Almost every child has heard the classic tale of Pinocchio, his growing nose teaching them at a young age that lying is a vice. Nasal implications aside, new research suggests that common childhood lies — like blaming the cat for knocking over the family heirloom, or pointing the finger at one’s younger sibling for taking the last cookie out of the cookie jar — may actually have long-lasting benefits for children.

Dr. Kang Lee, director of the Institute of Child Study at University of Toronto, found that children who lie more frequently at the age of two will tend to have 

faster brain development and lead more successful lives

 as they mature. Lying is a cognitive skill that depends on high-level reasoning, and the ability to fabricate a credible lie requires 

 and strong mental faculties, whether integrating information from a variety of sources or misconstruing the facts in a believable fashion. After analyzing 1,200 children between the ages of two and sixteen, Dr. Lee and his team concluded that children who lie possess stronger 

 the social cognitive ability to be in control emotionally and mentally.

Not only is the ability to tell convincing lies related to mature social and cognitive skills, but the inability to lie successfully is actually harmful.

As children fib with greater frequency, they are 

simultaneously developing cognitively and socially

. To craft a successful lie, children need to understand that others perceive situations differently and thus, they need to reorient their own perspective through the eyes of another. Also known as the “Theory of Mind,” this concept is the recognition that others have beliefs and understandings that are different from one’s own. Children who are in preschool and kindergarten begin to develop this skill, but as they mature, they gradually learn how to lie more persuasively.

In another study, psychologists at the University of Sheffield observed 135 children and noticed that children who lie 

performed better in cognitive tests than their more honest counterparts

. The Sheffield psychologists reasoned that the children who lied had better results because telling a convincing lie involves advanced memory skills in order to avoid revealing the truth.

Similar results can be found in a 2002 study in 

International Journal of Behavioral Development

, when small children were questioned about lies they made, 74 percent of them gave away the truth. However, as the children mature, they will gain better control of their verbal and nonverbal cues, becoming better liars. Lying at an early age gives children a head start on developing verbal memory. One of the lead researchers of the Sheffield team summarized that their research “shows that thought processes, specifically verbal working memory, are important to complex social interactions like lying because the children needed to juggle multiple pieces of information while keeping the researcher’s perspective in mind.”

Not only is the ability to tell convincing lies related to mature social and cognitive skills, but the inability to lie successfully is actually harmful. A study published by 

 in 1999 concluded that adolescents who tell less believable lies tend to often have worse social skills than their counterparts.

The bottom line all these researchers come to is that if parents catch their child in a lie, they should not be alarmed — in fact, their child most likely has an excellent memory and key critical thinking skills.

“Lying children will grow up to be successful citizens,”

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While many parents are alarmed by the lies their children tell, recent studies suggest that dishonest children simply possess stronger memory and cognitive faculties.

From lying children to successful adults

To Western ears, the date of September 1 sounds benign. In Japan, however, it carries a mournful burden. It’s the date that many of Japan’s schools reopen after summer vacation. It’s also the day that Japanese children are most likely to kill themselves.

A recent study published by Japan’s Cabinet Office

 examined the country’s more than 18,000 child suicides from 1972–2013 and found that 131 of those suicides occurred on September 1 — 32 more suicides than the next most-frequent date of death. 

, the study found distinctly larger numbers of suicides at the end of August and beginning of September, as well as during the middle of April. The former coincides with schools reopening after summer vacation; the latter, 

The numbers are glaring. Japan’s overall suicide rate is roughly 60 percent higher than the global average, a 2014 World Health Organization report noted. In 2014 alone, 

25,000 Japanese people took their own lives

 — roughly 70 suicides every day. Last year, suicide was the leading cause of death for Japanese children between the ages of 10 and 19. 

Among teens and young adults ages 10–24,

 there are roughly 4,600 suicide deaths in each year, and another 157,000 instances of hospitalization for self-inflicted injuries.

Suicide has a different role in Japan’s cultural heritage than it does in the West. For centuries, 

, a form of ritual suicide, was enshrined in Japan’s samurai code as a way for the famed warriors to avoid capture and retain some semblance of chivalry when shame or guilt was meted. Such was the cultural touchstone that could give rise to kamikaze pilots during World War II. Unlike in Western nations, where 

Christian doctrine has declared suicide a sin since St. Augustine wrote 

 in the fifth century, in Japan suicide is seen “as a way of taking responsibility,” 

, a psychologist at Tokyo’s Temple University.

That helps to explain the overall society’s high suicide rate. But even as the suicide rate for Japan’s general population has declined, it has still increased among Japan’s school-aged population. According to research by Hokkaido University professor Kenzo Denda, 1 in 12 Japanese elementary school-aged children, and 1 in 4 junior high school students suffer from clinical depression.

Some officials theorize that school-related problems, such as bullying, contribute to the country’s youth suicide crisis. For the victims of bullying, the return to school after a long vacation break can be wrenching. After gathering suicide notes from cases in 2006, police noticed a drastic increase in the number of students who blame overarching school pressures as the primary source of their problems. These school-related problems affect children of all ages more or less equally, whether those students were in elementary school or high school.

Additionally, the dynamic of collective thinking — the centripetal force of Japan’s society, wherein individual identity is sacrificed for the functioning benefit of a greater collective — results in the stigmatization of uniqueness, effectively placing a target on students who don’t fit in one way or another. 

As child psychiatrist Dr. Ken Takaoka explained to CNN

, schools prioritize this collectivism, and “children who do not get along in a group will suffer.”

, a form of social withdrawal, augment the problem further. Hikikomori causes some to feel isolated and as though they lack access to resources to vent. Lacking an outlet, students believe that they are not allowed to complain, and instead internalize their problems rather than seek help. Consequently, they have difficulty expressing emotions like anger and depression, which prevents those emotions from being processed in a healthy way, while concealing mental health issues from the outside world.

Even the basics of Japan’s mental health system are profoundly underdeveloped. 

, already short on psychiatrists, suffers even more because the country’s psychiatrists rarely coordinate with clinical psychologists, and the country does not offer any government-mandated training programs for clinical psychologists to earn official certification.

In an attempt to curb the youth suicide problem, Japanese officials have tried to open up a public discussion about mental health, but thus far, these attempts have fallen short. NGOs have contributed to the effort, with similarly lackluster results. Futoko Shimbun, a Japanese nonprofit organization, encourages students who are victims of bullying to stay home from school — a rather misguided effort indicative of a deep cultural discomfort with mental health issues.

While Japan faces abnormally high rates, the issue of youth suicide is not foreign to other nations. According to a 2014 

United Nations report, a suicide is committed somewhere in the world once every forty seconds

, accumulating to more than 800,000 suicides each year. According to the World Health Organization, suicides make up 15 percent of all violent deaths globally, meaning suicides amount to five times as many violent deaths each year than all the violent deaths in war.

For Japan, as any nation, there is no easy answer to reducing suicide. The Japanese government aims to 

reduce the country’s suicide rate by twenty percent by the year 2025

, but it remains unclear how exactly it plans to make that happen.

“Japan School Children Suicides: After Vacation, Many Young Students Kill Themselves, Study Finds,”

“Why does Japan have such a high suicide rate?”

“Child suicides tend to occur at end spring or summer school holidays: study,”

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As the suicide rate surges among Japanese schoolchildren, no one is able to offer a clear solution to the alarming phenomenon. 

The mystery behind Japan’s high suicide rates among kids

 as a beacon of energy —literally, not metaphorically. As more than 9 million visitors walk through the Paris museum each year, the building could be passively providing power to the entire city. 

Thanks to researchers at Michigan State University

, this futuristic image of the world may soon become an accessible reality.

As the cost of installing solar panels has dropped, 

, solar panels have become an increasingly common accessory for middle-income and working-class households. In the U.S. alone, nearly 645,000 homes and businesses have turned to solar as a primary source of alternative energy, 

according to a solar industry trade group

. In the idyllic image of the American home, solar panels may soon be as ubiquitous as the proverbial white-picket fence.

 photovoltaic (PV) cells, first discovered in the 1950s,

 have been the dominant source for solar power, concentrating solar power (CSP) technology has been rising in popularity in recent years. Though PV solar panels draw clear benefits like their accessibility and practicality, two questions then arise: how can solar energy technology advance, and where will the solar power trend turn next?

In the idyllic image of the American home, solar panels may soon be as ubiquitous as the proverbial white-picket fence.

Both of those questions may have found an answer 

in East Lansing, Michigan, where Richard Lunt and a team of researchers with Michigan State University revamped the concept of the solar concentrator

 by creating a new transparent material, the “transparent luminescent solar concentrator” (TLSC). Its purpose is simple but revolutionary: it’s a clear plastic that can be placed over any window or pane of glass to harvest solar energy.

Compared to how solar energy has functioned through PV cells, the method used by the transparent solar cell is somewhat counterintuitive. In the most basic terms, solar PV cells capture the photons and convert those pockets of light into electricity. By contrast, a transparent cell would allow the light to pass directly through, without capturing the photons.

While layering solar cells over plastic materials is far from original, past attempts have been ineffective, encountering issues with low energy yields and materials that were colored, rather than transparent. MSU’s scientists overcame these obstacles after discovering a class of organic salts that directly target specific nonvisible wavelengths of sunlight. Since infrared or ultraviolet light is undetectable by the human eye, 

the solar cells with the solar concentrator method have the transparency attribute

. The solar cells capture ultraviolet and near infrared wavelengths, which then become a “glowing” infrared light. At the edge of the plastic, 

the PV solar cells then convert the light into electricity

. In short, the purpose of the TLSC is to turn a window or sheet of glass into a PV solar cell in order to produce solar energy.

Transparency is not the sole defining characteristic of the TLSC — it’s also flexible, and with that characteristic come a host of benefits. “Solar-harvesting surfaces” can be hidden in plain sight without obstructing any view or causing any inconvenience, whether in the windowpanes of skyscrapers or on the screens of cell phones.

For MSU’s researchers, the final remaining hurdle is to maximize the energy-producing efficiency of the solar concentrator. Before going into the market, TLSC should aim to have a minimum conversion efficiency of five percent. Though Lunt and his team believe they’ll be able to reach ten percent efficiency, 

right now, their conversion efficiency hovers around one percent

The innovation has arrived, so the next step is to bring this technology of transparent solar panels to the market. 

Lunt has cofounded a startup, Ubiquitous Energy

, which is now at the brink of bringing the TLSC out of the research lab and into consumers’ hands, potentially changing any glass object — whether the Louvre’s glass pyramid or the common cellphone — into a conductor of electricity.

“A fully transparent solar cell that could make every window and screen a power source,”

“Solar Energy That Doesn't Block the View,”

 Michigan State University, August 19, 2014.

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In the idyllic image of the American home, transparent solar panels may soon be as ubiquitous as the proverbial white-picket fence.

Stephanie Lu