While we’re always using our brains, we’re not necessarily doing much to keep them in good shape. Here are the top ten sites and tools to train your brain and exercise your mental muscles…
There’s networking…. then there’s power networking. The DaVinci Institute in Louisville, Colorado is in the latter camp. Think of it as a high octane pool of movers and shakers in the world of entrepreneurs, inventors, business people, and artisans. (Pics)
The WikiLeaks Twitter account has just posted a press release calling for American politicians and media personalities to stop advocating the assassination of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
Along with this release comes a handy website, PeopleOKWithMurderingAssange dot com, that gives startling quotations along with the name of the speaker. Each quotation is followed by a link showing the greater context of the often violent and disturbing words.
The site shows a new name and quotation every time you refresh the page; so far, Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin and many others, including government and military figures, radio hosts, newspaper columnists and TV news reporters, are featured on the site…
Chicagoans that vote for their favorite seeds, get free seeds to plant in their gardens.
It seems like an oxymoron that childhood obesity could occur in food deserts, but in much of the country that’s exactly what’s happened. Food deserts, often located in impoverished urban environments, are areas where residents have little access to fresh fruits and vegetables because there are no grocery stores or farmers’ markets nearby. Such areas are often plagued with quickie marts where families feed themselves the processed junk that’s available, fostering an obesity epidemic. Read on to see how one program is working to change Chicago’s landscapes and make these infamous food deserts a thing of the past…
Opunake’s Dylan Karam, 11, got his first hammer for his fifth birthday and has never been far from a building site ever since.
Dylan Karam, 11, of Opunake, New Zealand, is building a house:
Since getting a hammer when he was five, Dylan has never been far from a construction site and has helped builders around Opunake in the last six years.
But it is his latest project that could be his most impressive…
Inmates at Gloucester prison in the UK are spending some of their free time (and you have a lot of that in prison) repairing donated bikes which are then shipped by Jole Rider to a partner organisation in Gambia, Africa. Once there, the bikes can change kids lives by allowing them to get to school. Bikes remain school property, with teachers allocating them to the students who need them most. When a child graduates from school, their bike is re-allocated to another child, multiplying the long-term impact of each bike.
Once at least 333 bikes have been refurbished, they are packed in a container and sent to Africa…
Researchers at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis are working with children who have face blindness (prosopagnosia) to try to come up with ways to treat people who have difficulty recognizing and distinguishing between faces. According to the researchers in this video face blindness affects 1 to 2% of all children…
Orville Douglas Denison thinks that telescoping ladders used by firefighters are too slow for firefighters to use effectively. So he designed a system that would lift up firefighters on something like a conveyor belt or an escalator:
In a rescue, firemen could extend Denison’s hydraulic ladder to windows as high as 113 feet. But rather than clamber up the ladder, the firefighter would hop on, and the rungs would roll up at 200 feet per minute—more than twice the average climbing speed of a firefighter weighed down by 130 pounds of gear…
Sometime this year, the world’s population will pass the 7 billion mark. By 2045, that figure is expected to be 9 billion. National Geographic is beginning a year-long series on how the world’s population came to be, where we are headed, and the challenges that come with so many of us living together. Those challenges include energy consumption, education, birth control, natural resources, immigration, and more.