Here is an interesting site that I came across while searching for something else.
It’s a list of roughly 1,400 common mistakes with a concise clarification of each.

Common Errors in English

Books English, Grammar

Dyscalculia is a learning disability that affects only mathematical ability. While otherwise intelligent, those affected by dyscalculia have trouble, among other things, establishing a connection between a set of object and the numeric symbol by which the set would be represented.

New Scientist magazine explorers the mathematical learning disability in detail in a recent article.

Math Intelligence, Math, mental math

It seems that the generally accepted belief, and that to which I subscribe, is that intelligence is immutable. There exists, at this point, no exercise or training program that improve your IQ.

A paper, however, by Susanne M. Jaeggi, Martin Buschkuehl, John Jonides, and Walter J. Perrig, titled “Improving fluid intelligence with training on working memory” suggests that this might not be the case.

In their research, they were able to demonstrate that those who trained with a simple dual n-back game succeeded in substantially improving their gF score on intelligence tests.

If you’d like to try, the game can be found here.

If you’d rather downoad a copy of the game, an offline version is available here.

General Science Intelligence

This image was produced by combining infrared images taken during 144 orbits of the Hubble Space Telescope with images captured by the Spitzer Space Telescope.

The Hubble’s contribution to the panoramic image, which was released yesterday at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society, covers an area near the center of the Milky Way roughly 300 by 115 light years in size and is ten times sharper than the sections previously captured by the Spitzer Space Telescope. Astronomers use infrared light to capture images of this section of the galaxy as it is largely unaffected by dust in the region, whereas visible wavelengths are, for the most part, scattered and absorbed.

The sharper image reveals approximately 600,000 stars. The majority of the massive stars near the center of the Milky Way are found near its black hole or in either the Quintuplet or Arches star clusters, so it came as a surprise to find a new population of roughly 200 massive stars that appear to be in isolation.

The black hole, which appears in the image as a bright spiral within a torus of dust and gas, may be the reason for the rogue stars. Its approximate weight of 4 million Suns would produce such a massive gravitational force that it may have scattered the stars as it tore apart clusters that once occupied the surrounding region. Researchers are, however, unsure if the black hole is to blame or if the stars were simply born outside of the typical clusters.

Image credits: Hubble image: NASA/ESA/Q D Wang/UMass Amherst; Spitzer image: NASA/JPL/S Stolovy/Spitzer Science Center/Caltech

General Science Astronomy, Hubble

Everyone loves top ten lists and Aaron Rowe just published a great one on WIRED Science yesterday.

You can find the article here.

General Science Top Ten