Trying to Learn a Foreign Language? Avoid Reminders of Home – ScienceNOW

Reminders of one’s homeland can hinder the ability to speak a new language. The findings could help explain why cultural immersion is the most effective way to learn a foreign tongue and why immigrants who settle within an ethnic enclave acculturate more slowly than those who surround themselves with friends from their new country.

ScienceNow

Mindfulness can increase wellbeing and reduce stress in school children

Mindfulness — a mental training that develops sustained attention that can change the ways people think, act and feel — could reduce symptoms of stress and depression and promote wellbeing among school children, according to a new study published online by the British Journal of Psychiatry.

Science News

Legal Prostitution and Sex Trafficking: From The Annals Of Bad Economic Research

Over here in Europe there’s been something of a scare campaign going on over “sex trafficking”. This is the idea that brutes and gangsters trick or force women into moving country and then hold them in sexual slavery: usually being forced to work as prostitutes. There’s been all sorts of research trying to look into how much this actually happens. Some says it’s pretty much non-existent, others that it’s a substantial minority of the whole sex industry. The truth is that people are simply using different definitions of what is “trafficking”. And it’s there that the entire subject becomes a complete and total mess.

Forbes