jazz

Solar cells made with bismuth vanadate achieve a surface area of 32 square meters per gram.  This compound can be paired with cheap oxides to split water molecules (and make hydrogen) with record efficiency. Short-term geoengineering could postpone global warming, only to have it happen more quickly in the future. Carotenoids tinge blackbird bills a deep orange, signalling fitness; birds with oranger bills are "are heavier and larger, have less blood parasites and pair with females in better condition than males with yellow bills." Fibroblasts can extrude a tidy biological scaffold for stem-…
A jazz player's brain: Brain activation while improvising. Blue areas are deactivated comparable to normal, orange and read are ramped up. From PLOS One. An intriguing finding: While improvising, jazz players seem to turn OFF the part of the brain that (to quote a new study just published in PLOS One) "typically mediate self-monitoring and conscious volitional control of ongoing performance." They're in what athletes call the zone, where they navigate the oncoming musical terrain by a sort of flexible trained instinct, like boulder-hopping downhill: Think about it and you stumble. Lovely…