Satellite images of eastern Myanmar (Burma) seem to corroborate reports of human-rights violations in the troubled Southeast Asian country, an international team of experts announced today.

A detailed analysis of images spanning several years pinpoints locations where villages have been burned, settlements have been relocated, and military forces have expanded their camps.

Project participants hope that the images will force the ruling military junta to account for its practices in front of the international community.

In recent days, the project team also ordered satellites to document the current military crackdown against escalating antigovernment street protests in Yangon and other cities.

The images may prove especially valuable now that phone lines and public Internet access have been shut down in the country, noted Lars Bromley, project director for AAAS.

"These images, if they come through, will be one of the few ways to really understand the level of deployment of the military regime around the cities," he said.

The people of Myanmar have been largely living in poverty, experts say, and several ethnic groups have been systematically abused or displaced.

The release of the satellite analysis comes at a time when Myanmar has drawn international attention due to a growing conflict between protestors and the military government.

A government crackdown that started this Wednesday has included raids on monasteries and shots fired into crowds. The military has reported ten fatalities, although the exact death toll is uncertain.

At least one confirmed death is that of Japanese journalist Kenji Nagai, a photographer for the AFP news service. Images smuggled out of the country seem to show Nagai being deliberately shot by a military gunman.

Din, of the U.S. Campaign for Burma, said he hopes the newly released satellite images will increase political pressure and rally other governments—including Burma's closest ally, China—to take action.

"With this satellite imagery," he said, "at least we are able to organize international activists around the world to stand together with us to put the pressure on the Chinese government to change its policy on Burma."

Related: Dalai Lama Offers Support to Myanmar Monks.

A team of scientists says it has found a string of vast, rich forests in an unexpected setting: far below the coral reefs found in the tropical Pacific Ocean. The new forests are made out of kelp plants that harbor a huge range of plants and animals. Like tropical rainforests, they may be refuges from threats posed by global climate change.

The team of American scientists says it found a vast underwater forest in an unexpected location. "These plants can grow basically down to about 100 150 feet depth and still grow to the surface," Graham said. Scientists don't know everything about how kelp forests work.

Sea creatures of every size and shape hang out inside these underwater forests, weathering storms, laying eggs and hiding from big things that want to eat them.

Graham says his computer model suggests that there are many more tropical kelp forests out there waiting to be discovered. He hopes to find the next one off the coast of Costa Rica.

While prescription medications work successfully to cure an ailment in some people, in others the same dose of the same drug can cause an adverse reaction or no response at all.

According to a research team led by Sean Cutler, an assistant professor of plant cell biology at UC Riverside, such variation in drug responses can be analyzed by studying much simpler organisms – like plants.

Focusing on Arabidopsis thaliana, a weedy plant in the mustard family, Cutler’s lab discovered a key protein in the plant that creates drug resistance. Called UGT (UDP-glycosyltransferase), the protein is a member of a family of proteins that also affect drug sensitivity in humans.

In their research, Cutler and his research team first screened and tested thousands of drug-like compounds in the lab as they searched for new inhibitors of plant growth. In the process, they discovered a new molecule, called hypostatin, which acts like a drug in inhibiting plant growth in some Arabidopsis plants. At the same time, the researchers grew Arabidopsis plants in a solution containing hypostatin, which allowed the plant cells to take up hypostatin.

Cutler and his team found that the plants’ UGT activates hypostatin by adding a sugar molecule to it. They also found that in plants that had a genetically defective UGT, hypostatin did not work properly because no sugar molecules – necessary for activating hypostatin – were added to it; in such plants, therefore, growth was not affected.

“This mechanism is very similar to that seen in humans, where altered drug sensitivity can occur because of defective or atypical sugar-tagging proteins,” Cutler said.

'I extend my support and solidarity with the recent peaceful movement for democracy in Burma,' the Dalai Lama said in a message released by the Tibet office and datelined in Dharamsala in northern India.

'I fully support their call for freedom and democracy and take this opportunity to appeal to freedom-loving people all over the world to support such non-violent movements,' he said.

'As a Buddhist monk, I am appealing to the members of the military regime who believe in Buddhism to act in accordance with the sacred dharma in the spirit of compassion and non-violence.

'I pray for the success of this peaceful movement and the early release of fellow Nobel Peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi,' he said.

The generals have normally been tough on dissent, and a crackdown on a pro-democracy uprising in 1988 left hundreds if not thousands dead.

But today's rally was the latest in more than a month of growing demonstrations against the junta since a massive fuel price hike triggered public anger.

Buddha vs the barrel of a gun by Pepe Escobar. (Asia Times Online)

Democratic Voice of Burma Myanmar protests photos.

Photographs from Rangoon. (Times Online blog)

TIMELINE-45 years of resistance and repression in Myanmar. (Reuters)

国家最高道德权威 缅甸僧侣挑战军人政权 (联合早报)

在这个近90%人口是佛教徒的国家，僧侣在人们心灵扮演重要的角色；青少年一生至少要出家一小段时期，这是他们的宗教义务，也是他们答谢父母为他们做出牺牲的方式。

　　在泰国的缅甸分析家温明说，许多青少年会在16岁以前进入寺庙见习，20岁左右再度出家。也就是说，几乎每个家庭都有成员当过和尚，这造就了一大群有组织的青年，在反政府示威中打先锋。

　　缅甸全国在任何时候都有至少40万个僧侣，其中约八成住在缅甸第二大城市曼德勒。

　　僧侣和民众在许多方面唇齿相依：僧侣依靠人们的布施，布施者则相信这么做能为来世积福积德。僧侣拒绝领受军人的布施，这一来，如英国《经济学家》指出，就可能导致后者来世不能有更好的出身。

　　另一缅甸分析家昂奈乌指出，由于军人政府的忽略，缅甸国内的学校、医院和社会福利制度都崩溃了，僧侣在填补这方面的空缺扮演越来越重要的角色。 他说：“寺庙开放园地，充当孤儿院和学校。他们也开始参与爱之病服务，以及许多社会及基层工作。”

The book, 'Nordmeer' by Gueorgui Pinkhassov.

The Arctic Sea. Despite its geographical proximity to the North Pole, this most northern sea is full of both mystery and colour. Life-threatening sub-zero temperatures, permanent ice cover, glaringly bright summer nights and fiercely dark winters combine to create both magical moments and extreme dangers. ..

Other Photo Essays from TIME:

Africa Under Water.

Life Beneath Antarctic Ice by Norbert Wu. The book, Under Antarctic Ice.

Related:

Dry Valleys of Antarctica.

Dr. Judith Beck is the Director of the Beck Institute for Cognitive Therapy and Research, Clinical Associate Professor of Psychology in Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, and author of Cognitive Therapy: Basics and Beyond.

Her most recent book is The Beck Diet Solution: Train Your Brain to Think Like a Thin Person.

Cognitive therapy, as developed by my father Aaron Beck, is a comprehensive system of psychotherapy, based on the idea that the way people perceive their experience influences their emotional, behavioral, and physiological responses. Part of what we do is to help people solve the problems they are facing today. We also teach them cognitive and behavioral skills to modify their dysfunctional thinking and actions.

I became particularly interested in the problem of overweight and was able to identify specific mindsets or cognitions about food, eating, hunger, craving, perfectionism, helplessness, self-image, unfairness, deprivation, and others, that needed to be targeted to help them reach their goal.

A unique feature is that the book doesn’t offer a diet but does provide tools to develop the mindset that is required for sustainable success, for modifying sabotaging thoughts and behaviors that typically follow people’s initial good intentions. I help dieters acquire new skills. Problems simply reflect lack of skills--skills that can be acquired and mastered through practice.

Some of the key critical skills are:

• How to motivate oneself. The first task that dieters do is to write a list of the 15 of 20 reasons why they want to lose weight and read that list every single day.
• Plan in advance and self-monitor behavior. A typical reason for diet failure is a strong preference for spontaneity. I ask people to prepare a plan and then I teach them the skills to stick to it.
• Overcome sabotaging thoughts. Dieters have hundreds and hundreds of thoughts that lead them to engage in unhelpful eating behavior.
• Tolerate hunger and craving. Overweight people often confuse the two.

The way you think about food, eating, and dieting affects your behavior and how you feel emotionally. Certain ways of thinking make it difficult to follow a diet and to maintain weight loss. The Beck Diet Solution takes you through a six-week process to change sabotaging thoughts (that cause you to stray from your diet) to helpful thinking (that will lead to success).

Related: Thinking thin can help you be thin. ‘The Beck Diet Solution’ says your mind is the key to weight loss.

In CT, therapeutic change is the result of clients confronting faulty beliefs with contradictory evidence that they have gathered and evaluated.

Is it more poisonous than a rattlesnake? Does it cause lightning strikes? And can it make a pregnant woman miscarry if she just looks at it?

These are just some of the many myths that surround the wildly misunderstood Heloderma horridum charlesbogerti — more commonly known as the Guatemalan beaded lizard. Actually, the creature is helpful to humans: Its venom is now used as an effective treatment for diabetes.

But fewer than 200 of these lizards survive — with the species in danger of extinction because of poaching and habitat conversion. The Nature Conservancy is implementing a two-pronged approach to save this important reptile:

• We're conserving the lizard’s habitat within the 50,000 acre patch of dry thorn scrub in Guatemala’s Motagua Valley.

• We're working to have it internationally recognized as an endangered species to deter poaching for collectors.

• We're educating the local community to build awareness about the creature's harmless nature and endangered status.

A Rare Species with Life-Saving Venom

• It's around 20 inches long with striking yellow markings and stripes on its tail.

• It has a long, forked tongue and belongs to the only family of venomous lizards in the world. (Its poison is not fatal to humans, but can kill small animals.)

• It endures high temperatures and long periods of drought by becoming totally inactive (a behavior known as aestivating).

• During its dormant period (from January to June), the beaded lizard survives on the food stored in its tail.

Scientists are now researching the beaded lizard's venom for other medicinal properties. But in the meantime, conservationists are trying to save this precious lizard from extinction.

Related: Red-Eyed Tree Frog: Rainforest Ambassador.

Modern pirates have long plagued Southeast Asia’s Strait of Malacca, robbing sailors, kidnapping crews, and stealing entire ships.

European colonizers and their navies brought the sultanates under control in the late 1800s, but the lanun were never eradicated. The 21st-century inheritors of their tradition continue to hunt these waters, mainly in three incarnations: gangs that board vessels to rob the crews; multinational syndicates that steal entire ships; and guerrilla groups that kidnap seamen for ransom.

Modern lanun have no shortage of targets. Each year, according to Lloyd’s of London, some 70,000 merchant vessels carrying a fifth of all seaborne trade and a third of the world’s crude oil shipments transit this critical choke point in the global economy. The strait’s geography makes it nearly unsecurable. It passes between Malaysia and Indonesia, known for thorny relations, further complicating the security picture. Some 250 miles (400 kilometers) wide at its northern mouth, the strait funnels down to about ten miles (16 kilometers) across near its southern end and is dotted with hundreds of uninhabited mangrove islands, offering endless hideouts to all manner of criminals.

“In some cases the ship’s owners dissuade the captain from reporting an attack,” he says. “They don’t want bad publicity or the ship to be delayed by an investigation.” As a result, no one knows for sure how many pirates remain active in the Malacca Strait.

I have traveled from the other side of the world to hear Johan Ariffin's story; to ask him why he became a lanun; to hear how it is possible for a handful of men to hijack a ship as large as the Nepline Delima.

The plot was hatched in a Batam coffee shop, Ariffin says, when a Malaysian shipping executive approached an Indonesian sailor named Lukman and inquired whether he could organize a crew to hijack the tanker. Ariffin, who went to sea in his teens and rose through the maritime ranks to become a mechanic, had served with Lukman on a few crews.

..

No pirate attacks had been reported in the Malacca Strait since I left. Indonesia and Malaysia had called on foreign governments to help fund their patrols. Without more resources, it is unclear how long the cash-strapped Indonesian navy will maintain its current level of vigilance.

A team led by biophysicist Jeremy Smith of the University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory has taken a significant step toward unraveling the mystery of how proteins fold into unique, three-dimensional shapes. Using ORNL's Cray XT4 Jaguar supercomputer as well as computer systems in Italy and Germany, the team revealed a driving force behind protein folding involving the way its constituents interact with water.

Proteins are the workhorses of the body, taking on a wide variety of tasks. They fight infections, turn food into energy, copy DNA and catalyze chemical reactions. Insulin is a protein, as are antibodies and many hormones.

Scientists are still very interested in deciphering how proteins work.

A protein is a string of amino acids, and what it does is determined by the shape it takes. That shape is determined by the sequence of the amino acids. Like a piece of biological origami, the protein folds itself into the form necessary to carry out its job. Without the shape the protein would be worthless.

Working on a smaller chain of amino acids known as a peptide, the group showed that the folding is determined largely by how parts of the peptide interact with water. Areas that shun water are said to be hydrophobic, and the team's results show that the way water wets these hydrophobic areas determines the ultimate shape and behavior of the peptide.

But when you get hydrophobic entities as long as several water molecules, the water molecules have a problem with that. They can't cloak themselves around the hydrophobic surface anymore, and there is a dewetting or drying effect as they are repelled from the surface.

"Our simulations have shown that Chandler's theory works for peptides, and, moreover, that the drying effect determines which structure our peptide adopts. It's kind of 'dry it off then fold it up.'"

"The runs were a couple of microseconds, which was adequate for the peptide that was simulated," Smith explained. "But the team is looking forward to increased computing capacity as it moves forward. The technique used is molecular dynamics simulation, and it needs high-performance leadership supercomputing to reach the length and timescales needed to fold a complete functional protein in the computer. With the projected capability improvements in Jaguar over the next couple of years, we will soon be approaching that goal."

Smith made it clear that the achievement would represent a watershed in the field.

"When we do eventually find out how to calculate protein structure from sequence," he said, "then a major revolution will come upon us, as we will have the basis to move forward with understanding much of biology and medicine, and the applications will range from rationally designing drugs to fit clefts in protein structures to engineering protein shapes for useful functions in nanotechnology and bioenergy."

What may seem like simple amusement for Guinness and her fellow canines is in fact revolutionizing cognitive research. Range is the first animal researcher to attempt to lure domestic dogs to a touch screen. Scientists in her field have spent decades working with pigeons pecking at pictures, conversing with apes using brightly colored touch symbols, and listening in on the grunting noises made by seals. But the talents of Canis familiaris remained largely unexplored.

"Dogs can do things that we long believed only humans had mastered," says Juliane Kaminski of the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Evolutionary Anthropology in the eastern German city of Leipzig.

"When it comes to understanding human behavior, no mammal comes even close to the dog," says Kaminski. Her Leipzig research team has demonstrated that dogs are far better than the supposedly clever apes at interpreting human gestures.

The researchers held two containers, one empty and the other containing food, in front of chimpanzees and dogs. Then they pointed to the correct container. The canines understood the gesture immediately, while the apes, genetically much more closely related to humans, were often perplexed by the pointing finger.

That's not all. Many dogs were even capable of interpreting the researcher's gaze. When the scientists looked at a container, the dogs would search inside for food, but when they looked in the direction of the container but focused on a point above it on the wall, the dogs were able to understand that this was not meant as a sign.

Dogs are so geared toward communication with people that it seems to run in their genes. Kaminski and her fellow researchers repeated the pointing experiment with six-week-old puppies. Astonishingly, even the puppies understood immediately that it was worth investigating the area the human finger was pointing to.

Range has already shown that dogs use a learning strategy -- selective imitation -- that, until recently, was believed to be unique to human children once they turned a year old. She taught her own dog to push a handle to open a food dispenser. Every dog would instinctively use its snout to push on such a device. But Guinness was only rewarded when she used her paw.

Once Guinness had learned the technique, individual dogs were brought in to observe her. If Guinness had a ball in her mouth, so that it was obvious that she could not use her snout, most of the observers pushed on the handle with their snouts. But when they saw Guinness without a ball they usually used their paws. If Guinness chose the more difficult method for no apparent reason, the dogs apparently concluded that there must be some advantage to this behavior.

Young children behave in a similar way.

Nowadays dog owners send their beloved pets to agility training, where they balance on ramps and crawl through tubes. Some dogs attend "dog dancing" sessions, and puppy training has become all the rage. "Dog education has changed," says Range.

Border collies like Rico and Guinness would probably be happiest watching over their own herds of sheep. "They simply want to work," says Range. American dog researcher Stanley Coren is convinced that the border collie is the most intelligent of the roughly 400 breeds of dog.

As clever as dogs are when it comes to all things relating to their masters, they fail miserably when logic comes into play.

The game 's objective is to put the block into the square hole by moving/flipping the block using the arrow keys. Stepping on a round switch (round button) will either connect or disconnect a bridge. There is also cross switch that is activated only when the block is standing vertically on its end. Orange tiles are broken if the block is standing vertically on it and will cause the block to fall. Stepping on a a ring switch will split the block into two and teleport the blocks somewhere. The blocks are merged back when they are placed next to each other. (use spacebar to select block) There are a total of 33 stages and the passcode can be used to load a stage.

The above stage challenges one to step on the ring switch without also stepping on the round switch (disconnects the bridge), which then allows the blocks to be merged near the hole for a drop.

Since Sky in Google Earth debuted two weeks ago to let the public explore the heavens from their computers, two University of California, Berkeley, astronomers have jumped in to populate Google's sky with the most recently discovered heavenly objects.

This week, Google posted on its Web site another layer of information users can add to their personal sky: real-time updates on new objects that flash in the heavens.

"Right out of the gate, Google Sky has become a powerful tool for the public and in the classroom," said Bloom, an assistant professor of astronomy who employed Sky in his opening lecture last week to an introductory astronomy class at UC Berkeley. "And if it works well and gets more and more of these transient events into the system, we as researchers will be using it."

Bloom and his colleagues at the California Institute of Technology and Los Alamos National Laboratory build the "cyber"-infrastructure, called VOEventNet, that allows satellites and telescopes to send astronomers, and Google, real-time information on these newly discovered transients in the sky. VOEvent is an important backbone for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, which should detect thousands of interesting transients every night. The LSST is a proposed ground-based 8.4-meter telescope that will image faint astronomical objects across the entire sky. (Targeted for completion by 2017)

"LSST answers the question, How do you do 21st century astronomy?" Bloom said. "The cutting edge won't be people going to telescopes and taking data, but terabytes and terabytes of data coming in every day, and astronomers sifting though the data for new discoveries."

VOEventNet, which allows these disparate data to be fed to Sky, was developed with funding from the National Science Foundation as a way to automate astronomy so that new observations are relayed within seconds or minutes to robotic telescopes that can quickly and automatically swivel to observe them.

Bloom expects more astronomers to take advantage of the ease of adding mash-ups to Sky in Google Earth in order to layer interesting astronomical objects over the viewing area and create personalized tours of the cosmos.

It's beautiful! 8)

They fly 50 miles per hour. Go years without touching land. Predict the weather. Mate for life. And they're among the world's most endangered birds. Can albatrosses be saved?

Scofield, of New Zealand's Canterbury Museum and co-author of Albatrosses, Petrels and Shearwaters of the World, has been studying albatrosses for more than 20 years. To research these birds is to commit oneself to months at a time on the isolated, storm-lashed but utterly spectacular specks of land on which they breed.

All but 2 of the 21 albatross species recognized by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature are described as vulnerable, endangered or, in the case of the Amsterdam and Chatham albatrosses, critically endangered. The scientists hope that the data they gather may save some species from extinction.

Scofield said. He and Moniz were planning to stay three weeks on the Pyramid (a storm-swept rock in New Zealand's Chatham Islands), and they hoped to deploy the popsicle-size GPS logger—tracking devices on a dozen breeding adults to track their movements at sea.

Albatrosses are masters of soaring flight, able to glide over vast tracts of ocean without flapping their wings. So fully have they adapted to their oceanic existence that they spend the first six or more years of their long lives (which last upwards of 50 years) without ever touching land.

Albatrosses can plunge into only the top few feet of the ocean, for squid and fish. The lengthy albatross "chickhood" is an adaptation to a patchy food supply: a slow-maturing chick needs food less often than a fast-maturing one. (Similarly, the prolonged adolescence—around 12 years in wandering albatrosses—is an extended education during which birds prospect the oceans, learning where and when to find food.) The chick's nutritional needs cannot be met by a single parent. Mate selection, therefore, is a critical decision, and is all about choosing a partner that can bring home the squid.

In Buller's albatrosses the search for a partner takes several years. It begins when adolescent birds are in their second year ashore, at about age 8. They spend time with potential mates in groups known as gams, the albatross equivalent of singles bars. In their third year ashore, males stake a claim to a nest site and females shop around, inspecting the various territory-holding males. "Females do the choosing, and their main criterion seems to be the number of days a male can spend ashore—presumably a sign of foraging ability," says Stahl.

Pairs finally form in the fourth year ashore. Albatross fidelity is legendary; in southern Buller's albatrosses, only 4 percent will choose new partners. In the fifth year, a pair may make its first breeding attempt. Breeding is a two-stage affair. "Females have to reach a sufficiently fat state to trigger the breeding feeling and return to the colony," says Paul Sagar of New Zealand's National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research. "When they are back, the local food supply determines whether or not an egg is produced."

Because it takes so long for the birds to produce a chick, albatross populations are keenly vulnerable to threats on their breeding islands.

Yet the most pernicious threats to albatrosses today are not to chicks but to adult birds. This is not just because of the efficiency of modern fishing practices but because fishing equipment—hooks, nets and trawl wires—inflict a heavy toll of injury and death. John Croxall, a seabird scientist with the British Antarctic Survey says, knowledge of the birds' distribution at sea and their foraging patterns is "critical to their conservation."

GPS loggers can give a bird's position to within a few yards. Some loggers also have temperature sensors. By attaching them to the legs of their study birds, scientists can tell when the birds are flying and when they are resting or feeding on the sea, because the water is generally cooler than the air.

Individuals of some species circumnavigate the globe, covering 500 miles a day at sustained speeds of 50 miles per hour. And then they somehow find their way home—even when home is an outpost in the ocean like the Pyramid, not much bigger than an aircraft carrier. Because the birds maintain their course day and night, in cloudy weather and clear, scientists believe they use some kind of magnetic reckoning to fix their position relative to the earth's magnetic field.

The birds also seem able to predict the weather. Southern Buller's albatrosses were found to fly northwest if a low-pressure system, which produces westerly winds, was imminent, and northeast if an easterly wind-producing high-pressure system prevailed. The birds typically chose their direction 24 hours prior to the arrival of the system, suggesting they can respond to barometric cues.

There are no reliable figures for the number of birds killed per year through contact with commercial fishing operations, but estimates for the Southern Ocean are in the tens of thousands. However, there is some evidence to suggest that fisheries may benefit albatross populations: a ready supply of discarded fish reduces competition for food between and within albatross species and provides an alternative food source to predatory birds such as skua, which often attack albatross chicks.

In albatrosses—long-lived, slow-maturing species that produce a single chick every one to two years—the long-term negative impact of adult death far outweighs the short-term benefit of chick survival. It may take three, four or even five successful chick rearings to compensate for the death of just one parent, says Stahl. He calculates that "even small increases in adult mortality can wipe out the benefit of tons of discards fed to chicks."

One albatross population that has unashamedly been propped up is the colony of endangered northern royal albatrosses at Taiaroa Head, near the city of Dunedin, on New Zealand's South Island. Taiaroa Head is one of the only places in the world where a visitor can get close to great albatrosses. The colony is tiny, with only 140 individuals, and the breeding effort is managed assiduously—"lovingly" would not be too strong a word.

Royal albatross chicks are nest-bound for nine months. Providing meals for these chicks is so demanding that the parents take a year off before breeding again. Lyndon Perriman, the senior ranger, described to me some of the ingenious techniques used to maximize reproductive success. ..

Scientists have worked out why mosquitoes make a beeline for certain people but appear to leave others almost untouched.

Specific cells in one of the three organs that make up the mosquito’s nose are tuned to identify the different chemicals that make up human body odour.

To the mosquito some people’s sweat simply smells better than others because of the proportions of the carbon dioxide, octenol and other compounds that make up body odour.

The researchers believe the discovery of the way the mosquito smells will lead to the development of a new generation of repellents that would block mosquitoes’ nose - preventing them finding humans prey - within five to 10 years.

While helping those people who always seem to get bitten and people with allergic reactions to bites, such substances could also save millions of lives in the fight against malaria, most prevalent life-threatening disease in the world.

Mosquitoes use three organs to smell and taste – a feathery antenna which can identify a wide range of different chemicals, a proboscis used for short-range detection and the maxillary palp for longer range smelling.

Malaria infects some 650 million people per year worldwide and kills between one and three million, mostly young children in Sub-Saharan Africa.

The work is part of a large international collaboration led by the US National Institutes of Health aimed at developing a chemical strategy to combat the spread of malaria in the developing world.

陈有利博士：学校有 “太多的测验，太少的教育”.

.. 赖炎燕并没有这方面的烦恼，对她来说，学校不是唯一教好孩子的途径，她宁愿让孩子在家——在趋于理想的学习环境，以最适合自己的速度和方式，用最丰沛的学习能量汲取营养。

赖炎燕是本地少数选择“家学”（homeschooling）的家长之一。她在大学主修电脑系统分析，现为全职数学补习老师。先生许维龙从事房地产业，夫妻俩对子女的教育有共识，选择在家教育孩子，而放弃学校教育。

“家学”在本地并不普遍。所谓“家学”，是指不进入主流教育体制，而靠家庭和社会资源的学习方式，在西方国家相当普遍。据《纽约时报》报道，2003年，美国就有110万名学童在家上学，每年的增长率介于7%到15%。在新加坡，这个数目少之又少，根据教育部资料，过去五年在家接受教育的小学生（7岁至11岁）有200人。

家长们发现，大规模集体统一教育虽能普及民智，但因为是“集体教育”，很难因材施教，而且在全国教育政策下，不得不使用一套固定的教育理论，久而久之，难免失于偏颇。

赖炎燕说：“我因为工作关系经常跟学生接触，发现他们不管来自什么背景或学校，都对学习感到厌倦。功课把他们压得喘不过气，使他们没有时间去感受生活的意义和生命的精彩。我觉得这很可悲，我不想让我的孩子也陷入这种深渊。”

让孩子在家接受教育的好处在于提供孩子有别于约定俗成的学习环境与动力，而不会因为既有的学习机制，而限制了孩子的独特性与发展潜能。赖炎燕说：“家学不同，它非常灵活，我可以按照孩子的能力为他设计教学内容，也可以控制教学进度，还可以让他学到一些学校不教的东西。”

赖炎燕认为，制式教育最明显的缺失是，只注重知识、技能的传授，却忽略了人本与生活教育。然而知识永远学不完，教育的目的应该是教导孩子如何寻找、运用知识与资讯的能力，了解人与大自然的关系，以及如何欣赏音乐、文学、绘画、艺术，激发他们的想象力和创造力，并培养他们照顾自己、关怀别人的能力。

赖炎燕说：“比起学业成绩，我更注重孩子的品格，因此我先生每天都会花半小时跟孩子一起学习哲学，好比池田大作的每日指导。” 许家没有电视，也不需要电视，孩子每天的作息都有一套时间表：大声朗读故事和论语，学习绘画和数学，或者到野外做科学实验、劳作及游戏。“我们很注重孩子的游戏时间，对我们来说，学习不一定需要课本，活学活用才能让孩子享受学习的乐趣，而不是压力。”

陈博士觉得给孩子多一点时间和空间去探索和思考是重要的。然而，现有的制度让我觉得学校只注重最后的成绩和排名，而不是过程，也很少关心学生的身心健康。” 不同孩子用不同感官来学习。陈博士认为，学校的教育模式并不适合所有孩子，因为大部分学校只提供以听觉为主的学习方式。

新加坡的家学社群经常有往来，并定期举办群体活动，如参观博物院、科学馆、动物园，举办郊游、手工艺训练班或音乐会等，让家学的孩子频繁接触和往来。

赖炎燕说：“我们经常在家举行聚会，孩子们还自发成立自己的游戏俱乐部，群育活动的品质一点也不比一般学校的差。此外，他们因为不用上学，接触社会的机会更多，沟通能力和实际生活的技能，要比同龄的孩子来得强。”

新加坡家学社群网站为www32.brinkster.com/singaporehg/，提供许多相关的家学教材和各种活动咨询。