In its short existence, No Child Left Behind, which was voted into existence in overwhelmingly bipartisan fashion, accomplished a lot. Girls and boys achieved parity in math for the first time in history, test scores for minorities went up across the board - but it had to die.It mostly had to die because a Republican had signed it and President Obama, the successor to President Bush, dutifully honored the national teacher's unions once he realized how national politics works. Prior to a looming reelection he had been endorsed both merit pay and No Child Left Behind.Its successor, because teachers said they do not like 'teaching to the test', are Common Core standards.  And they are taking education from flawed to worse.

Producing research that is accessible, highly-cited, globally visible and impactful is no easy task. Aside from being quality research, it requires multiple other skill sets and competition is fierce.There are over 3 million research articles written each year and even with pay-to-publish and 'light review' open access journals, only half will show up in international journals.

Know how many scientists got started wondering about nature by blasting ants with a magnifying glass?Quite a few, actually. While most scientists and engineers don't necessarily like Sid in "Toy Story", they confess to being a lot like him, Frankenstein-ing together toys and hooking things up to firecrackers and such.With that in mind, The Backyard Brains company has created an app intended to get children to be interested in neuroscience. And I bet it works. But it is controversial, at least among the demographic that makes everything controversial.

Growing custom-made, functioning organs will be regenerative medicine's defining moment and it will happen in 2014, predicts Real Clear Science's Alex Berezow.But will it be adult stem cells (it needs some work still, as I noted in articles a few times here) or Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer (ummm, banned by the Obama administration)?Alex has the answers in The Wired World In 2014, on newsstands everywhere, or Zinio or iTunes.

The United Nation's geographically chosen panel of climate experts, the the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC), is moving fast to correct errors in its first of four sections of its new report, heading off the public relations disaster of the last report, where it was only revealed by critics that the document contained 'grey literature', including an off-hand claim in a magazine, and was in part written by environmental activists.

The 104th Carnival of Math (1101000 in binary - see how clever they are??) is in full swing, with 40 entries. The friendship paradox, a flaw in RSA encryption, how combinatronics and Pampers are related, it's all here.If you, like me, like math and enjoy reading about math, even if you don't always 'get' what they are getting at in some of this, it's worth taking a look. Bonus: 104 is the sum of 8 consecutive even numbers: 6 + 8 + 10 + 12 + 14 + 16 + 18 + 20.Come Frolic at The 104th Carnival of Math! - Math Frolic

If you are not a celiac, there are numerous reasons not to jump on the gluten-free fad. Gluten-free products are nutrient poor, they're high in sugar, contain preservatives and are made with refined oils. That's not healthier and it's why Lady Gaga got fatter going gluten-free, even though she claimed it was a diet plan.And if you are celiac, buying gluten-free labels in a store can be dangerous, because they can still have trace amounts of gluten. Like 'organic' food and its dozens of synthetic ingredients and processes allowed, 'gluten-free' does not mean "100%" gluten-free.5 Reasons To Avoid The Gluten-Free Aisle by Dr. Amy Myers, Mind Body Green

Ask a sociologist, an epidemiologist, an anthropologist, a psychologist or a health guru what causes weight gain and you are going to get answers varying from heteronormative oppression by men to the diet choices of your grandparents and resulting epigenetics to blaming your parents because you swallow a lot of aggression.Oh. And marketing. That is always to blame. First Lady Michelle Obama did for obesity what Nancy Reagan did for drugs; she basically handed a government subsidy to a bunch of marketing and advertising agencies to solve a problem that she thinks is easily solved if we demonize one segment of culture. But, wait, isn't marketing the problem? Fight fire with fire, people.

In the United States, we have abandoned the experiment of returning to old, successful way of teaching math - No Child Left Behind led to parity for girls and boys for the first time in history but was unpopular with teachers and unions who said we shouldn't be 'teaching to the test'. Canada thinks just the opposite; like America in the 1990s, they are watching test scores plummet, and are thinking about abandoning the "concept-based learning" from the early 1900s that America has returned to - but they want to see if there can be a science reason to do so. 

Here's a fun number theory idea for you. Say you have a 3x3x3 matrix filled with numbers, including in the very center. So you have 27 numbers in a special 3-dimension configuration. Since there are three axis for such a cube, there are three ways of dividing such a cube into three 3×3 matrices and Once you do that you can get a cubic form by computing