Buddhist chant boxes are hardware loop players that are sold in temples throughout Asia. They are small battery-powered devices resembling a cheap AM radio that play looped recordings of Buddhist chants. They are intended for use when it’s not possible to get to a temple, or if one wanted to chant and meditate on the go. Each box usually contains either two or more chants.

In Buddhism, chanting is the traditional means of preparing the mind for meditation, especially as part of formal practice. Recitation of the name Amituofo is a way to purify the mind, thoughts and environment. When the mind is serene and compassionate, the living environment will become tranquil. The benefits from this kind of thought can neutralize turbulance from greed, anger, ignorance and arrogance. Everyone can benefit from this recitation regardless of religion.

Almost every Buddhist school has a tradition of chanting associated with it. While the basis for most Theravada chants is the Pali Canon, Mahayana and Vajrayana chants draw from a wider range of sources. In the Vajrayana tradition, chanting is also used as an invocative ritual in order to set one’s mind on a deity, Tantric ceremony, mandala, or particular concept one wishes to further in themselves.

While not strictly a variation of Buddhist chanting in itself, Japanese Shigin is a form of chanted poetry that reflects several principles of Zen Buddhism. It is sung in the seiza position, and participants are encouraged to sing from the gut, the Zen locus of power. Shigin and related practices are often sung at Buddhist ceremonies and quasi-religious gatherings in Japan.

Olfaction is the sense of smell. This sense is mediated by specialized sensory cells of the nasal cavity of vertebrates, and by sensory cells of the antennae of invertebrates.

The importance and sensitivity of smell varies among different organisms. Most mammals have a good sense of smell, whereas most birds do not. Among mammals, it is well-developed in the carnivores and ungulates, who must always be aware of each other, and in those that smell for their food, like moles.

It is estimated that dogs have an olfactory sense approximately a hundred thousand to a million times more acute than a human’s. This does not mean they are overwhelmed by smells our noses can detect, rather, it means they can discern a molecular presence when it is in much greater dilution in the air. 

Bears, such as the Silvertip Grizzly found in parts of North America, have a sense of smell seven times stronger than a dog, essential for locating food underground. Using their elongated claws, bears dig deep trenches in search of burrowing animals and nests as well as roots, bulbs, and insects. Bears can detect the scent of food from up to 18 miles away.

Fish also have a well-developed sense of smell, even though they inhabit an aquatic environment. Salmon utilize their sense of smell to identify and return to their home stream waters. Catfish use their sense of smell to identify other individual catfish and to maintain a social hierarchy.

Insects use their antennae for olfaction. Sensory neurons in the antenna generate electrical signals called spikes in response to odor. The antennae have sensory neurons in the sensilla with axons terminating in the antennal lobes where they synapse with other neurons in semidelineations called glomeruli.

Furoshiki are a type of square Japanese wrapping cloth that were traditionally used to transport clothes, gifts, or other goods. Although possibly dating back as far as the Nara period, the name, meaning bath spread, derives from the Edo period practice of using them to bundle clothes while at the public baths. Before becoming associated with public baths, furoshiki were known as hirazutsumi, or flat folded bundle.

Eventually, the furoshiki’s usage extended to serve as a means for merchants to transport their wares or to protect and decorate a gift. Although there are still furoshiki users in Japan, their numbers declined in the post-war period, in large part due to the proliferation of the plastic shopping bag. In recent years, furoshiki has seen a renewed interest as environmental protection became a concern. They are still commonly used to wrap and transport bento lunch boxes and often double as a table mat for the lunch.

Modern furoshiki can be made of a variety of cloths, including silk, cotton, rayon, and nylon. Furoshiki are often decorated with traditional designs or by shibori, a method of dyeing cloth with a pattern by binding, stitching, folding, twisting, or compressing it, known in the West as tie-dye. There is no one set size for furoshiki, they can range from hand sized to larger than bed-sheets.

Each year billions of plastic bags end up as litter; reusable bags, such as furoshiki can help reduce the impact to our environment. Its versatility allows you to wrap almost anything regardless of its shape or size. In March 2006, the Japanese Minister of the Environment, Yuriko Koike, created a furoshiki cloth to promote its use in the modern world.

Stendhal syndrome is a psychosomatic illness that causes rapid heartbeat, dizziness, fainting, confusion and hallucinations when an individual is exposed to art, usually when the art is particularly beautiful or a large amount of art is in a single place. The term can also be used to describe a similar reaction to other circumstances, as when confronted with immense beauty in the natural world.

The illness is named after the famous 19th century French author Marie-Henri Stendhal, who described his experience with the phenomenon during his 1817 visit to Florence, Italy in his book Naples and Florence: A Journey from Milan to Reggio.

Although there are many descriptions, dating from the early 19th century on, of people becoming dizzy and fainting while taking in Florentine art, the syndrome was only named in 1979, when it was described by Italian psychiatrist Graziella Magherini, who observed and described more than 100 similar cases among tourists and visitors in Florence. The syndrome was first diagnosed in 1982. The term is also used when describing the reactions of audiences to music of the Romantic period.

It is similar but not identical to Paris Syndrome, a transient psychological disorder encountered by some people visiting or vacationing in Paris, France. The symptoms occur during a trip which confronts the traveller with things they had not previously experienced and did not anticipate. The symptoms did not exist before the trip and they disappear with a return to familiar surroundings.

Illusory superiority is a cognitive bias that causes people to overestimate their positive qualities and abilities and to underestimate their negative qualities, relative to others. This is evident in a variety of areas including intelligence, performance on tasks or tests and the possession of desirable characteristics or personality traits. It is one of many positive illusions relating to the self, and is a phenomenon studied in social psychology.

It is often referred to as the above average effect. Other terms include superiority bias, leniency error, sense of relative superiority, and the Lake Wobegon effect (named after Garrison Keillor’s fictional town where “all the children are above average”).

Illusory superiority has been found in individuals’ comparisons of themselves with others in a wide variety of different aspects of life, including performance in academic circumstances (such as class performance, exams and overall intelligence), in working environments (for example in job performance), and in social settings (for example in estimating one’s popularity, or the extent to which one posesses desirable personality traits, such as honesty or confidence), as well as everyday abilities requiring particular skill.

For illusory superiority to be demonstrated by social comparison, two logical hurdles have to be overcome. Some psychological experiments require subjects to compare themselves to an average peer. If we interpret the average as the mean, then it is logically possible for nearly all of the set to be above average if the distribution of abilities is highly skewed. Hence experiments usually compare subjects to the median of the peer group, since by definition it is impossible for most of the set to do better than the median.

A further problem in inferring inconsistency is that subjects might interpret the question in different ways, so it is logically possible that a majority of them are, for example, more generous than the rest of the group each on their own understanding of generosity.

Mooncrete is an idea first proposed by Larry A. Beyer of the University of Pittsburgh in 1985. It is a hypothetical aggregate building material, similar to concrete formed from lunar regolith, that could cut the construction costs of building on the moon.

Basic ingredients for mooncrete would be the same as those for terrestrial concrete: aggregate, water, and cement. In the case of mooncrete, the aggregate would be lunar regolith. The cement would be manufactured by beneficiating lunar rock that had a high calcium content. Water would either be supplied from the moon, or by combining oxygen with hydrogen produced from lunar soil.

The casting of mooncrete would require a pressurized environment, because attempting to cast in a vacuum would simply result in the water, required for the chemical reaction that forms the curing process, evaporating, and the mooncrete failing to harden. Two solutions to this problem have been proposed: premixing the aggregate and the cement and then using a steam injection process to add the water, or the use of a pressurized concrete fabrication plant that produces pre-cast concrete blocks.

Mooncrete shares the same lack of tensile strength as terrestrial concrete. One suggested lunar equivalent tensioning material for creating pre-stressed concrete is lunar glass, also formed from regolith, much as fibreglass is already sometimes used as a terrestrial concrete reinforcement material. Another tensioning material, suggested by David Bennett, is Kevlar, imported from Earth, which would be cheaper, in terms of mass, to import from Earth than conventional steel.

The 2007 Siberian orange snow was an anomalous phenomenon that happened on February 2, 2007 when an orange-tinted snow fell across an area of 580 square miles in the Siberian Federal District in Russia, as well as into the neighbouring oblasts of Tomsk and Tyumen. It was most likely caused by a heavy sandstorm in neighbouring Kazakhstan. 

This orange snow was malodorous, oily to the touch, and reported to contain four times the normal level of iron. Though mostly orange, some of the snow was red or yellow. It affected an area with about 27,000 residents. It was originally speculated that it was caused by industrial pollution, a rocket launch or even a nuclear accident. It was later determined that the snow was non-toxic. However, people in the region were advised not to use the snow or allow animals to feed upon it. Coloured snow is uncommon in Russia but not unheard of, as there have been many cases of black, blue, green and red snowfall. 

The phenomenon was most likely caused by a heavy sandstorm in neighbouring Kazakhstan. Tests on the snow revealed numerous sand and clay dust particles, which were blown into Russia in the upper stratosphere. The speculation that the colouration was caused by a rocket launch from Baikonur in Kazakhstan was later dismissed, as the last launch before the event took place on January 18th.

Russia’s environmental watchdog originally claimed that the coloured snowfall was caused by industrial pollution. It stated that the snow contained four times the normal quantities of acids, nitrates, and iron. However, it would be nearly impossible to pinpoint a culprit if pollution were the cause, as there are various industries nearby, such as the city of Omsk, which is a centre of the oil industry in Russia.

Human Givens is a school or model of psychology described as a bio-psycho-social approach to psychotherapy. It attempts to find and address innate needs common to all humans, called givens.

According to the Human Givens approach, if someone cannot get their needs met in healthy ways, they will try to get them met in unhealthy ways. For example, someone might seek to satisfy the need for connection to the wider community by joining a street gang if no better means of community connection is available. It is the way those needs are met, and the way we use the resources that nature has given us, that determine the physical, mental and moral health of an individual.

Human Givens theorises that it is by meeting our physical and emotional needs that we survive and develop as individuals and a species. As animals we are born into a material world where we need air to breathe, water, nutritious food and sleep. These are the paramount physical needs. Without them, we die.

It theorises that we also need the freedom to stimulate our senses and exercise our muscles. In addition, we instinctively seek sufficient and secure shelter where we can grow and reproduce ourselves and bring up our young. These physical needs are intimately bound up with our emotional needs which are the main focus of human givens psychotherapy in practice. They are considered inbuilt patterns that continually interact with one another and seek their natural fulfillment in ways that allow us to survive, flourish and live together as many-faceted individuals in a great variety of social groupings.

The basic assumption is that humans have evolved innate emotional needs that they seek to match to their environment, and that mental distress results when these needs are not met in a balanced way. The focus of the therapy is the discovery and rectification of any blocks to these needs being met. Blocks may take such forms as a sick environment, misuse of imagination through excessive worrying, or damage to their internal guidance system by psychological trauma or a developmental disorder.

These needs are seen as part of the human condition independent of culture. The approach describes resources as having evolved in response to these needs, including memory, imagination, and self awareness, and that their exercise determines physical, mental and moral health. Misuse of these resources or failure to meet these needs leads to development of disorders such as addictions or depression.