Check out Norman Foster’s TED Talk on designing beautiful, pollution free buildings:

Does the practice of meditation foster one’s capacity for compassion and empathy? The Venerable Ajahn Chah believed so, and now, scientific evidence appears to confirm it. In an article published in the Public Library of Science, scientists used an MRI to examine the brain circuitry engaged when in a state of compassion for meditators and […]

The Florida State Senate’s K-12 Education Committee approved a bill to the main floor “protecting” teachers who wish to teach alternative theories of evolution (read: Creationism). Clearly these bills have been discussed in the blogosphere extensively, but whenever these bills are introduced I still cringe. For one, this is the very reason why we need […]

In a previous entry I wrote about the relative neglect of Tuberculosis compared to the international HIV/AIDS movement. In today’s issue of the Public Library of Science: Neglected Tropical Diseases, they take it a step further, arguing for increased funding for a wide variety of truly neglected tropical diseases that affect the poorest of individuals […]

The International Council on Clean Transportation recently released a report outlining car and light truck fuel efficiency for major countries across the world. The United States comes in dead last. So when Mitt Romney says things like:
“You put a big burden on energy in this country as the energy-intensive industries say, “We’re going to move […]

He’s back. The Washington Post reports on Ward Connerly’s initiative to end affirmative action in five new states: Colorado, Arizona, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Nebraska. If these initiatives can pass with overwhelming margins in Michigan and California, there’s little reason to believe that these purple/red states will feel any different. To launch an effective opposition campaign, […]

The New York Times published a world briefing today noting that the United States was cutting it’s embassy staff in half over a long standing dispute with Belarus.
The rift between the Bush Administration and Belarus began from the re-election of President Alexander Lukashenko, in which most independent sources stated that the election did not meet […]

If you read the New York Times today and saw their report on the collapse of the I-35W bridge in Minnesota, you may have been wondering like me exactly what those bends looked like, or for that matter, why did the bridge fail in the first place? For a better explanation than the one given, […]

Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick faces charges of: conspiracy to obstruct justice, obstruction of justice, misconduct in office, perjury in a court proceeding and two counts of perjury other than in a court proceeding.
Image taken from Flickr user “CAVE CANEM” under the Creative Commons License 

The Detroit Free Press says you haven’t lived in Ann Arbor until you’ve been to Zingerman’s. Uh, obviously.

People from Utah think Ann Arbor is part voodoo magic:
“Ann Arbor, Mich., seems like a typical friendly college town with several coffee shops, indie music stores and narrow streets that weave together the downtown area and the campus […]