The Jonah Lehrer debacle needs no further comment here, but one interesting feature of Charles Seife’s deconstruction and evisceration of Lehrer’s Wired blog on Slate was what he called “press-release plagiarism.” Seife… Read more »

“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… Read more »

Ernest Hemingway was supposedly asked by an editor how long it would take to finish a paragraph. Hemingway pointed to the whiskey bottle on his desk and said, “about an… 2 / Read more »

Considering that we skipped right over winter this year in New York, everyone seems to be talking about climate change lately: “Can you believe this weather? Thanks, global warming!” But… Read more »

Life may be just a little easier for John than for Dexter or Xavier. New research from cognitive scientists suggests that the ease with which words can be typed on… 1 / Read more »

An “academic spring” has broken out against scientific journal publisher Elsevier, says a New Scientist report by Jacob Aron. According to the report, “Inspired by a University of Cambridge mathematician,… Read more »

We may think of libraries as places that gather dust, but a library of dust itself? In this article from the New Scientist, we learn about some researchers who have… Read more »

We’ve been a fan of Longform.org for many months now, and decided to ask the editors there what they’ve been reading lately that gave them pause. Aaron Lammer and Max… Read more »

In what can only be called an incredible feat of conservation technology, a 1,000 year old text by Archimedes is now on view at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore.… Read more »

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… Read more »