Author: Brent Lambert

In an part of the world as old as Jerusalem one could be forgiven for placing added meaning onto a mysterious gold object found in a cemetery. That’s exactly what happened 6 months ago when a maintenance worker at a Jerusalem cemetery discovered a small pipe buried in one of the cemetery’s oldest mausoleums. Worried it might be a pipe bomb, police were called in and a controlled explosion was conducted. That’s when the strange contents of the pipe were discovered.

The term “higher consciousness” can sound mystical and possibly irritating to some folks, but it shouldn’t. It just captures how we see things when we go beyond our own egos. In a beautifully animated video produced by his project, The School of Life, philosopher Alain de Botton explains how we can look at the concept of higher consciousness from a neurological perspective, without the need of drugs or spiritual mumbo jumbo. The video was made in collaboration with the team at Mad Adam Films. For more amazingness from The School of Life visit TheSchoolOfLife.com and visit their shop HERE.

Over the course of 30 months between 1976 and 1978 Italian industrial designer, architect, and artist, Luigi Serafini, created the Codex Seraphinianus, one of the strangest and most intriguing encyclopedias ever published. Released in 1981 and containing about 360 pages (depending on the edition), the Codex contains a vast array of drawings, illustrations, and an indecipherable imaginary language. Philosophers have tried to explain its meaning, and code breakers have tried to reveal the secrets (if any) of the language itself. Great Big Story sat down with the man behind the book to see if they could find some answers.

KIT scientists now present the smallest lattice structure made by man in the Nature Materials journal. Its struts and braces are made of glassy carbon and are less than 1 µm long and 200 nm in diameter. They are smaller than comparable metamaterials by a factor of 5. The small dimension results in so far unreached ratios of strength to density. Applications as electrodes, filters or optical components might be possible.

The stunning AMB House, designed by Jacobsen Architecture and situated on the coast of São Paulo, Guaruja City in the middle of the Atlantic Forest, is the newest addition to my growing list of Dream Homes on FEELguide. From the street you can only see one of the three floors of the house because the terrain has accentuated slopes that give different views of an almost untouched natural landscape. The most common situation, where the rooms are upstairs and social rooms are downstairs, was reversed on the design of this residence. On the entrance of the house we have a hall that serves…

After a 5-month job stint in Miami back in 2005 I realized something about Magic City — it’s a great place to visit, but I would never want to live there again. One tends to assume there’s a lot happening there, when in fact, it’s a surprisingly dull town with a cultural fabric that’s borderline nonexistent (especially for someone like me who had moved there from Montreal, a town with an incredibly rich and diverse vitality). But if the stars aligned and I found myself having to move back to Miami for some weird reason, there’s only one house I would consider calling my…

A fascinating new study from Cornell University has discovered that each human body is genetically pre-wired for a specific kind of diet. Cornell researchers describe a genetic variation that has evolved in populations that have historically favored vegetarian diets, such as in India, Africa and parts of East Asia. A different version of this gene (called an allele) adapted to a marine diet was discovered among the Inuit in Greenland, who mainly consume seafood.