In August, leaders from more than 50 schools from around the country will gather at Yale to hear a simple but profound message — emotions matter in the classroom.
The training session will be the largest ever held by the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, which has built a sophisticated, science-based program that is anchored in the seminal work of now Yale University President Peter Salovey and fellow psychologist John D. Mayer. Less than a quarter century after publication of their paper, “Emotional Intelligence,” 75,000 educators in more than 500 schools in 30-plus states and countries including England, Spain, Italy, and Australia have learned about the key role of emotions in learning and behavior through a program called RULER. (more…)
ANN ARBOR — The remains of the earliest European fort in the interior of what is now the United States have been discovered by a team of archaeologists, providing new insight into the start of the U.S. colonial era and the all-too-human reasons spoiling Spanish dreams of gold and glory.
Spanish Captain Juan Pardo and his men built Fort San Juan in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in 1567, nearly 20 years before Sir Walter Raleigh’s “lost colony” at Roanoke and 40 years before the Jamestown settlement established England’s presence in the region. (more…)
THE PRESIDENT: Good afternoon, everybody. Please have a seat.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been talking about what I believe should be our number-one priority as a country — building a better bargain for the middle class and for Americans who want to work their way into the middle class. At the same time, I’m focused on my number-one responsibility as Commander-in-Chief, and that’s keeping the American people safe. And in recent days, we’ve been reminded once again about the threats to our nation.
As I said at the National Defense University back in May, in meeting those threats we have to strike the right balance between protecting our security and preserving our freedoms. And as part of this rebalancing, I called for a review of our surveillance programs. Unfortunately, rather than an orderly and lawful process to debate these issues and come up with appropriate reforms, repeated leaks of classified information have initiated the debate in a very passionate, but not always fully informed way. (more…)
Most of what scientists know of Jupiter’s moon Europa they have gleaned from a dozen or so close flybys from NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft in 1979 and NASA’s Galileo spacecraft in the mid-to-late 1990s. Even in these fleeting, paparazzi-like encounters, scientists have seen a fractured, ice-covered world with tantalizing signs of a liquid water ocean under its surface. Such an environment could potentially be a hospitable home for microbial life. But what if we got to land on Europa’s surface and conduct something along the lines of a more in-depth interview? What would scientists ask? A new study in the journal Astrobiology authored by a NASA-appointed science definition team lays out their consensus on the most important questions to address.
“If one day humans send a robotic lander to the surface of Europa, we need to know what to look for and what tools it should carry,” said Robert Pappalardo, the study’s lead author, based at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. “There is still a lot of preparation that is needed before we could land on Europa, but studies like these will help us focus on the technologies required to get us there, and on the data needed to help us scout out possible landing locations. Europa is the most likely place in our solar system beyond Earth to have life today, and a landed mission would be the best way to search for signs of life.” (more…)
The Yarlung-Tsangpo River in southern Asia drops rapidly through the Himalaya Mountains on its way to the Bay of Bengal, losing about 7,000 feet of elevation through the precipitously steep Tsangpo Gorge.(more…)
Baby rattlesnakes are born in July and August and will be active in the weeks ahead.
Experts on venomous creatures at the Arizona Poison and Drug Information Center advise gardeners, hikers, youngsters and other citizens to be especially cautious about rattlesnakes in the weeks ahead.(more…)
Berkeley Lab scientists image cell-to-cell connections between soil microbes
The next time your Facebook stream is filled with cat videos, think about Myxococcus xanthus.The single-cell soil bacterium also uses a social network. But forget silly distractions. M. xanthus relies on its connections to avoid getting eaten and to score its next meal.
That’s the latest insight from a team of Berkeley Lab scientists. Using several imaging techniques, they saw for the first time that M. xanthus cells are connected by a network of chain-like membranes. (more…)
Dolphins can recognize their old tank mates’ whistles after being separated for more than 20 years—the longest social memory ever recorded for a non-human species.
The remarkable memory feat is another indication that dolphins have a level of cognitive sophistication comparable to only a few other species, including humans, chimpanzees and elephants. Dolphins’ talent for social recognition may be even more long-lasting than facial recognition among humans, since human faces change over time, but the signature whistle that identifies a dolphin remains stable over many decades. (more…)
