Features Angleton Texas ISD dual-language program that pairs 10 English-speaking students with 10 native Spanish-speaking students in classes that divide their day between English and Spanish instruction. learn Spanish

The Governor wants to cut $700 million out of the public education budget.

School administrators across Virginia face extraordinarily difficult choices, as they ponder what to cut.

This week, we look at the kinds of programs that may not make the cut in Roanoke.

Shelly Moses is putting her students through the paces in Spanish class at Grandin Court Elementary.

11-year-old Jack Vance and his classmates are getting an early start on a foreign language.

Along with the rest of these 5th graders, Jack reads well above his grade level, just as Lee Pritchard does. Lee enjoys knowing how to talk to the waiter in a Mexican restaurant. "We went to El Rodeo. We had to order what we wanted in Spanish. It was cool," says Pritchard. "After the 7th or 8th grade, they just cannot get that pronunciation. And you heard them, I always tell them you sound like 'nativos' and they do so well, because in Spanish classes in middle and high school, they don't try as hard because they think it's silly," says Elementary Spanish Teacher Shelly Moses.learn spanish

Handwriting recognition reaches new levels. Linderman and colleagues have figured out how to translate electrical impulses from muscles in the forearm and hand into written language. Using pattern-recognition algorithms and a technique called electromyography, the researchers can recognize and reproduce a person’s unique handwriting pattern from the movement of their hands. Eventually, they hope to create a fingerless glove equipped with electrode sensors that can automatically translate hand motions into digital or handwritten text. “You can write in the air, can write on any surface, can write using a pen or pencil or even without,” said Linderman, “and this will be converted into text on the display of a cellphone or computer.”

When breast cancer develops during pregnancy, its diagnosis and treatment of are often delayed. As a result, the woman's long-term survival may be jeopardized, doctors at the University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center report.

The recommendation is certain to add a level of complexity to one of the most vexing debates in medicine: how men older than 50 should deal with the threat of prostate cancer. Each year, about 200,000 Americans are diagnosed with the disease, and about 29,000 die. A host of complications and controversies attend nearly every dimension of the disease, from prevention to diagnosis to treatment.