Month: January 2011

US lagging in life expectancy

The United States has fallen behind other developed countries in life expectancy gains in recent decades. Americans are among the most sedentary people, vying with Poland for the dubious status of topping that category, followed by Italy, England and Spain.

great news for the coming entitlements crisis.

UK Granny Cloud

Mitra’s new project uses the “UK Granny Cloud” — a large group of British grannies who’ve agreed to volunteer an hour a week to tutor Indian classrooms over Skype video conferences — to supplement education in Indian schools where there is a shortage of teachers.

call it harnessing slacker energy, or cognitive surplus, this is the future of all economies.

Dinosaur feathers

Helmut Tischlinger is the man shaping what your children will think dinosaurs looked like. Most of you probably know that the illustrations of dinosaurs we grew up with were created through a process that includes as much speculation as science. Fossils, obviously, couldn’t tell us what color T. Rex was, or whether the skin of a velociraptor felt like a lizard’s—as is popularly portrayed. Tischlinger is at the forefront of efforts to improve our understanding of what dinosaurs looked like on the outside—and inside—using UV light to pick out the ephemeral remains of soft tissues. His photos—created using hand-made lens filters—are regarded as some of the best work out there.


2015-06-07: 80m old feathers strengthen the view that dinosaurs were really kinda more like big chicken.

Historic NYC Bars

The Bridge Café, a wood-frame building erected in 1794 in the South Street Seaport, sits in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge even though it had already been in business for almost ninety years when the bridge was finished. In addition, when it was first built, before massive land-fill projects dramatically expanded the surface area of Lower Manhattan, the East River actually came up to the structure’s foundation.