A brand new US study in the vein of "wasn't that already completely obvious?" has revealed that boys and girls who play video games on school days do less homework and reading than those straight edge kids who swear off the stuff altogether. Boys average 30 percent less time spent studying, while girls drop off 34 percent. The good news is that video games didn't negatively impact quality family time or get in the way of sports and other such activities. Is that so? Apparently WoW players were not represented in this poll, most likely because they couldn't be bothered to put that raid on hold to answer a few questions. Speaking of... we'll be right back... after we do something very important and serious.

We can't say that we'd recommend a CEO steal property from Google in order to prove a point, but the head honcho of Macmillan Publishers pushed his superego aside and did just that at a recent BookExpo America in NYC. It's no secret that a number of publishers have been up in arms about Google's approach to digitizing their works, but Richard Charkin went so far as to recruit a colleague and swipe a pair of laptops from a Google Books kiosk at the event. About an hour later, the booth attendants actually noticed the missing goods and presumably began to panic, and the haughty executive then had the nerve to return the machines to their rightful owners whilst dropping the "hope you enjoyed a taste of your own medicine" line. He justified the bizarre behavior by suggesting that "there wasn't a sign by the computers informing him not to steal them," apparently referencing Google's controversial tactics when scanning books. That'll show 'em, Mr. Charkin.

[Via TechDirt]

Terrifying robots most certainly aren't anything new, and be it frightening or downright creepy, there's probably a bot out there weird enough to freak just about anyone out. Enter Morgui, the University of Reading-based robot that has been around for some time, but is just now getting the credit a bizarre skull that follows humans around should. The creation, which consists of a disembodied head, oversized blue eyes, and a classically evil grin, has been officially banned from testing around anyone under the age of 18 (permission notwithstanding) by the school's ethics and research committee, leaving the "Magic Ghost" to spook only mature audiences from here on out. Mo, as it's so aptly nicknamed, sports a metal head, the ability to detect visual / auditory cues, and sensors for radar, infrared, and ultrasonic detection as well, but oddly enough, it cannot detect human emotion, so you better not count on this fellow to have sympathy on your soul when you're screeching. The purpose of the machine is to judge how "people react to robots," and when the bot just so happens to lack any form of facial covering beyond a skeletal structure, we're sure the reactions are quite noticeable.

[Via CollisionDetection]

First off, contrary to the beliefs of certain commenters, we absolutely do not hate Sony -- we just think that after the infamous PS3 and BDP-S1 Blu-ray delays, the company would want to do everything possible to make sure that another highly-anticipated product doesn't fall into the same cycle. Yet that's exactly what we're seeing with the upcoming PRS-500 eBook reader first announced at CES -- originally scheduled for a spring release before slipping to a summer time frame -- whose launch has now been pushed back once again to sometime this fall. According to an email Sony sent out to potential customers -- wisely thanking them for their patience -- the e-ink-based Reader will now be shipping "in time for the holidays," which hopefully doesn't refer to December 24th. Sample launch titles include Freakanomics and The Da Vinci Code, although by the time you can actually get your hands on the hardware, you'll probably have already read those books along with many of the other initial offerings. As much as we'd like to own one of these handy ~$350 devices -- and despite having no need whatsoever for a bunch of aviation documents -- we're pretty close to just biting the bullet and shelling out $900 for the eFlyBook version of iRex's iLiad that went on sale yesterday.

[Thanks, Curt C. and Riley P.]