darksilenceinsuburbia:

Jeff Bartels.

Jeff Bartels was born on April 11, 1973 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. He grew up in the Toronto area where he showed an interest and talent for art at an early age. Throughout his schooling he focused his attention on art and in 1992 he continued those studies at the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto. Painting and sculpture continue to be Jeff’s main artistic focus and he has spent years working on his craft. Most of his paintings are done with oil on canvas that have recently taken on a photo-realistic style. By using dramatic lighting, exciting expressions and tight cropping, he is trying to bring emotion and passion to what can sometimes be seen as a cold style. The look of hyper-realism with the emotional impact of expressionism is what he is seeking. (by Honey)

This looks so real!

two-color:

American photographer Mitch Dobrowner has scooped the top prize at this year’s Sony World Photography Awards, picking up the L’Iris d’Or for his series of impressively stormy landscape images.

discoverynews:

expose-the-light:

Art by destruction by Alan Sailer

that egg

Gah, I really don’t feel like thanking God for all the good things in my life right now, but I know that doing that will take my mind off my traffic citation and get my mind in tune with an attitude that carries altitude. 

discoverynews:

good:

Last fall, GOOD attempted to decide whether a burrito—or a hamburger, or a taco, or a wrap, or an open-faced tuna melt, or an ice cream sandwich, or an oreo, or a piece of pizza —constituted a “sandwich.” This Pizza Hut hamburger pizza, now available in the Middle East, adds a whole new dimension to this debate. Is a hamburger pizza a sandwich? What if you fold it in half?

Amazing. How does Pizza Hut come up with these things and, uh, really?

I’m just rebloging because this looks so good.

thealterexperiment:

To a large portion of the male mindsets in this world;
A concerned friend who’s seen too many women treated less then what they’re worth.

Chivalry isn’t dead.
But you’re slowly killing it by;

Lack of simply a holding a door
Lack of simply pulling out a chair
Lack of respecting their…

szymon:

Miler Lagos’ Book Igloo

Mom, dad, you know how we don’t have enough book shelves to hold all your books. Well I’ve discovered a fun way to stack them until you get more shelves. I hope you won’t mind playing jinga for the time being while I stack your books into the shape of an igloo.

I hope this guy gets to record with Anberlin. Such a cool cover.

jtotheizzoe:

Scientists Use LEGO Robots To Grow Bones

It’s official. Your science is boring, and these people’s is awesome. Michelle Oyen’s lab at Cambridge has been working on growing bones using scaffolds and chemical engineering. It’s a painstaking process that involves hours and hours of dips in various bone-making chemicals in order to get a final product. Sounds like a job for a robot, right?

It turns out that Lego Mindstorm kits can do the job just fine, and for far cheaper than most robots. They plan on expanding their use to other projects in the near future.

This is so unfair. I mean, not only are they building bones in a lab, which is awesome, but they get paid to play with Legos! On second thought, maybe my childhood has provided me with a new resumé entry?

(ᔥ Co.Design)

Lego my eggo!

How Do We Fall Asleep?

Falling asleep is a routine yet mystifying process. Like trying to see the 3D image in a Magic Eye poster, the more you focus on it, the less likely it is to happen. It shies away from scrutiny and is best approached with an air of detached disinterest; so, though most of us fall asleep every night, we can’t say exactly howwe do it.

Even neuroscientists are still struggling to understand the mechanisms the brain uses to switch from a state of wakefulness to unconscious sleep, but research reveals that the transition is a lot more gradual and tumultuous than the flip of a light switch.

According to recent work by neuroscientists at Washington University in St. Louis, during the pre-sleep stage of the process — the period when you’re in bed with the lights off and your eyes closed, slowly “letting go” of the trials of the tribulations of the day — your brain waves exhibit what’s known as alpha activity, typically associated with quiet wakefulness.

“It is in this period that the brain progressively disengages from the external world,” Linda Larson-Prior and her colleagues wrote in a 2011 paper. “Subjects slowly oscillate between attending to external and internal thoughts, with the majority of internal thoughts being autobiographical or self-referential in nature.”

Then, at some crucial moment, you enter the transitional sleep stage, known as stage 1. Brain waves slow down, shifting to a form known as theta-band activity, but are still punctuated by brief bursts of alpha activity. These hiccups give you the sense that you’re still awake, said Scott Campbell, director of the Laboratory of Human Chronobiology at Weill Cornell Medical College, citing a landmark sleep study performed in the 1960s. “Investigators asked subjects aroused out of various stages of sleep whether they considered themselves asleep. Only about 10 percent of those aroused from stage 1 said that they had been asleep.” [Continue Reading]

Inception!