Monday, May 13, 2013 | 7:00 P.M.–8:30 P.M. The New York Academy of Sciences For more information about the event click here. School has traditionally been about teaching kids new knowledge and skills. Most people have long believed that each child’s temperament and capacity for learning are more or less inborn—or at least, not the [...]

There are signs, some would say omens, glimmering in certain children’s demeanors that, probably ever since there were children, have caused parents’ brows to crinkle with worry, precipitated forced conversations with nosy mothers-in-law, strained marriages and ushered untold numbers into the deep covenant of sexual denial. We all know the stereotypes: an unusually light, delicate, [...]

Early behavioral intervention has shown some promise as a way to help children with autism. But it’s difficult to see the hallmarks of autism before two years of age with today’s diagnostic criteria. Could we find other methods? Seeking to answer that question is Jed Elison at the California Institute of Technology, who is working [...]

Television has a bad side. According to a report from the University of Michigan, the average American child has seen sixteen thousand murders on TV by age 18. Indeed, programs explicitly designed for kids often contain more violence than adult programming, and that violence is often paired with humor. Every single animated feature film produced [...]

Thursday July 26th saw the launch of SciLogs.com, a new English language science blog network. SciLogs.com, the brand-new home for Nature Network bloggers, forms part of the SciLogs international collection of blogs which already exist in German, Spanish and Dutch. To celebrate this addition to the NPG science blogging family, some of the NPG blogs [...]

A juvenile chimpanzee in the Ivory Coast’s Tai Forest watches as her mother carefully places a soft coula nut onto a hard, flat rock. In her other hand, mom has a chunk of hard wood. Mom smashes the nut with her makeshift hammer, once, twice, three times. Having broken the outer shell, she plucks out [...]

One of the most influential voices of my childhood, and the childhoods of countless others raised alongside that omnipresent mouse, has died at the age of 86. Robert B. Sherman was a songwriter who, with his brother Richard, wrote some of the most beloved and memorable Disney songs. The Sherman brothers were perhaps best known [...]

Can dogs pretend? This is the question I asked yesterday, prompted by Sheril’s story: …this afternoon Happy did something unusual. She carried a toy frog over to her water bowl, and gently put it down as pictured. Given its orientation, I’m skeptical that her placement was an accident. The frog continues to sit like this [...]

Editor’s Note: While I’m on vacation, I’ve arranged a series of guest posts from other writers who routinely cover animal behavior and cognition. Today’s post, about the benefits of exposing children to animals, comes from Lauren Reid who blogs at Phylogenetic Tree Hugger. Follow her on twitter: @PygmyLoris. Animals are awesome. Okay, I am biased [...]

This seems to have become unofficial volcano week, here at ScienceBlogs. If you haven’t been following the coverage of the Eyjafjallaj