GEN-ERIC News

The reading skills of young male students may improve more when boys are tutored by women, a Canadian study shows, contradicting some school policies to hire male teachers to improve boys’ literacy. Herb Katz, an education professor at the University of Alberta, took 175 boys in the third and fourth grades, identified as struggling readers, and paired them with a research assistant who worked on their reading skills for 30 minutes a week over 10 weeks. On average, the boys paired with female tutors felt better about their reading skills after the 10 weeks than those who were coached by a male research assistant, the study found. Katz said the study, published in the U.S. journal Sex Roles, may prompt educational policy-makers in countries such as Australia and Britain to rethink directives that call for more male teachers to be hired to provide role models for boys whose reading skills lag their peers.

A judge will have to decide again whether a police officer can smell alcohol on a man’s breath from inside of a fast-food drive-through window. The prosecution believes Officer Kenneth Marrow can and did earlier this year. The attorney for 24-year-old Cody Schaaf disagrees and says the officer had no reasonable cause to stop Schaaf on suspicion of drunken driving. The stipulated trial Monday in Lancaster County Court centered on the arrest of Schaaf early in the morning of March 20. Sometime before 3 a.m., Schaaf ordered four cheeseburgers at a McDonald’s south of downtown Lincoln. As Schaaf’s car got to the pickup window, Schaaf was asked by a McDonald’s worker to pull ahead a few feet and wait for his food. The officer took the food to Schaaf’s car and eventually arrested him. Schaaf’s blood later tested out above the legal limit. A police spokeswoman said Wednesday that the officer had stopped at the restaurant because its managers had been reporting problems with drunken customers. Marrow testified during a hearing in July that Schaaf had bloodshot, watery eyes and that his speech was slurred. Marrow said he could smell alcohol coming from the car. But Mark Rappl, Schaaf’s lawyer, challenged Marrow’s account, doubting the officer could have detected the alcohol from inside the restaurant, seven feet from Schaaf.

AT&T Inc. will start sending iPhone customers thinner bills by default starting with their next billing cycle, the wireless carrier has told subscribers by text message. The change comes a week after blogs and forums lit up with tales of new iPhone owners receiving bills stretching scores, or even hundreds, of pages. Justine Ezarik, a graphic designer and blogger from Pittsburgh, became a temporary YouTube star for the video showing her unwrapping her first bill, a 300-page pile that listed every one of the estimated 30,000 to 35,000 text messages she sends each month.

A number of companies are trying to figure out ways to make cellulosic ethanol by breaking down sugar with microbes and enzymes. Sony has used similar principles to build a battery. In short, the anode of the battery consists of enzymes–a protein that speeds up chemical reactions in living organisms–which digest sugar while the cathode that breaks down oxygen. The two are connected by a membrane. The anodie extracts electrons and hydrogen. The hydrogen migrates through a membrane to the cathode side and makes water with the oxygen. Those loose electrons go to power your MP3 player or phone. Test batteries produced by Sony have managed to produce 50 milliwatts. The company even strung a bunch of them together to power an MP3 player. Sony presented a paper on it at the 234th American Chemical Society National Meeting & Exposition in Boston, one of the premier and longest running scientific conferences in the world.

Most lightbulbs create light with a pair electrodes. Luxim does it with radio waves. The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based start-up has come up with a way to get rid of the parts inside of high intensity discharge (HID) lamps that are often the first to fail. As a result, Luxim’s LiFi (light fidelity) lamp provides more lumens per watt and lasts longer than competing products, according to the company. In traditional HID lamps, high voltage pulses pass between two electrodes. The energy creates plasma from the ambient gases trapped inside the bulb and you get light. The electrodes, however, degrade over time. Tungsten splatters off of them and blackens the surface of the bulb.
By contrast, the Luxim bulb doesn’t have electrodes. Instead, a radio frequency amplifier pumps RF waves to an antenna inside a resonant cavity. The interaction between the waves and the crystal cavity convert trapped gases into a plasma.