Sleep Pods devised by MetroNap

“It has already been established that those who siesta are less likely to die of heart disease (people who siesta for 20-30 minutes each day are 30% less likely to suffer from heart disease as sleep lowers stress on the heart). Now, Matthew Walker and his colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, have found that they probably have better memory, too. A post-prandial snooze, Dr Walker has discovered, sets the brain up for learning. The ideal nap, follows a cycle of between 90 and 100 minutes (according the research, napping for 90 minutes after lunch can improve your productivity by up to 10%). The benefits to memory of a nap, says Dr Walker, are so great that they can equal an entire night’s sleep. He warns, however, that napping must not be done too late in the day or it will interfere with night-time sleep. Moreover, not everyone awakens refreshed from a siesta. The grogginess that results from an unrefreshing siesta is termed “sleep inertia”. This happens when the brain is woken from a deep sleep with its cells still firing at a slow rhythm and its temperature and blood flow decreased. Sara Mednick, from the University of California, San Diego, suggests that non-habitual nappers suffer from this more often than those who siesta regularly. It may be that those who have a tendency to wake up groggy are choosing not to siesta in the first place. Perhaps, though, as in so many things, it is practice that makes perfect.” Read the full story in Economist

Read more on the role of sleep in learning

Puntmobles Perec Wall-hung Shelf - click on the image to buy it

With iPad and Kindle paving the way for the virtual bookland on one hand and bookless world on the other, designers are turning humble book storage into a work of art. See our selection of cool bookshelves see our Links/Reading resources page. “There’s been a bibliophile backlash. Books have morphed from being ’stuff to store’ into a decorating opportunity.”
Read the full article with all the links to the top bookshelves designers.

How design can save newspapers - watch this video of Jacek Utko, the award-winning, the world’s best newspaper and magazine designer talking at TED

Read about the importance of summaries

The best book summaries

“It has a bookshelf. In addition there’s a button which is the store — we’ve created the new iBook Store. You can download right onto your iPad.” The store is very similar to iTunes. Same modal pop-overs. Pricing doesn’t look too bad. The book page display is nice. You can turn pages slowly or fast for speed reading. “You can change the font… whatever you want. And that is iBooks.” “So iBooks again, a great reader, a great online bookstore. All in one really great app. We use the ePub format. We’re very excited about this.” said Steve Jobs at the launch of the iPad and iBooks Store today in San Francisco (6pm London time).

iBooks Store on the iPod - speed reading ebooks on the go

Watch Apple video on the iPad below (if you want to just watch the iBook Store and the ebook reader skip to minute 4)
For more info go to the iPad, iBooks Store and ebook reading

Read more on speed reading on Stanza free ebook reader for iPhone

The Electronic Popable book, developed by the High-Low Tech group at the MIT Media Lab, has electronic circuitry embedded in its pages that turns the tabs, flaps and wheels of a traditional pop-up into switches and a variety of sensors. The interactive pages come alive with LED lights, sounds and even vibrate in response to touch.

Watch the Electronic Popable book in action

Venus fly traps spring up invitingly from one page; sensors in the trap’s jaws respond to the user’s touch, gently closing around the probing finger as it withdraws. The sensors control the amount of electric current flowing through springs in the leaf. The springs are made of the shape memory alloy nickel-titanium and contract to close the leaf shut as their coils are heated by the current. The leaves reopen as the wire cools.

To create the pages for the book, mechanical engineer Jie Qi and Lab director Leah Buechley used off-the-shelf electrically conductive paints and fabrics, adding custom-made magnetic components programmed using a standard integrated circuit. “The innovation was in finding new uses for these easily available materials,” Qi says.

This battery-operated pop-up book will be presented at the Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interfaces conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts, next week.
Source: NewScientist

A study at the University of Sussex last year indicated that reading for even just six minutes reduced stress levels in study subjects by 68%. Reading was the most prefered method for reducing stress when compared to other typical stress reducing activities like listening to music or going for a walk. Losing yourself in a book causes all of your muscles, including the heart, to relax.

Listening to music reduced the levels by 61%, having a cup of tea or coffee lowered them by 54% and taking a walk by 42%. Playing video games brought them down by 21% from their highest level but still left the volunteers with heart rates above their starting point. Dr Lewis, cognitive neuropsychologist said: “Losing yourself in a book is the ultimate relaxation. This is particularly poignant in uncertain economic times when we are all craving a certain amount of escapism. It really doesn’t matter what book you read, by losing yourself in a thoroughly engrossing book you can escape from the worries and stresses of the everyday world and spend a while exploring the domain of the author’s imagination. This is more than merely a distraction but an active engaging of the imagination as the words on the printed page stimulate your creativity and cause you to enter what is essentially an altered state of consciousness.”

If you can’t get into a story in just six minutes to achieve relaxation? Make sure to keep a book with you at your work desk, on a trip or best on your iPod or iPhone. Just read a chapter while waiting for the kettle to boil or while waiting in a queue.

Soon librarians, like doctors will be prescribing a good book alongside exercise and a healthy diet.