Dr. Dean Ornish talks about cardiovascular disease and obesity at the TED conference. He says that diet and lifestyle and prevent and sometimes reverse this epidemic.

He also talks about how genes are not our fate. Diet and lifestyle and change how your gene expression…

If you like doing Sudoku puzzles, you will like this variant of the puzzle by Scientific American known as “Sci-doku”. It uses letters instead of numbers. As with normal sudoku, each row, column, and nine-cell grid must contain one and only one of the nine letters. You can not just use any nine letters, you have to use the letters that are already shown on the grid.

Here are the full rules.

Play the Sci-doku games »

Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University professor and author of The Dominant Animal: Human Evolution and the Environment, talks in about the state of the world at the Long Now Foundation seminar.

Technology Students Mess with Dormitory Lights – Funny bloopers are a click away

The North Pacific Gyre is a section of the Pacific Ocean between Hawaii and California that is accumulating trash due to the nature of its water currents. This garbage patch in the ocean consists of trash debris and non-biodegradable plastic that just breaks up into more tiny pieces.

This video on YouTube sumarizes it best…

saying that there is 7 million tons of floating waste spanning an area twice the size of Texas. Birds and wildlife die when they mistaken these plastic bits as food. A lot of these garbage get washed up on beaches.

The latimes.com also has some video pieces on the North Pacific Gyre here.

And this video is a more detailed explanation of trash in our oceans…

The reason why there is not a lot of good photos of the North Pacific Gyre is that most of the garbage is just underwater and is somewhat spread out as explained in theoystersgarter.com.

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.