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We only have so much cognitive capacity to spread around. It’s a scarce resource.

This understanding of the brain’s bandwidth could fundamentally change the way we think about poverty. Researchers publishing some groundbreaking findings today in the journal Science have concluded that poverty imposes such a massive cognitive load on the poor that they have little bandwidth left over to do many of the things that might lift them out of poverty – like go to night school, or search for a new job, or even remember to pay bills on time.

In a series of experiments run by researchers at Princeton, Harvard, and the University of Warwick, low-income people who were primed to think about financial problems performed poorly on a series of cognition tests, saddled with a mental load that was the equivalent of losing an entire night’s sleep. Put another way, the condition of poverty imposed a mental burden akin to losing 13 IQ points, or comparable to the cognitive difference that’s been observed between chronic alcoholics and normal adults.

The finding further undercuts the theory that poor people, through inherent weakness, are responsible for their own poverty – or that they ought to be able to lift themselves out of it with enough effort. This research suggests that the reality of poverty actually makes it harder to execute fundamental life skills. Being poor means, as the authors write, “coping with not just a shortfall of money, but also with a concurrent shortfall of cognitive resources.”

The children were taken to unknown locations. Officials ominously promised the parents that they would not be seeing their children “anytime soon.”

HSLDA obtained and translated the court documents that authorized this use of force to seize the children. The only legal grounds for removal were the family’s continuation of homeschooling their children. The papers contain no other allegations of abuse or neglect. Moreover, Germany has not even alleged educational neglect for failing to provide an adequate education. The law ignores the educational progress of the child; attendance—and not learning—is the object of the German law.

Judge Koenig, a Darmstadt family court judge, signed the order on August 28 authorizing the immediate seizure of Dirk and Petra Wunderlich’s children. Citing the parents’ failure to cooperate “with the authorities to send the children to school,” the judge also authorized the use of force “against the children” if necessary, reasoning that such force might be required because the children had “adopted the parents’ opinions” regarding homeschooling and that “no cooperation could be expected” from either the parents or the children.

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A secret budget request obtained by The Washington Post from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden lumps Israel alongside U.S. foes Iran and Cuba as “key targets” for U.S. counterintelligence efforts. The document suggests Israel does not believe U.S. assurances that its interests are aligned with Israel’s on crucial issues such as Iran and peace talks with the Palestinians.

New figures published on Thursday show 397,500 people have emigrated since Ireland’s financial crisis began in 2008, with most travelling to the UK, Australia and Canada in search of work.

Snowden, currently living in Russia under a one-year grant of asylum, passed The Washington Post the 178-page intelligence community budget request for fiscal year 2013. Among the surprises reported by Post writers Barton Gellman and Greg Miller is that the CIA receives more money than the NSA: $14.7 billion for the CIA, versus $10.8 billion for the NSA. Until this morning it’s generally been believed that the geeky NSA, with its basements full of supercomputers, dwarfed its human-oriented counterparts.

The Post published only 43 pages from the document, consisting of charts, tables and a 5-page summary written by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. The Post said it withheld the rest, and kept some information out of its reporting, in consultation with the Obama administration to protect U.S. intelligence sources and methods.

One of those methods, though, is hinted at in the Clapper summary — and it’s interesting. Clapper briefly notes some programs the intelligence agencies are closing or scaling back, as well as those they’re pouring additional funds into. Overhead imagery captured by spy satellites was slated for reduction, for example, while SIGINT, the electronic spying that’s been the focus of the Snowden leaks, got a fresh infusion.

“Also,” Clapper writes in a line marked “top secret,” “we are investing in groundbreaking cryptanalytic capabilities to defeat adversarial cryptography and exploit internet traffic.”

The Post’s article doesn’t detail the “groundbreaking cryptanalytic capabilities” Clapper mentions, and there’s no elaboration in the portion of the document published by the paper. But the document shows that 21 percent of the intelligence budget — around $11 billion — is dedicated to the Consolidated Cryptologic Program that staffs 35,000 employees in the NSA and the armed forces.

Between 2005 and 2010, about 4 percent of U.S. adults aged 20 and older popped popular prescription drugs such as Lunesta and Ambien in the previous month, say government researchers who tracked 17,000 people to their homes and peered into their medicine cabinets.

About a quarter of those studied suffered sleep problems serious enough to report to their doctors, said Yinong Chong, an epidemiologist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“They told us they had difficulty getting to sleep, or they were waking up and couldn’t get back to sleep,” said Chong, whose study is based on data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey.

The report provides the latest evidence that a good night’s sleep is becoming more elusive. In 2008, market research from Thomson Reuters found that sleeping pill prescriptions had tripled among people younger than 45. The new study offers the first look at how many people are actually taking them, Chong said.

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The permanent members of the U.N. Security Council – Russia, Britain, China, the U.S. and France – had been invited to the closed meeting. An hour later the Russian and Chinese diplomats left the meeting and headed to the Security Council’s main conference room where debates on Haiti was taking place.

Western countries may, until the end of the day, submit to the Security Council a draft resolution that will give the green light to an armed operation in Syria. Russia and China, which have the right of veto in the Security Council, have spoken up strongly against the use of force.

However Western countries have made it clear that they might take measures without waiting for the U.N. Security Council’s decision as they did in 1999 in Kosovo. Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Gennady Gatilov said this would be a gross violation of international law.

The mini-brains are less than 4mm across but researchers say that they are equivalent in development to the brain of a human foetus at about nine weeks’ gestation, and even have the complex three-dimensional structure of a real embryonic brain.

Previous attempts at growing brain tissue in a laboratory dish have focused on culturing the nerve cells in two dimensions on a flat plate of nutrients, but the latest study used a droplet of nutrient gel as a three-dimensional scaffold on which the growing brain cells organised themselves into the miniature organ.

The scientists have called the primitive brains “cerebral organoids” and have emphasised that the living structures are still far from being described as true human brains with a potential for self-awareness or consciousness – a threshold of development that would be ethically wrong to cross, they said.

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Dr Knoblich said that the organoids have already shed light on a condition called microcephaly, when the brain fails to grow to its correct size in the womb, and also could eventually help research into conditions such as autism and schizophrenia, which both involve unknown malfunctions in early brain development.

“There have been numerous attempts recently to model human brain tissue from human cells. [Scientists] have gone on to generate an eye, a pituitary gland and even a human liver, but so far the most complex of all human organs, which is the brain, has not been susceptible to these kinds of cultures,” Dr Knoblich said.

“[This technique] allows us to study the human-specific features of brain development. We can analyse the function of individual genes in a human setting. We have been able to model one disease, microcephaly, but ultimately we’d like to move to more common disorders such as schizophrenia or autism,” he said.