Really interesting article on depression by Johan Lehrer. | The mystery of depression is not that it exists — the mind, like the flesh, is prone to malfunction. Instead, the paradox of depression has long been its prevalence. While most mental illnesses are extremely rare — schizophrenia, for example, is seen in less than 1 percent of the population — depression is everywhere, as inescapable as the common cold. |
| For some unknown reason, the modern human mind is tilted toward sadness and, as we’ve now come to think, needs drugs to rescue itself. |
The alternative, of course, is that depression has a secret purpose and our medical interventions are making a bad situation even worse. Like a fever that helps the immune system fight off infection — increased body temperature sends white blood cells into overdrive — depression might be an unpleasant yet adaptive response to affliction. Maybe Darwin was right. We suffer — we suffer terribly — but we don’t suffer in vain. Read more at www.nytimes.com |
Deep on the ocean floor, colonies of bacteria appear to have connected themselves via microscopic power grids that would be the envy of any small town.
Much remains unknown about the process, but if confirmed the findings could revolutionize scientists’ understanding of how the world’s smallest
ecosystems operate.
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Oxygen-breathing bacteria that live on the ocean bottom have a problem. Those sitting atop the sediment have ready access to oxygen in the water but
not to the precious mineral nutrients that lie out of reach a centimeter or so below the ground. Meanwhile, those microbes that live in the sediment
can access the nutrients, but they lack oxygen. How do both groups survive?
Read more at news.sciencemag.org |
I'm not sure I'd run up to it feeling welcomed home, but they seem to have the systems figured out for family living....... it's a start. Rainwater collection, solar power and composting waste. URL: www.zerohouse.net
Whatever works for you is the way to go, I think. This obviously works for these two. They are travelling and playing their music and enjoying life. Combining all the chi-chi style of world-class yachts — Weaver’s father was a carpenter with a Seattle-area yacht manufacturer, and the bus is outfitted with fancy scrap wood — and the environmental sensitivity you would expect of two recent college graduates from Washington state — thus the bus’s conversion to run on used vegetable oil from restaurants — the Bluebird sets a new standard in RVing. |
And then there’s the penthouse, a bolted-down shell of a 1979 Volkswagen camper bus that piggybacks on top of the Bluebird. Yes, the penthouse gets great light, and opens, hatchback-like, to the bus’s picket-fenced “yard,” also known as the back half of the roof. |
Looking for an adventure with an environmental bent, Weaver, 24, and Ruble, 23, friends from college, drove the bus to Austin in the late summer. At the time, they had already spent roughly $20,000 to outfit the bus, which Weaver had bought for $1,500 on Craigslist. Read more at www.statesman.com |
How do you educate a generation of students eternally distracted by the internet, cellphones and video games? Easy. You enable them by handing out free iPhones — and then integrating the gadget into your curriculum. |
The traditional classroom, where an instructor assigns a textbook, is heading toward obsolescence. Why listen to a single source talk about a printed textbook that will inevitably be outdated in a few years? That setting seems stale and hopelessly limited when pitted against the internet, which opens a portal to a live stream of information provided by billions of minds. Read more at www.wired.com |
Every day, 150 million people log on to Facebook to check their wall, update their status or look at photos from the night before posted by their friends.
“While all humans need to feel connected to each other or to some cause, there are also times when we simply want to disconnect,” said former marketing director for Apple, Steve Chazin. “And disconnecting is becoming increasingly hard thanks to social networking technology.”
Is it possible for an American to exist “off-the-radar” in a world where people are bound to their cell phones, their laptops, their omniscient social networking devices and ultimately, their virtual identities? I’ll find out soon enough. |
If they can adapt that to hearing devices, it may help the hearing impaired.
They have some interesting space saving ideas here. Can’t say I’d want to live in one permanently - but for a person just starting out, there are some ideas that could be put to good use to save space. The American sense of space is expansive—what with manifest destiny, great spans of geography, purple mountains, fields of grain, and so forth. This is not the case in other countries, where elevators are more likely to resemble vertically-oriented coffins. It is thanks to these other locations that we get so many ingenious space-saving ideas. Italian company Tumidei has taken economy to a new level by thinking in terms of levels. Read more at 3rings.designerpages.com |
Don Yoemans, Senior Research Scientist at NASA has written us a reality check with a sense of humour. | There apparently is a great deal of interest in celestial bodies, and their locations and trajectories at the end of the calendar year 2012. Now, I for one love a good book or movie as much as the next guy. But the stuff flying around through cyberspace, TV and the movies is not based on science. There is even a fake NASA news release out there… So here is the scientific reality on the celestial happenings in the year 2012.
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| Nibiru, a purported large object headed toward Earth, simply put - does not exist |
| The Mayan calendar does not end in December 2012. |
Re-purposed and reclaimed wood and metal mixed with solar and wind power capabilities plus the option of a rain water collection system design is winning awards. “We try and create what we call a positive footprint with our homes,” says Gardner’s business partner, Kimber Reed, pointing to the energy-efficient features design to work with renewable energy sources, and materials that would otherwise end up in landfills. “We build beyond green by actually helping the Earth, instead of simply trying not to damage it any further,” she says.
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The resulting space is elegantly spare, an artful combination of shiplap wood and corrugated metal that would look natural on a ranch or in Clarksville or Travis Heights. “We call it modern rustic,” Reed says. Even without any personal effects, the interior, a paradigm in spatial efficiency, is warm and inviting.
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Depending on the size of the house and its location, the solar can be grid-tied, meaning it’s hooked up to and supplemented by a city’s utilities, or an off-grid, stand-alone system that charges batteries that then power the house.
Read more at www.statesman.com |
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