If you haven’t noticed, audiobooks have made a recent and sharp rise in popularity among readers in recent years. In fact, in places like Sweden, more than half of all book sales in 2024 were audiobooks as opposed to print or e-books.[1] According to the Audio Publisher Association, audiobook sales in the U.S. have seen double-digit growth year after year, with global sales [...]
What are E-Readers? The use of E-Readers has been on the rise, opening more and more people up to reading as the need for physical books reduces. But what exactly are they, and what can they do? E-Readers contain a multitude of uses aside from simply reading; along with electronic versions of books, they have built in dictionaries, word search tools, highlighting, note-taking [...]
Introduction Over the past decade or so, Artificial Intelligence a.k.a. AI has taken the world by storm—some people are fully in support of AI’s many capabilities, while others argue that it does more harm than good. AI refers to machines' capability to learn through artificial neural networks that resemble humans’ [1]. However, AI is still in its infancy, and it’s difficult to tell [...]
Introduction Since ChatGPT launched in November 2022, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been a topic of conversation in academic communities. Experts in all fields have been trying to decide if AI use should be allowed and, if so, how it can be detected and disclosed. The scientific publishing community also finds itself asking: what are the potential gains and risks of using AI to [...]
Introduction to Virtual Reality (a.k.a. VR) Rock climbing, skydiving, extreme mountain biking, roller coasters, even tropical vacations: Thanks to VR, all these endeavors are now possible without leaving the comfort of your home. VR refers to the use of computer-generated imaging and stimuli to replicate a “real” environment. In their selected environment, users can experience sound, touch, and even 360-degree panoramic views, as [...]
If you’re a writer, you might have always thought that your mind works in a unique way. Well, science may have proved that to be true. In 2014, German scientist Martin Lotze and his team of researchers studied the brain activity of writers and non-writers as they wrote to compare their brain functions. With the help of fMRI scanners to see which parts [...]
The ability to recognize familiar faces or to learn to recognize new ones is a complex image process that we, humans, take for granted. Other mammals such as chimps have that ability, but what about sheep? A recent study revealed that scientists succeeded in training sheep to recognize the faces of four celebrities by repeatedly presenting the sheep with photographs of their faces. [...]
With the holiday season upon us, many of us will indulge in sweet treats at the office and at home, unless you are someone who does not care much for sweets, a concept that may surprise some of us candy lovers! It turns out our sweet tooth has to do with two genetic variants of a hormone known as FGF21. Published research from [...]
Most of us have, at some point, felt in sync with a friend or a family member because of a shared experience or shared perspectives. Not only can this “feeling” be measured in oscillation patterns of electrical signals—brain waves— that occur when brain cells communicate with each other, but brain-scanning studies revealed that human brain wave patterns do synchronize in an interactive group [...]
SONY DSC Before joining PSG as an editorial intern, I worked as a chemist in Cambridge, MA, in a six-story structure that once belonged to the New England Confectionary Company—famous for their colorful wafers and conversation hearts, and more commonly known as Necco. Back in 1928, the Necco candy factory embodied the “promising future of American architecture,” but in 2001, with [...]