Mind Soup

When you hear “Lebanon” and “government” in the same sentence, what comes to mind first? Sectarianism, money wasting, no electricity, no water, no jobs, bad internet, expensive living, taxes, wasta? The list goes on and on… Lebanon does not only have a beautiful landscape, it’s not only a touristic destination, it’s not only a clubbing hub, but it is also rich in resources that can help the Lebanese stand on their own feet. Lebanese are proud of that and are ready to fight for Lebanon, that’s the only thing they all agree on. But are we fighting for the right reasons? Do we participate in protests and political gatherings to improve our current state of living or just because our leaders tell us to? A couple of years back, Israel tried to claim the traditional Lebanese Hommos (Chickpeas) dish with tahini as their own. The whole Lebanese community from different sects and religions stood together and defended the Lebanese-born dish by breaking the Guinness Book of records for th...

MIND SOUP : So today, October 15, is Blog Action Day 2010 . The theme this year is water . As I live in a country where water is theoretically abundant, I, as many other Lebanese, may not feel the urge to conserve water or use it wisely. But as I watch TV and read bloggers posts from other countries, I have become more aware of the critical water situation the world is facing. After enrolling as a blogger against hunger for the United Nations World Food Programme and engaging more into the world blogosphere, I was shocked to know that around 4.500 children die daily from water related diseases and that a almost a billion people on Earth don't have access to clean and safe drinking water ! Since then I realized that there are so many things with our water consumption in Lebanon. We take hour-long showers, flood our houses to get them cleaned, stare at the open faucet while brushing our teeth, and use excessive amounts of water to irrigate our flowers and plants. But the most un...

Check out another great comic by Sareen Akharjalian , the woman behind Ink on the Side . This piece is about Lebanese people who steal electricity from their neighbors. Sad, but true!

I completely fell for this at first. It is filmed in a documentary-style, so you would assume that they are telling the truth. Apparently, this is all one big hoax just so people will want to buy the shoes they mention in the video. It's very clever advertising because they don't even mention the names of the shoes (from Hi-Tec) in the video. Check it out and then you can read the article that explains the whole hoax by clicking here .

This year provided plenty of cosmic eye-openers for astronomers and casual stargazers alike. Neighborhood planets such as Mercury and Jupiter received makeovers in both a scientific and literal sense. The discovery of water on the moon and Mars provided clues to the past, not to mention hints for the future of space exploration. A class of newly-detected "Super-Earth" planets around alien stars may ultimately prove more habitable than Earth. And a growing fleet of existing, new and revived space telescopes promises another stellar year ahead. Here are the stories that stood out: 9. Oddball Objects Earth had a front row seat to a multitude of space objects in 2009, with stunning meteor showers, wayward space rocks buzzing the planet and weird lights in the sky – both natural and man-made. Annual light shows such as the Leonid meteor shower continued to dazzle, but some space rocks came a bit too close for comfort. An asteroid exploded over Indonesia with the force of ...

Deck the pools: Festive divers work at an aquarium in Manila As the lights were switched on in Trafalgar Square last night – and we all start thinking of getting ours in this weekend – other countries were creating their eye-catching variations. The smallest would be pretty tricky to decorate – because it measures less than half the width of a human hair. Little bit of fun: This silicon tree is 0.04mm wide It is made from silicon with an ion beam, normally used on silicon chips, at Britain’s National Physical Laboratory. Meanwhile, Mexico City has gone to the other extreme, hoping to enter the record books with a tree that towers 90m (295ft) over shoppers – beating Rio de Janeiro’s 82m (270ft) effort. Dizzying: Mexico City’s 90m tree dwarfs the traffic passing by Big in another sense is the effort standing in New York’s Rockefeller Center. It has been bedecked with a dazzling 30,000 lights. But lights would be a fairly risky decoration for the tree ...

November 24 will mark the 150th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s book On the Origin of Species , one of the most influential books on biology ever written, and arguably the most controversial. One hundred and fifty years after Darwin made popular the idea that the diversity of life on planet Earth today descended (or ascended?) from lower life forms over millions of years, the general theory of evolution is still not accepted by vast numbers of people, to the chagrin of large numbers of evolutionary biologists.  Did all of life really descend from one-celled organisms that developed in primordial waters billions of years ago? Is that really what happened? If so, we should see plenty of evidence of it all around us, and there are significant numbers of scientists who argue that we indeed find just that. They argue that there are a sufficient number of transitional forms in the fossil record to support Darwin’s theory. They argue that natural selection, acting to preserve small...

(CNN) -- NASA said Friday it had discovered water on the moon, opening "a new chapter" that could allow for the development of a lunar space station. The discovery was announced by project scientist Anthony Colaprete at a midday news conference. "I'm here today to tell you that indeed, yes, we found water. And we didn't find just a little bit; we found a significant amount" -- about a dozen, two-gallon bucketfuls, he said, holding up several white plastic containers. The find is based on preliminary data collected when the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS, intentionally crashed October 9 into the permanently shadowed region of Cabeus crater near the moon's south pole. After the satellite struck, a rocket flew through the debris cloud, measuring the amount of water and providing a host of other data, Colaprete said. The project team concentrated on data from the satellite's spectrometers, which provide the best in...

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