The Guardian has a couple of (completely unrelated) articles of interest. One is on that hardy perennial, birth order. An impressively large study may finally have given us a clearer answer to a question that has been plagued with ambiguity; the study involved analyzing the entire population of Norway aged 16-74, between the years 1986 and 2000. And the conclusion was that, regardless of family size or income, first-born children do indeed do better in terms of educational achievement than their younger siblings: equivalent on average to the first child gaining an extra year of schooling compared with the third child.

The second article discusses a breakthrough by British scientists: making the first pure batch of brain stem cells from human stem cells. This may help in the fight against neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's and may also reduce the number of animals used in medical research.