Ryan McGinnis takes astonishing photos of storms. Something truly breathtaking. These are copyrighted photos, so I can’t show them here, but I suggest you drop a visit to his site and look at these stunningly captured seconds of life.

But please clean up your mess when you’re ready to go.

Times Square was littered with 40 tons of trash by Thursday morning.

Processing cement takes up much electric power. This power comes from fuel burning. Fuel burning is one of the major sources of CO2 emissions.

What if we could manufacture cement that captures CO2 instead of emitting more CO2? Well, that’s exactly what Calera cement aims to do.

So when you countdown your New Year’s Kiss, make sure to count for this extra second in your life.

5

4

3

2

1

!~ 0 ~!

Happy New Year!

This might be a good time to pay a visit. But be careful.

Ninety bathtub toys were hurled into a drainage hole on the Greenland ice in September - an experiment to see how melt waters find their way to the base of the ice sheet.

It was hoped the ducks would flow along subglacial channels and eventually pop out into the sea. They may still, but nothing has been seen of them so far.

“We haven’t heard anything from them yet,” said NASA’s Alberto Behar. “If somebody does find one, it will be a great breakthrough for us.”

The young women had survived the car crash, after a fashion. In the five months since parts of her brain had been crushed, she could open her eyes but didn’t respond to sights, sounds or jabs. In the jargon of neurology, she was judged to be in a persistent vegetative state. In crueler everyday language, she was a vegetable.

So picture the astonishment of British and Belgian scientists as they scanned her brain using a kind of MRI that detects blood flow to active parts of the brain. When they recited sentences, the parts involved in language lit up. When they asked her to imagine visiting the rooms of her house, the parts involved in navigating space and recognizing places ramped up. And when they asked her to imagine playing tennis, the regions that trigger motion joined in. Indeed, her scans were barely different from those of healthy volunteers. The woman, it appears, had glimmerings of consciousness.

Our skin is our contact point with the world. We want to keep it healthy and beautiful. So here’s my 2 cents: Stop everything you’re doing right now! And go do something nice for your skin. It’s that simple.