Norway’s First Youth-Only Library for kids ages 10 to 15. Adults not allowed!

Forget what you think about libraries! Biblo Tøyen, one of Oslo Public Library’s (Deichmanske bibliotek) newest additions, is breaking and changing all the library rules! This is a unique and innovative space, created for young people ages 10 to 15.

Why 10 to 15?

Christian Bermudez, a librarian at Biblo Tøyen explains, “Norwegian schools have an after school program called SFO (Skolefritidsordning) where children can stay at school until 5 pm. There they can play, do homework, or other activities. But this program is only available for kids from 1st to 4th grades so, Biblo Tøyen is a great option for older kids to come and enjoy staying here after school.”

Biblo Tøyen: new concept=great solution

The design team went directly to the source to begin their mission to rethink and redesign the library space. They held focus groups with young people to find out their wants and needs. The youth said they wanted a place to hang out, relax, and escape parents and siblings. In addition, they needed a safe place to socialize and said it should be a space where they can create and do things together. The library has achieved these goals by creating a cool and comfortable ‘third’ space between school and home where youth can learn, explore, and be themselves.

How Libraries Save Lives

One woman’s story of how a bookmobile transported her away from a deadly life and toward her human potential.

“Knowledge sets us free, art sets us free. A great library is freedom,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in contemplating the sacredness of public libraries. “If librarians were honest, they would say, No one spends time here without being changed,” Joseph Mills wrote in his ode to libraries. “You never know what troubled little girl needs a book,” Nikki Giovanni wrote in one of her poems celebrating libraries and librarians.

A beautiful testament to that emancipating, transformative power of public libraries comes from one such troubled little girl named Storm Reyes, who grew up in an impoverished Native American community, had her life profoundly changed, perhaps even saved, by a library bookmobile, and went on to become a librarian herself. She tells her story in this wonderful oral history animation by StoryCorps:

The piece was adapted into an essay in Callings: The Purpose and Passion of Work(public library) — the collection of tender, touching, and deeply humane stories edited by StoryCorps founder Dave Isay that also gave us pioneering astronaut Ronald McNair, who perished in the Challenger disaster, remembered by his brother.

Why Reading the Same Book Repeatedly Is Good for Kids

(Even If It Drives You Nuts)

Does your child have a favorite book they want to read over and over again? Or worse, wants you to read over and over again? I bet you’ve memorized every word. You loved its adorable illustrations and clever text when you first brought it home, but now you’ve grown to hate it. You might even wish it would disappear forever. I feel your pain. I know it can be maddening, but before you toss this particular book, you may want to reconsider. Despite its annoyances, repetitive reading — whether you’re reading to your child or they’re reading to you — offers a surprising number of benefits for new readers.

Vocabulary and Word Recognition

The more a child reads, the larger their vocabulary becomes. When a child reads or hears the same book multiple times, they become familiar and comfortable with a greater number of words. That text you’ve memorized? Chances are your child has too, and that’s a good thing.

Pattern and Rhythm

Hearing favorite stories read aloud helps children become aware of the pattern and rhythm of text. Language is more than just words — it’s how words sound and connect to each other. Parents can model the rhythms of reading for children who are just learning how language works.

Fluency

Fluency is the ability to read text “accurately, quickly, and with expression.” Repetitive reading allows a child to read without stumbling or stopping, and reading time becomes more pleasant for everyone. Once a child masters one book, it makes moving on to another more appealing.

This 78-page book on physics is selling more copies than 'Fifty Shades of Grey'

Since it was published last September, Carlo Rovelli's book, "Seven Brief Lessons on Physics," has sold more copies in Rovelli's native country, Italy, than E.L. James' smash hit "Fifty Shades of Grey," The Spectator reported.

And the English translation has quickly risen to become Penguin's fastest-selling science debut in the publishing company's history.

So what's Rovelli's secret?

After all, it's not like physics is a topic that people flock toward. In fact, physics has been the least popular STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) major for US undergraduates since the late '60s.

For starters, Rovelli is an expert on the topic.

He's a theoretical physicist by profession with a focus in quantum gravity — a field that attempts to join the greatest two theories in history: Isaac Newton's theory of gravity and Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity.

Rovelli is also an avid writer of popular science, so he has a habit of transforming complex ideas into clear, simple concepts.

Bedtime story is key to literacy, says children's writer Cottrell Boyce

As a new literacy drive is launched, authors including David Walliams and Michael Rosen warn of threat to storytelling from screens and busy lives.

The childhood tradition of a bedtime story is in serious peril, as experts warn that parents are not making the time to read to their children at the end of the working day and stop reading to them at too young an age.

“Parents lead very, very busy lives,” said Diana Gerald, chief executive of the Book Trust, which encourages children and families to enjoy books and develop their reading skills. “We live in a world where parents are juggling work and home life. Lots of parents are working shifts and there’s a lot of pressure on families. People are increasing their hours.”

A recent survey, by YouGov for the children’s publisher Scholastic, revealed last week that many parents stop reading to their children when they become independent readers, even if the child isn’t ready to lose their bedtime story. The study found that 83% of children enjoyed being read aloud to, with 68% describing it as a special time with their parents. (“It felt so warm, so spirit-rising,” as one 11-year-old boy put it.)

One in five of the parents surveyed stopped reading aloud to their children before the age of nine, and almost a third of children aged six to 11 whose parents had stopped reading aloud to them wanted them to carry on.

Frank Cottrell Boyce, who won the 2004 Carnegie medal for his first children’s book, Millions, was dismayed by the findings. “The joy of a bedtime story is the key to developing a love of reading in children”, he said – more so than literacy classes in school, which can be “a very negative experience”, for the many children he meets during visits to schools, whose first experience of books is in the classroom.

“They’re being taught to read before anyone has shared with them the pleasure of reading – so what motivation have they got to learn?” said Cottrell Boyce. “Even the ones that attain high levels of ‘literacy’ (whatever that is) are in danger of achieving that without ever experiencing the point of reading.” Frank Cottrell Boyce: ‘This is something people have done since the days of sitting around campfires napping flints. To stop doing now is to break the great chain of our being.’ 

Dinnertime storytelling makes kids voracious readers

Family dinners can whet children’s appetites for reading.

As a young child, I loved to imagine myself as a pioneer girl in Little House in the Big Woods, eating fresh snow drizzled with maple syrup. I even pestered my mother to make this treat with the dirty snow that fell on our Manhattan sidewalk. Not a chance.

Years later, I honored my young sons’ request to try a coconut after reading the adventures of Babar. Who knew that even a hammer and chisel won’t crack these nuts? I resorted to clearing out the sidewalk below and then pitching the fruit out a third-floor window.

It worked, but thankfully there are many easier ways to bring food and reading together than hurling coconuts or eating dirty snow.

Here are some of the connections I researched while working on my book, Home for Dinner. And remember, none of these requires a gourmet meal or a trip to the bookstore. Library books and a takeout pizza are just as good.

Dinner conversation builds vocabulary

For starters, there is the linguistic pairing of reading and eating, shown in such common expressions as “devouring a good book” or being a “voracious” reader.

Those sayings reflect the reality that children who have regular family dinners have a real leg up on being good and early readers. Years of research from the Home-School Study of Language and Literacy Development have shown that dinner conversation is a terrific vocabulary booster for young children – even better than reading aloud to them.

Pediatrics Group to Recommend Reading Aloud to Children From Birth

In between dispensing advice on breast-feeding and immunizations, doctors will tell parents to read aloud to their infants from birth, under a new policy that the American Academy of Pediatrics will announce on Tuesday.

With the increased recognition that an important part of brain development occurs within the first three years of a child’s life, and that reading to children enhances vocabulary and other important communication skills, the group, which represents 62,000 pediatricians across the country, is asking its members to become powerful advocates for reading aloud, every time a baby visits the doctor.

“It should be there each time we touch bases with children,” said Dr. Pamela High, who wrote the new policy. It recommends that doctors tell parents they should be “reading together as a daily fun family activity” from infancy.

This is the first time the academy — which has issued recommendations on how long mothers should nurse their babies and advises parents to keep children away from screens until they are at least 2 — has officially weighed in on early literacy education.

While highly educated, ambitious parents who are already reading poetry and playing Mozart to their children in utero may not need this advice, research shows that many parents do not read to their children as often as researchers and educators think is crucial to the development of pre-literacy skills that help children succeed once they get to school.

Reading, as well as talking and singing, is viewed as important in increasing the number of words that children hear in the earliest years of their lives. Nearly two decades ago, an oft-cited study found that by age 3, the children of wealthier professionals have heard words millions more times than have those of less educated, low-income parents, giving the children who have heard more words a distinct advantage in school. New research shows that these gaps emerge as early as 18 months.

What fiction has to say about the libraries of the future

Authors and artists have long imagined otherworldly libraries – magical libraries, mythical libraries, libraries of a distant past, future or planet. There’s Star Wars' Great Jedi Library – an enormous stronghold of knowledge and a symbol of the Jedi. In Lord of the Rings, Gandalf learns about inscription on the One Ring in the dusty library of Minas Tirith. Or think of the Doctor Who episode in which the Doctor and his companion visit the largest library in the universe in the 51st century – an entire planet – and find it eerily deserted.

Perhaps one of the most compelling literary representations of the library occurs in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose (1980), a medieval whodunnit set in a monastery filled with books. Despatched to solve a murder committed within the monastery’s precincts, the sleuthing monk William of Baskerville discovers that the murders result from the monastery librarian’s diabolical attempts to hide a lost classical work from the world. At a climactic point of the story, William observes that: “this library was perhaps born to save the books it houses, but now it lives to bury them.”

These imaginary libraries are testament to the undeniably magical and complex quality of libraries – the particular quality that silent stretches of volumes have, categorised and ready to offer up innumerable secrets. Or, indeed, they demonstrate how the plenitude of the library can make it a mysterious secret itself, resistant to decoding or ordering.

But the library as we know it is under threat – and so these fictional places have never been more relevant. One day, libraries may themselves be consigned to fiction. Funding has a large part to do with this – just look at the trend away from local libraries and towards regional hubs.

But digitisation is obviously also a major factor. Terry Pratchett imagined a labyrinthine library in Discworld overseen by an orangutan where students occasionally get lost and are forced to eat their own boots to survive. It may sound absurd, but this is perhaps the library that is most immediately relevant to today – with its endless shelves and connections to every library and every collection of books in the Multiverse.

School libraries shelve tradition to create new learning spaces

You might think technology would spell the end of books and libraries. But many schools have embraced the digital revolution and built innovative spaces that foster a love of literature.

What happens to school libraries when students find it more natural to turn to a computer screen than a book?

That is the question facing schools around the world as they struggle to keep up with the digital revolution while fostering a love of literature.

Many have found creative answers, developing spaces that allow children to make discoveries, put technology to imaginative use, learn, perform, and relax – as well as to read. In the process, libraries have often come to be the school’s focal point.

This was the idea behind the new library at Dixons Allerton Academy in Bradford built centrally over the entrance and linking the primary and secondary schools on the campus. Carolyn Shaw, learning commons leader at the school, says: “We have a big drive on books and reading for pleasure but we see ourselves very much as being the hub of learning in the school.”

The library is not just a new physical space, replacing a traditional book-lined room that had buckets on the floor because of leaky ceilings; it also plays an important part generally in delivering the curriculum. It does this through e-learning and information literacy specialist staff who loan out equipment and support teachers and students in using it wherever it is needed.

Only three pieces of equipment in the library are fixed, and these are for searching the catalogue. All other computers are laptops, with seating and tables equally moveable to allow the space to be used for exhibitions of pupils’ work or curriculum-linked displays, debates, presentations and even a jazz band.

BiebBus, The Expanding Mobile Library

BiebBus is a truck-container that travels from school to school, offering 7,000 books and a reading room.

Mobile libraries date back to 1905, when in Washington County, Maryland the first bookmobile offered its service to those American readers who would otherwise have no access to books, mostly the young and the elderly. The Netherlands also knows this tradition and has a wide network of regionally organized mobile libraries. On a personal note: I grew up in the rural northern part of the country and I remember feeling excitement for Tuesday afternoons when the 'bibliobus' would be in the village. It was the pre-internet era and the bus was a place of discovery.

The Zaan region is part of the Amsterdam metropolitan area and consists of a series of smaller villages. On their own they can't finance a full-time library but the 'bibliobus' is a viable alternative. Contrary to the more rural areas in the Netherlands, this region is densely populated and has narrow streets. As such the conventional mobile library with a trailer providing for 50 m2 of library surface was not an option; the vehicle would simply take too much parking space. Architect Jord den Hollander designed a smart solution. Possibly inspired by his youth memory of Gerry Anderson's TV series Thunderbirds he developed the 'Uitschuif Biebbus' or the expanding mobile library. 

Reviving the Library in Greece: The Future Is Now for the Future Library Network and the INELI-Balkans Project

One of the milestones of childhood is when a child learns to read. It starts out simply; the mere act of spelling out his/her own name and then reading it off a piece of paper is met with much fanfare by the child's parents and teachers. Single words soon turn into whole books. Suddenly, the world as described on the written page, is opened up to them and, well... nothing is the same again.

Nobody can argue the significance of reading in the life of any human. As a wise person once said, "The more you read the more things you'll know. The more that you learn the more places you'll go." By the way, I just quoted Dr. Seuss, the writer and illustrator who, through his 46 published children's books, has played a critical role in teaching millions of children worldwide how to read--including yours truly who is still expecting to run into a black and white cat wearing an extra tall, top hat. Maybe someday.

People will read; they want to. But to do so, not only do they need the skills but they need to have material to read. This is where public libraries come in.

In the U.S., going to the library is a commonplace practice. Every town has at least one easily accessible library on offer. But what about other countries around the world which don't, or can't, offer this service? And today's libraries have to keep up with the times, too. That means not only must they provide "old fashioned," printed hardcopies of tomes but they must also be fully equipped, technological hubs of knowledge and entertainment.

To that extent the past 15 years, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation put strong actions behind their belief that libraries are critically important for all people, with their Access to Learning Award and their Global Libraries program.

In 2010, the Veria Central Public Library in the province of Macedonia in northern Greece was one of the last libraries to be awarded this coveted prize. According to the Foundation, the Veria library made, "creative use of information and technology services," and offered, "a range of programs that meet the economic, educational and cultural needs of more than 180,000 people." Since the award, the Veria library has expanded its reach and in 2011 established the Future Library, a nonprofit directly derived from the ATLA award.

The year of books? Today's young people interpret reading as a social exercise

Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, has declared 2015 the Year of Books, committing to read a book every fortnight while discussing it on Facebook. The ultimate digital champion is now championing the world's most traditional form of expression and creativity, telling us that reading books and our social media culture can go hand in hand.

The smell of fresh paper and the thrill of turning over a new page could never compare to pressing a microscopic button on a Kindle e-reader. But given the unquestionably lower cost of non-print books, Britain's libraries and independent booksellers are in tougher competition than ever. The obvious question is: are young people reading, and if not, what will encourage someone to pick up a book in 2015? We live in an age of sharing. What was once considered a distinctly private experience is now one to make public. These days, it hardly seems worth looking past the front cover of a book before checking its rating on Goodreads. Put simply, the nature of reading is changing, and those rare independent bookshops still thriving are the ones that embrace this.

A prime example of this is Beerwolf, a bookshop within a cosy, dimly-lit pub in Falmouth, Cornwall. Books are flying out just as fast as pints. The owners are book-and-beer lovers at heart, passionate about creating an atmosphere which encourages both reading fascinating books and socialising.

"Some people come in for a book and end up having a drink, and some people come in for a drink and end up buying loads of books," says bar manager Ellie.

The future of Britain’s libraries: why lattes and Wi-Fi are nothing to fear

Few victims of austerity have been so fiercely mourned as libraries. If they are to be revived, a recent report argues, they must look down the High Street to Starbucks. Can that approach change a writer’s beloved childhood sanctuary for the better? 

 

I started coming to Torridon Road Library in Catford, south-east London with my book-loving father when I was four or five. My parents still live in my childhood home, five minutes’ walk from Torridon, and Dad still visits the library every week. But until today I hadn’t been back since I took my GCSEs nearly – God help me – a quarter of a century ago.

Torridon is the sort of library – small, beloved, attuned to the needs of the neighbourhood – that most people would agree we need more of, but which recent local authority cuts have made rarer than ever. Accordingly, it seems like a good place to settle down quietly and read the Independent Library Report, a recently published set of proposals for how those cuts might be mitigated. From the outside, only two things have changed since I shook the exam-room dust off my shoes: automatic doors have been installed behind the heavy oak originals (which now stand open all day) so that all may enter easily and not have to wait for a strong young man to happen past and help them get in; and the bit on the left that once housed the silent study room has been demolished and replaced with a two-storey children’s centre.

Inside, the lovely polished parquet floor has been mostly covered with inoffensive but unmistakably municipal carpet, and the space has been slightly reconfigured by the removal of two walls. Computers and automatic loan/return stations, a sofa and a loo have been added. The long oak table in the children’s section has gone and the hardback pony books replaced by paperback vampire romances.

But the bones of the place I remember are still there. The beautiful dome that I had no idea then was probably an homage to the British Library’s famous reading room is still intact, and comfortable seats are still clustered for long reading stints in the light-filled area beneath. Elsewhere, the high windows bordered with amber-coloured glass that for some reason used to fascinate me more than the dome are also untouched. It is not silent, but it has what Jeanette Winterson recalled her childhood haunt, Accrington Public Library, having: “a sense of energetic quiet.”

The most common mistake parents make about reading

Raising good readers seems pretty straightforward. Much of the research on it sounds like common sense: Let children pick what they want to read, even if it’s comic books or magazines; let them see you read; talk about books to them; make reading material available in your home; and above all else, read to them.

In the same way our children see us watching television, surfing the Internet and listening to music for entertainment, they should see us read for fun. If a parent loves to read, odds are good the child will learn to find joy in words, too.

So, it was surprising when a finding from the latest Scholastic Kids and Family Reading Report caught my eye, because it brought to light a common mistake most parents don’t realize they are making.

Most of us stop reading to our children too early.
The survey found that, predictably, the number of children read aloud to dips dramatically as a child grows up. More than half of children under the age of 5 are read aloud to almost every day. That drops to 1 in 3 children ages 6 to 8 and just 1 in 6 children ages 9 to 11. More telling than those numbers is how the children said they felt about it: 40 percent of children who are no longer read to aloud to say they wish their parents had continued.

Their No. 1 reason was because “it was a special time with my parents.”

Poetry is well and truly in the margins – will it ever get out?

I was on a train recently reading a book of poems by Carol Rumens when the elderly man sitting across the table said, “Do people still read poetry?” He frowned as though rats had re-infested his basement: my chosen book was so preposterous he couldn’t believe his eyes.

Experiment when you’re next around people who have read Wolf Hall, people who would go to see a play by David Hare or an exhibition of contemporary art. Ask them how recently, if at all, they have read a poem published since the year 2000. They are very likely to agree that they never read contemporary poetry.

Last May, Jeremy Paxman said that poetry was now “conniving at its own irrelevance” because poets were only talking to each other. He was speaking as a judge of the Forward prize for poetry, and poets were outraged – on Facebook many of my poet friends foamed at the mouth. But even speaking to defend poets, Michael Simmons Roberts had to concede that the habit of buying books of poetry has been lost.

This is now such a settled state of affairs that it is hard to remember that it was ever different, that poetry used to occupy a central place in culture. In the 1920s, T S Eliot’s depiction of modern civilisation as a Waste Land influenced everyone with intellectual interests – and in the 1930s, W H Auden’s diagnosis of a sickness at the heart of capitalism came to the lips of many people when they wanted to describe their current cultural condition. Eliot and Auden wrote as the inheritors of a powerful tradition that had lasted for six centuries.

But then things quickly began to change. By the 1960s, poets such as Philip Larkin and Sylvia Plath were still widely read and discussed, but poetry was beginning its migration to the cultural margins. The shift may have been encouraged by the growing prevalence of popular music: many people in this period kept saying that Bob Dylan was a more important poet than the usual ones who couldn’t play the guitar. And the rise of “pop” poets such as Roger McGough and Brian Patten drained all the challenge out of poetry in order to make it work in their performances. These were mildly entertaining, but they were never anything like as effective, or even as poetic, as the work of genuine performers of the period.

Pigs won’t fly in textbooks: OUP tells authors not to mention pork

Guidelines for writers have come to light telling them to avoid mention of anything which might offend overseas markets.

 
Stringent guidelines from educational publishers, that warn textbook authors off touching on topics from pork to horoscopes to avoid offending students in other countries, have come to light amid widespread criticism.
Their emergence follows the news earlier this month that publisher HarperCollins had pulped an atlas designed for use in Middle Eastern schools after outrage over its omission of Israel from the map. HarperCollins said at the time that the decision reflected “local preferences”, with the inclusion of Israel “unacceptable” to its Gulf customers.

The insistence that mentions of pork products in educational material designed for use abroad is also prohibited was revealed by Jim Naughtie on Radio 4’s Today programme, when he read out a letter he had obtained from Oxford University Press to an author, prohibiting the mention of “pigs plus sausages, or anything else which could be perceived as pork” in their book.

“Now, if a respectable publisher, tied to an academic institution, is saying you’ve got to write a book in which you cannot mention pigs because some people might be offended, it’s just ludicrous. It is just a joke,” said Naughtie, prompting a chorus of outrage in the Daily Mail, which quoted Tory MP Philip Davies describing the situation as “nonsensical political correctness”.

But according to authors, the guidelines are well-known and widely used by educational publishers, encompassing a range of “taboo” subjects in addition to pork, with publishers keen to avoid offending potential markets for their books abroad. There is even an acronym, PARSNIP, to remind authors of topics to be avoided: politics, alcohol, religion, sex, narcotics, isms (communism for example) and pork.

Bob the Street Cat books sell 1m copies in UK

Homeless busker James Bowen was helped in his struggle against addiction by the companionship of a stray cat. Now his books charting their friendship have propelled him into an elite publishing club.

 

 
Samuel Johnson used to buy oysters for his cat, Hodge; Charles Dickens was so distressed when his own pet died that he had its paw stuffed and turned into a letter opener. Now, proving that there is nothing the British like more than a heartwarming story about an indomitable feline, the homeless busker turned author James Bowen, who wrote about how his cat changed his life in A Street Cat Named Bob, has joined an elite club of writers to have sold more than one million copies of their books in the UK.

In 2007, Bowen, a recovering drug addict, found an injured Bob curled up on a step when he himself was living in sheltered accommodation. "He gave me this look, almost saying, 'help', but also 'sort it out'," said the author today. Bowen nursed Bob back to health, only to find the cat following him everywhere he went, even joining him when he busked and sold the Big Issue. The pair became well-known in London, going on to attract the attention of a literary agent, who sold Bowen's story of how, with Bob's help, he would get over his addictions to heroin and methadone, to Hodder & Stoughton.

The publisher said today that in just two years, combined sales of A Street Cat Named Bob (written with Garry Jenkins), its sequel The World According to Bob and the children's book Bob: No Ordinary Cat, have now topped sales of 1m copies – 1,082,025 to be exact – in the UK, in all formats. The extraordinary sales bring Bowen into the company of publishing phenomena including JK Rowling, EL James, Stephenie Meyer and Dan Brown.

"It's incredible," said Bowen. "When I first saw Bob on this doorstep, I never thought this is where I'd be today."

Turning up for his first signing, Bowen had expected a maximum of 50 people. "I don't think even Hodder thought there would be much of a turnout, but when there was a queue around the block, when they were turning people away and we had sold over 300 copies, I thought, 'what?' This is just about me and Bob and my life, talking about how I'm not perfect. Why are people so in love with this little man who's come into my life?" he asked.

Ebooks at night won’t help you sleep tight, US study finds

Harvard researchers say light-emitting ebooks negatively affect our sleep and lead to next-day grogginess.

Reading a light-emitting ebook before bed is bad for your health, according to a new US study. It warned that use of the devices affected both sleep at night and alertness the following morning.
Researchers from Harvard Medical School’s sleep medicine department put 12 healthy young adults through a two-week experiment, in which the participants would either read a light-emitting ebook for four hours before bedtime or a printed book. Study participants reading a light-emitting ebook took on average almost 10 minutes longer to fall asleep and said they were less sleepy an hour before bedtime than they were reading a paper book.

They also had suppressed evening levels of the sleep-promoting hormone melatonin – readers of print showed no suppression – and significantly less REM (rapid eye movement) sleep than print book participants. The next morning, they took “hours longer to fully ‘wake up’ and attain the same level of alertness”, researchers have reported in a new paper published in the journal of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Harvard’s Anne-Marie Chang, Daniel Aeschbach, Jeanne Duffy and Charles Czeisler wrote that sleep quality and duration has declined over the past 50 years, adversely affecting general health. They point to a recent survey which found that 90% of Americans use an electronic gadget at least a few nights a week before going to sleep. The Harvard study participants were reading on an iPad, but researchers said other devices would cause the same effect. (Lead researcher Czeisler told the BBC: “The light emitted by most ereaders is shining directly into the eyes of the reader, whereas from a printed book or the original Kindle the reader is only exposed to reflected light from the pages of the book.”)

In the paper the researchers write: “The use of light-emitting electronic devices for reading, communication, and entertainment has greatly increased recently. We found that the use of these devices before bedtime prolongs the time it takes to fall asleep, delays the circadian clock, suppresses levels of the sleep-promoting hormone melatonin, reduces the amount and delays the timing of REM sleep and reduces alertness the following morning. Use of light-emitting devices immediately before bedtime also increases alertness at that time, which may lead users to delay bedtime at home.”
They point out that the use of technology before bedtime is “most prevalent” in children and young adults, and call for further studies on the impact of the light exposure on learning and development.

The Best Science Books of 2014

The math of soul mates, the psychology of nothing, the physics of faith, and more illuminating insights on the universe and our place in it.

 

 
1. THE ACCIDENTAL UNIVERSE

“If we ever reach the point where we think we thoroughly understand who we are and where we came from,” Carl Sagan wrote in his timeless meditation on science and religion, “we will have failed.” It’s a sentiment that dismisses in one fell Saganesque swoop both the blind dogmatism of religion and the vain certitude of science — a sentiment articulated by some of history’s greatest minds, from Einstein to Ada Lovelace to Isaac Asimov, all the way back Galileo. Yet centuries after Galileo and decades after Sagan, humanity remains profoundly uneasy about reconciling these conflicting frameworks for understanding the universe and our place in it.

That unanswerable question of where we came from is precisely what physicist Alan Lightman — one of the finest essayists writing today and the very first person to receive dual appointments in science and the humanities at MIT — explores from various angles in The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew (public library | IndieBound).

At the intersection of science and philosophy, the essays in the book explore the possible existence of multiple universes, multiple space-time continuums, more than three dimensions. Lightman writes:

Science does not reveal the meaning of our existence, but it does draw back some of the veils.
[…]
Theoretical physics is the deepest and purest branch of science. It is the outpost of science closest to philosophy, and religion.
In one of the most beautiful essays in the book, titled “The Spiritual Universe,” Lightman explores that intersection of perspectives in making sense of life:

I completely endorse the central doctrine of science. And I do not believe in the existence of a Being who lives beyond matter and energy, even if that Being refrains from entering the fray of the physical world. However, I certainly agree with [scientists who argue] that science is not the only avenue for arriving at knowledge, that there are interesting and vital questions beyond the reach of test tubes and equations. Obviously, vast territories of the arts concern inner experiences that cannot be analyzed by science. The humanities, such as history and philosophy, raise questions that do not have definite or unanimously accepted answers.

The Best Children's Books of 2014

Intelligent and imaginative tales of love, loneliness, loyalty, loss, friendship, and everything in between.

 

“I don’t write for children,” Maurice Sendak scoffed in his final interview. “I write — and somebody says, ‘That’s for children!’”

“It is an error,” wrote J.R.R. Tolkien seven decades earlier in his superb meditation on fantasy and why there’s no such thing as writing for children, “to think of children as a special kind of creature, almost a different race, rather than as normal, if immature, members of a particular family, and of the human family at large.” Indeed, books that bewitch young hearts and tickle young minds aren’t “children’s books” but simply great books — hearts that beat in the chest of another, even if that chest is slightly smaller.

This is certainly the case with the most intelligent and imaginative “children’s” and picture-books published this year. (Because the best children’s books provide, as Tolkien believed, perennial delight, step into the time machine and revisit previous selections for 2013, 2012, 2011, and 2010.)