African-American school students asked to write about their personal values for fifteen minutes at the start of the school year earn higher grades for up to two years afterwards.
The work is a follow-up to a 2006 study in which students were asked to rank the importance of values such as religion, relationships and art and describe what the top value or values meant to them. The intervention reduced the achievement gap between African-American and European-American students by 40%. Low-achieving African-Americans benefited most, getting better grades than students in a control group who were asked to write about why the values they ranked lowest might matter to someone else.
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Women given testosterone for a month were no more likely than women not receiving the hormone to engage in risky financial decisions, according to researchers in Sweden. The findings could suggest that women are a safer pair of hands on the stock-market trading floor than men — or throw into doubt earlier findings about the effect of the hormone on men.
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A study looking at why clouds make the air near them glow more brightly suggests climate models may need to be revised.
Atmospheric scientists already account for the brighter air close to clouds, thanks to a 2007 study by Ilan Koren and his colleagues at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. The team showed that cloud droplets, attached to dust and smoke particles, float in a halo kilometres wide around clouds, bouncing sunlight back out of the atmosphere. Seen from a satellite, that means air close to clouds looks brighter.
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Researchers could cut the use of animals in their experiments by changing the way they analyze their results, according to a study by scientists based in Germany and the United States.
In a typical animal experiment, researchers will try to standardize factors such as the animals’ genetic backgrounds and laboratory conditions to make it as easy as possible for other researchers to reproduce their results later. Now, a team led by Hanno Würbel at the Justus-Liebig-University in Giessen, Germany, has reanalyzed a study of mouse behaviour by taking such genetic and environmental variations into account, and they got fewer spurious results, or false positives, than the initial study.
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Journalist covering global development by way of science and technology.
African-American school students asked to write about their personal values for fifteen minutes at the start of the school year earn higher grades for up to two years afterwards.