Feel good and look pretty

Sometime you need to sacrifice yourself for science and become object of your own research and get yourself off in a MRI machine. But then you can see how your brain looks like on pleasure. The five-minute movie shows how activity changes across 80 separate regions of the brain in snapshots taken every two seconds. The animation uses a "hot metal" colour scale that begins at dark red and progresses through orange and yellow to white at the highest levels of activity. It lights up the whole brain and the only thing that engages more brain structures is seizure. It peaks in hypothalamus which releases oxytocin - the feel good hormone - and nucleus accumbens, an area linked to reward and pleasure. And this is how it looks like:

And afterwards, when you're done you can rest watching the winners of this year's Art of Science competition hosted by Princeton University. These extraordinary images are not art for art’s sake. Rather, they were produced during the course of scientific research. It shows the beauty of science.

Then here is map of The Future of Science 2021: A Multiverse of Exploration and it's both fascinating and breathtaking. I wonder if I can print it in full size and hang it on the wall. The map focuses on six big stories of science that will play out over the next decade: Decrypting the Brain, Hacking Space, Massively Multiplayer Data, Sea the Future, Strange Matter, and Engineered Evolution. It makes me feel all fuzzy inside that I'm taking part (tiny but still) in one of the projects there.