Jean Piaget, the pioneering Swiss philosopher and psychologist, spent much of his professional life listening to children, watching children and poring over reports of researchers around the world who were doing the same. He found, to put it most succinctly, that children don't think like grownups. After thousands of interactions with young people often barely old enough to talk, Piaget began to suspect that behind their cute and seemingly illogical utterances were thought processes that had their own kind of ...

More than 1,500 years before the Maya flourished in Central America, 25 centuries before the Aztecs conquered large swaths of Mexico, the mysterious Olmec people were building the first great culture of Mesoamerica. Starting in 1200 B.C. in the steamy jungles of Mexico's southern Gulf Coast, the Olmec's influence spread as far as modern Guatemala, Honduras, Belize, Costa Rica and El Salvador. They built large settlements, established elaborate trade routes and developed religious iconography and rituals, including ceremonial ball games, ...

It's been just two years since Katie Couric's husband Jay Monahan died of colon cancer at age 42. Looking back, the popular co-host of NBC's Today show recalls that the only clue they had that anything might be wrong was that Monahan, who worked as a TV legal analyst, often felt tired and achy. That wasn't too surprising. He'd been busy covering O.J. Simpson's civil trial for MSNBC, shuttling back and forth between California and the home he shared in ...

Opening a teahouse in Vietnam may seem like taking coal to Newcastle. Yet the lovely views of Hanoi's West Lake from the two-story Ochao are more than matched by French founder Guillaume Le's perspective on reviving an ancient brewing art. "The Vietnam War disrupted tea production and destroyed people's knowledge about what was once a national pride," says Le, whose passion for seeking out the highest-quality specialty teas led him to quit a career as an orthopedist. Sourcing ...

When you splurge on designer shoes for your spouse this holiday season, you should double-check that they go with the rest of her wardrobe. Because if they don't, says a new study, she likely won't send you back to the store to return them. Instead, she'll just buy new clothes to make it all match, further draining that checking account already hit hard by the holidays. ...

Teacher effectiveness matters more to student learning than anything else schools do, and there are substantial differences between teachers. Those two points often get lost in the din about teachers unions or tenure. Underneath all that noise, however, researchers are quietly looking at teacher quality. Two new studies that didn't get a lot of attention challenge beliefs of reformers, teachers unions, and reform critics. In a paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, economists ...

At a San Francisco event last September, Research in Motion — the company whose BlackBerry phones rank among the most iconic gizmos of all time — announced its first tablet, the BlackBerry PlayBook. RIM played a splashy video about the device, detailed its features, and issued a press release laden with words like "unmatched," "uncompromised," and "unique." The one thing it didn't do was show off a working PlayBook — presumably because the tablet wasn't yet in ...

Harvard professor Martin Feldstein used to tell students in his introductory economics class that economists agree on 99% of the issues in the field. From the nature of monopolies to the basic laws of inflation, Feldstein asserted, economists of all political stripes are in accord on the same principles. He claimed that what we read about in the popular press are the 1% of economic issues where the data support no clear-cut conclusion. I'm pretty sure Feldstein was exaggerating the 99-1 split in economics, but ...

Too many kids are returning to the playing field too soon after a concussion. How many? According to an alarming new study, from 2005 to 2008, 41% of concussed athletes in 100 high schools across the U.S. returned to play too soon, under guidelines set out by the American Academy of Neurology. The 11-year-old guidelines say, for example, that if an athlete's concussion symptoms, such as dizziness or nausea, last longer than 15 minutes, he should be benched until he's ...

The "Great Man" theory of history is usually attributed to the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle, who wrote that "the history of the world is but the biography of great men." He believed that it is the few, the powerful and the famous who shape our collective destiny as a species. That theory took a serious beating this year. To be sure, there are individuals we could blame for the many painful and disturbing things that happened in 2006. The conflict in ...