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If you are reading this, the good news is that you have a brain inside your head. And you have probably read about the emerging brain fitness movement: frequent articles in the media, an ongoing PBS special, more and more products and games. Now, before you embark on buying any of those programs, you should know that there is a lot we can do without spending a dime. Based on dozens of interviews with scientists and recent research findings, let's take a look at some of the habits of Highly Effective Brains: 1. Learn what is the "It" in "Use It or Lose It". A basic understanding will serve you well to appreciate your brain's beauty as a living and constantly-developing dense forest with billions of neurons and synapses. 2. Take care of your nutrition. Did you know that the brain only weighs 2% of body mass but consumes over 20% of the oxygen and nutrients we intake? As a general rule, you don't need expensive ultra-sophist...

Sachertorte is the world's most famous grown-up chocolate cake, and as such it tends to disappoint more than it charms. Many people find its elegant simplicity something of an anti-climax. They come in a 'show me' state of mind and expect it to be twice the size and three times the richness. Perhaps they confuse it with the Black Forest gateau - such a vulgar treat when properly made - or one of those slabs of truffle-style restaurant cake that is really a pudding in denial. I love this Viennese confection for its understatement - no cream, no cherries, no booze, no swirls or curlicues. I love its shiny icing; the faint tang of fruit from the wafer-thin layer of apricot jam, and the single badge of dark chocolate that is its only adornment. But what I like most is the fact that it is cake. Most chocolate cakes nowadays seem to think they are a souffle, a giant truffle or a slice of wet mousse. Others, further down the social scale, seem to think they are a hat, but we are n...

Health food fads spark huge rise in animal testing THE trend for healthier eating has led to an increase of more than 300% in the number of laboratory experiments conducted on animals for food additives, sweeteners and health supplements over the past year. Home Office figures showed an increase from 862 to 4,038 experiments from 2005 to 2006. The disclosure will ignite an ethical debate about the way animals have become victims of the fad for health foods. Animal welfare groups said many of the tests are unnecessary or could be performed on humans. The experiments often involve using painful procedures and artificially induced injuries to research the effects of food. In a test at Glasgow University, rodents were fed raspberry juice and then killed to see where the juice had gone in their kidneys, liver and brains. At Hammersmith hospital, west London, rats were force-fed fish supplements, while at Glasgow Caledonian University they had the food supplement ginkgo biloba injected into...

We all know the pitfalls of Wikipedia, so where can you find some real facts online? It has become a reflex reaction in the digital age. If you have a question that needs an answer or a fact to check, simply head online and tap it into Google. More often than not you will be directed to Wikipedia, where the answer is laid out for you. The only problem is, it may not be the right answer. Though many of us have come to rely on the online encyclopedia, every entry in it is available for anyone to edit, so you can’t always trust what you find there. Fortunately, there are numerous more accurate resources on the web. The trick is knowing where to look for them. BE WARY OF WIKIS Loathe it or love it, there’s no escaping Wikipedia. However, the weaknesses of the site are frequently exposed (see, for example, the Times Online article about the senior Wikipedia editor who claimed to be a university professor but was actually a student at www.tinyurl.com/2ebqx3 ). That’s not to say much in...

From Disney's official 2008 preview comes the first image from the animated film Bolt , which you can view below. Bolt stars the voice of John Travolta as a dog who is the star of a hit TV show. However, when Bolt accidentally gets shipped from his Hollywood soundstage to New York City, he sets out on a cross-country trip through the real world. Here's more from the synopsis: "Armed only with the delusions that all his amazing feats and powers are real, and with the help of two unlikely traveling companions: a jaded, abandoned housecat named Mittens (voice of Susie Essman) and a TV-obsessed hamster in a plastic ball named Rhino, Bolt discovers he doesn't need superpowers to be a hero." Cinematical

by Nora Ephron When they got home ...

(from I Am Legend) will be in Blindness

Analysing what we look for on the web can offer a remarkable insight into our anxieties and enthusiasms. Four years ago, the writer and internet entrepreneur John Battelle had a sudden epiphany - the kind of moment that leaves you giddy, teetering on a conceptual cliff, as you contemplate its full ramifications. Battelle had already been preaching the transformative power of the internet for some time. But now his thinking turned to the millions of web searches that people were conducting around the world each day, using Google and a handful of other sites. As people searched, he realised, they were inadvertently leaving a trail - a gargantuan historical archive of whatever was on the world's mind at a particular time, which remained stored on the central computers of firms such as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. Battelle called it "the database of intentions". "This information represents, in aggregate form, a placeholde...

[The words I wanted to use and couldn't] By Stephanie Zacharek Those of us who live in big cities, who never see bears rummaging through our garbage or find wildcat prints in the snow, often think we're protected from nature. But even when we think we've built the most sophisticated fortresses against it -- office buildings that require three forms of ID for entry; apartment complexes with astute doormen who will let no raccoon pass unannounced -- nature always finds a way to come charging back. In her 2001 book "Wild Nights," a study of the way the creatures of the natural world find ways to assert themselves into the urban landscape, Anne Matthews writes, "More and more scholars now suggest that even a megacity is part of a larger land-use story, in which cities are as vulnerable to nature and fortune as any other life-form; some endure, some thrive, some shrink." And sure enough, coyotes now trek from God knows where to take up residence in Central...

Papel. Inúmeras aplicações. A propósito dos Japoneses, diz-nos o capitão Osborne: «Era maravilhoso ver com que mil e um fins, tão úteis quanto ornamentais, o papel era usado pelas mãos daquele povo industrioso e com tão bom gosto. Os nossos fabricantes de pasta de papel, tal como os do continente, deveriam ir a Yeddo para aprender o que se pode fazer com papel. Com vernizes lacados, pinturas hábeis, podem confeccionar-se caixas, bolsas de tabaco, cigarreiras, estojos para telescópios, etc. O papel entra em grande parte no fabrico de praticamente tudo o que se encontra numa casa japonesa; em suma, sem papel, todo o Japão estaria num impasse». Sir Francis Galton From my translation :)

English doesn't borrow from other languages. It follows them down dark allies, knocks them over, and goes through their pockets for loose grammar.

The Wines Reportage dal Malawi, dicembre 2007 Il mese di dicembre è stato un mese intenso in Malawi. Siamo a poco più di due anni dall’apertura del primo centro per il trattamento dei malati di AIDS e le attività di DREAM continuano a crescere a ritmi veloci. I laboratori di biologia molecolare presenti nel paese sono attualmente due, uno a Blantyre che serve la regione sud del paese, ed uno nei pressi di Lilongwe per la regione centrale. Il 14 dicembre una delegazione del governo guidata dal vicedirettore del ministero della salute e responsabile per la diagnostica ha visitato il laboratorio di Blantyre complimentandosi per la qualità dei servizi diagnostici offerti. Il 18 dicembre è stata effettuata una missione insieme allo stesso vicedirettore per la diagnostica e ad altri rappresentanti istituzionali all’ospedale di Mzimba, nel nord del paese, luogo individuato per la collocazione del terzo laboratorio di biologia molecolare previsto dal programma DREAM. Ne...

When the great Russian novels of the nineteenth century were first translated into English, beginning with Ivan Turgenev's in the 1870s, they were patted into a Victorian mold of "good writing." That the first to be translated was Turgenev, the most Europeanized of all the Russian writers, was to have a lasting influence on the reception of Russian literature in the English-reading world: Turgenev's elegant simplicity of style and gentle social realism fixed the acceptable boundaries of "Russianness," influencing later translations of the rougher and more Russian novels of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, which really only began to be widely read in English from the 1890s on. No one did more to introduce the English-speaking world to Russian literature than Constance Garnett (1862– 1946), who translated into graceful late-Victorian prose seventy major Russian works, including seventeen volumes of Turgenev, thirteen volumes of Dostoevsky, six of Gogol, four of Tolstoy...

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A round gray stone sits on my desk. The stone is cracked across the middle. It opens like a jewel box to reveal -- an ammonite , a fossilized sea creature shaped like the tightly coiled horn of a miniature ram. The ammonite lived in the sea tens of millions of years ago. It died and fell into the muck on the sea floor. As time passed, its shell was replaced by stone. I'll tell you in a moment where the fossil came from, but for now imagine picking up the stone that contains the fossil. Feel the heft in your hand, the river-worn convexity, the polish. The stone with its fossil treasure is a thing of visual beauty and tactile pleasure. Fossil ammonites are not uncommon. Ammonites once inhabited Earth's seas in teeming numbers, some as small as dimes, others as big as automobile tires. One place where they occur in abundance is in the Jurassic sandstones and mudstones near Whitby on the North Sea coast of England. The curious curled creatures in the rock could not he...

We shouldn't forget that a perfectly roasted piece of protein-on-the-bone served with its myriad accompaniments is not everyone's idea of heaven on earth. Some want a Christmas meal that is lighter, brighter and, crucially, totally meatless. The Christmas feast should be for everyone who gathers round our table. Here are some of the meat-free recipes I will be passing round over the next few weeks. ;)

Lisbon 2 Michael Barrientos for The New York Times Overlooking the Belém Tower on the Tagus River. Bargain-seeking tourists have long flocked to Lisbon, typically among the most affordable of European cities. But now the Portuguese capital is also emerging as a cultural force. The new Berardo Collection Museum , in the historic Belem district, boasts a major trove of modern and contemporary art. Designer hotels like Fontana Park and Jerónimos 8 are attracting style-savvy travelers. And the Design and Fashion Museum, scheduled to open in late 2008, will go a long way toward cementing the city’s avant-garde status. Where do you want to go in 2008? »

Despite this one, some of the others are not for the faint-hearted.

After enjoying one of the most celebrated careers in Hollywood, you’ve decided to go the art-house route and make “Youth Without Youth,” a Romanian fable about an age-defying linguist and his lover who is reincarnated as a seventh-century Indian. Is the film intended for a mass audience? No, not at all. How much did it cost to make? Under $15 million. Do you care if you earn the money back? No. When I finished “The Rainmaker,” I thought, This is the last movie I am going to do basically as a job for money. That was your last film, and it was made 10 years ago. You’re right. The clock is ticking. Your new film is based on a philosophical novella of the same name by Mircea Eliade, the great Romanian scholar who believed archaic religions created a kind of time-outside-of-time. That’s his big book, “The Myth of the Eternal Return.” What I understand of it is that all things come back in some sort of cycle that is regenerative. Or, in the words of the Lion King, it’s the circ...

or The Day Google Became Evil. from the author, BoingBoing's Cory Doctorow: It's great to see such an emergent community of translators who are using their linguistic skills to make English-only works available in other parts of the world. I've done some amateur translation from Spanish, but it's hard to keep the motivation up when you're only working for yourself (as is necessarily the case when you're working with traditional copyright). The "derivatives-friendly" Creative Commons licenses allow amateur translators to share the fruits of their work, get friendly feedback, collaborate and gain reputation, encouraging them to do more and more work. Now, if only more non-English works would be translated for us Anglos! Everywhere I go, I meet non-English-speakers who've read English writers in translation, as well as French, German, Russian, Japanese, etc -- lots of stuff gets translated out of English, but precious little comes to us, leaving us...

The following takes place between 12pm and 1pm on the eighth day of my 48-day jail sentence for driving under the influence of alcohol. Still assigned to laundry detail, I'm building up a clearer intelligence picture. Something about this washroom isn't right. Maybe it's the large quantity of white powder that's delivered each day and used in a process I don't understand. Maybe it's the two men of Central Casting Middle Eastern appearance who whisper urgently by the mangle. Maybe I'm going to have to waterboard them to find out. Walking towards the canteen at lunch, though, I got the hardware breakthrough I'd been waiting for. A phone. I grabbed the receiver. "Chloe, I need you to reconfigure the spy satellite on to Glendale city jail laundry," I panted. "Then I want you to download the surveillance data on to my... wait, I don't have my PDA. Bake it all into a big cake and send it over. Chloe? Dammit, answer me! We're running out ...

The rule with lingerie is that the less there is of it, the more expensive it will be. It's the only thing you don't get what you pay for. Lingerie starts simple and then gets very complicated, with multi-layers and flaps and straps and fluffy pompoms. Men can find this quite confusing, and mentally it gives the impression of going to bed with an advent calendar. Women buy lingerie to make themselves feel good. Men buy it for the same reason. As part of a couple, a man is free to suggest various outfits, but then these need to be translated by the women into something in a non-industrial material that allows breathing and movement. Lingerie now comes in many colours and patterns. Never buy a pattern that would also look good as a wallpaper: it may make finding you in the bedroom difficult. Red is the equivalent of painting a go-faster stripe on your sports car. It's either for people who want to say loud and clear, "I'm hot", or for partners who are extremely ...