Scientific American Girl

http://pss.sagepub.com/content/26/2/135?etoc.i

abtract: The gender imbalance in STEM subjects dominates current debates about women’s underrepresentation in academia. However, women are well represented at the Ph.D. level in some sciences and poorly represented in some humanities (e.g., in 2011, 54% of U.S. Ph.D.’s in molecular biology were women versus only 31% in philosophy). We hypothesize that, across the academic spectrum, women are underrepresented in fields whose practitioners believe that raw, innate talent is the main requirement for success, because women are stereotyped as not possessing such talent. This hypothesis extends to African Americans’ underrepresentation as well, as this group is subject to similar stereotypes. Results from a nationwide survey of academics support our hypothesis (termed the field-specific ability beliefs hypothesis) over three competing hypotheses.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2014/09/16/343539024/too-few-university-jobs-for-americas-young-scientists

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/08/03/337565016/lego-releases-female-scientists-set-may-appease-7-year-old-critic

http://commonhealth.wbur.org/2014/06/dyslexia-brain

How does language shape thought? And vice versa?

For a nice summary of her amazing work:

"A study published on April 22 (and currently under review) looked at how likely faculty were to respond to a request to meet with a student to informally discuss potential research opportunities—a scenario picked as a proxy for the many informal events that could boost an academic career and which fall outside institutions’ formal checks and balances. They found — overwhelmingly—that professors of all groups were more likely to respond to white men than women and black, Hispanic, Indian or Chinese students. Academics at private universities and in subjects that pay more on average were the most unresponsive."

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/12/opinion/sunday/raising-a-moral-child.html?smid=fb-share&_r=0

A new article published in Science found that during sleep, brain cells shrink and there is 60% increase in the interstitial space, increasing the flow of cerebral spinal fluid and flushing out toxins like beta amyloid.

From NPR: 

"The results appear to offer the best explanation yet of why animals and people need sleep. If this proves to be true in humans as well, it could help explain a mysterious association between sleep disorders and brain diseases, including Alzheimer's."

NPR's article: http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2013/10/18/236211811/brains-sweep-themselves-clean-of-toxins-during-sleep

http://www.npr.org/2014/03/17/290089998/does-teaching-kids-to-get-gritty-help-them-get-ahead

Grit is the hot topic right now in education reform. But can we really teach kids to be grittier? Does it really matter more than IQ? 

One quote from the article that I particularly like:

"It's a little bit of a chicken-and-egg kind of question. Passion may drive kids to be gritty, but being gritty and able to tolerate failure also enables kids to develop and pursue a passion."

Sent in my a scientificamericangirl reader

A short piece about how a part of your brain is reserved for letter processing: