I’m not sure why, but this has always been a topic of interest for me. Never really had serious body image issues, I think it’s just a fascination with their culture…

French people eat until they’re full, Americans eat until the food’s gone
Furthermore, we have found that the heavier a person is — French or American — the more they rely on external cues to tell them to stop eating and the less they rely on whether they felt full,” said senior author Brian Wansink, the John S. Dyson Professor of Marketing and director of the Cornell Food and Brand Lab in the Department of Applied Economics and Management, now on leave to serve as executive director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion until January 2009.

Via Boing Boing

Along the same lines, close friend of mine also recommended the above book to me French Women Don’t Get Fat.

…you’ll find simple tricks that boil down to eating carefully prepared seasonal food, exercising more and refusing to think of food as something that inspires guilt. It’s both a practical message and far easier said than done in today’s ‘no pain, no gain’ culture.

Tags: boing boing, books, eating, fat, food, french, science / technology, skinny
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I am really happy to see that a company is doing something worth while with corporate sponsorship, These numbers are not huge in the world of big business marketing.

ie: NASCAR owners operate on a very slim margin. Most top tier teams require $25million/year in sponsorship money to make ends meet.

It really makes me want to support a company like Google when they can make the decision to support human kind as a whole. Support science, discovery and the human spirit as opposed to putting shoes on some idiot Jocks feet.

Thank you Google!
-Jack

February 21, 2008, Mountain View, CA – The X PRIZE Foundation and Google, Inc. today announced the first ten teams to register for the Google Lunar X PRIZE, a robotic race to the Moon to win a remarkable $30 million in prizes. This international group of teams will compete to land a privately funded robotic craft on the Moon that is capable of roaming the lunar surface for at least 500 meters and sending video, images and data back to the Earth.

ABOUT THE GOOGLE LUNAR X PRIZE
The $30 million prize purse is segmented into a $20 million Grand Prize, a $5 million Second Prize and $5 million in bonus prizes. To win the Grand Prize, a team must successfully soft land a privately funded spacecraft on the Moon, rove on the lunar surface for a minimum of 500 meters, and transmit a specific set of video, images and data back to the Earth. The Grand Prize is $20 million until December 31st 2012; thereafter it will drop to $15 million until December 31st 2014 at which point the competition will be terminated unless extended by Google and the X PRIZE Foundation. For more information about the Google Lunar X PRIZE, please visit www.googlelunarxprize.org.

Quoted from: Google Lunar XPrize

Tags: commentary, creative, Google, lunar, progress, science / technology, space, thank you, thank you note, thanks, vision, X prize, xprize
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This experiment was the starting point for a collaboration between Beta Tank and Peter Marigold. their ‘Mind Chair’ is a ubiquitous polypropylene chair fitted with a custom solenoid based sensor. A camera is plugged into the device, allowing the sitter to view the images on the camera through their back.

A replica of the prototype will be on view at the MOMA’s ‘Design and the Elastic Mind’ exhibition starting February 24.

Via DesignBoom

Tags: art, chair, design, mind, moma, science / technology, seeing
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…Biogerontologists like Aubrey de Grey, author of Ending Aging, believe that living longer is a fairly straightforward engineering problem: Find out what breaks and fix it. De Grey promotes an approach he calls ‘Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence,’ or SENS. It identifies seven specific breakdowns and attempts to attack each of them in turn. He and others are researching longevity with support from nonprofits and an X Prize approach aimed at extending the life span of mice. (Researchers call it the Mprize, a reference to their quest to engineer the ‘Methuselah mouse.’) I certainly wish them well—after all, I’m not getting any younger—but de Grey says that it will probably be 20 or 30 years before we see effective anti-aging drugs on the market…

Via Popular Mechanics

Tags: anti-aging, bioengineering, life span, science / technology
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