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Lifelong health is determined by more than just our genes: experiences at sensitive periods of development change the brain in ways that increase or decrease risk for later physical and mental illness, including addiction. That finding is the premise of the Brain Story, which puts scientific concepts into a narrative that is salient to both expert and non-expert audiences. The Brain Story synthesizes decades of research and reflects a body of knowledge that experts agree is useful for policy...

Teaching used to be known as the noblest profession. Today, not so much. It’s often depicted in terms of overwork, low pay, and overall disrespect. Small wonder, then, that young people are turning away from a future in education. According to a survey published by the Chronicle of Higher Education , in 2015, only 4 percent of college freshmen said they were likely to major in education, down from 11 percent in 2000. A research brief published in September by the Learning Policy Institute...

The Trauma and Learning Policy Initiative has made this excellent 11 minute video available for sharing widely. All children need safe and supportive environments in order to learn. The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) study demonstrates that nearly every school has students who have been exposed to overwhelming experiences, such as witnessing violence at home, being direct targets of abuse, homelessness or having a parent with substance abuse or mental health issues. For some children...

It’s no wonder criminal-justice reformers woke up from Election Day 2016 with a sense of existential gloom. Given candidate Donald J. Trump’s law-and-order bluster, his dystopian portrayal of rising crime and an ostensible war on the police, and a posse of advisers who think the main problem with incarceration is that we don’t do enough of it, the idea that justice reformers have anything to look forward to is at best counterintuitive. It is reasonable to expect that President Trump and his...

The standard definition of drug or alcohol addiction is that it's a chronic, incurable disease of the brain. In a comprehensive report on the topic, published last month, the surgeon general gives this familiar definition a more positive spin. He eschews the "cure" word and focuses instead on the fact that, as with other chronic diseases such as diabetes, there are effective treatments. There are methods for managing and reducing symptoms. The surgeon general's report takes pains to note...

For many children, December often is linked to presents and excitement, but when a young child doesn’t seem all that enthused about getting gifts, it could be a sign that something is wrong. Measuring brain waves, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have found that clinically depressed children don’t respond to rewards the same way as other children do. Previous research from the same group of scientists found that a reduced ability to experience joy is a key...

Mindfulness – the practice of attending to thoughts and feelings in the present moment – has been the focus of a lot of research attention recently and even under the full glare of science, it just keeps getting better. In the first ever large scale study of its kind, researchers explored whether teaching people mindfulness would be as effective as maintenance doses of antidepressants in managing relapse in depression. According to Willem Kuyken, lead author of the study and Professor of...

In the sweltering days of July, tensions between police and civilians were running high. A cop fatally shot Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, setting off a week of protests. Another police officer fatally shot Philando Castile in a suburb of St. Paul, Minnesota, while his fiance and her 4-year-old daughter watched. A sniper shot and killed five police officers in Dallas. But inside a Disneyland convention center in Anaheim, California, almost 700 law enforcement officers and security...

The first anti-bullying project took place more than 30 years ago in Scandinavia. Since then, projects have cropped up around the world, mostly taking a similar overall approach: raising awareness of bullying and getting students to engage in activities that highlight its negative effects. By 2004, enough anti-bullying projects had been introduced in enough places to review their overall impact, including some meta-analyses of their results. Unfortunately, the evidence about their success...

When the federal government reversed course last month, deciding not to regulate many genetic tests , one big winner was Proove Biosciences , a Southern California company that markets an unproven “opioid risk” test. Proove claims its test can predict, with 93 percent accuracy, which patients will become addicted to or misuse prescribed opioid pain pills. That’s been an irresistible sales pitch for many physicians, who struggle to treat pain patients compassionately but fear adding to the...

Brain tests at the age of three appear to predict a child's future chance of success in life, say researchers. Low cognitive test scores for skills like language indicate less developed brains, possibly caused by too little stimulation in early life, they say. These youngsters are more likely to become criminals, dependent on welfare or chronically ill unless they are given support later on, they add. Their study in New Zealand appears in the journal, Nature Human Behaviour. The US...

On a map, 24 contiguous municipalities just northwest of St. Louis resemble nothing more than a crazy quilt. And for decades, their governance and services were a patchwork, too. Each municipality—from the tiny, two-street Village of Glen Echo Park, population 160, to the neighborhood-sized City of Normandy, population 5,008—has its own government. That’s two dozen mayors and city councils and almost as many police departments in an area that spans almost 11 square miles, is home to 36,250...