Small places of beauty in the city

The Body Has a Mind of Its Own is a new book by Sandra Blakeslee and Matthew Blakeslee, a mother-son partnership with a history of writing good science books and articles. I found this book from an article they wrote for Scientific American's Mind magazine...

The Longevity Diet is a book about calorie restriction and how to go about trying it. The authors are Brian Delaney, President of the Calorie Restriction Society, and Lisa Walford, the daughter or Dr Roy Walford who was one of the early proponents of calorie restriction for people...

Calorie restriction refers to feeding an organism less than it would like to eat, typically from 20% to 50% less. In many organisms, such as nematode worms, mice, and rats, calorie restricted diets can significantly increase lifespans...

There are a number of low-carb diets, such as Dr Atkins, that are promoted as causing your body to burn more fat and lose weight very quickly. These diets have you to go into ketosis and use fat as your primary energy source...

Better skin and slower aging by controlling your blood sugar

Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs That Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime is a new book by Aubrey de Grey and Michael Rae. de Grey is a PhD biogerontologist whose goal is to repair age-related damage so that people now alive will be able to live healthy, indefinitely long lifetimes...

Your brain needs exercise to stay in shape. Dr Ryuta Kawashima is a professor of neuroscience and has done extensive fMRI (functional magentic resonance imaging) of people's brains while they perform different tasks...

Sharon Beals is a San Francisco photographer who creates exquisite images. Her current work is with bird nests...

If you only do one thing for your health and well-being, make sure you get enough omega-3's. If you only do two things, take resveratrol plus quercetin...

I live in San Francisco, and panhandlers are a fact of life. You see them everywhere, often in the median before a traffic light, where they can collect from people driving by while the light is red...

Get out of the rut.

I wrote an article about omega-3 yesterday, and I wanted to give some background for my recommendations. Omega-3's and omega-6's are called essential fatty acids (EFA's), because the body can't make them...

Want to feel better?

One of the booths at the local farmer's market had a trick for keeping strawberries fresh. I like to have a few berries cut up over yoghurt in the morning, so before I discovered this technique, a basket would go bad before I could finish it...

We saw Man of La Mancha last night at the SF Playhouse; a wonderful show. They perform in a small theater with about 100 seats, so every seat is a good one and it is a very different (and nice) experience compared to a large theater such as ACT...

Biofeedback can be an extremely effective technique. There is a story about an Indian yogi who learned to raise the temperature of a spot on the back of his hand to 103 degrees by just meditating and thinking about it...

Goldstar Entertainment is a good way to get half-price tickets for events. I signed up for it a few years ago, and have found it a great resource...

We've traditionally tied emotion to the heart: words and phrases such as heartbroken, heartfelt, a heart full of love. Then modern science came along, and we were taught that all emotions really come from the brain, and that the body is just what the brain uses to survive in the physical world, that the brain is in charge...

Amazing collection of tanks and other military vehicles