gender

A new study conducted by researchers at Michigan State University suggests that playing video games helps foster the development of visual-spatial skills among middle school students. Cultivating the ability to think visually is crucial to excelling in fields like engineering and surgery, and the hand-eye coordination attained through gaming is increasingly important in our digital world. But the total lack of games tailored to girls could be providing boys with an academic advantage over their female counterparts.

In 2005, the then-president of Harvard University said that men are better at math and science than women. (President Lawrence Summers' exact words were a bit more roundabout. While theorizing why women are underrepresented in those fields, he said "there is a different availability of aptitude at the high end.")

Turns out Summers's attitude may be to blame, according to a new study from vocational psychologists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The seahorse is a strange fish. Many of the traits it possesses have evolved in a direction unlike any other family of animals underwater—its bent S-shape; its head at a 90-degree angle to its body; its prehensile tail; and, most curiously, the male's brood pouch. A lab at Texas A&M University led by Adam Jones is currently studying these structures in the hope of understanding how it was that male pregnancy evolved in seahorses and how it affects the traditional sex roles in the fish.

If we have learned anything about education in recent years, its that the one-size-fits-all mentality of the basal reader just does not work. People learn differently; sexes learn differently. But the research has only gone so far in exploring from where these differences originate. Previously, studies focused only on cognition or brain function.