Painting Berlin’s Streets

September 11th, 2011

Humans have been making art for 75,000 years. Here is 500 liters of water-based environmentally-friendly paint on asphalt (no clean-up!) spread by 2000 cars at Rosenthaler Platz last spring. By IEPE & the anonymous crew.

Street Art Utopia

The Art of Science

August 20th, 2011

FEI produces and distributes electron microscopes for nanoscale research. They hold an annual image contest among those who own their machines and exhibit these images on their site. The 2011 winner (above) by Martina Dienstleder (hand-colored by Manuel Paller) is a micrograph of a cracked particle of steel.

Here are a few more images from their gallery:

Building Smarter Beings

July 17th, 2011

By Riddhi Shah of the HuffingtonPost: Over the last decade, interest in the science of meditation has skyrocketed. We now know more than ever before about just how meditation affects our minds and bodies. Increased research has led to a plethora of fascinating discoveries: Take, for instance, the fact that meditation can prevent heart disease. Or that it reduces stress. Or that it can significantly lessen ADHD symptoms, and in many cases, beats medication.

Still, much is left to be discovered. We know more but we definitely don’t know everything. While we wait for science to catch up with ancient wisdom, check out this slideshow on the complex effects of the simple act of focused breathing [here are its salient points]:

  • [S]ustained meditation leads to something called neuroplasticity, which is defined as the brain’s ability to change, structurally and functionally, on the basis of environmental input. For much of the last century, scientists believed that the brain essentially stopped changing after adulthood. But research by University of Wisconsin neuroscientist Richard Davidson has shown that experienced meditators exhibit high levels of gamma ray activity and display an ability — continuing after the meditation session has attended — to not get stuck on a particular stimulus. That is, they’re automatically able to control their thoughts and reactiveness.

One Fine Day

February 23rd, 2011

Future possibilities!

Now, imagine a vision of your best life–and move towards it, a little at a time!

A Monkey Can Do That?

February 22nd, 2011

By Joanna Zelman: Professor John David Smith and Michael Beran trained macaques, which are of the Old World group (native to Africa, Asia, and Europe), to play a computer game where if they got an answer right, they received a treat. A wrong answer meant no treat, but a brief pause before the next question. But there was a third option — the question mark. By selecting the question mark, the screen skipped the present question, considered too hard, and moved on to the next.

The macaques responded in the exact same way as humans — the monkeys chose to skip the tricky questions. Meanwhile, Dr. Smith told the BBC, “Monkeys apparently appreciate when they are likely to make an error… They seem to know when they don’t know.”

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