Carl On Creativity

On a personal level, he was larger than life, always sharply dressed, traveling the world, and ready for romance. He was a rock star who convinced many governments of the need to pay attention to housing and cities. But he was also a brazen opportunist who aligned himself with some of history’s most despicable characters, at one point trying to ingratiate himself with the collaborationist Vichy government in World War II. Always chasing the commission, he was accused of being a capitalist, fascist, and communist, all at the same time. He was paternalistic, chauvinistic, a serial philanderer—and he was French! (Though born in Switzerland, he became a French citizen in 1930).

Any biographer must adopt a policy of showing his subject warts and all, and I readily acknowledge Le Corbusier had some really bad ideas. But my plea is to refrain from throwing out the baby with the modernist bathwater. There are fundamental themes in Le Corbusier’s career that are quite relevant to the most pressing urban issues before us today.

-The Hazardous Business of Celebrating Le Corbusier

If all goes to plan, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft will beam new images of Saturn and its rings to Earth early Thursday, sharing data collected Wednesday from its first dive through the gap between the planet and its striped belt of ice and rock particles.

Today’s dive also marks the start of the final phase in the craft’s 13-year visit to Saturn. Days ago, it used the gravity of Saturn’s moon Titan to bend its path toward its eventual destruction on the planet.

Cassini descended below the ring plane around 5 a.m. ET Wednesday, but the antenna it would normally use to send images is instead being used to deflect potentially harmful objects away from its instruments. As it performed the move, the craft’s Twitter feed announced, “Shields Up!”

Cassini Spacecraft Starts Weaving Between Saturn And Its Rings

How Do Pelicans Survive Their Death-Defying Dives?

Brown pelicans hit the water at breakneck speed when they catch fish. Performing such dangerous plunges requires technique, equipment, and 30 million years of practice. 

Prophetic Prism, Cloudstone Curio and Temple of Mystery by Noah Bradley on inprnt

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Training the brain to treat itself is a promising therapy for traumatic stress. The training uses an auditory or visual signal that corresponds to the activity of a particular brain region, called neurofeedback, which can guide people to regulate their own brain activity.

However, treating stress-related disorders requires accessing the brain’s emotional hub, the amygdala, which is located deep in the brain and difficult to reach with typical neurofeedback methods. This type of activity has typically only been measured using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which is costly and poorly accessible, limiting its clinical use.

A study published in the current issue of Biological Psychiatry tested a new imaging method that provided reliable neurofeedback on the level of amygdala activity using electroencephalography (EEG), and allowed people to alter their own emotional responses through self-regulation of its activity.

“The major advancement of this new tool is the ability to use a low-cost and accessible imaging method such as EEG to depict deeply located brain activity,” said both senior author Dr. Talma Hendler of Tel-Aviv University in Israel and The Sagol Brain Center at Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center, and first author Jackob Keynan, a PhD student in Hendler’s laboratory, in an email to Biological Psychiatry.

The researchers built upon a new imaging tool they had developed in a previous study that uses EEG to measure changes in amygdala activity, indicated by its “electrical fingerprint”. With the new tool, 42 participants were trained to reduce an auditory feedback corresponding to their amygdala activity using any mental strategies they found effective.

During this neurofeedback task, the participants learned to modulate their own amygdala electrical activity. This also led to improved downregulation of blood-oxygen level dependent signals of the amygdala, an indicator of regional activation measured with fMRI.

In another experiment with 40 participants, the researchers showed that learning to downregulate amygdala activity could actually improve behavioral emotion regulation. They showed this using a behavioral task invoking emotional processing in the amygdala. The findings show that with this new imaging tool, people can modify both the neural processes and behavioral manifestations of their emotions.

“We have long known that there might be ways to tune down the amygdala through biofeedback, meditation, or even the effects of placebos,” said John Krystal, Editor of Biological Psychiatry. “It is an exciting idea that perhaps direct feedback on the level of activity of the amygdala can be used to help people gain control of their emotional responses.”

The participants in the study were healthy, so the tool still needs to be tested in the context of real-life trauma. However, according to the authors, this new method has huge clinical implications.

Wall Dogs: The Midair Muralists Who Paint New York

It’s 8am in Soho, the thermometer reads just above freezing, and the sky is bleak. Taxis splash down the streets; New Yorkers stride with their heads down, leaping over puddles, carelessly bumping into each other. Everyone wants to get out of the cold, out of the rain, into the warmth.

Ten stories above — on a long, skinny platform hanging from the facade of a building at Canal and Mercer in downtown Manhattan — it’s a different story. Climbers’ ropes secured around their torsos, Jason Coatney and Armando Balmaceda stand in a melange of open paint cans and brushes. These two muralists of Colossal Media, the largest hand-painted advertising company in America, are heavily layered in sweatshirts and raincoats. But in this industry, c’est la vie. Paintbrushes in their fingerless-gloved hands, earbuds in their ears — “I like to start out with Miles Davis in the morning,” Coatney smiles, his breath visible in the frigid air — they begin yet another workday in the sky.