Ikea's flat-pack refugee shelter, an online sexual health test and Taipei's scooter share among ideas to go on show at London's new Design Museum
David Bowie's final album cover, a build-your-own robotic surgeon and a coffee cup that allows astronauts to drink in space are among the Designs of the Year, a 70-strong lineup of ingenious innovations that will be exhibited at the Design Museum's new home in Kensington from 24 November.
Related: Design Museum aims for Tate Modern effect in new home, says director
Continue reading...overlooking the heart of the coney island amusement district, the space brings creativity and artistry to the famous boardwalk and beach.
The post coney art walls turn brooklyn landmark into an open-air museum appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine.
How are dogs and wolves similar and different? In a word? Intensity. Take any behavior exhibited by even the most uninhibited dog, then turn it up to thirty-seven and you've got that same behavior in a wolf.
Put another way, dogs dig holes; wolves dig mines. Dogs might rip up your sofa, a wolf will reduce one to feathers,splinters, springs and bits of fabric no more than a one-inch square.
I like to call wolves "raw dogs", "proto-dogs", or "the blueprint". Even with captive bred wolves, they exhibit a broader and more complex range of behavior than what I've experienced with dogs.
Even primitive dog breeds (more "wolf like" dogs) seem to be less adept at solving problems and more inclined to look towards a human for help.
Wolves have around 33% more gray matter than a comparably sized domestic dog. In general, I've witnessed the ability among wolves and high content wolfdogs to solve problems quickly that stymy dogs until they give up.
Aqutaq [my wolf], for example is incredibly adept with a lead line. She fully understands the concept of the line and that it connects us in such a way that we must be on the same side of any tall obstacle. She might be sixteen feet in front of me and on the wrong side of a tree, yet she'll anticipate this issue, and alter course such that she moves to pass the tree on the side that matches mine.
If she becomes entangled while moving through brush, she also understands to retrace the path of the line to unwind it.
Physically, they're very similar, although domestic dogs can eat foods that contain many more carbohydrates as a result of their long-term association with people. Wolves are also only reproductively active once a year, whereas dogs can cycle multiple times. Pound for pound wolves are stronger, have better endurance, have a much greater bite force, and are faster than all but a very select few breeds of dog.
For those that are curious, in my life I've had many different breeds of domestic dogs including:
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Oldest European object left on Australian soil on loan from Amsterdam, and WA Maritime Museum says it will probably not leave the Netherlands again
A pewter plate that is the oldest European object to be left on Australian soil has been loaned to a Perth museum 400 years after it was originally nailed to a wooden post in Shark Bay, Western Australia.
The flattened engraved plate was left by the Dutch explorer Dirk Hartog in 1616 in the Dutch East India company ship Eendracht, meaning unity or concord, which had arrived there en route to Java.
Related: It's not 'politically correct' to say Australia was invaded, it's history | Paul Daley
1616 the 25 October is here arrived the ship Eendraght of Amsterdam, the upper merchant Gillis Miebais of Liege, skipper Dirck Hatichs of Amsterdam. The 27 ditto (we) set sail for Bantam, the undermerchant Jan Stins, the first mate Pieter Dookes Van Bil. Anno 1616
Related: Indigenous treasures, briefly on loan to Australia, are about to be taken away again
Continue reading...around the belgian city, 'redball' visits famous sights such as the law courts designed by architect richard rogers and the HETPALEIS performing artists center.
The post redball project squeezes into architectural landmarks across antwerp appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine.
seen from a distance, the outline of this low, walled enclosure conjures the image of a life-size lego construction.
The post benedetto bufalino installs a walled football field on a beach in anglet, france appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine.
the display, which runs from september 10th to october 30th, 2016, serves as a platform for the sale of outdoor art.
The post zaha hadid's lilas pavilion featured at sotheby's beyond limits sculpture exhibition appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine.
When deadlines are looming, the phone keeps ringing, and your inbox is overflowing, the idea of taking a break seems faintly ludicrous. The only option, you tell yourself, is just to plough on. Understandable, but shortsighted you'll end up paying a heavy price in the long term.
Just as you need to refuel your car and recharge the batteries in your cell phone, it's important to give yourself the chance to recoup your energy levels throughout the workday. In fact, the more demanding your day, and the less time you feel like you have to take any breaks, the more crucial it is that you make sure you do take regular breaks to prevent yourself from becoming exhausted.
But not just any kind of break will do. Psychologists and business scholars have recently started studying the most effective ways to relax during a workday they call them “micro breaks” and their latest findings point to some simple rules of thumb to sustain and optimize your energy levels through a grueling nine to five. We've crunched the data into the following three-step process to reach peak restfulness.
It's extremely tempting, especially when we're tired, to spend breaks doing things that are convenient, but aren't truly restful. This might be internet shopping, browsing the latest news, or skimming an industry magazine. However, studies show that brief work breaks are only genuinely rejuvenating when they give you the chance to fully switch off. By contrast, any kind of activity that involves willpower or concentration, even if it's not in a work context, is only going to add to your fatigue levels.
Consider a study published this year by researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and George Mason University that involved nearly a hundred Korean office workers keeping a diary for ten work days, in which they noted how much work pressure they had after lunch and what they did during any work breaks. Each participant ultimately noted how fatigued they felt at the end of the day. The researchers coded the work break activities as relaxing (such as daydreaming or stretching), as nutrition-based (grabbing a coffee), social (chatting with colleagues), or cognitive (reading newspapers or checking emails).
As you'd expect, feeling that work demands were more intense around lunch time went hand in hand with feeling more end-of-day fatigue. Crucially, the right kind of break provided a protective buffer against this link between work demands and fatigue. Which kind of break was this? Only relaxation and social break activities had any benefit. Cognitive activities during work breaks actually made fatigue worse, likely because reading websites or checking emails taxes many of the same mental processes that we use when we're working.
Another related study, published this year by a pair of researchers at Ajou University in South Korea and the Korea Institute for Research in the Behavioral Sciences, found that workers who spent their lunch break using their smart phone, as opposed to chatting with friends, felt like they'd enjoyed as much distraction from work as the sociable folk, but they actually ended up feeling more emotionally exhausted in the afternoon.
There's a popular theory in psychology that says our concentration and willpower levels are like fuel in a car the more you use them in one activity, the less you have left over for other tasks. The theory has recently come under criticism for being overly simplistic, but if nothing else, it provides a useful analogy to make sense of the new research findings on workday breaks: As your energy reserves get gradually depleted through the day, you're only going to allow these reserves to replenish if you genuinely relax in your break times.
A key insight from the research is that it makes a difference when you take breaks. Most of us feel more energetic in the morning than in the afternoon, and it can be tempting to wait until we're flagging later in the day before allowing ourselves a short break. However, findings suggest that we actually respond better to breaks in the morning it seems you need to have some fuel in the tank to benefit from a re-fill.
This was one of the main findings to come out of a study of 95 employees at Baylor University across five days, in which they filled out brief surveys about how they were feeling after each break they took. Breaks taken in the morning were much more beneficial, in terms of the improvements in how the workers said they felt afterwards physically and mentally.
A related detail from this study was that if you take frequent breaks, then they don't need to be as long to be beneficial a couple of minutes might be enough. On the other hand, if you deprive yourself of many breaks, then when you do take one, it's going to be need to be longer to have any beneficial effect.
Of course, when you're embroiled in a complicated creative project, the idea of breaking off for 30 minutes or an hour can seem unappealing and impractical and so you end up wading on, meaning your performance is likely to suffer. Crucially, if you remember and have the self-discipline to take breaks early and often, you won't be faced with this dilemma later in the day you will be less fatigued, and any breaks you take at this later juncture needn't be as long and disruptive.
For creatives who work in a large office building, it's easy to find yourself spending whole days indoors you might take breaks to the water cooler or the staff canteen, but nothing beats getting outside and away from the work environment. One problem with staying in the office, is that even if you take a decent lunch break and chat with colleagues, there's still that pressure to maintain a good impression and you often end up talking shop.
When researchers led by John P. Trougakos at the University of Toronto recently studied the effect of different lunch break activities among nearly a hundred university workers, they found that staff who socialized at lunch or did any work-related activities at lunch were rated as more fatigued by their colleagues at the end of the day. This was especially the case if the socializing was imposed by management something to bear in mind for bosses who try too hard to foster camaraderie in the work place.
If you can get outside, even if it's just a five minute walk around the block, you potentially depending on where you're located also get to benefit from a rejuvenating dose of nature. Countless studies have shown how a green environment gives us a mental recharge, and what's really encouraging is that recent work has shown that this doesn't have to be a tropical rainforest. A modest urban park is all it takes.
There's a work zeitgeist today that says you have to be constantly busy to succeed. If you've got time to go for a short walk, you're obviously not consumed by drive and ambition, so the mistaken ethos goes. The psychological reality is that your mental and physical reserves are limited and it is only by taking frequent short breaks of a truly restful nature that you will fulfil your true potential.
A final thought you might have the view that you'll push yourself relentlessly during the day, squeezing every minute for what it's worth, and then completely flake out after dark. This strategy of extremes might work for a robot, but not a human. Psychology research from the University of Konstanz in German and Portland State University shows that over-exhaustion at the end of the day makes it even more difficult to recuperate after work hours. In other words allowing yourself proper breaks during the day will make your out-of-hours recovery more effective, ultimately boosting your productivity and creativity in the weeks and months ahead.
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Russian scientists think they may have received a signal from a star 94.4 light years from Earth. Other expert alien-spotters have moved quickly to investigate
Name: HD164595.
Age: 4.5 billion years, give or take.
Continue reading..._ Reboot © __ posted a photo:
Mnesoi posted a photo:
tvrdypavel posted a photo:
Big Ben and Houses of parliament at dusk, London, UK
Michel Chevreul Scientist of the Day
Michel-Eugène Chevreul, a French chemist and color theorist, was born Aug. 31, 1786.
Tomorrow's morning sky will be temporarily blotted by an inky blackness as the Sun disappears behind the moon, leaving a dazzling ‘ring of fire' in an annular solar eclipse over Africa.…
“They're the pinnacle, they're what everyone wants to row out here,” Trevor tells me as he loads up his first dory. We're on the Salmon River in central Idaho, packing up for a six-day float through the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness. I cut my teeth guiding on this river, and I couldn't wait to come back, this time with a camera.
For those that don't know, a dory is a large flat-bottomed row boat, made from various materials including wood, fiberglass, or aluminum. In my eyes (and for most boatman I've encountered), there is no better way to experience a river. In a dory, you can feel “every wave, ripple, and current” that passes beneath the boat. At the hands of a skilled guide, dories are the most maneuverable and responsive boats through a rapid. However, with this speed comes great responsibility. It is awfully easy to put a hole in one of these boats, so only the most skilled guides get to row them.
Trevor grew up around whitewater. His father was one of the early dory guides in Idaho. Trevor's got years of guiding experience under his belt now, but today he's been granted his first dory, the Great Thumb (each boat is named for a threatened or lost place).
As he packs up he tells me about the spots he's most nervous about. He's done this stretch of river dozens of times, but sitting behind the oars of a dory, everything will look different. A shallow rock in a raft means a slight bump, in a dory it can be catastrophic. Gun Barrel rapid on day one will test him, and Black Creek on day two.
“Black Creek,” I ask. Never heard of it. Its been almost 10 years since I last paddled this river, but I was pretty sure I hadn't paddled any Black Creek rapid.
Due to the truly wild and undammed nature of this river, it is always changing. A few years ago Black Creek flash-flooded and filled the river channel with boulders, creating a brand new rapid in its place (and coincidentally took away the iconic Salmon Falls rapid just up stream).
The Salmon River continues to carve a new path, a unique quality for a river today. Trevor and the other guides know that sharing these amazing places with people will be the best way to protect them for future generations. And what better way to go down river than in the Cadillac of boats, the dory.
The Water Is for Fighting project documents the challenges facing our nations freshwater resources. Corey Robinson is a filmmaker and Young Explorer Grantee collecting these stories through film, still pictures and words. Check out the other videos here.
Follow along with @coreyrobinson #w4f2015
“Whisky is for drinking, water is for fighting.”
Mathias Appel posted a photo:
The Royal Navy's newest offshore patrol vessel, HMS Forth, is now fitting out in Glasgow and we're told she weighs as much as 120 London buses.…
select mixes by genre: | ![]() | ![]() | ![]() | ![]() |
000:00 | milk and sugar | heat | enormous |
005:53 | mambo brothers | momento | toolroom |
011:44 | jindo | summer stories | inmotion |
015:22 | dj face off | the power | ppmusic |
019:55 | mark knight | your love | toolroom |
025:35 | technasia | suga | toolroom |
029:30 | giom | kalimba song | supremus |
034:43 | coeo | native riddim | toy tonics |
040:17 | superlover | circus | suara |
044:27 | love committee | just as long as I got you | alkalino |
053:29 | razor-n-tape | so true | razor-n-tape |
057:51 | italobros | for love | fogbank |
061:36 | paolo barbato | keep on loving | ocean trax |
064:28 | prok and fitch | tears | suara |
069:25 | ronn | sunshine | guesthouse |
073:19 | dirty secretz | trippin | whartone |
076:42 | brothers in progress | collision | monza ibiza |
081:19 | dj face off | surfer | white |
085:57 | the face | loving | defmix |
090:36 | nice7 | point | gruuv |
096:18 | greg gauthier | another door | what's up |
101:44 | gerd | for 12 mins she danced with an alien | bmu |