Parents know that once children begin to read for pleasure, their reading skills improve, and so does their entire educational experience. One way to kick-start this process is to let students select their own books, and that's why the Scholastic Book Fair is always a time of celebration at elementary schools. Scholastic, which had sponsored book clubs for decades already, became the go-to publisher for book fairs in the early 1980s.  

Then as now, the events would normally be sponsored by parent-teacher associations or school librarians, and a division of labor was involved. Scholastic and the other companies would drive the books to the school, where volunteers would set up the provided displays, handle payment, and box up the unsold books. Then Scholastic would haul away the unused inventory. Books cost between 75 cents and $3.95, with the schools getting between 20 percent and 33 percent of the gross revenue. In the 1980s, a typical fair might collect $1500.

While the school faculty appreciated the revenue and the promotion of literacy, students were less interested in the economics than the shelves of books that flaunted their unbent spines and promised a break from required reading. In both the book fairs and catalogs, volumes about boy detective Encyclopedia Brown mingled with Garfield collections and Captains Courageous by Rudyard Kipling. Poster books of BMX bikes and joke books were in plentiful supply.

Read about Scholastic Book Fairs at Mental Floss.

EndeavorRx is a FDA-approved prescription game that helps kids between ages eight to twelve who are struggling with ADHD. The game lets users dodge obstacles and collect targets as they traverse through icy wonderlands and lava rivers. Akili Interactive, EndeavorRx’ developer, says that the game stimulates neural systems that are intrinsic to attention function, as Slate details: 

The decision follows seven years of clinical trials. Over five separate studies, researchers examined more than 600 kids to determine whether EndeavorRx could affect their ADHD symptoms. One such study found that 30 percent of the children “no longer had a measurable attention deficit on at least one measure of objective attention” after playing EndeavorRx for 25 minutes a day, five days a week for four weeks. According to Akili, these changes persisted for up to one month following treatment with EndeavorRx. The most common side effects were frustration and headache, which seem mild in contrast to traditional medications.

The parent barn owl has come back to its nest and to its young after a hunt, bringing with it a vole as food for the young. Unfortunately, the food cannot be easily split, and so only one chick can be fed at a time, while the other five chicks wait (barn owls raise six chicks at once on average, but not all of them hatch at the same time). It wouldn’t be surprising if the chicks competed for the food, and then the eldest chick won because it’s larger and healthier, taking the food as their price. But we’re talking about barn owls here, and they might just be one of the most generous birds on the planet, as the elder owlets sometimes share their meal with their younger siblings.

Such cooperative behavior has been reported in adult nonhuman primates and birds, but rarely among young.

A young owlet, however, has to be a good younger sibling to its elder sibling if it wants to share food, and so the young owlet decides to groom the elder sibling to “maximize the probability of being fed in return.”

“I don’t know any other species where you can find it,” says Pauline Ducouret, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. But scientists weren’t sure what prompted the food sharing. Now, observations of nests show that elder barn owlets offer their food to their younger siblings in exchange for grooming, Ducouret and her colleagues report in the July issue of the American Naturalist.

More details about this study over at ScienceNews.

What are your thoughts about this one?

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With the many technological advancements that the world has seen since the end of World War II, it could be said that wars may be more violent than they were before. After all, new weapons of war mean new ways to kill a person. However, this is not the case at all. Turns out the world has been less violent in the past 30 years, according to this recent study.

The study, by mathematicians at the University of York, used new techniques to address the long-running debate over whether battle deaths have been declining globally since the end of the Second World War.

The team carried out a "change point" analysis on publically available data sets tracking the number of global deaths in battle since the Napoleonic wars.

And what they found was a greater level of peace beginning in the 1990s.

Co-author of the study, Professor Niall MacKay from the Department of Mathematics at the University of York, said: "The question of whether the world today has become more or less dangerous is a hotly debated issue among historians. Our study attempts to address this question purely from the perspective of what the data can tell us.

"The change for the better our analysis detected over the past 30 years may be due to peace keeping work by global organisations like the UN and increased collaboration and cooperation between nations."

The researchers, however, admit that there is room for inaccuracy in their study. Nevertheless, it is a study that could give us hope for a better future.

More details about this over at EurekAlert.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: Pixabay)

Found around 604 light-years from Earth, in the constellation Scorpius, is the red supergiant star Antares. When scientists estimated its diameter in the past, they determined that about 700 of our own suns could fit in the supergiant. It turns out, however, that Antares is much larger than that, as a new radio map created with the help of two powerful telescope arrays reveals that the red supergiant’s atmosphere goes beyond its radius.

With this detailed map, the team found that Antares' chromosphere, a gaseous layer that creates a star's outer atmosphere along with its corona, stretches to 2.5 times the star's radius. For context, our sun's chromosphere only extends to 0.5% of our star's radius.

"The size of a star can vary dramatically depending on what wavelength of light it is observed with," Eamon O'Gorman, a researcher at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies in Ireland and lead author of this study, said in a statement. "The longer wavelengths of the VLA revealed the supergiant's atmosphere out to nearly 12 times the star's radius."

The star is indeed worthy of being called a supergiant.

More details about this over at Space.com.

(Image Credit: NRAO/AUI/NSF, S. Dagnello/ Space.com)

You know what’s more epic than synchronized swimming? Synchronized basketball!

In this amazing montage, watch as various basketball players unconsciously synchronize their movements with each other during different games.

This video was posted by reddit user chocolat_ice_cream on the subreddit Nearly Impossible Odds. Watch it over at the site.

(Image Credit: u/chocolat_ice_cream/ Reddit)

Despite being protected against advertisements of tobacco, alcohol, and gambling, children who use social media are still exposed to a health risk in the form of junk food advertisements from junk food companies. The bad news is, there are hardly any restrictions to these kinds of advertisements. This recent study reveals that this is happening on a global scale, which means that kids all around the world are “heavily exposed to unhealthy food marketing, including on TV, online and through outdoor advertising.”

In our study, we focused on the 16 largest social media platforms globally. These included platforms popular with children, such as Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Snapchat and Facebook.

We examined each platform's advertising policies related to food and drinks.

We found none of the social media platforms have comprehensive restrictions on the advertising of unhealthy foods to children.

More details about this study over at MedicalXpress.

(Image Credit: Fotorech/ Pixabay)

It is never a bad idea to arm yourself with survival tips, as you never know when disaster will strike. The only problem, however, is trying to remember these things when disaster does strike, as you might panic and forget all of these things.

Cracked lists 25 cool survival tips that you might need in the future. See them over at the site.

(Image Credit: Cracked)

A perfect rocket launch is a thing of beauty, but failures are much more entertaining! Since you learn from your mistakes, we are pretty sure YouTuber BPS.space has learned a lot from these many failures. -via Digg

I may have found the most useless yet the most adorable thing on the Internet: chicken arms (which are really doll arms tied on a steel wire).

A man known only as “Uncle Brian” sent this product via priority mail (because why not) over to his nephew who he calls “Sparkle.”

“[Uncle Brian] found something that I thought you could use from time to time,” he says in the letter.

Sparkle then took photos of the chicken wearing the arms.

Image via Wholesome Gang on Facebook

Scientists have managed to decode the tooting and quacking sounds that newborn queens make in the hive. Apparently, the queens quack when they are ready to emerge from their eggs. Only one of them, however, can hatch from their eggs, for a death battle ensues if two queens hatch at the same time. And so, the queen bee who just managed to hatch begins tooting to signal the worker bees to keep the other eggs captive.

Dr Martin Bencsik, from Nottingham Trent University, who led this study, described the tooting and quacking of these "wonderful animals" as "extraordinary".

The worker bees will only let another queen hatch when the tooting ceases.

"Quacking queens are purposefully kept captive by the worker bees - they will not release the quacking queens because they can hear the tooting.

"When the tooting stops, that means the queen would have swarmed [split the colony and set out to find a new nest] and this triggers the colony to release a new queen."

Dr Bencsik said bee society was "absolutely splendid" to observe.

Via Classic FM

(Image Credit: Scott Bauer, USDA Agricultural Research Service/ Wikimedia Commons)

It's easy to unfriend someone, even face to face. What's hard is befriending someone. It takes a lot more than a click. Doug Savage of Savage Chickens shows what works and doesn't work among the two platforms.

“Tell me about a time you failed,” or some variation of this question is considered by many applicants to be the most dreaded interview question. But this question is not asked to make the applicant embarrass himself. Rather, the interviewer asks this question with some hidden questions in mind. And that’s the key towards giving a proper answer to this question: knowing what the interviewer is really asking.

There are good reasons why your answer to this question can be incredibly telling. So, let’s start there. When the interviewer asks this question, what are they really hoping to learn?

Generally speaking, this:

• Do you have humility?
• Are you comfortable with the idea of failure?
• Are you reflective of your own failures?
• Do you take accountability?
• Do you receive and take action on feedback?
• Have you learned something from the experience?

Understanding that these are the unasked questions, your job now is to choose the right example and use it to tell the story in a way that delivers on all of the above.

Rachel Cooke gives us tips on how to compose a great answer to this question. See them over at QDT.

(Image Credit: geralt/ Pixabay)

The instructions sometimes warn us against doing something, but do not explain why. We all want to know why. What would happen if we did what we are specifically told not to do? Nick Wibert succumbed to the temptation so that you don't have to. -via Metafilter

In the year 1515, no one in Europe had seen a rhinoceros since the Roman Empire withdrew a thousand years earlier. Well, maybe except for a few sailors and other world travelers. But that year King Manuel I of Portugal was given a gift of a rhino from a menagerie in India. While the privately-owned beast was seen by relatively few people in Portugal, it was the talk of Europe even before it arrived, and everyone wanted to know what a rhinoceros looked like.

Albrecht Dürer, a German painter and printmaker living in Nuremberg, was captivated by the strangeness of the animal. So he began to a prepare a pen sketch relying on the written description and the sketch made by an unknown artist. Dürer never saw the animal himself, but the woodcut he prepared became so famous that for two centuries it was the only rhinoceros Europeans ever saw.

But Dürer’s representation of the rhinoceros was not anatomically correct. He put armor like plates on the animal’s body, complete with rivets along the seams. He placed a small twisted horn on its back and gave the animal scaly legs. Despite its anatomical inaccuracies, Dürer's fanciful creation became so popular that three hundred years later, European illustrators continued to publish Dürer's woodcut, even after they had seen the real animal.

You have to admit it's a fascinating piece of art. Was Dürer trying to be artistic or as representational as he could? Read about the afterlife of Dürer's rhino and the real rhinoceros named Genda that inspired it at Amusing Planet.