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Many people believe that learning should feel like work. Often when families move to Finland from other countries and put their children in day care, they worry that the schools are not teaching them enough. They say, “The kids are not learning anything. They’re just playing.” But that’s the whole point: humans learn by playing, and that philosophy is built into the Finnish school system. My kids have a short school day and little homework, yet Finnish students earn some of the highest scores of any nation on international tests....

Rice feeds more than half the world’s people. The long-leaved grass, which thrives in shallow wetlands, produces edible seeds that have sustained humans for generations. In the 1960s researchers bred rice plants to respond favorably to fertilizer, which helped prevent famine by allowing farmers to grow more rice per acre than ever before. Now scientists have improved rice once again, this time by stiffening the plant. Tomoaki Sakamoto of the University of Tokyo and his colleagues tested 34 different varieties of rice plants in which individual genes had been removed–specifically avoiding an approach in which genetically desirable traits are imported from other plants....

Chemist Pete Wishnok of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology explains. The Internet is full of Web sites discussing whether club soda can defeat red wine stains. Some experiments show that club soda does not work very well, whereas others indicate that it is pretty good at removing red wine, so the evidence still seems to be mixed. There’s no particularly good chemical reason why club soda should remove stains: it’s essentially just water with carbon dioxide dissolved in it, along with some salts....

From Nature magazine The ability to see objects hidden behind walls could be invaluable in dangerous or inaccessible locations, such as inside machinery with moving parts, or in highly contaminated areas. Now scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge have found a way to do just that. They fire a pulse of laser light at a wall on the far side of the hidden scene, and record the time at which the scattered light reaches a camera....

Forget leap years, months with 28 days and your birthday falling on a different day of the week each year. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland say they have a better way to mark time: a new calendar in which every year is identical to the one before. Their proposed calendar overhaul — largely unprecedented in the 430 years since Pope Gregory XIII instituted the Gregorian calendar we still use today — would divvy out months and weeks so that every calendar date would always fall on the same day of the week....

Many people think of nail biting as a nervous habit, but the driving force may not be anxiety. Mounting evidence shows that people who compulsively bite their nails, pick their skin or pull their hair are often perfectionists, and their actions may help soothe boredom, irritation and dissatisfaction. As many as one in 20 people suffer from body-focused repetitive disorders, engaging in behaviors such as biting their nails or plucking out hair until they damage their appearance or cause themselves pain....

NASA’s $2.5 billion Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission is slated to launch in late November, and will drop a car-size rover named Curiosity at the Gale crater. “We are going to the mountain at Gale crater,” Michael Watkins, project engineer for the Mars Science Laboratory at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., revealed in a press conference today (July 22). “It exhibits three different kinds of environmental settings, perhaps the trilogy of Mars history....

By Lucas LaursenProfessional and amateur astronomers will be teaming up tonight to gather information about the origins and future of the Perseid meteor showers. The spectacle occurs every year when dust from a particular comet hits Earth’s atmosphere, visible as streaks of light shooting across the night sky.Members of the International Meteor Organization (IMO), a group of amateur astronomers who are located around the world, will collect reports of meteor sightings made with the naked eye–aided by the new Moon, which will provide especially dark skies....

A small pilot study raises hopes that personalized cancer vaccines might prove safer and more effective than immune-based therapies already in use or further along in development. In a paper published online in Nature on Wednesday, scientists reported that all six melanoma patients who received an experimental, custom-made vaccine seemed to benefit: their tumors did not return after treatment. Researchers not involved in the study praised its results, but with caveats....

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Pope Francis makes an urgent call for protection of the planet and repeats his view that global warming is mostly man-made in his keenly awaited encyclical, according to a draft published by an Italian magazine on Monday. The Vatican said the document, leaked by the magazine l’Espresso, was not the final version. That is due for release on Thursday. “The rules of the embargo remain in place....

Ethanol is not the most energy-dense of fuels nor the cheapest. Consequent­ly, Amyris Biotechnologies in Emeryville, Calif., has come up with a potentially better solution. It did so by starting with a long roster of organic compounds from which it chose potential replacements for gasoline, diesel and jet fuel that could be burned in modern engines and would be compatible with the existing petroleum infrastructure. Then the company used custom-designed microbes to produce the new fuels by fermentation from a conventional ethanol feedstock....

Different immune cells regulate pain sensitization in male and female mice, according to research published on June 29 in Nature Neuroscience. The surprising biological divide may explain why some clinical trials of pain drugs have failed, and highlights shortcomings in the way that many researchers design their experiments. The immune system has important roles in chronic pain, with cells called microglia being key players. Microglia express a protein called brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) to signal to spinal-cord neurons....

The southern half of the United States is far less resilient than the northern half, according to a groundbreaking federal study that analyzed factors such as income inequality and religious affiliation in every county. But one of the least resilient counties, oddly, is New York County, better known as Manhattan, which suffers because residents eschew personal automobiles. The study, done for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, takes a unique approach to studying resilience by measuring individuals’ financial stability as well as their connection to their community....

The surface of the planet Mercury has been completely mapped for the first time in history, scientists say. The closest planet to the sun hasn’t received as much scientific attention as some of its more flashy solar system neighbors, such as Mars, but NASA’s Messenger spacecraft is helping to close the gap. The probe has been in orbit around Mercury since March 2011, and its team announced Feb. 28 that the spacecraft had finished mapping the planet’s surface....

By Lisa Rapaport (Reuters Health) - U.S. teens who try electronic cigarettes may be more than twice as likely to move on to smoking conventional cigarettes as those who have never tried the devices, report researchers from the University of Southern California. The findings, published August 18 in JAMA, offer some of the best evidence yet at establishing a link between e-cigarettes and smoking, said Dr. Nancy Rigotti, an expert in tobacco research at Massachusetts General Hospital and author of an editorial accompanying the study....

In the 1970s two research teams led by Paul Costa and Robert R. McCrae of the National Institutes of Health and Warren Norman and Lewis Goldberg of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and the University of Oregon, respectively, discovered that most human character traits can be described using five dimensions. Surveys of thousands of people yielded these largely independent traits: Extroversion: The most broadly defined of the Big Five factors measures cheerfulness, initiative and communicativeness....

Health organizations recommend children receive the varicella vaccine at one year old to protect them against chickenpox, but the vaccine appears to have another benefit: it cuts the risk of shingles, a painful and potentially debilitating rash caused by the reactivated chickenpox virus, by more than half in children over two years old, according to a new study. Approximately 38 per 100,000 children vaccinated against chickenpox developed shingles per year, compared with 170 per 100,000 unvaccinated children, researchers found....

Dear EarthTalk: What happens to major appliances that get carted off when new ones take their place? We have a dishwasher and a refrigerator that are both on the blink now and may need replacement. I’d rather fix them than buy new, even if it’s more expensive to do so, because I don’t want to add these big clunkers to the waste stream. What’s your take on this? —D. M., Westport, Conn....

Perhaps all the time spent furiously hunting for the red- and white-stripe-wearing hider Waldo could have been avoided if his eventual spotter just glanced and pointed to the page. At least that is what is indicated by the findings of a new study conducted by researchers at University College London, which appears in the January 9 issue of Current Biology. Psychologist Li Zhaoping presented 10 subjects with a matrix of more than 650 lines leaning at a 45-degree angle, like slashes, with one object somewhere in the array reversed, like a backslash....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The history of tobacco use in the Americas goes back over 1,000 years when natives of the region chewed or smoked the leaves of the plant now known as Nicotiana rustica (primarily in the north) and Nicotiana tabacum (mostly in the south). After European colonization, tobacco would become the most profitable crop exported from the Americas....