Britney Spears collaborates with Takashi Murakami for POP Magazine

Britney Spears collaborates with Takashi Murakami and channels her inner manga for Britain's POP Magazine. Murakami also worked on the cover art for Kanye West's Graduation.

The comic-book-inspired shoot was directed by legendary artist Takashi Murakami, and Brit was pretty pleased with his work.

Read more: http://www.eonline.com/uberblog/b196811_britney_spears_goes_bridalmdashwith.html#ixzz0xeIcFzv1

 Britney Spears goes anime in Break the Ice from 2008's Blackout directed by Robert Hales.

Is It All in My Head?

"With diseases like chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia, what you believe about your illness influences how sick you become."

"Anybody who has a chronic illness has alterations in biological and psychological mechanisms," says James F. Jones, M.D., a chronic fatigue expert with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "You really can't separate the brain and the body, because psychology is biology—everything that takes place in the brain is chemical or electrical. You can't have the one without the other."

"Doctors suspect that by continuing to focus on an elusive biological cause, they could be missing out on the other half of the picture—and the chance to find a solution. They have begun to re-examine the role of severe stress, depression and even personality traits in initiating and fostering disease." - Is It All in My Head? by Melissa Schorr, published on May 01, 2005 - last reviewed on July 20, 2009, Psychology Today

Ouranos the Greek God of Heaven

Ouranos οὐρανός (Greek) often translated as Air or Heaven in the New Testament (Were religious concepts and ideas borrowed from Greek mythology. If so, how original is modern religion)?

Word Origin and History
Uranus - first planet discovered that was not known in ancient times, named for the god of Heaven, husband of Gaia, the Earth, from L. Uranus , from Gk. Ouranos  lit. "heaven," in Gk. cosmology, the god who personifies the heavens, father of the titans. Cf. Urania , name of the Muse of astronomy, from Gk. Ourania , fem. of ouranios , lit. "heavenly."
Source: Answers.com

The Interaction between Genes and the Environment

Nature and Nurture or Genes and the Environment
Neuroscientists at MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory found that a previously unsuspected set of genes links nature and nurture during a crucial period of brain development.

["Disorders"] thought to be tied to brain changes that occur when the developing brain is very susceptible to inputs from the outside world. Nature--in the form of genes--and nurture--in the form of environmental influences--are fundamentally intertwined during this period.

"Our work points to how a disorder can be genetic and yet be dependent on the environment," said co-author Mriganka Sur, Sherman Fairchild Professor of Neuroscience at the Picower Institute and chair of MIT's brain and cognitive sciences department. "Many genes require activity to be expressed and make their assigned proteins. They alter their expression when activity is altered.
Source: Science Daily

Days of Future Past

Prediction and the Functions of a Theory

Predicting events that will occur in the future and explaining events that have occurred in the past are, except for difference in temporal perspective, essentially the same activity as long as scientific statements are abstract. (Reynolds, 1971, p.5)