Eideard

Whether rich or poor, residents of the United States or China, illiterate or college graduates, parents who have books in the home increase the level of education their children will attain, according to a 20-year study led by Mariah Evans, University of Nevada, Reno associate professor of sociology and resource economics.

For years, educators have thought the strongest predictor of attaining high levels of education was having parents who were highly educated. But, strikingly, this massive study showed that the difference between being raised in a bookless home compared to being raised in a home with a 500-book library has as great an effect on the level of education a child will attain as having parents who are barely literate…compared to having parents who have a university education… Both factors, having a 500-book library or having university-educated parents, propel a child 3.2 years further in education, on average.

Being a sociologist, Evans was particularly interested to find that children of lesser-educated parents benefit the most from having books in the home. She has been looking for ways to help Nevada’s rural communities, in terms of economic development and education.

“What kinds of investments should we be making to help these kids get ahead?” she asked. “The results of this study indicate that getting some books into their homes is an inexpensive way that we can help these children succeed.”

Evans said, “Even a little bit goes a long way,” in terms of the number of books in a home. Having as few as 20 books in the home still has a significant impact on propelling a child to a higher level of education, and the more books you add, the greater the benefit…

The researchers were struck by the strong effect having books in the home had on children’s educational attainment even above and beyond such factors as education level of the parents, the country’s GDP, the father’s occupation or the political system of the country.

Having books in the home is twice as important as the father’s education level, and more important than whether a child was reared in China or the United States. Surprisingly, the difference in educational attainment for children born in the United States and children born in China was just 2 years, less than two-thirds the effect that having 500 or more books in the home had on children.

I presume the benefit was from having access to the books. It certainly was an advantage for me and my sister.

Though both of us were taught to read before entering kindergarten, though both took those long Saturday roundtrip walks to the Carnegie Library in our community – our parents had belonged to a couple of book clubs for all their lives together. It took me years – enjoyable years I might add – to catch up to both of them reading through our home library.

Female ducks have evolved an intriguing way to avoid becoming impregnated by undesirable but aggressive males endowed with large corkscrew-shaped penises: vaginas with clockwise spirals that thwart oppositely spiraled males…

“In species where forced copulation is common, males have evolved longer penises, but females have coevolved convoluted vaginas with dead-end cul-de-sacs and spirals in the opposite direction of the male penis,” said Patricia L.R. Brennan, lead author of the paper…“This coevolution results from conflict between the sexes over who is going to control fertilization.”

The research builds upon a 2007 Yale study that first described the strange morphology of a duck’s sexual organs. While most birds have no phalluses, ducks turn out to have relatively large, flexible penises—up to 20 centimeters—tucked inside their bodies. During sex, male ducks extend, or evert, their phalluses inside the female. Brennan and her Yale colleagues used high-speed video to document the erection of the duck penis for the first time and found the whole process takes less than half a second—an act the Yale team described as “explosive.”

Such large phalluses are supposed to give males a reproductive advantage when there is much forced mating. However, the Yale team hypothesized that females could make copulation difficult for the males with their complex genitalia…

Cripes. I thought finding a quiet place to park was the toughest challenge to sex in the wild.

St. Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow, with its colorful onion domes, is an architectural icon. And now you can eat it.

Pastry Chef Troman Felizmenio has created a piece of culinary art by making a gingerbread copy of the landmark for the holiday season. He works at the Ritz Carlton hotel near the Kremlin and Red Square.

Creation of the edible cathedral, which is 2 meters (6.5 feet) high, began in early September and lasted nearly three months, according to a description from the hotel.

The chef and his crew have made smaller versions for sale – only $1600 each.

The Large Hadron Collider is just a few days from being switched on, but the scientists in charge of the 17-mile long super collider are already getting impassioned pleas to stop their work, some of the scientists have even received death threats…

On September 10th, scientists at the LHC will fire the first proton beams down the super collider. These proton beams will have a modest 450 GeV or less than one-tenth of the collider’s full strength and no collisions are expected because the beams will only be fired one way through the tunnel. Eventually CERN hopes the LHC help scientists discover the elusive Higgs-Boson particle by smashing together proton beams with 5-7 TeV worth of energy.

Some ignoramuses have theorized that such collisions could cause a miniature black hole to form and obliterate our planet, but such collisions in the form of cosmic rays have been occurring on Earth and other planets for a long time. In fact these collisions pack much more of a punch than anything the LHC can produce. However, this hasn’t stopped people from trying to stop the project.

MIT professor and Nobel Prize winning physicist Frank Wilczek is just one of the scientists who has received death threats in the past days.

But for anyone who’s thinks the LHC will end the world, Professor Brian Cox of Manchester University said, “Anyone who thinks the LHC will destroy the world is a t***.” Hey, wasn’t he supposed to use a more scientific word?

Scientific words of any kind mean nothing to the nutballs in tinfoil hats.

Click photo for example of huge nest

The ability to work together and capture larger prey has allowed social spiders to stretch the laws of nature and reach enormous colony sizes, UBC zoologists have found. The findings may also explain why social spiders thrive in tropical areas but dwindle with increasing latitude and elevation.

“The size of organisms tends to be constrained by a scaling principle scientists call ‘surface to volume ratio,’” says Leticia Avilés, lead author. While organisms typically have energetic needs proportional to their volume, they must acquire nutrients through their surface.

“As the organism grows, this surface to volume ratio declines. In a way, this is how nature keeps the sizes of various species in check.”

The same principle may apply to social groups. The surface area of the three-dimensional webs social spiders use to capture prey does not grow as fast as the number of spiders contained in the nests; so number of incoming prey per spider declines with colony size. But Anelosimus eximius, a species of social spider notable for its enormous colony size – some total more than 20,000 individuals – have gained the ability to stretch that law by cooperating and thus capturing increasingly large insects as their colonies grow.

I wonder if this applies to Facebook?