The Arctic Circle. How the city hurts your brain. THE CITY HAS always been an engine of intellectual life, from the 18th-century coffeehouses of London, where citizens gathered to discuss chemistry and radical politics, to the Left Bank bars of modern Paris, where Pablo Picasso held forth on modern art. Without the metropolis, we might not have had the great art of Shakespeare or James Joyce; even Einstein was inspired by commuter trains. And yet, city life isn't easy. The same London cafes that stimulated Ben Franklin also helped spread cholera; Picasso eventually bought an estate in quiet Provence.
While the modern city might be a haven for playwrights, poets, and physicists, it's also a deeply unnatural and overwhelming place. Now scientists have begun to examine how the city affects the brain, and the results are chastening. "The mind is a limited machine,"says Marc Berman, a psychologist at the University of Michigan and lead author of a new study that measured the cognitive deficits caused by a short urban walk. Worldchanging 101: An Anniversary Collection. Worldchanging is six years old today! To celebrate our sixth anniversary, we've created a collection of what you might think of as the Worldchanging canon: pieces that have had enduring popularity and that we think say something important.
And it turns out the two overlap pretty well. After compiling a list of our most popular articles we noticed that a high proportion of our most read, forwarded and linked pieces not only represent groundbreaking work, they also highlight many of the core ideas we often discuss on Worldchanging. Below you'll find the links to our anniversary series, Worldchanging 101. We hope this toolkit makes Worldchanging's big ideas exciting and accessible to all who want to rediscover some excellent writing, whether new to the site, or old friends. We encourage you to share what you like with others. Worldchanging 101: PLANET 10 Landmark Posts on Planet: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. Worldchanging 101: POLITICS 10 Landmark Posts on Politics: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. NYC water towers seen as ground for wind farms. By Joan Gralla NEW YORK Thu Jun 11, 2009 11:56pm IST NEW YORK (Reuters) - New York City could become the grounds for a new kind of urban wind farm if a Cleveland-based mechanical engineer has his way.
Cleveland State University's Fenn College of Engineering on Thursday said it will unveil a new wind turbine design by one of its professors, Majid Rashidi, that could attach to the sides of the water storage tanks that sit on the rooftops of many city apartment buildings. Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who has made green programs a centerpiece of his administration, last August proposed crowning the city's bridges, skyscrapers and shorelines with turbines, but critics said they would be impractical and possibly hazardous. But Rashidi said his turbines solve a key stumbling block of harnessing wind power effectively in crowded urban areas because they accelerate the flow of wind through four rotating turbines.
Rashidi's four turbines could produce 8 kilowatts per hour. (Editing by Leslie Adler)