children

Kids these days. It seems that they were born into a society that spends 90 percent of its time staring at glowing rectangles, much to the chagrin of parents everywhere. Playing outside just seems like too low-tech of an option for them to bother wasting their time with. However, Bulpadok, an Australian app company, might convince them to take the screen with them outdoors, with The Hidden Park, a new iPhone-based scavenger hunt.

There was a time when carting a plastic lunchbox to your high school cafeteria was a popularity death knell. The ubiquitous paper bag was more fashionable, but in our new, green-conscious era, maybe it’s time for the lunchbox to make a comeback. Though schools probably can’t impose outright bans on paper bags, they can make efforts at generating less waste. Without the resources to rebuild every school out there with the most sophisticated green technology, however, the pertinent question is: How can pre-existing school buildings become more environmentally friendly?

By the time they are two years old, most children from middle and upper-income families have been vaccinated against polio, mumps, measles, rubella and tetanus. But many low-income children--too many, according to the Center for Disease Control (CDC) and the Vaccines for Children Program-- have not. A new study examining the results of the U.S. National Immunization Survey carried out between 1995 and 2007 showed "significant disparities in timely vaccination coverage...

Two years ago, a yellow spongiform robot named Keepon became a minor YouTube sensation when one of its creators programmed it to do a squishy, twisty dance in time to the Spoon song "I Turn My Camera On." The video has garnered more than 2 million hits. Now Keepon's keepers, Marek Michalowski, a Ph.D student in robotics at Carnegie Mellon University, and Hideki Kozima of Miyagi University in Japan, are turning Keepon's attention to a more serious task: to study how children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) interact socially and to see if the robot may be able to help in therapy.

It seems like every couple of years there are some new baby rules. Don’t lay them down on their stomachs. Don’t lay them down on their backs. Do yoga while pregnant. Don’t do yoga while pregnant. Breast feed. Don’t breast feed. In light of a new study, the latest piece of baby advice you might hear from your doctor may be “don’t conceive in the spring or summer.”

We’ve all heard the news: We’re getting fat. Americans are inactive, McDonald’s-eating smokers with diabetes, right? That’s certainly a generalization, but you know what they say. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Tons of research dollars have been poured into studying this historic obesity epidemic. While some may imagine that obesity begins once a child is tall enough to reach the top shelf where mom and dad keep the cookies, a new study points to an even earlier age that jump starts obesity: infancy.

Parents of hyperactive kindergarteners, beware! According to researchers from the Université de Montréal in Canada, your inattentive five-year-old may be prone to develop a gambling addiction later in life. And when I say later in life, I mean your child might begin participating in recreational gambling as early as middle school.