CONSTANT text messaging and e-mailing causes a reduction in mental capability equivalent to the loss of ten IQ points, according to research.
Tapping away on a mobile phone or computer keypad or checking messages on a handheld gadget temporarily reduces the performance of the brain, according to the study into the effects of "infomania".
When you actually look at the intimate life of America's youth, you find this heterodoxical pattern: people can seem raunchy on the surface but are wholesome within. There are Ivy League sex columnists who don't want anybody to think they are loose. There are foul-mouthed Maxim readers terrified they will someday divorce, like their parents. Eminem hardly seems like a paragon of traditional morality, but what he's really angry about is that he comes from a broken home, and what he longs for is enough suburban bliss to raise his daughter.
For more than a century, it has caused excitement and frustration in equal measure - a collection of Greek and Roman writings so vast it could redraw the map of classical civilisation. If only it was legible.
Now, in a breakthrough described as the classical equivalent of finding the holy grail, Oxford University scientists have employed infra-red technology to open up the hoard, known as the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, and with it the prospect that hundreds of lost Greek comedies, tragedies and epic poems will soon be revealed.
In the past four days alone, Oxford's classicists have used it to make a series of astonishing discoveries, including writing by Sophocles, Euripides, Hesiod and other literary giants of the ancient world, lost for millennia.
They even believe they are likely to find lost Christian gospels, the originals of which were written around the time of the earliest books of the New Testament.A less-than-firm grasp on the doctrine of scriptural transmission and canonicity. But fascinating, all the same.
The Shackled Continent is an important book. Written by Robert Guest, Africa Editor of The Economist, it provides an illuminating account of why Africa is so poor. His conclusion is that sub-Saharan Africa is poor because it is shackled by poor government. Guest has spent six years reporting from Africa, and fills the book with accounts of what he has witnessed.
Guest argues for "fair aid, free trade". He explains how aid has often been wasted on arms, to provide luxuries for the ruling elite, and to be put away in Swiss bank accounts. African leaders sometimes call for a "Marshall Plan" to help Africa like the Marshall Plan that helped rebuild Europe after World War II. But, as Guest explains, Africa has already received the equivalent of six Marshall Plans, and yet is still poor.