Lit

what made you look this up, if it's ok to ask? - Halil

That was sooo London or the UK at least for the most part, I recognised the architecture, but a few looked completely foreign, like those ruins, couldn't suss their locations, unless they too are in the UK somewhere? - Halil

These guys are awesome (wish I could do this stuff as well as them)!! - Lit

The skills, flexibility, agility, and the like are admirable and worth at least a partial endeavoring. - Lit

Love it... - Lit

♥ GR8 combination of instrumentation. My kinda music. - JB

:) - Jenny H.

#Lits_music - Lit

love it! - ebru

"A new private company called Deep Space Industries announced today that it intends to send a fleet of small spacecraft to near-Earth asteroids with the aim of mining resources and turning them into products using space-based 3-D printers. Last year was thick with audacious private spaceflight company unveilings, including the announcement from Planetary Resources, Inc. of their plans to mine relatively valuable platinum group metals from asteroids...There exists potentially extremely valuable material on asteroids, including nickel, silicon, platinum group metals such as platinum and palladium, and water, which can be broken down into hydrogen and oxygen to make rocket fuel. DSI intends to create a fleet of prospecting spacecraft called “FireFlies” (perhaps trying to rouse interest in their plans from Joss Whedon acolytes) that will travel to asteroids in Earth’s vicinity on journeys of two to six months." - Lit

“Using resources harvested in space is the only way to afford permanent space development,” Gump said in statement. “More than 900 new asteroids that pass near Earth are discovered every year. They can be like the Iron Range of Minnesota was for the Detroit car industry last century – a key resource located near where it was needed. In this case, metals and fuel from asteroids can expand the in-space industries of this century. That is our strategy.” Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/deep-sp... - Lit

This is really cool, the kind of stuff we need to be doing. There's plenty of money in the world it just needs a big enough challenge to release it. We may also need an Asteroid branch of the air force. I can imagine a bond villain hijacking the mining facilities and holding the earth hostage to an asteroid attack :-) - Todd Hoff

Guess they would have to develop the technology to easily direct asteroid re-maneuvering and movement first ;) ...Glad you enjoyed the posted material. :) - Lit

"In addition to calling for changes in how the country handles gun sales, the proposal would increase mental health services, finish rules on mental health parity and restore federal gun research. Modern Healthcare: Mental Health Care Part Of Obama Plan To Fight Gun Violence Surrounded by schoolchildren, President Barack Obama on Wednesday introduced his plan to reduce gun violence ... that includes increasing access to mental health services and conducting federal scientific research on gun-violence causes and prevention. The president's announcement comes one month after a lone gunman murdered 20 children and six school staffers in a shooting massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. In addition to 23 executive actions, the plan includes recommendations that Congress act swiftly to pass legislation that would require a universal background check for all gun sales, restore a ban on military-style assault weapons and limit ammunition magazines to 10 rounds (Zigmond, 1/16)." - Lit

"It's not only April showers that bring flowers. It's also global warming. A recent study conducted by scientists from Boston University, Harvard University, and the University of Wisconsin found that flowers are blooming earlier and earlier every year in two historical sites. Using data collected by famous naturalists and authors Henry David Thoreau and Aldo Leopold, the researchers graphed the change in flower bloom times. The 161-year-old and nearly 80-year-old data allowed them to see exactly how much the temperatures had changed. Their findings were drastic and worrisome. After comparing past bloom times with present bloom times, the researchers found that plants, such as serviceberry and nodding trillium, are blooming up to one week earlier." - Lit

"Swartz believed deeply that information — particularly that which might benefit society — should be made available for free to the public. In 2011, Swartz was indicted on federal data-theft charges for breaking into the MIT computer system and allegedly downloading 4.8 million documents from the subscription-based academic research database JSTOR. Swartz was facing up to 35 years in prison and a fine of up to $1 million. He pleaded not guilty. His trial was set to begin this April. .... Swartz, who studied at Stanford University for one year before dropping out, would later become a fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, where he worked with Lawrence Lessig, the renowned law professor and activist. Over the years, Swartz worked with Lessig on several major projects, including Creative Commons and Rootstrikers." - Lit

"A passionate advocate for social justice, Swartz founded the group Demand Progress, which played a crucial role in persuading the U.S. Congress to back down from controversial antipiracy legislation last year. In a statement, Swartz’s family criticized the way the federal government has handled the JSTOR case. “Aaron’s death is not simply a personal tragedy,” his family wrote. “It is the product of a criminal-justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney’s office and at MIT contributed to his death." Read more: http://business.time.com/2013... - Lit

I just love that torch song vibe to her voice. - Todd Hoff

#birdaha - Koleksiyoner Ali

You are welcome...thought you might like it. - Lit

Happy to meet you. - Lit

"The numbers are in: 2012, the year of a surreal March heat wave, a severe drought in the corn belt and a massive storm that caused broad devastation in the mid-Atlantic states, turns out to have been the hottest year ever recorded in the contiguous United States. How hot was it? The temperature differences between years are usually measured in fractions of a degree, but last year blew away the previous record, set in 1998, by a full degree Fahrenheit." - Lit

"If that does not sound sufficiently impressive, consider that 34,008 new daily high records were set at weather stations across the country, compared with only 6,664 new record lows, according to a count maintained by the Weather Channel meteorologist Guy Walton, using federal temperature records. That ratio, which was roughly in balance as recently as the 1970s, has been out of whack for decades as the country has warmed, but never by as much as it was last year. “The heat was remarkable,” said Jake Crouch, a scientist with the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C., which released the official climate compilation on Tuesday. “It was prolonged. That we beat the record by one degree is quite a big deal.” Scientists said that natural variability almost certainly played a role in last year’s extreme heat and drought. But many of them expressed doubt that such a striking new record would have been set without the backdrop of global warming caused by the human release of greenhouse gases. And they warned that 2012 was likely a foretaste of things to come, as continuing warming makes heat extremes more likely. Even so, the last year’s record for the United States is not expected to translate into a global temperature record when figures are released in coming weeks. The year featured a La Niña weather pattern, which tends to cool the global climate over all, and scientists expect it to be the world’s eighth or ninth warmest year on record. Assuming that prediction holds up, it will mean that the 10 warmest years on record all fell within the past 15 years, a measure of how much the planet has warmed. Nobody who is under 28 has lived through a month of global temperatures that fell below the 20th-century average, because the last such month was February 1985." - Lit

"Last year’s weather in the United States began with an unusually warm winter, with relatively little snow across much of the country, followed by a March that was so hot that trees burst into bloom and swimming pools opened early. The soil dried out in the March heat, helping to set the stage for a drought that peaked during the warmest July on record. The drought engulfed 61 percent of the nation, killed corn and soybean crops and sent prices spiraling. It was comparable to a severe drought in the 1950s, Mr. Crouch said, but not quite as severe as the legendary Dust Bowl drought of the 1930s, which was exacerbated by poor farming practices that allowed topsoil to blow away. Extensive records covering the lower 48 states go back to 1895; Alaska and Hawaii have shorter records and are generally not included in long-term climate comparisons for that reason. Mr. Crouch pointed out that until last year, the coldest year in the historical record for the lower 48 states, 1917, was separated from the warmest year, 1998, by only 4.2 degrees Fahrenheit. That is why the 2012 record, and its one degree increase over 1998, strikes climatologists as so unusual. “We’re taking quite a large step above what the period of record has shown for the contiguous United States,” he said. In addition to being the nation’s warmest year, 2012 turned out to be the second-worst on a measure called the Climate Extremes Index, surpassed only by 1998. Experts are still counting, but so far 11 disasters in 2012 have exceeded a threshold of $1 billion in damages, including several tornado outbreaks; Hurricane Isaac, which hit the Gulf Coast in August; and, late in the year, Hurricane Sandy, which caused damage likely to exceed $60 billion in nearly half the states, primarily in the mid-Atlantic region. Among those big disasters was one bearing a label many people had never heard before: the derecho, a line of severe, fast-moving thunderstorms that struck central and eastern parts of the country starting on June 29, killing more than 20 people, toppling trees and knocking out power for millions of households. For people who escaped both the derecho and Hurricane Sandy relatively unscathed, the year may be remembered most for the sheer breadth and oppressiveness of the summer heat wave. By the calculations of the climatic data center, a third of the nation’s population experienced 10 or more days of summer temperatures exceeding 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Among the cities that set temperature records in 2012 were Nashville; Athens, Ga.; and Cairo, Ill., all of which hit 109 degrees on June 29; Greenville, S.C., which hit 107 degrees on July 1; and Lamar, Colo., which hit 112 degrees on June 27. With the end of the growing season, coverage of the drought has waned, but the drought itself has not. Mr. Crouch pointed out that at the beginning of January, 61 percent of the country was still in moderate to severe drought conditions. “I foresee that it’s going to be a big story moving forward in 2013,” he said." - Lit

Lovely - Todd Hoff

It is :) #Lits_music - Lit

"Think of these lessons as Cliff Notes for "Running 101." Learn them, and you can make it through your beginning-running efforts with an "A" grade." - Lit

"13. Add a little stretching and strengthening. Running is a specialized activity, working mainly the legs. If you're seeking more complete, total-body fitness, you need to supplement your running workouts with other exercises. These should aim to strengthen the muscles that running neglects, and stretch those that running tightens, which means strengthening the upper body and stretching the legs. Add a few minutes of strengthening and stretching after your running workouts, because that's when these exercises tend to do the most good. 14. Follow the hard-day/easy-day training system. Most runs need to be easy. This is true whether you're a beginning runner or an elite athlete. (Of course, the definition of "easy" varies hugely for these groups; an easy mile for an elite runner would probably be impossible for many beginners or even veteran runners.) As a new runner, make sure you limit yourself to one big day a week. Run longer and slower than normal, or shorter and faster than normal, or go to the starting line in a race where you'll try to maintain your best appropriate pace for the entire race distance. 15. Congratulations: You're a winner. One of the great beauties of running is that it gives everyone a chance to win. Winning isn't automatic; you still have to work for success and risk failure. But in running, unlike in other sports, there's no need to beat an opponent or an arbitrary standard (such as "par" in golf). Runners measure themselves against their own standards. When you improve a time, or increase a distance, or set a personal record in a race, you win--no matter what anyone else has done on the same day. You can win even bigger simply by keeping at it for the long haul, for years and decades. You don't have to run very far or fast to outrun people who have dropped out. It's the Tortoise and the Hare story all over again. Slow and steady always wins the race." - Lit

"Sex, we have been led to believe, is as natural as breathing. But in fact, contends British philosopher Alain de Botton, it is "close to rocket science in complexity." It's not only a powerful force, it's often contrary to many other things we care about. Sex inherently sets up conflicts within us. We crave sex with people we don't know or love. It makes us want to do things that seem immoral or degrading, like slapping someone or being tied up. We feel awkward asking the people we love for the sex acts we really want. There's no denying that sex has its sweaty charms, and in its most exquisite moments dissolves the isolation that embodied life imposes on us. But those moments are rare, the exception rather than the rule, says de Botton, founder of London's School of Life. "Sex is always going to cause us headaches; it's not something we can miraculously grow relaxed about." We suffer privately, feeling "painfully strange about the sex we are either longing to have or struggling to avoid." If we turn to sex books to help us work out this central experience of our lives, we are typically assured that most problems are mechanical, a matter of method. In his own new book, How to Think More About Sex, de Botton makes the case that our difficulties stem more from the multiplicity of things we want out of life, or the accrual of everyday resentments, or the weirdness of the sex drive itself. Here are some of the most basic questions it answers. —The Editors" - Lit

"Why is adultery overrated? Contrary to all public verdicts on adultery, the lack of any wish whatsoever to stray is irrational and against nature, a heedless disregard for the fleshly reality of our bodies, a denial of the power wielded over our more rational selves by such erotic triggers as high-heeled shoes and crisp shirts, by smooth thighs and muscular calves. But a spouse who gets angry at having been betrayed is evading a basic, tragic truth: No one can be everything to another person. The real fault lies in the ethos of modern marriage, with its insane ambitions and its insistence that our most pressing needs might be solved with the help of only one other person. If seeing marriage as the perfect answer to all our hopes for love, sex, and family is naive and misguided, so too is believing that adultery can be an effective antidote to the disappointments of marriage. It is impossible to sleep with someone outside of marriage and not spoil the things we care about inside it. There is no answer to the tensions of marriage. When a person with whom we have been having an erotic exchange in an Internet chat room suggests a meeting at an airport hotel, we may be tempted to blow up our life for a few hours' pleasure. The defenders of feeling-based marriage venerate emotions for their authenticity only because they avoid looking closely at what actually floats through most people's emotional kaleidoscopes, all the contradictory, sentimental, and hormonal forces that pull us in a hundred often crazed and inconclusive directions. We could not be fulfilled if we weren't inauthentic some of the time—inauthentic, that is, in relation to such things as our passing desires to throttle our children, poison our spouse, or end our marriage over a dispute about changing a lightbulb. A degree of repression is necessary for both the mental health of our species and the adequate functioning of a decently ordered society. We are chaotic chemical propositions. We should feel grateful for, and protected by, the knowledge that our external circumstances are often out of line with what we feel; it is a sign that we are probably on the right course." - Lit

"The science of self-improvement never ceases. Every year brings dozens of new quirky findings about how to be more effective, whether in managing our time, being more creative or just getting things done. Here are some of the highlights for me from 2012." - Lit

"1. You don’t know yourself as well as you think. We think we know ourselves best, but more and more evidence is surfacing to the contrary. This raises an interesting challenge for employers who solely base their hiring decisions on self-reported questionnaires. Psychologist Timothy Wilson proposes that to really know someone, you have to ask others to evaluate you. It turns out that how you see yourself and how other people see you are only very modestly correlated. In his book, Strangers to Ourselves, Wilson talks a lot about the adaptive unconscious. He tells us that much of what we do lives in the unconscious and therefore we cannot detect it ourselves. Things like what we think, feel, and want become unnoticeable. Now of course, if you’ve ever practiced mindfulness, or have ever self-reflected, some of the unnoticed start to surface and we gain insights, but more often than not, a lot of information goes unnoticed. This is why one might have a hard time understanding why things go wrong. Given that we aren’t completely conscious of what we were doing, we tend to blame others for our mistakes. In order to gain better insight into ourselves, we need help getting the right answers. It turns out that other people's assessment of your personality predicts your behavior better than your own assessment would. So instead of thinking you already know everything about yourself, stop for a minute, and ask someone else. 2. Have a problem? Distract yourself from it It’s already known that in order to gain an insight, your brain has to be in a quiet state, but new research by Neuroscientist David Creswell from Carnegie Mellon sheds light on the phenomenon of how and why it can be valuable to come back to a problem, after a brief moment of distraction. Creswell explored what happens in the brain when people tackle problems that are too big for their conscious mind to solve. He made three groups of people think about purchasing an imaginary car based on multiple wants and needs. One group had to choose immediately—this group didn’t do so well at optimizing their decision. The second group had time to try to consciously pick the best car— yet their choices weren’t much better. The last group was given the task, then given a distracter task—something that didn’t require lots of mental energy, but still held their conscious attention, allowing for their non-conscious to keep working on the problem. Results showed this group did significantly better than the others at optimizing their decision. FMRI scans also showed something interesting happening with the third group. According to Creswell, the brain regions that were active during the initial learning of the problem, continued to be active (we call this unconscious neural reactivation) even while the brain was distracted with another task. In short, when trying to solve a complex task, people who were distracted after first tackling the problem did better than people who put in conscious effort." - Lit

"3. We’re more creative when thinking about others. Creativity in the business world is increasingly important. Creativity often involves viewing things from different perspectives. New findings show that we are more creative when we think of others solving problems instead of ourselves. To test this, professors Evan Polman and Kyle Emich presented 137 undergraduates with this riddle: “A prisoner was attempting to escape from a tower. He found a rope in his cell that was half as long enough to permit him to reach the ground safely. He divided the rope in half, tied the two parts together, and escaped. How could he have done this?” Half the participants were asked to imagine themselves as the prisoner locked inside the tower (we’ll call them the “prisoner group”) and the other half were asked to imagine someone else trapped in the prison (“imaginary group”). In the prisoner group, 48% of participants solved the riddle, but in the imaginary group, 66% were able to solve the riddle. In a second experiment, the same professors asked participants to draw an alien that someone else might use to write about in a short story. In a third, participants had to come up with gift ideas for themselves, someone close to them, and someone they barely knew. In the results across all three experiments, Polman and Emich found that participants were more creative or had better solutions when thinking for someone else. This is an intriguing finding with many implications and applications for creative problem solving. Just try to imagine someone else coming up with good ideas for using this finding… 4. It’s not napping, it’s constructive rest We live in a time when where more people are staying connected on vacations. People have forgotten how important it is for your mind to rejuvenate. Research shows that naps improve productivity—a growing body of evidence shows that taking regular breaks from mental tasks improves productivity and creativity — and that skipping breaks can lead to stress and exhaustion. (I’ll be right back…zZz) John P. Trougakos, an assistant management professor at the University of Toronto Scarborough and the Rotman School of Management, compares the brain to any other muscle in the body. Similarly to how muscles become fatigued after repeated and sustained use, so does the brain after sustained mental exertion. The brain needs a rest period before it can recover he explains. There is no need to take a break if you’re on a roll though, Trougakos advises. For some people, working over an extended period can be revitalizing—you get into a zone. It is only when you’re forcing yourself to go on that you should stop. Research from the University of Notre Dame even shows that sleeping shortly after learning new information is the most beneficial for recall. Notre Dame Psychologist Jessica Payne and colleagues studied 207 students who habitually slept for at least six hours per night. Payne randomly gave each student information to study at either 9am, or 9pm, allowing for the 9am team to be awake for the rest of the day, while the 9pm, went to sleep. She tested these students on their recall after 30 minutes, 12 hours, and 24 hours. She found that after 12 hours, those students who slept shortly after studying had a better overall memory. After 24 hours, when both teams were well-rested, all students had superior memory recall. "Our study confirms that sleeping directly after learning something new is beneficial for memory” Payne says. In a world where we believe to be more successful you have to work longer hours, perhaps its time for a change, or even time for a break. Jessica will be presenting these and other findings at the 2013 NeuroLeadership Summits. 5. Optimize your peak time. What if you aligned everything in your schedule according to your body’s biological clock? New research is showing there’s a peak time for all activities, from when you should think critically to the best time for a tweet. People run on circadian rhythms that are patterns of brain wave activity, hormone production, cell regeneration and other biological activities linked to our 24-hour daily cycle. Disruption of these rhythms can be quite harmful. Steve Kay, a professor of molecular and computational biology at the University of Southern California, says problems such as diabetes, depression, dementia and obesity, can develop from not listening to our body’s clock. If you get paid to think critically, try to get most of your work done in the late morning, right after a warm shower. This will motivate your body’s clock by raising its temperature and preparing your working memory, alertness and concentration for getting things done. Anytime before noon is the best for when it comes to focusing because the afternoon (12pm-4pm) is prime time for distractions according to recent research led by Robert Matchock, an associate professor of psychology at Pennsylvania State University. (Tips on how to manage these distractions can be found in my previous blog.) If you get paid to think creativity, most adults perform their best right as they begin to slump in terms of wakefulness. Martin Moore-Ede, chairman and chief executive of Circadian, a training and consulting firm, says at around 2pm, sleepiness tends to peak. This can boost creativity. When you’re fatigued, your mind can’t stay focused and you drift in and out of all these different avenues in your mind, which allows for you to free associate and be open to new ideas. In summary, it turns out that if you want to be most effective, letting go of the need for your own conscious mind to do all the problem solving might be the key. Let your unconscious do more work, whether through napping or distractions, and try seeing things through the eyes of others. Finally, quite counter-intuitively, perhaps others know more about us than we do ourselves." - Lit

#Lits_music - Lit

"Rita Levi-Montalcini, a Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist who began her seminal research on cell development while dodging bombs and fleeing Nazi persecution during World War II, died Dec. 30 at her home in Rome. She was 103. ...Dr. Levi-Montalcini was widely regarded as one of the most influential scientists of her generation, and her accomplishments were particularly notable because of the handicaps and obstacles faced in science by women throughout the world when she began her career.Her rise to the highest reaches of scientific achievement was made even more difficult because she embarked on her career under the fascist regime of Benito Mussolini, who expelled her and her fellow Jews from the Italian academic world. She shared the 1986 Nobel Prize in medicine for her discovery of a substance known as the nerve growth factor, a naturally occurring protein that helps spark the growth of nerve cells. She launched that groundbreaking research in a makeshift bedroom laboratory during the war and deepened it in the 1950s at Washington University in St. Louis, where she worked alongside her co-Nobelist, the American biochemist Stanley Cohen." - Lit

"In essence, Dr. Levi-Montalcini’s discovery helped explain how embryonic nerve cells grow into a fully developed nervous system and, more broadly, how a damaged nervous system might be repaired. Cohen was credited with the identification of the epidermal growth factor, a similar substance that helps regulate the growth of skin and other cells. Together, those advances “opened new fields of widespread importance to basic science,” the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute declared in awarding the prize to the two scientists. The nerve growth factor is considered a foundation for modern research into treatment of Alzheimer’s disease and has also influenced research on cancer, Parkinson’s disease and muscular dystrophy. Writing in the journal Science in 2000, Dr. Levi-Montalcini attributed her success to “the absence of psychological complexes, tenacity in following the path I reputed to be right, and the habit of underestimating obstacles.” Rita Levi-Montalcini was born April 22, 1909, in the northern Italian city of Turin. Her mother, Adele Montalcini, was a painter; her father, Adamo Levi, was an engineer and subscribed to the then-prevailing view that women were best suited to the domestic life. “It was he,” Dr. Levi-Montalcini wrote in an autobiography, “who had a decisive influence on the course of my life, both by transmitting to me a part of his genes and eliciting my admiration for his tenacity, energy and ingenuity; and, at the same time, by provoking my silent disapproval of other aspects of his personality and behavior.” She discovered her affinity for science in her early 20s and gravitated toward medical research because she had lost a beloved governess to cancer. Dr. Levi-Montalcini received a medical degree in 1936 from the University of Turin, where her classmates included the future Nobel laureates Salvador Luria and Renato Dulbecco." - Lit

"The federal law prohibits U.S. citizens from adopting children who are Russian citizens, and also prohibits activities relating to selecting and transferring Russian children to U.S. citizens for adoption from being conducted in Russia. In this connection, the Agreement between the Russian Federation and the United States of America Regarding Cooperation in Child Adoption, signed in Washington on July 13, 2011, has been terminated. The federal law also provides that the law itself, as well as the Federal Law On the Exit from the Russian Federation and Entry into the Russian Federation, concerning the undesirability of the presence (residence) of foreign citizens in the Russian Federation, will affect citizens of countries that have prohibited Russian citizens from entering their territory and frozen Russian citizens’ assets because of their supposed involvement in human rights violations in Russia. " - Lit

Yes it is! :) The sound is a bit like 80's, electronic, and indie alternative... really liking the group ... #Lits_music - Lit

"Experiencing and expressing gratitude is an important part of any spiritual practice. It opens the heart and activates positive emotion centers in the brain. Regular practice of gratitude can change the way our brain neurons fire into more positive automatic patterns. The positive emotions we evoke can soothe distress and broaden our thinking patterns so we develop a larger and more expansive view of our lives. Gratitude is an emotion of connectedness, which reminds us we are part of a larger universe with all living things. Below are some of my favorite quotes about gratitude to help inspire you and deepen your thinking about finding an enduring place for gratitude in your own life." - Lit

"Gratitude Quotes "Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom." - Marcel Proust "We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures." - Thornton Wilder As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them. John F. Kennedy At times our own light goes out and is rekindled by a spark from another person. Each of us has cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have lighted the flame within us. Albert Schweitzer The deepest craving of human nature is the need to be appreciated.
-- WIlliam James "Be thankful for what you have; you'll end up having more. If you concentrate on what you don't have, you will never, ever have enough."
-- Oprah Winfrey He is a wise man who does not grieve for the things which he has not, but rejoices for those which he has." - Epictetus" - Lit

"How to Bring Gratitude into Your Life To begin bringing gratitude into your life, you can deliberately meditate on all the things in your own life that help you or give you pleasure. You can also write a gratitude diary, posting pictures and writing about the things you feel grateful for each day. The holidays are a great time to express your gratitude to friends and family by writing cards and exchanging thoughtful, personal gifts. Baking cookies for neighbors or sharing food with the poor are other ways to express appreciation for the abundance of food that we have in this country. Gratitude can lead to feelings of love, appreciation, generosity, and compassion, which further open our hearts and help rewire our brains to fire in more positive ways." - Lit

"Amazon spent another year invading everyone's territory and pushing the limits of its business strategy. The e-commerce company continued to dabble in book publishing and Web site hosting and tried its hand at video-gaming development. Anything slightly related to its business -- Amazon jumped on it. That's not surprising given Amazon's history with identifying and mimicking both services and products to strengthen its bottom line. Here are the five biggest Amazon stories of 2012: 1. Go big on hardware or go home Amazon beefed up its hardware selection this year, releasing three new devices to add to its previous line of e-book readers and its tablet. The new devices, the Kindle Paperwhite, the Kindle Fire HD, and the updated Kindle Fire, are part of the company's strategy to make money off content. Amazon actually loses money on the sale of the devices, but that doesn't matter to the retail giant. It wants people to buy into its ecosystem of apps, books, movies, and music. The Kindle Fire HD, which comes in both 7- and 8.9-inch models with modest prices, also happens to compete with Apple's iPad for tablet dollars. 2. A push for original content The company backed the creation of more original content this year, invading the space of various forms of media. In addition to helping authors self-publish their writing and produce movies, the company bought a book publishing company and opened up its own social gaming studio to develop and publish titles. The studio, Amazon Game Studios, launched in August with a desktop game and quickly followed suit with a mobile game. Amazon does it because it can. If its already-loyal customers -- and there are many of them -- buy into its all-in-one digital spread, Amazon can control how and what they consume." - Lit

" 3. More sales tax drama Ah, the ongoing sales tax battle. This dates back years -- and continued to be an issue for Amazon in 2012. As part of Amazon's quest for faster, cheaper shipping, the company started building fulfillment centers in additional states, forcing sellers to start collecting sales tax in several states this year, including California, Texas, and Pennsylvania. These centers store and ship the goods that independent retailers sell to consumers -- the more fulfillment centers, the faster Amazon can ship. Customers in more states, like Massachusetts and New Jersey, will start paying taxes in 2013. The ability to ship quickly to customers is clearly important to Amazon. The company also shelled out $775 million to buy a company that runs logistics for fulfillment systems. 4. Continually shaking up traditional book selling This goes to the core of Amazon's "Earth's Biggest Bookstore" motto from the 1990s. Amazon certainly disrupted the book selling industry when it first came on the scene. And it continued to enter skirmishes with book publishers and competing book brokers in 2012. Tensions between Amazon and Barnes & Nobles, the world's biggest brick-and-mortar bookseller, have always been high. But this year the companies used tablets to fight their battles. Amazon also found itself at odds with Apple. The iPad maker accused Amazon of being the "driving force" behind federal prosecution that ended in several publishers settling with the government. Prosecutors accused the publishers of colluding with Apple to fix the price of e-books in an alleged affront to Amazon. In an attempt to soothe its disgruntled competitors, Amazon's publishing arm signed a deal that allowed competitors to sell Amazon's titles. 5. Battles with Netflix Amazon bulked up its video streaming offerings throughout the year, signing deals with studios and TV service Epix in order to get enough films to compete with Netflix. On top of bundling its video streaming service with its premium shipping account, Amazon also began offering its $7.99-per-month streaming plan this year, directly challenging Netflix's $7.99 plan. All of this has left some bad blood between the companies, with Netflix CEO Redd Hastings publicly dumping on Amazon. Adding fuel to that fire, the year ended on a downbeat for both companies. On Christmas Eve, Netflix's video streaming service suffered a widespread, hours-long outage across the Americas. The culprit was Amazon Web Services, which Netflix uses for video streaming." - Lit

"Our eyes may be our window to the world, but how do we make sense of the thousands of images that flood our retinas each day? Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have found that the brain is wired to put in order all the categories of objects and actions that we see. They have created the first interactive map of how the brain organizes these groupings. The result — achieved through computational models of brain imaging data collected while the subjects watched hours of movie clips — is what researchers call “a continuous semantic space.” Some relationships between categories make sense (humans and animals share the same “semantic neighborhood”) while others (hallways and buckets) are less obvious. The researchers found that different people share a similar semantic layout. “Our methods open a door that will quickly lead to a more complete and detailed understanding of how the brain is organized. Already, our online brain viewer appears to provide the most detailed look ever at the visual function and organization of a single human brain,” said Alexander Huth, a doctoral student in neuroscience at UC Berkeley and lead author of the study published today (Wednesday, Dec. 19) in the journal Neuron." - Lit

"A clearer understanding of how the brain organizes visual input can help with the medical diagnosis and treatment of brain disorders. These findings may also be used to create brain-machine interfaces, particularly for facial and other image recognition systems. Among other things, they could improve a grocery store self-checkout system’s ability to recognize different kinds of merchandise. ”Our discovery suggests that brain scans could soon be used to label an image that someone is seeing, and may also help teach computers how to better recognize images,” said Huth, who has produced a video and interactive website to explain the science of what the researchers found. It has long been thought that each category of object or action humans see — people, animals, vehicles, household appliances and movements — is represented in a separate region of the visual cortex. In this latest study, UC Berkeley researchers found that these categories are actually represented in highly organized, overlapping maps that cover as much as 20 percent of the brain, including the somatosensory and frontal cortices. To conduct the experiment, the brain activity of five researchers was recorded via functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) as they each watched two hours of movie clips. The brain scans simultaneously measured blood flow in thousands of locations across the brain. Researchers then used regularized linear regression analysis, which finds correlations in data, to build a model showing how each of the roughly 30,000 locations in the cortex responded to each of the 1,700 categories of objects and actions seen in the movie clips. Next, they used principal components analysis, a statistical method that can summarize large data sets, to find the “semantic space” that was common to all the study subjects. The results are presented in multicolored, multidimensional maps showing the more than 1,700 visual categories and their relationships to one another. Categories that activate the same brain areas have similar colors. For example, humans are green, animals are yellow, vehicles are pink and violet and buildings are blue. For more details about the experiment, watch the video above. “Using the semantic space as a visualization tool, we immediately saw that categories are represented in these incredibly intricate maps that cover much more of the brain than we expected,” Huth said. Other co-authors of the study are UC Berkeley neuroscientists Shinji Nishimoto, An T. Vu and Jack Gallant." - Lit

"Free books from NASA, the Hubble Space Telescope's science team and the European Space Agency bring Earth and the heavens to life — as long as you have an iPad, and the patience to wait for a longish download. Even if you have a regular old computer, you can still download the books about Hubble and its successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, as PDF files. But you'll miss out on all the interactive features. Those two books were unveiled today by the Baltimore-based Space Telescope Science Institute, which takes care of the science programming for the two NASA-funded telescopes. They're joining the ESA's first iBook, "Earth From Space: The Living Beauty," on my iPad bookshelf. The Hubble book guides you through scores of pictures from the world's most famous space telescope, organized into categories ranging from cosmology to planetary science. There's also a chapter on the telescope itself, with a 3-D model and a diagram you can tap on to learn about all the components. (Our Flash interactive about Hubble takes a similar approach.) When you tally up all the interactives, videos and picture galleries, the content adds up to a lot more than the 84 pages on the screen." - Lit

"The 74-page e-book about the Webb telescope uses a similar approach to explain the science behind the $8.8 billion observatory, which is currently scheduled for launch in 2018. There aren't any pictures from the Webb, of course, but the book's interactives, videos and photo galleries explain how the telescope will observe the cosmic frontiers in infrared wavelengths. "These new e-books from NASA will allow people to discover Hubble and Webb in a whole new way — both the science and the technology behind building them," Amber Straughn, an astrophysicist on the Webb telescope project at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, said in today's news release. "They collect all of the amazing resources about these two observatories in an excellent product that I think people will really enjoy." While the NASA iBooks look outward, ESA's iBook looks back toward Earth, incorporating stunning images from Europe's Earth-observing satellites. The 104 pages cover our planet from the core to the cryosphere, from the oceans to the wilderness. You can set color-coded virtual globes spinning with a brush of your fingertip." - Lit

""By turning the virtual pages of this iBook you will discover how some of the latest technology has changed the way we see Earth," Volker Liebig, director of ESA's Earth observation programs, said in the space agency's publication announcement. "So, it was time to bring these ‘scientific voyages’ to you in a dynamic way. I believe that electronic media hold a huge potential, just like satellite technology. They help you to discover the scientific world of spaceflight." While the Hubble and Webb e-books are downloadable via Apple's iBookstore, you download "Earth From Space" directly from ESA's website and follow the instructions. You'll need to be patient: Each book packs in hundreds of megabytes' worth of data, so the download can take as long as 20 minutes over a home broadband connection. There were times when I wondered whether it'd ever finish. But if you're a fan of space imagery, these books are well worth the wait — especially when you consider that they're free. - Lit

"'The structure and content of thinking looks very much like the structure and content of dreaming. They may be the product of the same machine,' said Matthew Wilson, a neuroscientist at MIT and a panelist at the New York Academy of Sciences discussion 'The Strange Science of Sleep and Dreams' on Friday (Nov. 9). His work and others' explores the crucial link between dreams and learning and memory. Dreams allow the brain to work through its conscious experiences. During them, the brain appears to apply the same neurological machinery used during the day to examine the past, the future and other aspects of a person's (or animal's) inner world at night. Memory is the manifestation of this inner world, Wilson said. 'What we remember is the result of dreams rather than the other way around,'" he said. - Wynne Parry - Lit

"Facebook's photo-sharing service Instagram has moved to deny that it has changed its privacy policy to give it the right to sell users' photos to advertisers without notification. It said instead that users had incorrectly interpreted its revised terms of serviced, which it blamed on its "confusing" choice of language. Instagram's clarification follows much user opposition to the believed change. "To be clear: it is not our intention to sell your photos," it said. Instagram chief executive Kevin Systrom said in a blog posting: "It is our mistake that this language is confusing. "We are working on updated language in the terms to make sure this is clear." Compulsory changes to Instagram's terms of service are due to come into effect on 16 January, The originally proposed new wording that caused the controversy included: "You hereby grant to Instagram a non-exclusive, fully paid and royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable, worldwide license to use the content that you post on or through the service." The terms also stated that "a business or other entity may pay us to display your username, likeness, photos, and/or actions you take, in connection with paid or sponsored content or promotions, without any compensation to you."" - Lit

I wonder how many people deleted their accounts over this "confusing language"? - Jenny H.

The language doesn't seem confusing at all. Seems pretty clear. They own all the value. - Todd Hoff

Since Facebook doesn't charge users anything, the users are the product. - Morton Fox

"These fascinating and beautiful images tell important stories that shed light on the living universe around us, showing us the intimate structures and dynamic events of life in ways that we cannot ordinarily see," Brad Burklow, of Olympus, said in a press release." - Lit

"This incredible image of fern spores is just one of the many mind-blowing images that won the Olympus BioScapes Imaging Competition in 2012." - Lit

"Balancing time commitments against health benefits, it appears that AT (Aerobic Training) is the optimal mode of exercise for reducing fat mass and body mass, while a program including RT (Resistance Training) is needed for increasing lean mass in middle-aged, overweight/obese individuals." - Lit

I'd love to find somewhere where they do water aerobics, must add that to my new years resolution list/to do list - Halil

Great idea :) - Lit

"Of the four dietary groupings, only the junk food category showed any link with a different risk for developing colon tumors. Of the 160 people who scored low on the junk food diet, 17 developed tumors, while 18 out of the 160 people who ate the most junk food developed tumors. The numbers initially seemed similar, but after taking into account smoking and other risk factors, the researchers determined that those in the high junk food group were twice as likely to develop colon tumors." - Lit

"Self-change is tough, but it's not impossible, nor does it have to be traumatic...To increase the overall probability of success, divide a behavior into parts and learn each part successively." - Lit

"Change Requires Structure Many people view structure as restrictive, something that inhibits spontaneity. While spontaneity is wonderful for some activities, it's a surefire method for sabotaging change. Strategy: Identify what works Classify all activities and materials you're using as either helpful, neutral or unhelpful in achieving your goal. Eliminate unhelpful ones, make neutrals into positives and keep or increase the positives. After evaluating his morning routine, he replaced time-consuming breakfasts with quick protein drinks. Strategy: Revisit your plan regularly Review every day how and why you're changing and the consequences of success and failure. Research by Daniel Willingham, Ph.D., a psychology professor at the University of Virginia, showed that repetition increases the probability of success. Each night he reviewed his plan, smiled and said, "Hawaii, here I come." Strategy: Logically sequence events According to behavior expert Richard Foxx, Ph.D., a psychology professor at Penn State University at Harrisburg, it's important to sequence the aspects associated with learning a new behavior in order of level of difficulty or timing. He completed all bathroom activities, then ate breakfast. Practice Is Necessary Practice is another key approach to change, suggests one study on changing conscious experience published recently in the British Journal of Psychology. I've found that the majority of failures occur because this principle is ignored. Practice makes new behaviors automatic and a natural part of who we are. Strategy: Use helpers Not all behaviors can be learned on your own. Sometimes it's useful to enlist the help of a trusted friend. When even the telephone answering service failed to wake him up, he asked his secretary to call. Strategy: Practice in many settings If you want to use a new behavior in different environments, practice it in those or similar settings. Dubbing this "generalization," psychologists T.F. Stokes and D.M. Baer found it critical in maintaining new behaviors. During the first week he would try to be punctual for work. The following week, he would try to be on time for his regularly scheduled tennis game. New Behaviors Must Be Protected Even when flawlessly performed, new behaviors are fragile and disappear if unprotected. Strategy: Control your environment Environmental issues such as noise and level of alertness may interfere with learning new behaviors. After identifying what helps and what hinders, increase the helpers and eliminate the rest. Having a nightcap before bed made it difficult to wake up in the morning, so he avoided alcohol after 7 p.m. Strategy: Use memory aides Because a new behavior is neither familiar nor automatic, it's easy to forget. Anything that helps memory is beneficial. He kept a list in each room of his apartment describing the sequence of things to be done and the maximum allowable time to complete them. Small Successes Are Big Unfortunately, plans for big successes often result in big failures. Focus instead on a series of small successes. Each little success builds your reservoir of self-esteem; one big failure devastates it. Strategy: Map your success Approach each step as a separate mission and you'll eventually arrive at the end goal. For each morning activity he completed within his self-allotted time limit, he rewarded himself by putting money into his Hawaii-getaway fund. The process of changing from what you are to what you would like to become can be either arduous and frustrating or easy and rewarding. The effort required for both paths is the same. Choose the first and you'll probably recycle yourself endlessly. Apply my 10 principles, and change, once only a slight possibility, becomes an absolute certainty. The choice is yours." - Lit