"The Stella Prize is a new major literary award for Australian women's writing.
The Stella Prize celebrates Australian women's contribution to literature. Named after one of Australia's most important female authors, Stella Maria 'Miles' Franklin (1879-1954), the prize rewards one writer with a significant monetary prize of $50,000.
The Stella Prize will also raise the profile of women's writing through the Stella Prize longlists and shortlists, encourage a future generation of women writers, and bring readers to the work of Australian women.
The Stella Prize will be awarded for the first time in 2013, and both fiction and non-fiction books are eligible."
"It's about 11.7 million square miles, which is really big-big enough to fit the United States, China, India, Japan, and much of Europe within its borders. And that's precisely what Kai Krause did with this inventive map, "The True Size of Africa," which he describes as his contribution to "the fight against rampant Immappacy.""
"What is constant multi-tasking doing to teens' brains? That's the question NewsHour Science Correspondent Miles O'Brien set out to answer as he interviewed teens and neuroscience experts around the country.
Scientists at the National Institutes of Health are currently studying whether teens' addictions to technology are wiring their brains differently than those of their parents and earlier generations. During adolescence, brain connections are "pruned" - those that are used a lot are strengthened, while those that are rarely used fall off.
According to a scientist at UCLA who also studies the effects of technology on teens' brains, the brain's release of the chemical dopamine has a lot to do with why technology can become addictive for young people. When the brain experiences something pleasurable, like connecting with others via social networking, it is hard-wired to want more of it by releasing dopamine.
Yet other researchers say multi-tasking and playing intense video games can actually help develop some skills like better vision and improved short-term memory. Because modern technology is still in its infancy, scientists are only uncovering the beginnings of how it will affect the human brain functions of tomorrow.
I've been using Twitter on the iPad and selecting the READ LATER option for links to sites. The InstaPaper app lets me read these longer articles when I have time and off line, which is convenient.
Using the photo-sharing site Flickr and a personal history of studying whale photos, she identified a picture, taken in 2001 by tourist Freddy Johansen in Madagascar, of an Antarctic humpback known to scientists as number 1363. Two years earlier, researchers had spotted 1363, a female, swimming alongside another whale in Brazil. Brazil to Madagascar. That’s a distance of 6,000 miles, nearly double any documented migration by a humpback.
The discovery led to her co-authoring a paper published earlier this month in Biology Letters, and earning her the esteemed title of citizen scientist. In the process, she changed our understanding of the humpback whale.
great little story of how a school teacher added to the world's knowledge of humpback whales thanks to her own ongoing passion and inquiry into whales AND the benefit of Flickr, where she could examine other people's photographs of whales