Source: www.ecowatch.com | Original Post Date: December 19, 2015 –

Reminiscent of a scene out of Space Balls (Perri-Air anyone?), a Canadian startup, Vitality Air, is selling bottled air from the Rocky Mountains. It may have started out as a joke, but citizens of smog-choked cities in eastern China are buying it up.

@vitalityair sells fresh Banff air to smog sufferers. No, this isn't Spaceballs. https://t.co/SF9PMki1sw pic.twitter.com/HeIVYqkLeB

— CBC-The Current (@TheCurrentCBC)

“A gag gift, that’s how it started off, but you know what? There’s actually a lot of demand for this in … highly polluted countries,” co-founder Moses Lam told the Canadian National Post. The company was founded by Lam and Troy Paquette more than a year ago, but only began selling in China less than two months ago.

The idea came when Lam sold a bag of fresh Canadian air on eBay for 99 cents. That’s steep enough for something that most people have always considered free. But when a second bag bidded up to $168 “we thought ‘hey, we might have a market for this,’” Lam said.

Source: www.themindunleashed.org | Original Post Date: September 30, 2015 –

What if it was possible to live in a city and a forest at the same time, having your house surrounded by green but being in close proximity to the downtown? I bet many of you could only dream to live in a place like that. However, this dream could actually become a reality someday thanks to Dutch architect Raimond de Hullu and his conceptual design called the OAS1S.

De Hullu’s vision of a green neighborhood is an off-grid community powered by renewable sources of energy and equipped with onsite waste and water treatment systems. All buildings would be made of recycled wood and organic insulation materials. Thus, the ‘urban forest’ would be completely energy and water self-sufficient and eco-friendly.

The community would consist of four-floor buildings equipped with triple glazing windows and solar panels. As for the interior design, there would be skylights, large windows and French balconies. De Hullu calls it “a treehouse combined with modern luxury.”

Source: www.themindunleashed.org | Original Post Date: December 19, 2014 –

It seems that dogs understand much more than we think. According to a new study, dogs don’t simply respond to what we say, but they also pay attention to the way we say something. The most curious thing about this finding is that humans process speech in an extremely similar way.

In the process of listening, the human brain responds to a number of elements apart from the spoken words. These elements include different auditory and visual stimuli, such as emotional tone and certain information about the speaker – gender, age, identity, etc. The human brain is capable of perceiving these stimuli thanks to distinguishing and processing separately various components of human speech.

2016 Democratic presidential candidate and U.S. Senator from Vermont Bernie Sanders wrote an op-ed for The New York Times on Wednesday calling for the Federal Reserve to be audited independently by the Government Accountability Office on an annual basis.

Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has scheduled a historic Jan. 12 vote on a bill, colloquially referred to as “Audit the Fed,” which was introduced by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.). The bill would authorize the GAO to perform full audits of the Federal Reserve System.

“To rein in Wall Street, we should begin by reforming the Federal Reserve, which oversees financial institutions and which uses monetary policy to maintain price stability and full employment. Unfortunately, an institution that was created to serve all Americans has been hijacked by the very bankers it regulates,” wrote Sen. Sanders.