Category Archives: Body & Mind

Smarter Kids Emerge From Montessori Programs

toddler playing

toddler playing

If you’re looking for opinions on education all you need to do is ask parents what they think. If you want actually useful data to plan policy then talk to experts on how children learn. Those experts will all agree that inquiry based learning is the way to go. A recent study confirmed that the inquiry approach is the best way, and that following the tried and true Montessori methods is best for children and even cheaper for society.

By the end of kindergarten, children who won a random lottery to attend public Montessori preschools outperformed their peers in reading, executive function, short-term memory, and social understanding—all while costing approximately $13,000 less per child than traditional preschool programs.

Those costs do not include anticipated savings from improved teacher morale and retention, a dynamic demonstrated in other data.
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“These findings affirm what Maria Montessori believed over a century ago—that when we trust children to learn with purpose and curiosity, they thrive,” said Angeline Lillard, Commonwealth Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia. “Public Montessori programs are not only effective but cost-efficient.”

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Forget Cremation, Get Eaten When You Die

hands

You will die. It’ll happen to everyone, yet too often people don’t think about the practical aspects in advance. One often overlooked question is what to do with your body when you’re done with it. In North America popular ways to be rid of one’s body are cremation (which requires oodles of energy and is quite bad for the planet), and displaying the corpse (which is requires oodles of chemicals that are bad for the planet). A safe, clean, and fast way to help bodies decompose is a burial container filled with mushrooms and it’s now available in Canada.

“If you compare it to wood [coffins] or even metal, those things take decades. And here, we’re talking about days or months,” he explained to me from Delft, in the Netherlands. On its website, Loop Biotech claims the coffin adds to the “biodiversity of the soil” around it as it degrades, and Hendrikx says other coffins may also contain chemical additives that could leach into the soil. Hendrikx estimates Loop Biotech has sold more than 2,000 cocoons in Europe, and has just started in North America.
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Valentine, also on the board of the Green Burial Society of Canada, sees natural burials as inclusive of different family rituals and desires, but can be as simple as burying a body in a shroud and ensuring native grasses and plants grow above. What’s more, an environmentally conscious death doesn’t need to be about measuring emissions.

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Want Above Average Intelligence? Study Philosophy

steaming mug

The humanities have been pushed to side due to the praise and perceived wealth that STEM education gets. This is not good for a vibrant and diverse society as the humanities provide people with knowledge that can expand minds and sway cultures. The field of philosophy is one such domain that provides people new ways of thinking, and a multitude of ways to question their own thoughts and those of others. Philosophy means practicing logic and exploring new ideas, which is perfect for setting people up for success in a world of information.

In a world filled with lies and other misinformation, content generated by AI, and malicious state actors swaying geopolitics, it’s more important than ever to posses critical thinking kills that studying philosophy provides.

According to the University of Illinois, the average salary for a philosophy graduate who finds work within six months of graduation is $60,069. This puts them above economics majors and just below physics majors. Other sources report similar figures.

They also enjoy a respectable increase when one considers mid-career earnings. The median philosophy major can expect to earn a salary of more than $80,000. This is higher than that earned by business management or chemistry majors. And according to data from Payscale, those with only an undergraduate degree in philosophy rank 16th for mid-career median earnings.

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Successful Treatment for Huntington’s Disease

nurses walking in a hallway

Huntington’s disease is a neurological disease that combines dementia and motor neurone issues, making for a very unpleasant experience. Historically, people suffering from Huntington’s disease had low prospects for living their lives as they normally did and a shorter lifespan. A UK team has developed a very interesting solution to treat Huntington’s disease by injecting modified viruses directly into the brain, the really cool thing is that these little viruses then block the ability of Huntington’s disease to spread. It’s a novel and very 21st century approach and good news not only for people who may get Huntington’s but also for related neurological diseases.

It starts with a safe virus that has been altered to contain a specially designed sequence of DNA.

This is infused deep into the brain using real-time MRI scanning to guide a microcatheter to two brain regions – the caudate nucleus and the putamen. This takes 12 to 18 hours of neurosurgery.

The virus then acts like a microscopic postman – delivering the new piece of DNA inside brain cells, where it becomes active.

This turns the neurons into a factory for making the therapy to avert their own death.

The cells produce a small fragment of genetic material (called microRNA) that is designed to intercept and disable the instructions (called messenger RNA) being sent from the cells’ DNA for building mutant huntingtin.

This results in lower levels of mutant huntingtin in the brain.

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Video Games Don’t Harm Brain Development

Video games are fun, and they won’t cause harm to your kid’s mental development. Of course, moderation is key since it’s good to experience a multitude of things to do; however, the evidence that video games themselves harm development just isn’t there. So play video games and let your kid play video games.

It is currently the summer so perhaps you should play outside for now though.

“Overall, neither duration of play nor choice of video game genres had significant correlations with the CogAT measures. That result shows no direct linkage between video game playing and cognitive performance, despite what had been assumed,” said May Jadalla, professor in the School of Teaching and Learning at Illinois State University and the study’s principal investigator.

But the study revealed another side of the issue, too. Certain types of games described as helping children build healthy cognitive skills also presented no measurable effects, in spite of the games’ marketing messages.

“The current study found results that are consistent with previous research showing that types of gameplay that seem to augment cognitive functions in young adults don’t have the same impact in much younger children,” said C. Shawn Green, professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

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