There is an art to resting and it has nothing to do with your sleep habits

How rested are you? Fresher than an Alpine daisy, or dragging yourself through the day, propped up by caffeine and anxiety? Feeling rested isn't about how much sleep we get, despite our obsession with sleep quality, monitoring its length, depth, and hygiene via sleep trackers, sleep-journaling, sleep rituals or sleep clinics. Rest is different from sleep, yet we frequently confuse the two.

Resting can be active. It can be passive. It can be anything you want it to be, as long as you find it restful. Running, gardening, knitting, yoga, walking, swimming, cooking, listening to the radio, reading, doing the crossword, dancing, staring at your foot... it's all good. The only kind of rest which is counter-productive is enforced rest - ask anyone who has ever been confined to bed. That kind of rest drives us crazy. We are also wary of being seen to be doing nothing in a hive culture of manic activity.

In her new book, The Art of Rest, psychology broadcaster and author Claudia Hammond examines the pursuits we find restful, how we rest, and how rest works. It also looks at our attitudes to rest, and the cult of busyness.

Read more at the Independent 

There is a survey behind this book - the Rest Test, led by researchers from Durham University. It involved more than 18,000 people in 134 countries, who were asked to list what they found most restful - reading was number one

Five most restful activities

The survey asked people to choose the activities that they find the most restful. The results show that the top five most restful activities are those often done alone: 

• Reading (58 per cent)
• Being in the natural environment (53.1 per cent)
• Being on their own (52.1 per cent)
• Listening to music (40.6 per cent)
• Doing nothing in particular (40 per cent)

Dr Felicity Callard continued: “It’s intriguing that the top activities considered restful are frequently done on one’s own. Perhaps it’s not only the total hours resting or working that we need to consider, but the rhythms of our work, rest and time with and without others.

The Scientific and Medical Network

The Scientific and Medical Network (SMN) is a worldwide professional community and membership organisation for open-minded, rigorous and evidence-based enquiry into themes bridging science, spirituality and consciousness. It promotes a cultural shift in our understanding of reality and human experience beyond the limits imposed by exclusively materialist and reductionist approaches.

The Network brings together open-minded and discerning people who are inclined to a non-materialist interpretation of the universe and who have a sympathetic interest in parapsychological and spiritual matters.

Read more at the SMN website

Science Week 10 - 17 November

Science Week 2019 will focus on climate action, seeking to help people understand climate change, how science and technology can help us create a positive climate future and the impact we as individuals can have on climate change. While one person may feel unable to make a difference on their own, a collective effort to offset our carbon emissions will have a positive impact.  Throughout Science Week there will be a variety of ways for you to get involved and find out more about our amazing planet through events, interviews, social media and much more. You can get involved by finding an event to attend here or following #BelieveInScience online.

Read more at Science Foundation Ireland

Super massive black hole nearest Earth is becoming intensely bright!

The huge black hole at the heart of our galaxy has turned unusually bright – and scientists have no explanation for the dramatic behaviour.

It has started eating far more interstellar gas and dust than it has ever been seen doing before, researchers said. When they first spotted it, they thought they had accidentally looked a star – but further research has shown that the black hole is in fact showing behaviour that astronomers had never expected.

“We have never seen anything like this in the 24 years we have studied the supermassive black hole,” said Andrea Ghez, UCLA professor of physics and astronomy and a co-senior author of the research. “It’s usually a pretty quiet, wimpy black hole on a diet.

Read more at Independent 

Water vapor — and maybe even rain — found on distant world twice the size of Earth

Water vapor has been found in the atmosphere of a distant planet that’s just over twice the size of Earth. It’s the smallest world yet found with water in its surrounding atmosphere, and it’s possible that it even rains liquid water there. That makes this world a tantalizing candidate in the ongoing search for extraterrestrial life outside our cosmic neighborhood.

Finding water around an exoplanet (a world outside our Solar System) is particularly exciting for scientists because water is a critical ingredient for life on our planet. It could equally be pivotal for life that exists elsewhere in the Universe. Researchers have found this precious molecule around exoplanets before, but these worlds have not been suitable places for life to thrive. They’ve been large balls of gas, similar in size to Jupiter or Neptune, lacking any kind of surface for life as we know it to exist.

Read more at the Verge

Nasa puts up deep-space atomic clock

Nasa has put a miniaturized atomic clock in orbit that it believes can revolutionize deep-space navigation.

About the size of a toaster, the device is said to have 50 times the stability of existing space clocks, such as those flown in GPS satellites.

If the technology proves itself over the next year, Nasa will install the clock in future planetary probes.

The timepiece was one of 24 separate deployments from a Falcon Heavy rocket that launched from Florida on Tuesday.

The other passengers on the flight were largely also demonstrators. They included a small spacecraft to test a new type of "green" rocket fuel, and another platform that aims to propel itself via the pressure of sunlight caught in a large membrane; what's often called a "lightsail".

Read More at BBC news

Our Universe Might Be Trapped Inside An Enormous Black Hole!

For almost a century, the Big Bang theory has been bandied as the ultimate theory that describes the origin of the universe. The universe, as we know by it, was created in a massive explosion that created the majority of the matter which our physical laws abide by. Scientists believe that our galaxy, the Milky Way, came into existence billions of years ago, following the Big Bang and that the already-vast universe is an ever-expanding cosmos.

Now, a recent breakthrough states that black holes also have the singularity trait in common with the universe. The new study conducted by a team of progressive astrophysicists at Canada’s University of Waterloo has mentioned that the universe exists farther from the horizon of a huge black hole with higher dimensions, and it might have been present in the cosmos right from the very beginning of time.

Read More at Mashable