Sleep in your genes [Article]

How much sleep do you need? Depends on your genes, claim a group of geneticists from University of California.

In 2009, a team led by geneticist Ying-Hui Fu at the University of California San Francisco discovered a mother and daughter who went to bed very late, yet were up bright and early every morning. Even when they had the chance to have a lie-in at the weekend (a tell-tale sign that you are sleep-deprived) they didn’t take it. Tests revealed that both mother and daughter carried a mutation of a gene called hDEC2. When the researchers tweaked the same gene in mice and in flies, they found that they also began to sleep less 

No one told him he couldn't do it. [Video]

Watch this 4 year old boy play the piano. and he has more fun doing it!!

Make every moment a work of art [Article]

James Altucher writes about his experiment of wearing a suit and begging for five dollars from the folks who work in the richest block on the planet - Wall Street. He also has other words of advise - but this stands out: make every moment a work of art.

Management exists to minimize the problems created by its own hiring mistakes [Article]

Thus says Scott Adams, referring to a video game company called Valve who have 400 employees, & no management structure, & his own start-up (about which he's sharing very little, at least yet).  He reckons that the

need for management will shrink- at least for some type of businesses - because entrepreneurs have the tools to make fewer hiring mistakes in the first place 

Theodor Geisel's book of art [Artivle]

Theodor Seuss Geisel was well known as Dr. Seuss for his children's picture books. He wasn't as well known for his humorous story about n-u-d-i-s-t sisters, as Maria Popova helps us discover in the Atlantic. Take a look through "The Seven Lady Godivas: The True Facts concerning History's barest family". 

Samuel Clemens' fan mail [Article]

Maria Popova shares a collection of the mail that Samuel Clemens (better known to the world as Mark Twain) received from his beloved readership
Eg: A poor & barely literate Englishwoman sent him this sincere personal story & a modest request:

Dear Sir

I wonder if you would care to hear how much my husband & self appreciate your books. We have been married 4 years & I have bought him one of your works each birthday & at Christmas. He is never tired of reading them & they keep him at home many a time when he would be out at night He reads them aloud to me & I enjoy the reading as much as himself. The reason I am writing is to beg a favour of you. Would you be kind enough to give me your phota so that I can give my husband a surprise on his next birthday? We have one hung up that I cut from a paper but I should dearly prize a real phota I dont seem able to come across one here & we arent so well off else I might if I was rich. My husband earns £ 1/-per week as a booking clerk on the railway. We have a little boy six months & his father says when he is older he will tell him about poor little Huck & Tom Sawyer. Perhaps you will be too great a man to answer this & grant my request as we are only humble cottagers. I trust Ive done no harm writing. I have just been reading some extracts in our paper copied from your articles in the “North American Review” I am sorry you lost your daughter Susy you seem to have had a lot of trouble in your life but you always come up smiling. This seems a long letter but I will have to pay 2 ½ to post so I will get my money’s worth. The only thing is I am sorry you arent an Englishman & more especially a Lancashire man, perhaps you will put this in the fire I hope I have a phota from you

I beg to remain

Yours respectfully

Edith Draper

The world's best pro scooter riders [Video]

Can you keep your balance on those tiny wheels?

An interview with a mortician [Article]

Caitlin Doughty, the woman behind Jezebel’s “Ask A Mortician” series, explains the benefit of confronting one’s own death. She discusses “Ars Moriendi,” a manual from the Middle Age that “was basically an instructional tract for how to die, or the best ways to die”:

There was an experiment done where they went into a nursing home with elderly people, and they gave them a plant to take care of. And they said, “This plant is going to die if you don’t take care of it. You’re responsible for watering and caring for this plant.” And they found that the people they gave those plants to lived significantly longer than those who didn’t have them, because they felt some control over their life, they had some reason to be moving forward and to be taking these daily steps. I think “Ars Moriendi” had a similar purpose: The dying person is given this measure of control over their own death and moving ahead, not just a victim of our medical system where they’re like, “I’m just going to lie here and slowly go crazy and rot and die.”

via The Daily Dish

Citizen Journalism at work [Article]

Eliot Higgins, an unemployed British blogger with no military background, has become a crucial source of information about illegal weapons being used in Syria for both human-rights organizations and traditional journalists.

The after effects of US in Iraq [Article, Video]

Around the 10th anniversary of the Iraq invasion by the US, investigative reporter from Al Jazeera discusses how the US has left behind a legacy and cancer:

Dr. Samira Alani actually visited with doctors in Japan, comparing statistics, and found that the amount of congenital malformations in Fallujah is 14 times greater than the same rate measured in the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan in the aftermath of the nuclear bombings. These types of birth defects, she said—there are types of congenital malformations that she said they don’t even have medical terms for, that some of the things they’re seeing, they’ve never seen before. They’re not in any of the books or any of the scientific literature that they have access to. She said it’s common now in Fallujah for newborns to come out with massive multiple systemic defects, immune problems, massive central nervous system problems, massive heart problems, skeletal disorders, baby’s being born with two heads, babies being born with half of their internal organs outside of their bodies, cyclops babies literally with one eye—really, really, really horrific nightmarish types of birth defects. And it is ongoing.

See for yourself the horrifying impacts, nearly a decade later mind you, that the stuff they use in the bombs has on the human body. And the powers that be continue to want to "shock & awe" the "enemy"

For all you coffee lovers out there [Invention]

'text from the website'
Meet Velopresso, an innovative coffee vending trike for true off-grid selling of quality espresso on city streets, at trade fairs, events and in parks, etc. Designed from the ground up around a custom rear-steer tricycle, a unique pedal-driven grinder, and a robust gas-fired lever espresso machine, Velopresso is a celebratory fusion of human power, sensory pleasures and technology – old tech with hi-tech, bicycles and coffee, their engineering and aesthetics. The result is a unique hybrid machine with a compact footprint and near-silent, low carbon operation – fine coffee, no electricity, no motors, no noise!

Building the worlds largest ship in 76 seconds [Video]

Maersk’s Triple-E is a new class of fuel-efficient container ships, designed for lower speeds and CO2 emissions. The 400-meter long ships break the record in container ship capacity and are expected to be the world’s largest ships in service. With the Discovery Channel, Maersk is giving a sneak peek of the construction of one of their massive vessels at the DSME shipyard in Okpo, Korea with this 76-second time-lapse video.

Teaching boys to be kind [Article]

In the wake of another publicised rape, this time in the US, Kim Simon writes about what it means to raise boys to be kind men.

While it’s true that big scary monster men sometimes jump out of bushes to rape unsuspecting women, most rapists look like the men we see every day.  Acquaintance rape (or date rape) accounts for the majority of sexual assaults among young people: in colleges, in high schools, at parties, in the cars and bedrooms that belong to the men who women trust.

Ayumu's photographic memory & recall [Article, Video]

Frans de Waal and Jennifer Pokorny were awarded the 2012 Ig Nobel Prize for their discovery that chimpanzees can identify other chimpanzees individually from seeing photographs of their rear ends. (If you're interested in their research paper, click here for a pdf document). A recent essay by de Waal in the WSJ, called the "Brains of the Animal Kingdom" begins thus:

Who is smarter: a person or an ape? Well, it depends on the task. Consider Ayumu, a young male chimpanzee at Kyoto University who, in a 2007 study, put human memory to shame. Trained on a touch screen, Ayumu could recall a random series of nine numbers, from 1 to 9, and tap them in the right order, even though the numbers had been displayed for just a fraction of a second and then replaced with white squares

I tried the task myself and could not keep track of more than five numbers—and I was given much more time than the brainy ape. In the study, Ayumu outperformed a group of university students by a wide margin. The next year, he took on the British memory champion Ben Pridmore and emerged the “chimpion.

How do you give a chimp—or an elephant or an octopus or a horse—an IQ test? It may sound like the setup to a joke, but it is actually one of the thorniest questions facing science today. Over the past decade, researchers on animal cognition have come up with some ingenious solutions to the testing problem. Their findings have started to upend a view of humankind’s unique place in the universe that dates back at least to ancient Greece….

 If nothing, watch the video of Ayumu for a demonstration of his photographic memory!

Personal Tracking. Unwanted. Big Data. [Blog Post]

Doc Sears detects a change in people's attitudes towards unwanted tracking of their digital activities, & has several links in that blog post. He quotes Erik Cecil :

“The backwash that’s coming is a tsunami that hasn’t hit yet. Right now it’s a wide swell over deep water. But you can tell it’s coming because the tide is suspiciously far out. So we have all these Big Data marketing types, out there on the muddy flats, raking up treasures of exposed personal data. They don’t see that this is not the natural way of things, or that it’s temporary. But the tidal wave is coming. And when it finally hits, watch out.

Top Secret Drum Corps [Video]

Top Secret Drum Corps is a precision drum corps based in Basel, Switzerland. With 25 drummers and colorguard members, the corps became famous for its demanding six-minute routine performed at the Edinburgh Tattoo in 2003. With its invitation to Edinburgh, Top Secret became one of the first non-military, non-British Commonwealth acts to perform on the Esplanade at Edinburgh Castle. Watch a dazzling performance

What's the right thing to do? [Video, links]

Michael Sandel runs a course on Justice at Harvard. He's now opening the course to the world, as a Massive Open Online Course. You can register for free, if you'd like to explore your moral limits & how you think about justice. You could, alternatively, watch the series of youtube videos, beginning with "The moral side of murder", & follow the links for more, if you're interested. Certain to test your sense of justice, & get you thinking.

 If you had to choose between (1) killing one person to save the lives of five others and (2) doing nothing, even though you knew that five people would die right before your eyes if you did nothing—what would you do? 

An Eulogy [Video]

John Cleese offers an eulogy at the funeral service of his co-author of Monty Python, Graham Chapman. If you'd like to know more about the irreverent Chapman, click here

Rosetta Tharpe, Didn't it rain [Video]

The Godmother of Rock n Roll, Sister Rosetta Tharpe's live performance from 1964 in Manchester "Didn't it rain"

“I’m singing, oh I’m singing in my soul, when the troubles roll, I sing from morn’ till night, it makes my burdens light…”

Sugar & substance abuse [Article]

Scientifically speaking, a drug is any substance that alters normal bodily function when absorbed into the body of a living organism.  Students have been overdosing on sugar, says the Guardian, & appeals to them to just say no. Sugar has been shown to have the same impact on the human body as heroin.

We don't think of sugar as a drug: it's found in most of the foods and drinks we encounter every day. And at university, where stress levels can be high and fast food is cheap, it's all too easy to reach out for the comfort blanket it provides.

Many students' diets consist of pizzas, take-aways and chocolate bars. Whether you spend your time raving or revising, there's always something better to do than think about eating healthily. And with university halls often providing only the most basic cooking facilities, a well-balanced diet simply doesn't feature in most students' lifestyles.