The need to belong hasn’t changed. What has changed is how people fulfill it. Now there’s the option to turn to things like Facebook, for example, rather than an external religious group, to find a community.

Many of the worlds’ greatest medical challenges stem from poverty, inequality, discrimination, pollution, and environmental devastation, as critical race, gender, and decolonization scholars have shown us.

Let’s be alert to the ways in which risks and ethical issues present themselves at every stage of developing and implementing promising new treatments. Scientists themselves do not have to do this work. That is what social scientists do.

In these cultures, leaders are fearful of losing their livelihood and use the same fear to lead their employees. So, it is not surprising that so many of us have experienced unjust and inequitable working conditions in command and control cultures where leaders use fear and aggression as the means to drive employee productivity.

Eventually, the very thing she was trying to protect, her livelihood, was lost. Would she have saved her own job had she opted for a different organizational structure or a nicer management style?

Though, historically, the command and control management structure and its many iterations of management styles has been successfully used by many companies, there is evidence that organizational cultures based on value systems that reward initiative, creativity and innovation result in greater employee productivity, loyalty and engagement than cultures based on control. In other words, organization's that adopt command and control management structures, even when coupled with friendlier management styles, are likely to find that employee productivity, engagement and loyalty are not as high as those organizational cultures that encourage initiative, creativity and innovation.

Research into the effect of technology on the development of the language and literacy skills vis-à-vis reading activities of children has offered evidence for favorable effects of digital-form books.

E-books are also being increasingly used to teach reading among beginners and children with reading difficulties.

Technology can be used to improve reading ability in many ways. It can enhance and sustain the interest levels for digitial natives by allowing immediate feedback on performance and providing added practice when necessary.

Technology can also help in improvement of writing skills. Word processing software promotes not only composition but also editing and revising in ways that streamline the task of writing.

However, the web cannot be discounted as being "bad for language", considering that it also offers very useful tools such as blogging and microblogging that can help the student improve her writing skills with dynamic feedback. The possibility of incorporating other media into a written document (e.g. figures, graphics, videos etc.) can enhance the joy of writing using technology.

Technology enhanced oral communication is indeed useful in that it allows students from remote locations, or from all over the world to communicate orally through video and audio conferencing tools.

As with anything to do with technology, there are also detractors who propose negative influence of features like animation, sound, music and other multimedia effects possible in digital media, which may distract young readers from the story content.

Such complaints notwithstanding, the symbiotic ties between linguistics and technology cannot be ignored.

Nearly all the AAAS scientists (98%) say they have some level of interaction with citizens at least from time to time, and 51% have at least some contact with reporters about research findings. In addition, nearly half of AAAS scientists – 47% – use social media to talk about science or read about scientific developments at least some of the time.

The scientists who are most likely to be involved in public activities show distinct patterns by age, by the level of public debate and public interest they perceive in their specialty, and by discipline. Virtually all scientists engage with citizens. Mid-career and older scientists are especially likely to speak to reporters. Younger scientists are more likely to use social media. And blogging is something that equally spans the generations under age 65.

But it's another example of this mountain of studies that suggest that the social context in the social world changes our behavior even when we're not aware of it.

The data hit the fan, at which point Green distanced himself from the survey and called for the Science article to be retracted. The professor even told Retraction Watch, the website that broke the story, that all he'd really done was help LaCour write up the findings.

Science magazine didn't shoulder any blame, either. In a statement, editor in chief Marcia McNutt said the magazine was essentially helpless against the depredations of a clever hoaxer: "No peer review process is perfect, and in fact it is very difficult for peer reviewers to detect artful fraud."

This is, unfortunately, accurate. In a scientific collaboration, a smart grad student can pull the wool over his adviser's eyes - or vice versa. And if close collaborators aren't going to catch the problem, it's no surprise that outside reviewers dragooned into critiquing the research for a journal won't catch it either. A modern science article rests on a foundation of trust.

If the process can't catch such obvious fraud - a hoax the perpetrators probably thought wouldn't work - it's no wonder that so many scientists feel emboldened to sneak a plagiarised passage or two past the gatekeepers.

Major peer-review journals tend to accept big, surprising, headline-grabbing results when those are precisely the ones that are most likely to be wrong.

Despite the artful passing of the buck by LaCour's senior colleague and the editors of Science magazine, affairs like this are seldom truly the product of a single dishonest grad student. Scientific publishers and veteran scientists - even when they don't take an active part in deception - must recognise that they are ultimately responsible for the culture producing the steady drip-drip-drip of falsification, exaggeration and outright fabrication eroding the discipline they serve.

The answer is not “because Britain is better and unique” but “because I am British and these are the stories I have been brought up on” at school, university, on TV and elsewhere. Go to another country and you will see that they have their own, equally admirable, pantheon of greats.

The area that I have been working on, the eighteenth-century search for longitude, likewise reveals the need to challenge nationalistic assumptions.

Historians and readers of history both need to be aware of the biases of our education and literature. Accounts of British exceptionalism, especially those that lump the rest of Europe or the world into an amorphous group of also-rans, are more the result of national tradition and wishful thinking than a careful reading of the sources.

Another change that interested the panellists was the increased number of collaborative and multiple authored papers now submitted to journals, which led them to think about the ethics of acknowledgement. In Meurig Thomas’s view the author is, simply, “the person that primarily thinks about the experiment, plans it, and writes it. I can sleep more comfortably at night this way. If I claim to be a senior author, I have to write it and I have to concoct what the experiment was, and defend it.” Chaloner suggested that authorship has grown “because of the pressure for people to have publications in their names”, with an “agreement to let you come onto this paper and I’ll get on yours next time”. Frith referred to this as “gaming”.

Despite all of the technological developments in the last fifty years, there has been no quick or easy response to questions over refereeing, and the event ended with the feeling that although there is no doubt technology has transformed the way science is communicated, its effect has not invariably simplified the process.

While some advantages, such as lack of dementia, appear late in life, others may appear early only to disappear thereafter. Research on multilingual minds is, itself, still in a kind of adolescence, but it is a promising one

In stage 1, they submit the introduction, methods, proposed analysis, and if necessary, pilot data. This manuscript then goes through the usual peer review process, and is assessed on criteria such as the soundness of the methods and analysis, and overall plausibility of the stated hypotheses.

Once researchers have passed through stage 1, they can then move on to data collection. In stage 2, they then submit the full manuscript – the introduction and agreed methods from stage 1, plus results and discussion sections. The results must include the outcome of the analyses agreed in stage 1, but the researchers are allowed to include additional analyses in a separate, ‘exploratory’ section (as long as they are justified).

Pre-registering scientific articles in this way helps to protect against a number of undesirable practices (such as p-hacking and HARKing) that can exaggerate statistical findings and make non-existent effects seem real. While this is a problem across psychology generally, it is a particularly extreme problem for violent video game research.

By outlining the intended methods and analysis protocols beforehand, Registered Reports protect against these problems, as the review process concentrates on the robustness of the proposed methods. And Registered Reports offer an additional advantage: because manuscripts are never accepted based on the outcome of the data analysis, the process is immune to researcher party lines. It doesn’t matter which research ‘camp’ you are in; your data – and just as importantly, your methods - will speak for themselves.

The study, published in Science, began with two Pavlovian-style conditioning exercises designed to counter race and gender biases.

However, they caution that the use of the technique in future would need strict ethical guidelines. “Sleep is a state in which the individual is without wilful consciousness and therefore vulnerable to suggestion,” they add.

Scientists believe the technique works because we consolidate memories by replaying them during sleep and transferring the information from the brain’s temporary storage to long-term memory. Hearing the distinctive sound would trigger the memory to be replayed repeatedly, the scientists said, enhancing the learning process.

“We call this Targeted Memory Reactivation, because the sounds played during sleep could produce relatively better memory for information cued during sleep compared to information not cued during sleep.

And the biggest problem is this: While the content will be new, the underlying design will not change. The SAT will remain a “norm-referenced” exam, designed primarily to rank students rather than measure what they actually know.

Norm-referenced tests like the SAT and the ACT have contributed enormously to the “educational arms race” — the ferocious competition for admission at top colleges and universities. They do so by exaggerating the importance of small differences in test scores that have only marginal relevance for later success in college. Because of the way such tests are designed, answering even a few more questions correctly can substantially raise students’ scores and thereby their rankings. This creates great pressure on students and their parents to avail themselves of expensive test-prep services in search of any edge. It is also unfair to those who cannot afford such services. Yet research on college admissions has repeatedly confirmed that test scores, as compared to high school grades, are relatively weak predictors of how students actually perform in college.

College admissions will never be perfectly fair and rational; the disparities are too deep for that. Yet the process can be fairer and more rational if we rethink the purposes of college-entrance exams.

Poor sleep may be contributing to the buildup of the brain plaques that drive the disease

“Sleep is a great early warning beacon, a distress call that we can latch onto, to potentially alert us to the beginnings of Alzheimer’s,” says Walker.

Still, most teenagers said they read the first few sites that popped up in an online search, rather than delving further.

Deb Levine, founder of YTH, a company that works with many organizations to create health applications, said that teenagers do not search online the way adults do, which contributes to the uneven quality of the information they receive.

According to Lieberman, “The brain has a major system that seems predisposed to get us ready to be social in our spare moments. The social nature of our brains is biologically based.”

"Our conclusion is that in retrograde amnesia, past memories may not be erased, but could simply be lost and inaccessible for recall," lead author Susumu Tonegawa, director of the RIKEN Brain Science Institute in Saitama, Japan, said in a statement. "These findings provide striking insight into the fleeting nature of memories, and will stimulate future research on the biology of memory and its clinical restoration."

"It's very difficult to be doing this in humans, partly for the ethical reasons — the work is invasive — but also because we tag the memories in the brain before they're learned," Tomas Ryan, a neuroscientist at MIT

Genes couldn’t change that swiftly, but better nutrition and health probably played a role. Still, that can’t explain why the change affected adults’ scores more than children’s. Economic prosperity helped, too—IQ increases correlate significantly with higher gross domestic product.

“Life history” is another promising theory. A longer period of childhood correlates with better learning abilities across many species.

The best explanation probably depends on some combination of factors. Dr. Flynn himself argues for a “social multiplier” theory. An initially small change can set off a benign circle that leads to big effects. Slightly better education, health, income or nutrition might make a child do better at school and appreciate learning more. That would motivate her to read more books and try to go to college, which would make her even smarter and more eager for education, and so on.

The fact that more people go to school for longer likely played the most important role—more education also correlates with IQ increases. That could explain why adults, who have more schooling, benefited most.

The thing that really makes humans so smart, throughout our history, may be that we can invent new kinds of intelligence to suit our changing environments.

The National Research Council framework for K-12 science education recommends that by the end of Grade 5, students should appreciate that rising average global temperatures will affect the lives of all humans and other organisms on the planet. By Grade 8, students should understand that the release of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels is a major factor in global warming. And by Grade 12, students should know that global climate models are very effective in modeling, predicting and managing the current and future impact of climate change.

Relying on a climate-change curriculum and teaching materials largely sourced from federal agencies—particularly those of the current ideologically driven administration—raises a number of issues. Along with the undue authoritative weight that such government-produced documents carry in the classroom, most of the work is one-sided and presented in categorical terms, leaving no room for a balanced discussion. Moreover, too much blind trust is placed in the predictive power of long-range computer simulations, despite the weak forecasting track record of most climate models to date.

Employing such a Socratic approach to teaching climate change would likely lead to a rational and thought-provoking classroom debate on the merits of the case. However, that is not the point of this academic exercise—which seems to be to indoctrinate young people by using K-12 educators to establish the same positive political feedback loop around global warming that has existed between the federal government and the nation’s colleges and universities for the past two decades.