The War with the NewtsKarel Čapek
The CanalLee Rourke
“A group of baboons has learned to discriminate real English words from non-words just by looking at them written down,” according to a report in the New Scientist. In a study conducted by Jonathan Grainger and colleagues of the University of Aix-Marseille, France, six captive…
The Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project has released a lengthy study of changing American reading habits with some surprising findings. The 68-page report, “The Rise of e-Reading,” found that “printed books still dominate the world of book reader,” it also found that…
Writer Clive Thompson — a regular contributor to Wired and the New York Times Magazine and one of those people generally treated like a guru when it comes to the future of the book business — has given an interview to Findings.com in which he…
Forty-five years ago Oxford University Press published the first edition of William H. McNeill’s survey, A World History. It’s still in print. Now in its fourth edition, the book has not had significant trade sales in the US for at least a decade, according to…
A shocking expose in the Guardian reveals the answer to the question you’ve no doubt asked yourself — trembling — many times: Is reading in the loo dangerous to your health? As reporter Ian Sample observes, the question has far-reaching implications — this sort of…
A British study has found that “Becoming engrossed in a good book or a crossword really can block the ability to hear,” says a report in the Daily Mail. According to the report, “Scientists demonstrated that when someone focuses their full attention on something, they…
“While Amazon announced last week that it now sells more e-books than printed ones, plenty of readers still prefer the old-fashioned printed page to an electronic screen, and for good reason,” says Andrew Irvine in a column for the Edmonton Journal called “Why books will…
A new study by education publishers Pearson has cast fresh light on the struggle to get boys to love reading. The publisher commissioned the study of 500 English teachers across the UK as well as 269 boys aged 11-13. Among the results, the study showed…
As someone with a terrible memory for faces I was oddly comforted (and slightly disturbed) to read this New Scientist article (via The Rumpus) which suggests that the human ability to read actually cannibalizes parts of the brain used for other visual skills, such as…
Science News (via, via) reports that typists have two neural systems that check for typos when they write. The conscious system pays attention to the words being written and looks for errors. The other, subconscious, system relies on the brain’s motor memory for what a…