acetylcholine, a neurotransmitter that fires up the brain and forces muscles to contract, ramps up production. Unsurprisingly, areas of the brain controlling awareness and consciousness remain dormant.

Assuming there is a purpose, natural selection suggests that dreaming must provide some sort of survival benefit. Why spend energy on involuntary movements and brain activation if nothing is being achieved? One possibility is that dreams are kind of a virtual reality world, a space where humans can safely practice coping with threats (being chased, for example, is pretty common). REM sleep and dreaming may also help process important or traumatic memories. Finally, there is a theory that dreams are a way for the brain to rid itself of information it isn’t using, a sort of “psychic disk cleanup.” According to Merced, any of these explanations could be correct. Sweet dreams to all, humans and octopuses alike!

Social networking sites (SNS) such as Facebook and Instagram are known to cause stress in users, known as technostress from social media. However, when faced with such stress, instead of switching off or using them less, people are moving from one aspect of the social media platforms to another -- escaping the causes of their stress without leaving the medium on which it originated.

"While it might seem counter-intuitive, social media users are continuing to use the same platforms that are causing them stress rather than switching off from them, creating a blurring between the stress caused and the compulsive use."

"Even when users are stressed from SNS use, they are using the same platforms to cope with that stress, diverting themselves through other activities on the SNS, and ultimately building compulsive and excessive behaviour. As a result, they embed themselves in the social network environment rather than getting away from it, and an addiction is formed."

"These improvements in physical activity levels and educational outcomes are the result of quite basic physical exercises. Teachers can easily incorporate these physical active lessons in the existing curriculum to improve the learning experience of students."

In one of the 42 studies analysed, eight- and nine-year-olds simulated travelling the world by running on the spot in between answering questions relating to different countries. The research team, also led by Dr Norris at UCL, concluded that the children were more active and more focused on the task than peers in a control group, following teachers' instructions more closely.

In another study in the Netherlands, primary school children who took part in physically active lessons three times a week over two years made significantly better progress in spelling and mathematics than their peers -- equating to four months of extra learning gains.

"It is difficult to predict how organisms will respond to changes in extreme events because these events tend to be, by definition, quite rare," Botero said. "But we can have a pretty good idea of how any given species may respond to current changes in this aspect of climate -- if we pay attention to its natural history, and have some idea of the climatic regime it has experienced in the past."

develop an evolutionary model of how populations respond to rare environmental extremes. (Think: 500-year floods.) These rare events can be tricky for evolution because it is difficult to adapt to hazards that are almost never encountered

Haaland and Botero also found that factors speeding up trait evolution are generally likely to hinder -- rather than favor -- adaptation to rare selection events. Part of the reason: High mutation rates tend to facilitate the process of adaptation to normal conditions during the long intervals in between environmental extremes.

Two MIT professors have found a strong relationship between students' grades and how much sleep they're getting. What time students go to bed and the consistency of their sleep habits also make a big difference. And no, getting a good night's sleep just before a big test is not good enough -- it takes several nights in a row of good sleep to make a difference.

100 students in an MIT engineering class were given Fitbits, the popular wrist-worn devices that track a person's activity 24/7, in exchange for the researchers' access to a semester's worth of their activity data

One of the surprises was that individuals who went to bed after some particular threshold time -- for these students, that tended to be 2 a.m., but it varied from one person to another -- tended to perform less well on their tests no matter how much total sleep they ended up getting.

President Trump has given a master class in the unhappy link between his “gut” and the gutting of American credibility.

From Trump’s sort-of green light to Turkey’s assault on northern Syria, to his threat to “totally destroy and obliterate” the Turkish economy, to his Chamberlain-like dismissal of Kurds’ fate (“We are 7,000 miles away!”), he has played the clown in chief.

Europeans now shrug when they don’t laugh. The consensus is the United States has lost it. There’s nobody home. A child-president in the Oval Office writes a letter to the Turkish leader who appropriately tosses it in the garbage.

“I don’t want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the four horsemen of calumny — fear, ignorance, bigotry and smear,” she said. “I doubt if the Republican Party could — simply because I don’t believe the American people will uphold any political party that puts political exploitation above national interest. Surely, we Republicans aren’t that desperate for victory.”

sometimes the point is just to get people to look up.

The problem with politicians who abuse power isn’t that they don’t get results. It’s that the results come at a high cost to the Republic — and to the reputations of those who lack the courage or wisdom to resist.

We do not have all the answers. We are on a spiritual journey.

Britain — and much of Europe, the theological cradle of Christianity — has perhaps never been so removed from belief in God. Elsewhere, the world is becoming more religious, and Christianity is growing, robustly so in China and Africa. With 2.2 billion followers, the faith that began as a small Jewish sect is by far the planet’s most popular and diverse religion.

While organized religion may be dying in Europe, the pilgrim trails of the Via Francigena, and the better-known Camino de Santiago in Spain, are drawing crowds.

but UN data suggests there were about a billion people in 1800, 2 billion in 1927, 5 billion in 1987 and just over 7.5 billion today.

Since the 1960s, more boys than girls have been born every year. About 117 million women are believed to be “missing” in Asia and eastern Europe – due to discriminatory son preference and gender-biased sex selection.

Over the last 30 years, some regions have seen up to 25% more male births than female births, reflecting the persistent low status of women and girls.