An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: The teenage brain has been characterized as a risk-taking machine, looking for quick rewards and thrills instead of acting responsibly. But these behaviors could actually make teens better than adults at certain kinds of learning. "In neuroscience, we tend to think that if healthy brains act in a certain way, there should be a reason for it," says Juliet Davidow, a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University in the Affective Neuroscience and Development Lab and the lead author of the study, which was published Wednesday in the journal Neuron. But scientists and the public often focus on the negatives of teen behavior, so she and her colleagues set out to test the hypothesis that teenagers' drive for rewards, and the risk-taking that comes from it, exist for a reason. When it comes to what drives reward-seeking in teens, fingers have always been pointed at the striatum, a lobster-claw-shape structure in the brain. When something surprising and good happens -- say, you find $20 on the street -- your body produces the pleasure-related hormone dopamine, and the striatum responds. But the striatum isn't just involved in reward-seeking. It's also involved in learning from rewards, explains Daphna Shohamy, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute at Columbia University who worked on the study. She wanted to see if teenagers would be better at this type of learning than adults would. To test this, Shohamy and her colleagues used an fMRI scanner to watch brain activity in a group of adults and teenagers. They were looking at the striatum, but also in a different part of the brain called the hippocampus. The hippocampus (which looks like, and is named after, a seahorse) helps people remember things like dates and times: the who, what, when and where. As the adults and teens had their brains scanned, they played a game that rewarded players for guessing correctly. Between questions, participants saw random pictures of neutral objects. As expected, the reward-hungry teenagers figured out the game faster than the adults did. Surprisingly, the striatum was equally active in both teenagers and adults. But in teens, it also worked closely with their hippocampus.

A while ago you had the chance to ask amateur scientist, and author of the Getting Started in Electronics and the Engineer's Mini-Notebook series, Forrest Mims, a number of questions about science, engineering, and a lifetime of educating and experimenting. Below you'll find his detailed answers to those questions.

Frequent Slashdot Contributor Bennett Haselton writes in "A federal judge rules that a student can seek attorney's fees against a high school principal who suspended her for a Facebook page she made at home. Good news, but how could the school have thought they had the right to punish her for that in the first place? Posing the question not rhetorically but seriously. What is the source of society's attitudes toward the free-speech rights of 17-year-olds?"

Lucas123 writes "More than half of all Americans visited a library this past year and, of those, most were from Generation Y, the tech-loving young adults aged 18-30 years, according to a recent survey. The reason most cited for visiting their local public archive? Not books. Most were seeking gaming software programs, characters in the Second Life virtual world and online help with homework."
Another way to think about the results: about 47 percent of Americans didn't visit a library even once last year.

The history of videogames is a subject that has been remarkably well documented. From Pong to the launch titles of the 360, games have always had historians. Now that gaming is taking its place beside movies and music as a recognized art form, new players have to be informed of the hobby's past. Smartbomb: The Quest for Art, Entertainment, and Big Bucks in the Videogame Revolution tells the tale of modern gaming's formation via the personal stories of the people who make them. It's a well-considered look at the early days and recent history of interactive entertainment. Read on for my impressions of a book with not only a sense of history, but a handle on what's fun.

Liza writes: "The FCC issued a Notice of Proposed Rule-Making today, implementing the mandatory filtering requirements for schools and libraries. People should know that this applies to all schools and libraries that receive "E-Rate" discounts for Internet access, Internet service, or internal connections." More of Ms. Kessler's comments below; but you'll want to see the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking first. The ALA's guide to the law has some good information. For nearly every U.S. reader: this law will affect your local library. Go talk to them. Get involved.

This is the last in our retrospective on the columns that Jon Katz began writing after the killings at Columbine High School in 1999, followed by another handful of the many impassioned comments and emails that those columns drew, a few of which at least give hope that it is possible to tame the Hellmouth.

Here are some more of the Slashdot comments (and sobering e-mails) that Jon Katz inspired when he started writing about the frustrations of high-school life in Voices From The Hellmouth and subsequent columns.

Relax -- You're human. A UCLA study has seriously debunked concerns that the Net has dehumanized America. Nearly two-thirds of Americans have ventured online, and a significant majority deny that the Net creates social isolation. Parents say their Net-using kids don't suffer poorer grades, and almost everybody says the Net connects them to family and friends in a "positive" way. The study has other interesting findings about Net use. You might want to commit it to memory.

If you're looking for a political issue that will advance freedom, support the growth and innovation of technology, support younger geeks (and adults) who depend on libraries for access to the Net and Web, and also strike a blow against the Luddites who dominate Congress and media, there's a great cause for you: your local library needs some help. Enlightened educators and librarians are seeking help in blocking imminent federal legislation that would require the installation of filtering software on all school and library computers connected to the Net.

Unlike any previous information conduits, Open Media are conceived, developed and dominated by the young, especially college kids with access to high-speed bandwidth and teenagers with lots of time and expertise. Change or die time. Third in a series.

dantes asks: "As the managing Internet engineer for a large commercial entertainment site, I am wondering what measures people are taking to deal with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), which goes into effect April 21, 2000. A description of who must comply from the FTC Web site: "If you operate a commercial Web site or an online service directed to children under 13 that collects personal information from children or if you operate a general audience Web site and have actual knowledge that it collects personal information from children, you must comply with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act." I have run this by higher-ups and our lawyers here and have received little to no response. I would prefer to not have to re-write our registration functionality on the 20th of April. I have theorized a bunch of tricks including simply not saving information for users who represent themselves as younger than 13; my thinking is that we will be able to use our source code and our data to defend our policy should the need arise. Any other ideas?" Will most online registration forms need to be changed for this? Is it even something that deserves worrying about?

Senator and GOP presidential frontrunner of the week John McCain (R-Ariz.) gave a little talk this afternoon practically in the Geek Compound's back yard. Billed by a local group as a town meeting on censorware, with handouts on "Internet porn filters" passed around beforehand, this roving reporter was dying to find out what would be said. Click for more...

The United States loves to see itself as the cradle of liberty, but when it comes to sex, America mostly demonstrates its prudishness and hypocrisy. Sex is our national taboo.The Net, our new national taboo-buster, along with a spate of new laws and court rulings, have all taken this national phobia to meltdown. Are free speech and the online liberation of sexuality incompatible?

Our interview guests this week are American Jim Tyre and Australian Irene Graham. Both are long-time, well-known online free speech and anti-censorware activists; links from Monday's call for questions can tell you all about them. Anyway, here are their answers to your questions. They'll tell you everything you ever wanted to know about censorware and why it's not a good thing. There are also a lot of good tips about online and political activism in general contained in their answers; you may want to read this to pick up on those even if censorware and free speech aren't your personal "hot button" issues. (mucho more below)

No surprise that Friday's The Message from Seattle column drew some heat here. But as happened after Columbine last year, the resulting testimony and e-mail - about Seattle (and Slashdot, too, which has become a model for some of the protester's software) - was powerful. Here are some of those perspectives, and a bonus -- you can listen to the riots in realtime with WinAmp:

Thanks to the miracle of e-mail and a few administrators outraged at the latest law enforcement intrusion into American schools, we present below the FBI's Geek Profile, the agency's secret checklist of potentially violent characteristics being distributed to educational institutions in the United States and Canada. I'm turning myself in.

More stories from the Hellmouth that is High School for many bright, individualistic American kids continued to pour in yesterday. They are jarring testimonials from kids, adults, men and women. In the past four days, I've gotten well over 2000. These stories, many of them painful and engraged, tell us more about what happened in Littleton, Colorado -- a lot more -- than the dumb, exaggerated, frightening alarms about video games, Goths and geek monsters pouring out of much of the mainstream media. Update: 04/27 07:44 by CT : Sharon Isaak from Dateline NBC wants to get in touch with folks to do a story on this subject for this show. She's specifically seeking Jay of the Southeast, Anika78 of suburban Chicago, ZBird of New Jersey, Dan in Boise, Idaho, but he'd also like anyone who's been targetted as a result of this thing to contact her. Wonder if they make ya wear pancake makeup...