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Note-taking: pen and paper versus the laptop

   “The Pen Is Mightier Than The Keyboard: Advantages of Longhand over Laptop Note Taking” by Pam Mueller (Princeton University) and Daniel Oppenheimer (University of California, Los Angeles) was first published in Psychological Science in April 2014. Participants in the study were Princeton University students and the material used was a series of TED talks. Half of the 66 students in the study used laptops to take notes; the other half wrote their notes using pen and paper. Both sets of students were then tested on their memory for factual detail, their conceptual understanding of the material and their ability to synthesise and generalise the information. The study found students who used laptops consistently took more notes than the “old...

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To the Moon!

How many pens do you need to get to the Moon   Ballpoint pens can produce up to two miles of writing. As there are 238,855 miles to the moon from earth, it would require nearly half a million ballpoint pens to draw a straight line to our only natural satellite. That's a lot of pens!

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What is the most popular highlighter colour?

Tell us what yours is? Yellow is in the middle spectrum of visible light, and thus works well for people with colour blindness. This is one of the biggest reasons why yellow is the most popular colour of fluorescent highlighter ink. As Chris Martin of Coldplay fame might say, “It’s all yellow”

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