Dean Fixsen explains why he believes a global conference in Washington DC in 2011 will enable prevention scientists to leap the gap between evidence-based policies and reliably built and implemented services.

Inviting groups of children between the ages of eight and 15 from two poor and predominantly African-American neighborhoods in Baltimore and Pittsburgh to paint, draw and collage their insights into community safety claims top-class research interest. But hopes that the “Visual Voices” model might provide a breakthrough in the growth area of community-based participatory research have yet to be justified.

From the Harvard academic who worried Western societies with warnings that the essential fabric of community life was wearing out comes something worse 15 years and 9/11 later: evidence that inequalities are tearing the US remnant in two.

Tracing the neurological impact of social rejection using brain imaging technology has led Californian psychobiologists to suggest that commonplace non-prescription painkillers may be an effective treatment for emotional hurt.

“On Saturday, the bear joined me building a Kapla tower and, after that, we watched The Ice Age video that I got from my Mum and Dad as a comfort prize when I was ill…” Is a wandering teddy bear likely to get further under the skin of 21st century family life than the average prevention science researcher?

The UK city of Liverpool is the focus of an experiment that brings families and schools together in an effort to build mutually supportive neighborhood networks to help vulnerable families.

As social and emotional learning programs are introduced into the whole-school curriculum on both sides of the Atlantic, researchers in Illinois are beginning to establish which children may need them most.

Familiar statistics carry less familiar recommendations for policy and practice: to break the cycle of damaging effects that link disadvantage to maternal depression and to developmental disorders, government should invest in trials of mother and toddler therapy.

Ideas about character have been central to US developmental scientist Richard Lerner’s concept of positive youth development. Is “character education” now likely to find its way on to the policy agenda of a new UK government?

After almost a decade in the making, an impact study has come to the unsettling conclusion that the US Head Start program (uncle of the UK’s Sure Start) works … kind of …

US researchers Dean Fixsen and Karen Blase recruit an old testament prophet, a civil rights activist and the founder of the Chicago Leadership Institute to the good cause of better implementation science.

Efforts to bring enduring peace to the Basque Country of northern Spain include an experiment with classroom teaching whose principles owe much to US-made "positive youth development" initiatives.