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Showing posts from April, 2016

Just 1 Minute Of Intense Exercise Rivals The Benefits Of A 45-Minute Workout collective-evolution

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Chances are, if you are like the majority of Americans, Australians, or Brits, you’re probably not getting enough exercise. From office chair to car ride to couch, we could definitely be staying more active. We all know we should exercise, but sometimes life happens and many of us would rather do almost anything else. The main excuse becomes, there’s just no time . Well, what if I told you that you could get the exact same benefits of a 45-minute workout, in 1 minute? According to this new study , you can. According to exercise physiologist from McMaster University, Martin Gibala, “Brief bursts of intense exercise are remarkably effective.” You should know that the entire workout routine is actually 10 minutes, but this includes warming up and cooling down, with only short bursts of intense physical activity lasting 1 minute. What excuse could you possibly have not to spare 10 minutes? None. The answer is none. You have no excuses. You have 10 minutes—I know you do. The Study Gibal

Les ‘Survivorman’ Stroud Talks Connecting To The Earth, Outdoor Meditation, & Surviving A Car Accident collective-evolution

Les Stroud is a documentary filmmaker and a survival expert, but prior to the release of the Survivorman show, few would have predicted that people would be so fascinated by a man simply living in the wild for a week or more. Why is just surviving so interesting to us? The answer is probably a combination of a few variables, but after speaking with Les, I believe that the greatest of these is our disconnection from the Earth. We live in these artificial environments that we have created out of concrete, brick, and steel. Our flesh very rarely touches the ground or the trees and if it does we consider ourselves dirty . The modern day definition of survival is making sure our weekly paycheck can cover our food, utilities, and household expenses. We are constantly balancing these equations in our head and it’s no wonder most people feel a little off . There is nothing natural about our present lifestyle and watching Les reminds us of what real Survival is all about. We had the chance

A House Plant That Can Charge Your Cell Phone? collective-evolution

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Think about it: USBs have completely changed the world. File sharing is so much easier and our data storing capabilities much better; we can fit huge amounts of information on these tiny little units and we can charge almost all of our electric devices with them, too. USBs are making our lives easier everywhere we turn and finding their way into many of our everyday items. Now, we may be also seeing them in our plant pots. European start-up  Arkyne Technologies  is developing Bioo Lite — a little gizmo which, when placed within a plant pot, harnesses the power of photosynthesis to charge smart devices. The system generates electricity using only water, soil, and the energy of any common house plant. Various institutions have been  working to develop similar technology for some time now , but this particular iteration is pretty awesome. There are also a couple of other plant-powered devices out there already, like this one , but Bioo Lite has said one of their goals is to eventually t

Noam Chomsky: How Bernie Sanders Has Created A “Mobilized Force That Could Change The Country” collective-evolution

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Bernie Sanders caught the attention of Collective-Evolution long ago, and when he finally said something that no other presidential candidate has ever admitted to during his or her campaign, it really hit home. It’s something that North America needed to hear on a stage where millions of people were watching—during a debate between Sanders and Hilary Clinton. He stated: Let me tell you something that no other candidate for president will tell you, and that is, no matter who is elected to be president, that person will not be able to address the enormous problems facing the working families of our country. They will not be able to succeed because the power of corporate America, the power of Wall Street, the power of campaign donors is so great that no president alone can stand up to them. That is the truth. People may be uncomfortable about hearing it, but that is the reality. ( source ) This is a theme that’s been emerging for decades. North America and other allied governments a

Decades After Chernobyl & Here’s What Radioactivity Is Doing To Wildlife collective-evolution

In 1986 the largest nuclear disaster the world has ever seen took place at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine. It was the result of a flawed Soviet reactor design along with detrimental mistakes made by the plant operators, both of which were the consequence of Cold War isolation and a lack of safety culture. The disaster resulted in 10 days of meltdowns, explosions, and nuclear fire that injected enormous amounts of radioactivity into the atmosphere, polluting much of Europe and Eurasia. Approximately 400 times more radioactivity was released into the atmosphere than when the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. The first atomic bomb exploded 70 years ago in Alamogordo, New Mexico, and since then, more than 2,000 atomic bombs have been tested, and more than 200 small and large accidents have occurred at facilities, both causing more radioactivity to make its way into our atmosphere. Thirty years later, the radioactive cesium from the disaster can still be detected in some

Was Hugo Chavez Right About HAARP & The HAITI Earthquake? Is Weather Even Natural Anymore? collective-evolution

Hugo Chavez was the 64th president of Venezuela and a politician for many years before that, and he served as president for 14 years, until his death in March of 2013. The official story is that he died in a military hospital following a severe heart attack, but others have suggested that the United States government may have played a role — an accusation quickly and vehemently denied by the U.S. State Department. Chavez was known for speaking his mind and stirring up controversy, which is one reason why people speculate about his death. His comments regarding the earthquake that hit Haiti in 2010 were particularly direct; he claimed that the United States Navy induced the Haiti Earthquake using a weather weapon, accusing the United States of “playing God.” A Spanish newspaper quoted Chavez as saying that “the US Navy launched a weapon capable of inducing a powerful earthquake off the shore of Haiti. This time, it was only a drill, and the final target is destroying and taking over Ir

Researchers Accidentally Made a Battery That Could Last a Lifetime

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All kinds of electrical devices we have today are made to have a limited lifetime, which perfectly serves the interests of the consumerist society we live in. Just think about it: if all home appliances and electronic devices we use daily were designed to last, would we need to constantly buy new ones? Batteries are no exception to this. Even the best-performing lithium batteries can work efficiently up to 500 charge cycles , after which they lose their capacity and need to be replaced. Now, researchers led by doctoral candidate Mya Le Thai of the University of California seem to have created a battery with a lifespan of over 200,000 charge cycles, which is 400 greater than that of the batteries currently available in the market ! Moreover, this remarkable invention was made as a result of an accident in the lab. “Mya was playing around, and she coated this whole thing with a very thin gel layer and started to cycle it ,” Reginald Penner of the University of California said in a

Metro Buses Converted Into Mobile Food Markets For Low Income Neighborhoods collective-evolution

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Back in 2010, the city of Toronto, Ontario, launched an innovative program which saw old, unused metro buses converted into mobile grocery stores. Dubbed Mobile Good Food Markets, these convenient markets-on-wheels have been travelling across the Greater Toronto Area selling affordable fresh food at people’s doorsteps, making healthy eating accessible to even the lowest earning neighbourhoods. How They Got Started Beginning as a collaboration between FoodShare Toronto , a non-profit organization dedicated to delivering healthy food and food education to all, and the city of Toronto and United Way Toronto, the idea to take old buses and convert them into mobile food markets was borne of a desire to see healthy food made accessible to everyone in the city. Selling everything from kale and collards to apples and oranges, these buses make fresh, nutrient-dense food available to various neighbourhoods twice per week. And while the overhead costs of driving and servicing the buses prevent

Media Bias: London Muslims March Against ISIS Goes Unreported By Mainstream Media collective-evolution

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Mainstream corporate media is ruining the United States elections, and in this insightful video , Amy Goodman from  Democracy Now  explains why. She compares Bernie Sanders — someone who is currently making history and garnering the attention of millions — to Donald Trump, noting how Trump’s airtime greatly exceeds that of Sanders. This is not surprising, however, as Sanders himself has called out mainstream corporate media for its bias, and many award-winning journalists have done the same, illustrating how mainstream media is plagued by corporate, intelligence, political, and financial interests. Some of these interests are furthered through pushing the idea that the world faces a great threat, that we are in danger, and must accordingly give more money to the department of defence and more of our personal freedoms to the government; national security must be heightened in order to combat ‘terrorism.’ We have been seeing this with ISIS a lot lately, and with terrorism in general.

Why You Need To Do The Things That Scare The Sh*t Out Of You collective-evolution

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As a child I remember standing at the top of the stairs to my basement looking down into the darkness. On an afternoon much like any other winter’s day as a child, I was in the midst of playing a hockey game with myself (and my very vivid imagination) on the main floor of my family’s house when my yellow Nerf ball slipped through the staircase railings and fell into the basement. The light switch was readily accessible to brighten the staircase portion to the lower level, but I knew that chances were the ball had made its way into the darkness — darkness that could only be lit by a series of pull strings sporadically placed around the unfinished mystery. I always had the option of calling for my mom, but who wants to do that? That would require admitting that I was still afraid of the dark, something that she wouldn’t care about but that my 12 year old ego couldn’t stand. In keeping my perceived “manliness” in place, far too many hockey games ended early, or experienced longer than

The Emotion-Bashing Needs to Stop

Emotions are a rich aspect of being human. We should honor our unique capacity to experience the complexity of humanity’s emotional spectrum, instead of bashing those which we sometimes might consider ‘bad’. There are no strictly ‘good’ or ‘bad’ emotions. Fear for example, is a necessity for survival. Anger is necessary for engaging the pursuit of justice. Sadness helps us to understand the various loves and pursuits we have in life. Yet we do live in a duality of positive and negative spin. Both parts make a whole. So there are emotions that we process as more positive, like ‘happiness’, or more negative, like ‘grief’, yet both play a necessary role in helping us to learn and grow within the earthly context we find ourselves. The Difference between Emotions and Feelings There are many academic and anecdotal variations for what are considered primary and secondary emotions, which can be further explored in this article . Personally I like to look at it simply within the context of

7 Amazing Experiences in the Moment of Spiritual Awakening

What does it mean to be “ awake “ ? It has happened to all of us that we came under the spell of a moment some time during our life. A beautiful landscape, a sunset, a beautiful piece of art, the rhythm of music enchanted us. It may even happen that we are just lost in the silence of a peaceful moment. The identification with the forms and shapes loosens a little bit for a short while, and in that instant we may experience an entirely different state of Consciousness . See 7 amazing experiences in the moments of spiritual Awakening . When our identification with a form ceases, a new space is generated between us and the form and we are able to see and recognize that we are not identical with that form. We virtually step out of the psychological time frame, we stop mulling over injuries of the past, and do not build our identity for the future. The  Ego disappears, telling personal history stops, and the line of our accustomed identity is broken. We are awake, only the present mo

15 Surprising Qualities of the Creative Genius

Creativity. What is it? And how do you know if you’ve got it? The most used buzzword in self-descriptions on linked in profiles for 2 years running. The number one factor, across 33 industries, to which Fortune 500 CEOs attribute their success. We’re fascinated by creativity and yet we continue to struggle in defining it. Perhaps we can benefit by examining those individuals hailed as creative geniuses. Picasso, Einstein, Edison, Steve Jobs… What did all of these people have in common? Below I list 15 surprising qualities of the Creative Genius. 1. Creative Geniuses are open to new experiences. On an individual level, psychologists have identified “openness to experience” as the single most important trait of exceptionally creative people. Creative geniuses make a conscious effort to introduce change into their lives. They often put themselves in situations in which they’re more likely to experience the unexpected. 2. Creative Geniuses have a high tolerance for uncertainty. Many of

Mercury Retrograde In Taurus: A Shift In What We Value And How Others Value Us collective-evolution

The planet Mercury is in its retrograde phase from April 28th until May 22nd, 2016. This is an astronomical/astrological phenomenon that occurs roughly every four months for over a three week period. From our perspective on Earth, it looks as if Mercury is going backwards because of the relationship between both Earth’s and Mercury’s orbit around the Sun. Accordingly, astrologers observe retrograde planets differently compared to when they appear to be forward moving. Retrogrades are recognized as a time when we are reworking how we orientate ourselves with the themes and energies of that specific planet in a specific sign. Mercury started its pre-retrograde phase on April 14th; therefore certain things that have been put in place or occurred between then and the 28th will still be going through a ‘sorting out’ process throughout the following three weeks. Mercury Retrograde: Changes, Errors, Chaos, Insights, Revisitation, and Transformation Mercury rules over all types of communi

How You Can Get ‘High’ On Dirt collective-evolution

No, we’re not talking about the type of high cannabis or psychedelics might provide. We’re talking about being high on life, feeling good and warding off depression and other lower states of feeling. That’s what new research is saying about dirt! With a plethora of pills on the market today to help ease and eliminate depression, it can seem defeating to feel like we live in a world where holistic remedies are buried beneath synthetics. However, soil microbes may be on your side, as they have been found to have similar effects on the brain as Prozac, minus the side effects and potential of chemical dependency. How Dirt Can Make You Happy Long before modern medicine came to be, natural remedies were used to cure mental and emotional issues. But while ancient healers may not have always had the scientific resources to understand why some things worked, modern scientists can now help further connect the dots. Soil microbes and human health have now been positively linked through resear