The North Pacific Gyre is a section of the Pacific Ocean between Hawaii and California that is accumulating trash due to the nature of its water currents. This garbage patch in the ocean consists of trash debris and non-biodegradable plastic that just breaks up into more tiny pieces.

This video on YouTube sumarizes it best…

saying that there is 7 million tons of floating waste spanning an area twice the size of Texas. Birds and wildlife die when they mistaken these plastic bits as food. A lot of these garbage get washed up on beaches.

The latimes.com also has some video pieces on the North Pacific Gyre here.

And this video is a more detailed explanation of trash in our oceans…

The reason why there is not a lot of good photos of the North Pacific Gyre is that most of the garbage is just underwater and is somewhat spread out as explained in theoystersgarter.com.

This is a great concise summary of global warming explaining, what is it, what causes it, and what are its effects.

Dr. John Medina, developmental molecular biologist, gives an informative and humorous talk at Google about brain science and his book “Brain Rules”.

In this talk he talks about brain rule number one which is that aerobic exercise boosts cognitive performance especially executive function. He says “if you have an active lifestyle you have a 50% reduction in the risk of Alzheimer”. He answers the question of how much exercise if required to get these benefits: Two to three times a week for 20 minutes per session. Aerobic exercise increases blood flow to the dentate gyrus of brain and elevates BDNF which is like Miracle Grow for brains.

Then he talks about stress on the brain. Stressed brains does not learn the same way and hurts learning. He says “stress damages cognition in virtually every way cognition can be measured.”

And he ends with the most important brain rule of all: curiosity.

David Pogue, New York Times columnist, starts off with a funny song about tech support. Before the talk has ended he also did a funny “Bill Gates Song” and another funny song on Steve Jobs. The rest of his talk is quite funny too as he shows why people like simplicity and as he shows examples of the opposite.

Take a look at the code of programmers of various levels linked here.

They are all writing the standard “Hello World” program. Especially funny is the one by the “Chief Executive”.

Watch Michael Moschen’s unique juggling act set to music and motion.

Mark Bittman goes over the history of how we eat and explains what is wrong with the way we eat today. He advocates eating more plants and less animals — both for our own health as well as help prevent global warming. Oh, you didn’t know that raising cattle contribute to global warming? Mark Bittman says “livestock is the second highest contributing factor to atmosphere-altering gases. Nearly one-fifth of all greenhouse gases is generated by livestock production — more than transportation.”

This is a movie made and directed by a real waitress Patti DiVita, telling you what it really is like waitressing.

You can download the full movie here. Don’t forget to leave her a tip though.

Radio program “This American Life” explains the U.S. subprime mortgage crisis in the episode “355: The Giant Pool of Money” broadcasted May 9, 2008. The host Ira Glass along with NPR correspondent explains the big picture and put the complex subject in simpler terms that we can understand. You can heard the full episode on thislife.org.

Or you can hear a shorter explanation titled “Global Pool of Money Got Too Hungry” on npr.org.