NASA Images. Hubble Heritage Gallery of Images - StumbleUpon. Frozen time on Photography Served. Why Nikola Tesla was the greatest geek who ever lived. Additional notes from the author: If you want to learn more about Tesla, I highly recommend reading Tesla: Man Out of Time Also, this Badass of the week by Ben Thompson is what originally inspired me to write a comic about Tesla. Ben's also got a book out which is packed full of awesome. There's an old movie from the 80s on Netflix Instant Queue right now about Tesla: The Secret of Nikola Tesla. It's corny and full of bad acting, but it paints a fairly accurate depiction of his life. The drunk history of Tesla is quite awesome, too. 6 Insane Discoveries That Science Can't Explain.
The Giant Stone Balls of Costa Rica The Mystery: Costa Rica and a few surrounding areas are scattered with giant stone balls. They are smooth and perfectly spherical, or nearly so. Some of them are quite small, a few inches in diameter, but some of them are as large as eight feet in diameter weighing several tons. They have been chiseled to perfection by persons unknown, despite the fact that Costa Rica is still not scheduled to enter the Bronze Age until 2013. The are balls everywhere and serve no apparent purpose, like a swing club on Gentlemen's Night.
And God said, "It's nice, but could use some more purposeless balls. " Some of the balls have been blasted apart by locals hoping to find gold, coffee beans, or even babies. Why Can't They Solve It? About the most useful information anyone has gotten is that there are not, under any circumstance, any quarries anywhere near the balls.
Our Guess: The Baghdad Batteries Source. Well, it's not like we keep digging up ancient camcorders over there. How to Trick Your Brain for Happiness. This month, we feature videos of a Greater Good presentation by Rick Hanson, the best-selling author and trailblazing psychologist. In this excerpt from his talk, Dr. Hanson explains how we can take advantage of the brain’s natural “plasticity”—it’s ability to change shape over time. gobyg There’s this great line by Ani Tenzin Palmo, an English woman who spent 12 years in a cave in Tibet: “We do not know what a thought is, yet we’re thinking them all the time.” It’s true. The amount of knowledge we have about the brain has doubled in the last 20 years. Yet there’s still a lot we don’t know. In recent years, though, we have started to better understand the neural bases of states like happiness, gratitude, resilience, love, compassion, and so forth.
Ultimately, what this can mean is that with proper practice, we can increasingly trick our neural machinery to cultivate positive states of mind. But in order to understand how, you need to understand three important facts about the brain. 1. 2. Once more, without the clear dust cover. Here's the &quo. The Curiosity Rover Landing. 8 — Dopamine Makes You Addicted To Seeking Information. Does the unpredictability of a text message trigger dopamine release? Do you ever feel like you are addicted to email or twitter or texting? Do you find it impossible to ignore your email if you see that there are messages in your inbox? Have you ever gone to Google to look up some information and 30 minutes later you realize that you’ve been reading and linking, and searching around for a long time, and you are now searching for something totally different than before? These are all examples of your dopamine system at work. Enter dopamine – Neuro scientists have been studying what they call the dopamine system for a while.
The myth — You may have heard that dopamine controls the “pleasure” systems of the brain: that dopamine makes you feel enjoyment, pleasure, and therefore motivates you to seek out certain behaviors, such as food, sex, and drugs. It’s all about seeking — The latest research, though is changing this view. And for those of you who like research: Kent C.