The UCL study also found physically punished children were more likely to struggle in school

The study, using data from 19,000 children born in the UK in the early 2000s, also found that teenagers experiencing physical punishment in early childhood were markedly more likely to bully siblings and others or engage in cyberbullying.

The effects of smacking appeared most immediately in behaviour problems among infants, while repeated experience of physical punishment at ages three, five and seven was associated with lower literacy.

Link to the study

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Their crime: handing out copies of an editorial, published in the journal Diabetes Care on April 29, sharply criticizing the Trump administration’s ongoing attacks on scientific research

At the Long Marine Laboratory in Santa Cruz, California, a 16-year-old sea lion named Ronan loves to put on a show. With her head bobbing in time to a percussive beat, she hits her marks not just with accuracy — but with flair. Her timing is so precise, researchers say, it outpaces even the best of us.

“She is incredibly precise, with variability of only about a tenth of an eyeblink from cycle to cycle,” said Peter Cook, a cognitive neuroscientist at New College of Florida and lead author of a new study out today in Scientific Reports. “Sometimes, she might hit the beat five milliseconds early, sometimes she might hit it 10 milliseconds late. But she’s basically hitting the rhythmic bullseye over and over and over again.”

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Dual-use research that leads to applications for both civilian and military or security purposes is geographically widespread and more scientifically influential than is research that has strictly civilian applications.

An analysis of data from bibliometric databases and US patent records found that 14% of 600,000 scientific papers published between 1981 and 2005 originated from dual-use research projects (see ‘Dual-use attracts attention’). The study also found that dual-use research publications are cited more than their non-dual-use research counterparts.

Experts say dismantling the ocean observation system will ‘severely degrade’ the accuracy of weather predictions

The Trump administration’s plan to dismantle an ocean observation system vital to understanding the climate crisis and marine ecosystems would “severely degrade” the accuracy of weather predictions and El Niño forecasts, with economic consequences for the US, European and American scientists have warned.

Decommissioning the US system, which plays a major part in a global ocean observation network, would lead to a massive increase in error in the annual estimates of ocean heating rates, according to research published last month.

As a result, the forecasts and early warning systems for storms, tropical cyclones and El Niño would degrade, “sometimes dangerously so”, according to Sabrina Speich, an expert in global ocean monitoring at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS) in Paris and chair of the ocean expert panel of the Global Climate Observing System.