December 2015

Alizah Olivo is eight years old and lives in the South Bronx. Her father, Nelson, works as the maintenance supervisor at a homeless shelter, and her mother, Carmen, registers admittances in an emergency room. Alizah has three brothers and one sister; she is the second youngest. The family’s apartment is on the fourth floor of a recently constructed apartment building on Washington Avenue, in the Morrisania section. On the building’s first and basement levels is the DreamYard...

Within the world of juvenile justice, law enforcement and corrections officials are re-examining theories and punishments associated with juveniles. This book is a valuable resource for academic courses designed to compare and contrast juvenile justice systems and gain an appreciation of how different cultures approach juvenile justice. But the potential audience also spans the judicial and general interest sectors. The text is organized, balanced and investigates a global concept of...

Most states continue to house youth in adult prisons, putting them at risk for physical and sexual abuse, says a new report. But as the number of youth in both juvenile and adult facilities decrease, states have the chance to end the practice of housing youth in adult facilities entirely, said the Campaign for Youth Justice in the report. [For more of this story, written by Sarah Barr, go to http://jjie.org/most-states-still-house-some-youth-in-adult-prisons-report-says/161302/]

About an hour after sunset recently, Ryan Hoffman rode his bike, a hot pink Huffy, into oncoming traffic on an unlit stretch of Highway 17-92 here. Hoffman, once a standout football player at the University of North Carolina , collided violently with a rusty white Ford Mustang, striking the front bumper and then slamming into the windshield with so much force it sounded like a gunshot. As the car skidded to a stop, Hoffman was hurled down the road. [For more of this story, written by Juliet...

Mark Zuckerberg is a dad! And he's marking the birth of his first child (and #GivingTuesday) with a promise to give away 99 percent of his shares in Facebook to make a brighter future. In an open letter to Max, their newborn daughter, Zuckerberg, 31, and his wife Dr. Priscilla Chan, 30, pledged to give 99 percent of their shares in Facebook — worth about $45 billion today — over the course of their lifetime. The letter has a sweeping vision, traversing social and political...

http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/12/when-grit-isnt-enough/418269/

Transitional kindergarten—the first year of a two-year kindergarten program for California children born between September 2 and December 2—is intended to better prepare young five-year-olds for kindergarten and ensure a strong start to their educational career. The goal of this study was to measure the success of the program by determining the impact of transitional kindergarten on students’ readiness for kindergarten in several areas. AIR researchers compared language,...

New research finds that an imbalance between two neurochemical systems in the brain is linked to posttraumatic stress disorder with the greater the imbalance, the more serious the symptoms. Researchers from Uppsala University and the medical university Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden, found that people with posttraumatic stress disorder have an imbalance between two neurochemical systems in the brain, serotonin, and substance P. Experiencing a traumatic event is not uncommon...

Newspapers “reinforce ignorance” with simplistic reporting about mental health, the comedian Jo Brand has said as she condemned the current system of press regulation as a “sham”. The former mental health nurse spoke out on Tuesday about the reporting of suicide, in particular, after recent cases such as the death of actor Robin Williams and that of the 92-year-old woman said to have been “driven to kill herself” by charities bombarding her with requests...

As the sounds of an abusive husband interrogating his partner intensify off-screen, a camera pans up a flight of stairs. A young boy, maybe 3, sits in knitted pajamas at the top of the staircase, cradling a plastic yellow truck. He listens intently as the sickening cacophony grows, while his parents’ shadows dance off the walls. Screams and shouts turn to tears and pleading before the sharp crack of a blow reverberates throughout the house. Though we never the see the punch, the...

A new scientific model that incorporates the myriad drivers of depression could lead to more precise treatment for an illness that affects 350 million worldwide. Developed by scientists at Michigan State University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, the model provides a better understanding of depression and the foundation for creating a pioneering tool to attack the complex disorder. A paper outlining the research team's...

In one of the 20th century’s most disastrous collisions of political ideology and science, the Russian botanist Trofim Lysenko steered the USSR’s agricultural research policies to deemphasize the deterministic concepts of Mendelian inheritance. Instead, Lysenko was committed to the idea that, within the space of a single generation, the environment could alter the phenotype of future generations, an idea that is now often (imprecisely) referred to as “Lamarckian”...