Pogo is excited about Art In A Nutshell's new line of jewelry.  To start, the peanuts are grown in the community garden at Slackerville.  Single chamber shells are selected and then scraped out of their foam insides revealing a faceted type texture that is painted.  The peanut is carved to reveal the Old Man in the Peanut, nestled back into its shell, and then preserved with epoxy.  This gem, the only one of its kind in the world, is anchored and affixed to a chain ready for you to sport around town.

If you haven't heard of LP (Laura Pergolizzi,), I promise you will.  Her Warner Bros. debut release is scheduled for the second half of 2012 and I can't wait!  I am sad I missed her at SxSW in 2006.

Scientists Watch the Brain as it Watches Faces

Lead author of the paper, published Jan. 4 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, is Ming Meng, a former postdoc in Sinha’s lab and now an assistant professor at Dartmouth College. Other authors are Tharian Cherian and Gaurav Singal, who  is a resident at Massachusetts General Hospital.

      Meng and company make some initial insights into how the left and right sides of the brain process faces. By watching the brain as the individual is shown a series of pictures that range from faces to near-faces, the scientists are able to observe actions in the brain that correlate to the pictures shown.  I wish I had access to a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine as I would show these individuals more than just faces to get at how the Recognition of Resemblaces really works!  Exciting start.  Here are the links to the full story:

http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-01-brain.html

http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-01-complexity-left-brainright-brain-paradigm.html