Your brain is like a muscle: use it and make it strong

for playing basketball, or to make more abstract comparisons, like deciding whether the purple ball or yellow ball is heavier to solve the puzzle above. With good reasoning skills, you can learn new things more easily, both at school and in your favorite hobbies. These skills help you to: (1) make sense of new information by linking it to other things that you already know, (2) understand the point of a story or problem and how this can be applied in a different context, and (3) notice when something does not make sense or goes against something else that you have heard There are many different parts of the brain that you use when you are reasoning. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is one method that researchers use to investigate what the different parts of Look at the puzzle in To solve this puzzle, you must use your reasoning skills. Reasoning allows you to compare objects, like when deciding which shoes would be bette

EU Agro Biogas Project

EU-AGRO-BIOGAS is a European Biogas initiative to improve the yield of agricultural biogas plants in Europe, to optimise biogas technology and processes and to improve the efficiency in all parts of the production chain from feedstock to biogas utilisation. Leading European research institutions and universities are cooperating with key industry partners in order to work towards a sustainable Europe. Fourteen partners from eight European countries are involved. EU-AGRO-BIOGAS aims at the development and optimisation of the entire value chain – to range from the production of raw materials, the production and refining of biogas to the utilisation of heat and electricity

Seven easy steps to open science: An annotated reading list

The open science movement is rapidly changing the scientific landscape. Because exact definitions are often lacking and reforms are constantly evolving, accessible guides to open science are needed. This paper provides an introduction to open science and related reforms in the form of an annotated reading list of seven peer-reviewed articles, following the format of Etz, Gronau, Dablander, Edelsbrunner, and Baribault (2018). Written for researchers and students-particularly in psychological science-it highlights and introduces seven topics: understanding open science; open access; open data, materials, and code; reproducible analyses; preregistration and registered reports; replication research; and teaching open science. For each topic, we provide a detailed summary of one particularly informative and actionable article and suggest several further resources. Supporting a broader understanding of open science issues, this overview should enable researchers to engage with, improve, and implement current open, transparent, reproducible, replicable, and cumulative scientific practices

Developing adaptive control:Age-related differences in task choices and awareness of proactive and reactive control demands

Developmental changes in executive function are often explained in terms of core cognitive processes and associated neural substrates. For example, younger children tend to engage control reactively in the moment as needed, whereas older children increasingly engage control proactively, in anticipation of needing it. Such developments may reflect increasing capacities for active maintenance dependent upon dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. However, younger children will engage proactive control when reactive control is made more difficult, suggesting that developmental changes may also reflect decisions about whether to engage control, and how. We tested awareness of temporal control demands and associated task choices in 5-year-olds and 10-year-olds and adults using a demand selection task. Participants chose between one task that enabled proactive control and another task that enabled reactive control. Adults reported awareness of these different control demands and preferentially played the proactive task option. Ten-year-olds reported awareness of control demands but selected task options at chance. Five-year-olds showed neither awareness nor task preference, but a subsample who exhibited awareness of control demands preferentially played the reactive task option, mirroring their typical control mode. Thus, developmental improvements in executive function may in part reflect better awareness of cognitive demands and adaptive behavior, which may in turn reflect changes in dorsal anterior cingulate in signaling task demands to lateral prefrontal cortex

The Quincunx as Architectural Structure. Geometry and Digital Reconstructions After Leonardo Da Vinci’s Centralized Plan Temples

The success of the Quincunx plan in the religious architecture of 15th and 16th century Italy is generally related to the suggestions coming from some monumental sacred buildings, from the places where these buildings are located and their ancient and oriental origin. Added to this, this scheme demonstrated an ability to adapt to different sites and themes and to be contaminated by forms and types coming from distant sources. Some of Leonardo da Vinci’s studies on centralized temples, which are collected in the Codex B at the Institute de France, in the Codex Ashburnham 2037, and in the Codex Atlanticus, testify above all the value of the Quincunx as a flexible geometric and compositional device with great semantic and didactic potential, providing a medium for the subsequent 16th century developments by Bramante and his Roman followers