The "Yes" Baby is now a "Yes" Boy!!

Learning instrument does not make children more intelligent, experts claim

Common claims that learning music boosts children's IQ and helps them perform better at school can not possibly be true, psychologists said.

Evidence linking musical children to high achievement in school can be better explained by the fact they generally come from more privileged backgrounds, it was claimed.

Children who take music lessons tend to have better-educated, higher-earning parents, and to do more extra-curricular activities than other children their age.

Their upbringing, and not the music lessons themselves, helps the children develop characteristics such as conscientiousness which boost mental processes like memory, learning and reasoning, researchers said.

Prof Glenn Schellenberg, a psychologist from the University of Toronto studied the link between musical training and intelligence in a group of 130 children who were aged 10 to 12.

His team studied whether the association could be explained by two key personality traits, conscientiousness and openness to new experiences.

Prof Schellenberg explained: "We were motivated by the fact that kids who take music lessons are particularly good students, in school they actually do better than you would predict from their IQ, so obviously something else is going on and we thought that personality might be the thing."

Presenting the study at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston on Sunday, he revealed that the association between music lessons and intelligence was mainly down to the children's personalities.

When researchers took into account the likely contribution of each child's personality to their school grades and IQ scores, and removed it from the overall equation, the link between music training and intelligence disappeared.

The study also showed it was possible to predict how long a child had been taking music lessons based on their answers to a personality questionnaire, Prof Schellenberg added.

"What this means is that kids who take music lessons have different personalities, and many or virtually all of the findings that have shown links between music and cognition may be an artifact of individual differences in personality," he said.

"You can explain almost all of the data that are out there by saying that high-functioning kids take music lessons."

The findings show that paying for a child to take music lessons purely for the presumed educational benefit is a "complete waste of time," he said.

"Primarily the associations are driven from the other direction, in that people with specific personalities and with higher levels of cognitive abilities and from more well-off families are more likely to take music lessons."

Prof Daniel Levitin, a psychologist from McGill University in Montreal, said this did not mean music lessons were of no value, however.

"There are benefits to having a society where more people are engaged with the arts, so even if music instruction doesn't make you a better mathematician or a better athlete, even if it only gives you the enjoyment of music, I think that is a good end in and of itself," he said.

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Got Food Allergies? You Can Now Test Your Meal On the Spot Using a Cell Phone

Are you allergic to peanuts and worried there might be some in that cookie? Now you can find out using a rather unlikely source: your cell phone.

A team of researchers from the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science has developed a lightweight device called the iTube, which attaches to a common cell phone to detect allergens in food samples. The iTube attachment uses the cell phone's built-in camera, along with an accompanying smart-phone application that runs a test with the same high level of sensitivity a laboratory would.

Food allergies are an emerging public concern, affecting as many as 8 percent of young children and 2 percent of adults. Allergic reactions can be severe and even life-threatening. And while consumer-protection laws regulate the labeling of ingredients in pre-packaged foods, cross-contaminations can still occur during processing, manufacturing and transportation.

Although several products that detect allergens in foods are currently available, they are complex and require bulky equipment, making them ill-suited for use in public settings, according to the UCLA researchers.

The iTube was developed to address these issues, said Aydogan Ozcan, leader of the research team and a UCLA associate professor of electrical engineering and bioengineering. Weighing less than two ounces, the attachment analyzes a test tube-based allergen-concentration test known as a colorimetric assay.

To test for allergens, food samples are initially ground up and mixed in a test tube with hot water and an extraction solvent; this mixture is allowed to set for several minutes. Then, following a step-by-step procedure, the prepared sample is mixed with a series of other reactive testing liquids. The entire preparation takes roughly 20 minutes. When the sample is ready, it is measured optically for allergen concentration through the iTube platform, using the cell phone's camera and a smart application running on the phone.

The kit digitally converts raw images from the cell-phone camera into concentration measurements detected in the food samples. And beyond just a "yes" or "no" answer as to whether allergens are present, the test can also quantify how much of an allergen is in a sample, in parts per million.

The iTube platform can test for a variety of allergens, including peanuts, almonds, eggs, gluten and hazelnuts, Ozcan said.

The UCLA team successfully tested the iTube using commercially available cookies, analyzing the samples to determine if they had any harmful amount of peanuts, a potential allergen. Their research was recently published online in the peer-reviewed journal Lab on a Chip and will be featured in a forthcoming print issue of the journal.

Other authors of the research included graduate student and lead author Ahmet F. Coskun and undergraduate students Justin Wong, Delaram Khodadadi, Richie Nagi and Andrew Tey, all of whom are members of the Ozcan BioPhotonics Laboratory at UCLA. Ozcan is also a member of the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA.

"We envision that this cell phone-based allergen testing platform could be very valuable, especially for parents, as well as for schools, restaurants and other public settings," Ozcan said. "Once successfully deployed in these settings, the big amount of data -- as a function of both location and time -- that this platform will continuously generate would indeed be priceless for consumers, food manufacturers, policymakers and researchers, among others."

Allergen-testing results of various food products, tagged with a time and location stamp, can be uploaded directly from cell phones to iTube servers to create a personalized testing archive, which could provide additional resources for allergic individuals around the world. A statistical allergy database, coupled with geographic information, could be useful for future food-related policies -- for example in restaurants, food production and for consumer protection, the researchers said.

From:Sciencedaily

Baby Sign Language

Baby Sign Language

CAN be an effective communication tool for infants and young children.

Limited research suggests that using baby sign language may improve a child's ability to communicate and ease frustration, particularly between ages 8 months and 2 years.

http://www.babysignlanguage.com/chart/

Interesting True Fact About Albert Einstein

1.               Einstein Had Speech Difficulty as a Child

As he was a late talker, his parents were worried. At last, at the supper table one night, he broke his silence to say, "The soup is too hot."
Greatly relieved, his parents asked why he had never said a word before.
Albert replied, "Because up to now everything was in order."

2.              When Albert Einstein died, his final words died with him. The nurse at his side didn't understand German.

3.              Albert Einstein was once offered the Presidency of Israel. He declined saying he had no head for problems.

4.              Einstein wasn't present in December 1922 to receive the Nobel prize in physics. Instead he was on a voyage to Japan.

5.              He married his cousin Elsa Lowenthal.

World’s Smartest Kids

a) Nobel Peace Prize Nominee at The Age Of 12
b) IQ higher than Einstein
c) Youngest member of IQ society Mensa
d) Seven-year-old surgeon
e) Graduated from Stanford University Online High School by the age of 11
f) Physics student at age three
g) Smartest Man Of All Times-Mathematic genius at the age of 8
h) Youngest Painter-2 years old
i）Child Prodigy Writer And Young Poet

1. Gregory Smith – Nobel Peace Prize Nominee at The Age Of 12

Introducing Gregory R. Smith. He looks like a normal kid, but you should know that he went to college at the age of 10, when he received a four-year scholarship to Randolph-Macon College. Just two years after this extraordinary event, he received his first nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize at just 12 years of age.


2. Jacob Barnett 12-year-old autistic boy: IQ higher than Einstein

Are you joking??Higher than Albert Eistein"s Iq 160?No joke guys his name is Jacob Barnett.This little guy began attending Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis at the age of 8. His IQ is 170 making it higher than Albert Einstein’s score. When he was only 12, he stunned his university professors after grappling with some of the most advanced concepts in mathematics. What’s even more amazing is that he taught himself calculus, algebra, geometry and trigonometry in just one week.At an early age, Jake was diagnosed with Aspergers syndrome, which is a less severe form of autism. His family was extremely worried, but they soon realized how gifted their son was. He was solving 5000 piece puzzles by the age of 3, and he was writing equations on the windows… if his evolution is so spectacular up till now, we can only expect great things from him in the future.

3. Saffron Pledger – Youngest member of IQ society Mensa

"I am only a little girl but I’m very pleased to have passed these tests, even if they were quite hard. I will be very pleased to become a member of Mensa-Saffron Pledger"

This lovely little girl is named Saffron Pledger, she has an IQ of 140, and she is the youngest person to ever apply for Mensa membership. Despite the fact that her IQ makes her smarter than almost 98% of the population, little Saffron takes interest in normal activities for a 3 year old girl. She likes bed time stories… she likes them so much that she reads them to her baby sister.

4. Akrit Jaswal – seven-year-old surgeon

"People saw my potential and wanted to help me excel in life…I think they’re of above average intelligence, but not as clever as me.-Akrit Jaswal"

Akrit Jaswal was born on April 23, 1993 and he has often been called the world’s smartest boy after people caught wind of the fact that he has an IQ of 146, and he is the smartest boy in India. The boy became the smartest surgeon and Uniersity student in India.

5. Colin Carlson - graduated from Stanford University Online High School by the age of 11

Look like young Bill Gate?This Bill Gate alike young boy named Colin Carlson.When Colin was just 9 years old, he began taking up classes at the University of Connecticut, and by the time he was 12, he was already a full time sophomore. His biggest problem? The University denied his application to participate in field work which required his moving to South Africa. Colin did not let things this way, so he founded an environmental organization and filed an age discrimination complaint against the University of Connecticut.
6. Kim Ung-Yong – physics student at age three

When he was just 3 years old, Kim Ung-Yong began taking lectures as a guest physics student at the Hanyang University in South Korea. It wasn’t long before the world found out about his incredible intelligence and so, by the age of 8, NASA flew him over to the United States for studies. The man was born in 1962, and he is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the person with the highest IQ in the world: 210! And if that doesn’t tell you much, maybe you’ll be amazed by the fact that Kim Ung-Yong spoke at just 4 months of age, and by the age of 2, he could already read in Japanese, Korean, German and English.

7. William James Sidis: Smartest Man Of All Times

When he was just 8 years old, William James Sidis proved that he was a mathematical genius as he developed a new logarithm table based on the number 12. One year later, he was holding lectures at Harvard University. He enrolled at Harvard when he was 11 years old, and graduated at the age of 16 suma cum laude. The man is considered to be the smartest man to ever live, with an estimated IQ score of 250-300. He wrote four original works of his own before he was seven, and he was fluent in 8 different languages.

8. Aelita Andre – Youngest Painter

Aelita Andre was only 2 years old when her abstract paintings were displayed in a famous art gallery in Australia, but she was even younger when she painted them. The child’s paintings were promoted by Mark Jamieson, the director of Brunswick Street Gallery in Melbourne’s Fitzroy. 

9. Adora Svitak Child Prodigy Writer And Young Poet

Adora Lily Svitak is a little girl born on October 15, 1997 and she is a child prodigy, an internationally published author. She is known for writing essays, poems, blogs, and even full-length books.