Italian circus says escaped lion posed no risk

The lion that escaped from a circus near Rome posed no threat to the public, his handler insisted Sunday, as campaigners called for Italy to ban wild animals in entertainment.Residents of the seaside town of Ladispoli were told to stay indoors for more than five hours on Saturday evening while police, vets and circus staff tracked the lion, finally sedating and then capturing him.Extraordinary videos published by Italian media, apparently taken by locals, showed the fully-grown lion with a shaggy mane walking through dark and deserted residential streets, padding past parked cars.But Rony Vassallo, who is responsible for the animals in the Rony Roller Circus, said that while the thought of confronting a lion would make most people fearful, eight-year-old Kimba posed little danger.Residents of the seaside town of Ladispoli were told to stay indoors for more than five hours on Saturday evening while police, vets and circus staff tracked the lion."He met with people in an environment he wasn't used to... and nothing happened, he didn't even for a second have the instinct to attack a person," he told AFP at the circus site.He said his fear had been "that someone could have harm the animal, out of fear, or excess enthusiasm".Nearby, not far from the red and white striped main tent where preparations were under way for the afternoon show,...

Read More........→October 06, 2024

Counting on Fingers Really Helps Kids Improve Their Math Skills–By 40% New Study Shows

By Yan Krukau via Public Domain on PexelsSome teachers consider finger counting a signal that youngsters are struggling with math, while others associate its use as advanced numerical knowledge.Now, new research is the first to show that children’s performance in arithmetic can show a “huge” improvement through the teaching of a finger-counting method.Swiss and French teams explored whether finger counting can help primary-school-aged children to solve math problems. They said adults rarely use their fingers to calculate a small sum, because such behavior could be attributed to cognitive impairments or “pathological difficulties” in math.But young children under age 8 who use their fingers to solve such problems may be seen as intelligent, probably because they have already reached a level that allows them to understand that a quantity can be represented by different means.The research aimed to determine whether children who don’t count on their fingers can be trained to do so, and whether such training would result in enhanced arithmetic performance.The study, published in the journal Child Development, focused on 328 five- and six-year-old children at kindergarten, mainly living in France, and tested their abilities to solve simple addition problems.The kindergarteners were recruited through their teachers, who voluntarily took...

Read More........→September 23, 2024