Private school children are disproportionately represented at the top universities. So this means that private schools are obviously better, right? Maybe not:

• Australian academics looked at 26,000 students aged (8-9) and (10-11) from state and private schools. The raw data showed privately schooled kids did better, on average.
• However. Once backgrounds were controlled for (parental education, health, household income) they showed that there was no difference between private and state schools.
• The most significant correlation was between birth size and low academic success.
• Overall, their results show that a child’s home life matters much more for their academic success than their place of education.

Admittedly, the study only looks at pre-teenage children, and a follow-up study on children of more varied ages would be of great value. For more information, head on over to the TES.

Source: Times Educational Supplement

Biofuels are the product of fermenting crops to produce ethanol, which because it is flammable is then mixed with petrol and used in cars. Growing your own fuel may sound renewable, but science journal Nature, and the European Union Parliament disagree:

• On the September 10th the EU parliament voted to limit biofuels to 5% of transport fuel by 2020.
• For ten years the EU has actively encouraged biofuels. The u-turn is recent. The idea was that if you only burned what you had grown, then there shouldn’t be a net increase in CO2
• However, biofuels are typically grown on land that would otherwise have been used for crops. This means that those crops have to be grown elsewhere.
• This has lead land-grabs and the displacement of indigenous peoples. From a carbon perspective, it has led to deforestation. So while growing and burning biofuels may in itself be carbon neutral, cutting down forests to do it in isn’t.
• The UK Parliament has set a target to encourage ‘second generation’ biofuels; fuels made from waste products such as corn stover (what’s left in a field after the corn is harvested)

Read the full story, with links to related content, over here

Source: Nature

The disaster in the Philippines has caused untold devastation, though relief operations are underway. Future protection methods are already being discussed, writes Gwynn Guilford:

• Most of the 3,900 people tragically killed by Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines earlier this month lost their lives to 20 foot tidal surges.
• Some areas had suffered from illegal logging prior to the typhoon, and some hadn’t. The areas that had trees remaining fared better than those where trees had been removed.
• Some 70-90% of a wave’s impact can be removed by tree buffers.
• The Philippines environment secretary is now pushing measures to replant 380 km of unprotected beach length.

The article contains a video demonstration of how trees can diminish the impact of water. See more over here

Source: Quartz

If you want to know about the hotel industry, there are few people better to ask than the just retired CEO of Marriott hotels, Bill Marriott. He revealed the following to the Economist about how the industry has changed since he started in 1957:

• The lobby has become the place to be. Modern hotel guests go to their rooms, dump their stuff and return downstairs.
• Despite this people want more space in their room. Mostly work is done from the bed with a laptop, so desks have shrunk in order to make space. Big closets have also gone as guests don’t bother to pack much…or unpack.
• The hotel has become increasingly a place to ‘entertain and be entertained’. This means a more boutique style downstairs.
• Bill offers two pieces of advice to the modern entrepreneur. The first is that business today is all about focus and specialism. If you want Wall Street to become interested, make your business easy to understand.
• The second is perhaps counter-cultural. Instead of customer focus, Bill invests in employees. Take care of them, he says, and they will take care of the customer. And then you get returning clients.

For more about what Bill considers his greatest mistake and his thoughts on opening a low-budget hotel, click over here

Source: The Economist

Toilets are great aren’t they? Tanya Lewis offers some reasons why countries without toilets suffer:

• Firstly, for reasons of improving basic hygiene. In 2012 heavy rains caused flooding in Sierra Leone that washed out the simple latrines, and meant a cholera outbreak that made 25,000 people ill.
• Trachoma is a disease that causes blindness, and is carried by a fly that breeds exclusively on human excrement. Toilets for everyone would mean less blindness, to the tune of 1.2 million fewer blind people.
• If there are no toilets, this means doing one’s business outside. Women need to travel a fair way to relieve themselves, and put them at risk of sexual violence. More toilets, safer women.
• Can you imagine being a teenage girl with no private restrooms at your school? Not likely. Private toilets increase female school attendance.

And if you’re interested in knowing what this has to do with Bill and Melinda Gates, or for an article with links to many of the issues listed above, click here

Source: Live Science

No-one is going to argue that nicotine is a health drug. But did you know it was used as a poison? Deborah Blum reports:

• In 1850, Gustave Fougnies was killed at a dinner party with his brother, the Comte de Bocarme.
• The motive was clear. The Comte de Bocarme was heavily in debt, and relying on his father’s inheritance. This, however, went to Gustave, who had recently become engaged.
• On the grounds of the Comte’s house was a greenhouse full of nicotine leaves and bodies of dead animals. This was however circumstantial, as at the time it was impossible to find nicotine in a body.
• A few years earlier, a French prosecutor had begun raging in court “Henceforth, let us tell would-be poisoners…use plant poisons. Fear nothing; your crime will go unpunished. There is no corpus delecti (physical evidence) for it cannot be found.”
• Chemist Jean Servais Stas, enraged at the abuse of his discipline, spent 3 months with samples of Gustave’s tissue. He eventually abstracted nicotine using ether, acetic acid and ethanol. Proof, at last, of nicotine’s use.
• The Comte of Bocarme’s final wish was for the guillotine’s blade to be sharp.

If you’re interested in the history of nicotine, how it compares to arsenic, and what this has to do with Michigan in 2003, click here

Source: Wired

We’ve come a long way from the biplanes of the 1920’s, guided by maps and massive concrete arrows. Pilots are now blessed with a bewildering array of automated control systems. But have things gone too far, asks Andy Pasztor?

• A series of pilots were tested in flight simulators. It was found that if the autopilot went wrong, this was noticed and aircrew intervened before things got out of hand.
• However, the Federal Administration Authority (FAA) has said that pilots “sometimes are not prepared to deal with non-routine situations”, in a soon to be released study.
• According to their research, being a pilot no longer means flying planes, so much as being an adept manager of a complicated system.
• These systems have made flying much safer. But sometimes those flying planes don’t have good situational awareness, or fail to understand what their systems are telling them. Crashes in 2009 and 2013 are suspected of being the results of these two factors.
• Over reliance on the electronics has been recognised as a problem in the industry for a long time, and this is not the first study to highlight problems.

For an article best read a suitable time after landing, look over here

Source: Wall Street Journal

Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs, are a system whereby universities around the world can gain access to the very best universities by streaming courses, participating in seminars online and then working at their home university as well. Is this the best of both worlds, asks Anya Kamenetz?

• MOOCs can trace their origins to when MIT began putting its classes online. Nothing more than a few reading lists and a video camera set up at the back of the lecture hall, but these videos got millions of visitors.
• Today MOOCs are accessed via edX (non-profit), Coursera and Udacity (for-profits). MOOCs follow a rough template of  lectures, readings, assignments, and assessment through “calibrated peer review”.
• Giving a US education to the developing world sounds great, as students are able to access to a higher level of academia than they would otherwise be able to.
• But is this at the cost of the local educational institutions? If all students around the world are able to learn from Stanford and MIT, will this mean that the host universities will never be invested in?

MOOCs are already a big deal in the developing world, and are being suggested as a way for US colleges which are low on funding to boost their classes (the suggestion of Bill Gates). For the full story, look over here

Source: Slate

Over in Britain, there have been a couple of suggestions recently to lower the age of consent from 16 to 15 or even to 13. (See the articles for the quite different reasoning behind the suggestions). But why is the age of consent 16 today?

• In 1875, the age of consent was raised from 12 to 13 in the UK.
• There wasn’t much upper-class motivation to change the age of consent. Their assumption was that among the working classes girls would be abused by their brothers and fathers anyway, so how would a law help? To change attitudes would require a scandal.
• William Stead (pictured) was a Victorian gentleman and a pioneering investigative journalist. He agreed to pay £5 (£500 today) for a night with a 13 year old virgin, who had been drugged and duped for his purposes. Stead wrote that when they met she gave “a helpless, startled scream like the bleat of a frightened lamb”
• Stead published his newspaper article, and caused public outrage. Within a week the age of consent had been raised to 16.
• Sensationalism may have helped to raise the age of consent, but it was indeed sensationalism. The 13 year old was not drugged, nor had her mother knowingly sold her into prostitution as Stead had alleged. His credibility was questioned, and he was jailed for 3 months.
• The act of parliament that raised the age of consent to 16 also closed down many brothels and, as a last minute amendment, outlawed “gross indecency” between two men; this was the law that would see Oscar Wilde sent fatally to jail in 1895.

For the full story, head over to the BBC.

Source: BBC History

Sometimes you’re lost, and use your phone to get you home. And sometimes you use a 70 foot concrete arrow.

• After World War I, there was a surplus of planes and a desire for fast postal delivery…behold air mail.
• To help guide pilots across miles of unremarkable terrain, the federal government had huge arrows made and installed, 50 or 70 foot long.
• So the mail could be moved at night, manned watchtowers were constructed next to the arrows with rotating lights, visible from altitudes of 10 miles.
• It was in the 1940’s that saw the end of our favourite pointers. A combination of the increased sophistication of radio and the need for scrap metal for the war effort meant that the beacon towers were disassembled.
• It isn’t known how many of the arrows or watchtowers still survive.

For more pictures of these long-forgotten installations, have a look over here

Source: Messy Nessy Chic