Milo Beckman was studying advanced algebra when he was 8. By 15, he was a Harvard prodigy. Now aged just 25, he’s written a brilliant book that takes everything we know (and fear) about maths out of the equation – starting with numbers.
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New medical schools have opened, allowing 12,000 students to start medical degrees last autumn
The arts degree is in steady decline as medicine, computing and engineering soar in popularity, university entry figures show today.
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As well as institutional rankings, The Sunday Times and The Times have identified the centres of excellence within each of 67 subject areas. The subject rankings are based on student opinion on teaching quality and their wider university experiences, combined with the outcomes of the 2014 research assessments, graduate job prospects and course entry standards.
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The ban aims to protect young people’s mental health and body image.
Cosmetic surgery clinics will be banned from promoting breast enlargement, nose jobs and liposuction to children, under plans announced by the advertising watchdog today.
The rules will stop adverts for cosmetic surgery during or around TV programmes and online content, either aimed at under-18s or likely to appeal to young audiences. It will mean that viewers of Love Island, the ITV reality show, will no longer see adverts for breast enlargement procedures.
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Covid maths/statistics.
Did you get the all clear in your daily cancer check this week? Of course you did not have one. Even after decades of trying it has proved extremely difficult to find regular tests that do not do more harm than good by wrongly telling healthy people they are ill. These basic statistics explain why scientists are very sceptical about Boris Johnson’s “Operation Moonshot”.
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World political leaders must step up on the environment, activist tells Venice film festival showing of documentary about her.
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As I live with a screenwriter husband, we watch films as a family a lot, and I do mean A LOT!
We’ve watched our fair share of space movies and although our daughter is intrigued by all things space, the thought of travelling there is a big no no. It frightens her. However she is interested in working for NASA, when she’s an adult.
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Interestingly, a few days before I started to suffer from Covid symptoms (19th March), my 12 year old daughter complained that she felt nauseous. We assumed she might be suffering from a little anxiety, caused by the virus’s spread and her potentially being over tired. I took her into school late on the Tuesday (11am), school closed 4pm on the Wednesday, to start remote lessons on the following Monday and I started to get sick on the Thursday.
Did she catch Covid and pass on to me? We still don’t quite know. I donated blood plasma and now know that I have antibodies, although sadly not high enough to donate again. My husband and daughter have not yet been tested.
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I found this extremely interesting. I know a few adults and children with high functioning autism.
The scientist Dr Camilla Pang considers autism to be her superpower. What sets her apart from ‘neuro-typical’ people also helps her to explain their emotions
Dr Camilla Pang tells an instructive story about how her brain works. One day, when she was a child, she answered the phone at home. The conversation went as follows: “Hi Millie, is your mum there?”
“Yes,” she replied, and hung up.
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“Did you know that a long, long time ago, long before there was even pizza in Chicago, we were known for something else—dragons?”
The students laugh, knowing it’s not true, but they lean forward to hear more.
“See, here in Chicago we had the most beautiful dragons that anyone had ever seen. Dragons that had colors that people couldn’t even imagine. If you were stealthy enough and watched over by the lake, you could have seen dragons of the deepest blues, whose scales changed colors with the seasons. Over in Grant Park, you might spot dragons with scales in jewel-toned greens hiding in the trees, and white winter dragons that shimmered in the coldest weather. But then everything changed.”
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Your average American 14-year-old just started his or her freshman year in high school. They might be trying out for their school basketball team for winter sports or they could be auditioning for the school play.
But Kara Fan is not your run-of-the-mill 14-year-old. She is America’s Top Young Scientist.
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The Evening Standard’s Women Tech Charge podcast is back for series two and Entrepreneur First co-founder Alice Bentinck is this week’s guest.
Hosted by Dr Anne-Marie Imafidon, the CEO of STEMettes.org, Women Tech Charge invites women from all areas of science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) to share amusing and insightful insights into their careers and what it’s really like to be part of the 17 per cent of the UK’s tech workforce that identifies as female.
Bentinck had her first taste of entrepreneurship when she was 16 and tried the Young Enterprise programme at school. Her team was given £10 and tasked with coming up with a product.
“It was just the beginning of understanding that business was a thing and that start-ups were a thing and just the rush of having a small team, creating a product and then selling it to people and they will give you money.”
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Italy is to become the first country in the world to make classes on climate change compulsory in schools, Lorenzo Fioramonti, the education minister, said yesterday.
From September, schoolchildren will dedicate an hour a week to learning about global warming and the possibilities of sustainable development.
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Myopia rates among under-16s have tripled since the 1960s. Opticians urge parents to send their children outside
An epidemic of short-sightedness is linked to youngsters staring at screens, reading books and doing homework, say scientists — who recommend removing their gadgets and sending them outside for at least two hours a day.
Researchers have found a direct relationship between the time youngsters spend on “nearwork” and myopia. They also predict a surge in the numbers of people who become blind or visually impaired, as people who develop short-sightedness early in life are at far higher risk of serious eye problems when older.
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As someone who was badly bullied as a teenager and again in my adult life, at work, I found this article very interesting. I now realise that my interactions with others were closely linked to my relationship with my own mother. We had an extremely toxic and dysfunctional relationship. I was incredibly shy and found making friends hard, something I've worked extra hard at as an adult to change. I still find the thought of being in a room with people I don't know, terrifying. Will they find me boring, what will we talk about, how awkward I feel about air kisses, yet I'm very happy to hug someone. Aged 45, following my father’s disappearance and subsequent suicide, I finally had the courage to walk away from her permanently.
Guardian Article
Gestures, facial expressions, posture – they are all crucial to what we’re communicating, though many of us don’t realise it
My interest in human behaviour and psychology started in primary school. In my attempts to socialise with other children, I had a constant, nagging feeling that everybody else had received a manual entitled How to Interact with Others. I was socially awkward, to put it mildly, and this meant I was picked on a lot, which in turn meant I started to ask myself some questions: how did my behaviour differ from others? Why did my antagonists act as they did?
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Reading fairy tales and solving puzzles with your children could reduce their risk of developing dementia in later life, it has been claimed.
The suggestion came after research found that eight-year-olds with strong problem-solving skills retained them in old age.
Scientists studied 502 Britons born in the same week in March 1946 who took thinking and memory tests at eight and again between the ages of 69 and 71. They found that “childhood cognitive ability was strongly associated with cognitive scores . . . more than 60 years later”.
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Six thousand schoolchildren are to be part of a pioneering project that will monitor the effects of classroom air pollution on education and health.
The project will involve 20 primary schools in Greater Manchester amid concern that air pollution acts like an “invisible bully” that prevents children from realising their potential, damaging health and hindering academic performance.
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Interestingly, we have recently had the should we move to California conversation. We love Suki’s new school and are both keen she stays until the end of her A’levels.
Californian children will be able to stay in bed longer in the mornings after the state became the first in the US to delay start times at most public schools.
The new law is a response to scientific research suggesting that a later start to the school day would improve pupils’ health and generate better educational outcomes.
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School gates can be a “breeding ground for harmful myths” about vaccines, the chief executive of NHS England has said, as he called for a zero-tolerance approach to misinformation about their alleged dangers.
Simon Stevens said it was often the parents who did their best to find out more about the impact and effect of vaccines on their children who were liable to be deceived by “fake news”.
“In this way the school gates themselves can be a breeding ground for harmful myths to catch on, spread and ultimately infect parents’ judgment,” he wrote in the Daily Mail.
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Turkey has ruled that the million-selling book Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls should be partially banned and treated like pornography because it could have a “detrimental influence” on young people.
The book, which has been published in 47 languages, offers a series of inspiring stories about women from history for young children. But in a decision published last week, the Turkish government’s board for the protection of minors from obscene publications said: “Some of the writings in the book will have a detrimental influence on the minds of those under the age of 18.”
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