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Teaching Kids A Second Language Isn’t A Waste Of Money
Business Insider: Children growing up in low-income households often fall behind their peers in just about every category––from school testing, college exams and even their mortgage rates later in life. What if learning a second language could change that? It sounds far-fetched, but a team of University of Luxembourg researchers say they've found strengths in low-income bilingual children that may help them surpass the challenges of poverty––namely how they quickly and efficiently they learn to process information early in life. Read the whole story: Business Insider
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Sprich den Ekel aus! (Expressing Your Emotions Can Reduce Fear)
bild der wissenschaft: Menschen mit Spinnenphobie sollten ihre negativen Gefühle aussprechen „Wenn ich diese eklige, haarige Spinne sehe, stellen sich mir alle Haare auf“, wäre ein geeigneter Satz, um die Abscheu gegenüber dem achtbeinigen Tier zu äußern. Aber auch, um Ekel und Angst vor ihnen abzubauen, sagen amerikanische Wissenschaftler. Aus mehreren psychologischen Studien geht bereits hervor, dass es sich lohnt, über Probleme und negative Gefühle zu reden. Neurologen zufolge relativieren sich durch das Aussprechen die Eindrücke und verlieren an Gewicht.
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Clothes make the man/woman (smarter)
The Sydney Morning Herald: Say you're getting ready for an exam. You spend hours brushing up on vocabulary; you do hundreds of practice problems - those are good techniques, but you might consider adding a new trick - wearing a lab coat. People who wore white lab coats made half as many mistakes on attention-related tasks as those wearing their regular clothes, according to a study published this year by Hajo Adam, a visiting assistant professor at Northwestern University, along with colleague Adam Galinsky. It isn't clear if the effect wears off over time, or if knowing the trick removes its effectiveness.
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Twins born on same day as their twin brothers, 4 years later
NBC: Exactly four years after a British mother gave birth to a pair of twin boys, on July 18, she delivered a second set of naturally conceived twins, according to a report Thursday in the British newspaper The Sun. The mom, Kim Hefer, is reportedly the first woman in the United Kingdom to have to two sets of twins on the same day years apart. A bookie set the odds of this happening at 30 million to one, the paper reported. That’s only the most recent case of attention-grabbing coincidental births.
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8 Amazing 60-Second Health Fixes
Prevention: "Feelings of having too much to do and not enough time to do it can exact a toll on health and wellbeing," says Melanie Rudd, PhD candidate at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. Her solution? Look at something that inspires awe. Her findings, which will appear in the journal Psychological Science, reveal that people who viewed 60-second videos that included awe-inspiring views (astronauts in space, whales breaching and gorgeous waterfalls) felt less time-crunched and less impatient afterward. Why? "Experiencing feelings of awe can alter people’s perceptions of time,” says Rudd. Read the whole story: Prevention
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Why Can Some People Recall Every Day Of Their Lives? Brain Scans Offer Clues
NPR: Six years ago, we told you about a woman, identified as A.J., who could remember the details of nearly every day of her life. At the time, researchers thought she was unique. But since then, a handful of such individuals have been identified. And now, researchers are trying to understand how their extraordinary memories work. Bob Petrella, 62, of Los Angeles had to go through a lot of memory testing to qualify as someone with superior autobiographical memory. First, there were lots of questions about news events from the past several decades, like the O.J. Simpson car chase.
