This is a great concise summary of global warming explaining, what is it, what causes it, and what are its effects.

The Discovery Channel website also has several good videos about global warming.

Dr. John Medina, developmental molecular biologist, gives an informative and humorous talk at Google about brain science and his book “Brain Rules”.

In this talk he talks about brain rule number one which is that aerobic exercise boosts cognitive performance especially executive function. He says “if you have an active lifestyle you have a 50% reduction in the risk of Alzheimer”. He answers the question of how much exercise if required to get these benefits: Two to three times a week for 20 minutes per session. Aerobic exercise increases blood flow to the dentate gyrus of brain and elevates BDNF which is like Miracle Grow for brains.

Then he talks about stress on the brain. Stressed brains does not learn the same way and hurts learning. He says “stress damages cognition in virtually every way cognition can be measured.”

And he ends with the most important brain rule of all: curiosity.

Mark Bittman goes over the history of how we eat and explains what is wrong with the way we eat today. He advocates eating more plants and less animals — both for our own health as well as help prevent global warming. Oh, you didn’t know that raising cattle contribute to global warming? Mark Bittman says “livestock is the second highest contributing factor to atmosphere-altering gases. Nearly one-fifth of all greenhouse gases is generated by livestock production — more than transportation.”

In this 2004 documentary “Super Size Me”, Morgan Spurlock ate nothing but McDonald’s for a whole month. Doctors tracked what happens to his health during this experiment. The film explores the obesity epidemic and how much fast food is contributing to this.

The first person to discover Nirvana was a prince in India 400 years before Christ. His name was Siddhartha and he discovered Nirvana while sitting under a tree through contemplative meditation. Then there is brain scientist Jill Bolte Taylor in the modern world of today who during during a stroke to the left hemisphere of her brain experienced nirvana.

Watch both stories below…
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This documentary shows archaeologists uncovering the history of Buddha. Buddha was a prince in India 400 years BC by the name of Siddhartha. In his teens, he went outside the insular palace walls and discovered there was great suffering in the world such as old age, disease, and death. He journeyed in the lands as well as in his mind to find answers to the end of such sufferings and discovered it through contemplative meditation while sitting under a tree. There he reached nirvana and became Buddha, the “awakened one”. This was the start of the Buddhism.

Brain scientist Jill Bolte Taylor gave this talk at TED where she showed us a real brain and how it consists of two separate halves. The right half thinks in parallel and knows the concept of “we”. The left half thinks in serial and knows that concept of “I”. One day she had a stroke on the left hemisphere and she is able to describe to us today what happened on that day as her brain functions started to shut down. She described how she lost the normal brain chatter that are always in our head, how she gained a perspective as an outsider looking at herself, and how she experienced nirvana.

The title of this video “Maxed Out” refers to the maxing out on the credit card. It explores the credit card industry and Americans’ propensity to buy things on credit. The dark side is that credit card debt can sneak up a person. And sometimes the debt gets so bad that the person commits suicide.

The video contains interviews with Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard law professor who co-authored the book The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke.

This is the full-length two-hour long documentary found on Google Video.

Michael Moore’s film “Sicko” compares (sometimes with ironic humor) at the US’s broken healthcare system with universal health care systems in other countries such as Canada, Britain, France, and even Cuba.
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Professor Dan Ariely who studies behvioral economics explains some of our behavior that seems counter-intuitive in these videos…

Dan Ariely home page »

This report shows that there are is a dip in happiness in during midlife. And this is true for people in countries all over the world. Could this be a contributing factor in mid-life crisis?

Mark Penn, a well-known pollster, speaks at Google headquarter about social trends. Penn is also the author of the book titled “MicroTrend”.

Mark Zuckerberg, a 23 year old as of this video in 2008, is the founder and CEO of Facebook. Lesley Stahl of “60 minutes” interviews him and gives us a brief history of the company. We also get a glimsp of Facebook head-quarters in Palo Alto, California where Mark sits at a modest desk along with his other software engineers.

Professor Dr. Marti Hearst lectures at University of California at Berkeley. This is the first lecture of the course “Search Engines: Technology, Society, and Business” from School of Information Management and Systems (SIMS 141).

This video is about two hours. If you want to bypass the portion of the video that goes over the course logistic and skip directly to the part of the lecture on how the web works, skip to 30 minutes into the video. If you want to skip to how search engines work, skip to 76 minutes into the video.
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Thomas Friedman, New York Times Foreign Affairs columnist goes to India Bangalore’s call centers to talk to the young folks living there and how globalization is changing the way they live. Friedman does not only just visit the high tech centers; he also visits the villages of the working poor less than an hour’s ride away where there is often not even running water.

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