Understanding the Fibonacci Sequence and Golden Ratio

Why Creativity Thrives In The Dark Great artists and original thinkers often seem instinctually drawn to the darker hours. The writer Toni Morrison once told The Paris Review that watching the night turn to day, with a cup of coffee in hand, made her feel like a "conduit" of creativity. "It's not being in the light," she said, "it's being there before it arrives." Turns out you need not possess a Nobel Prize in Literature to appreciate the creative confines of a dark room. "Apparently, darkness triggers a chain of interrelated processes, including a cognitive processing style, which is beneficial to creativity," the researchers concluded in the September issue of the Journal of Environmental Psychology. The work takes the study of illumination in a new direction. To start, the researchers demonstrated in three tests that merely thinking about different types of light influenced a person's creativity. Of course, thinking about a dark room is very different from sitting in one. So what's the secret of dim lighting?

Germ-killing nanosurface opens up new front in hygiene (Update) Imagine a hospital room, door handle or kitchen countertop that is free from bacteria—and not one drop of disinfectant or boiling water or dose of microwaves has been needed to zap the germs. That is the idea behind a startling discovery made by scientists in Australia. In a study published on Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications, they described how a dragonfly led them to a nano-tech surface that physically slays bacteria. The germ-killer is black silicon, a substance discovered accidentally in the 1990s and now viewed as a promising semiconductor material for solar panels. Under an electron microscope, its surface is a forest of spikes just 500 nanometres (500 billionths of a metre) high that rip open the cell walls of any bacterium which comes into contact, the scientists found. It is the first time that any water-repellent surface has been found to have this physical quality as bactericide. Explore further: Researchers create compounds that boost antibiotics' effectiveness

Millions of bees die because of Neonicotinoid pesticides manufactured by Bayer and Syngenta and 94% of GMO corn in US is treated with either imidacloprid or clothianidin pesticides A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that Neonicotinoid class of pesticides and clothianidin adversely affect the immune system of honeybees by promoting replication of a viral pathogen in them. According to the Italian scientists, a molecule is triggered by Neonicotinoid pesticides that could harm bees’ colony. The researchers discovered that neonicotinoid insecticide clothianidin can increase the levels of a specific protein in bees and negatively affects the immune system response in bees and make them more susceptible to be attacked by harmful viruses and pathogens. The leading author of the study, Francesco Pennacchio and his colleagues found that leucine-rich repeat protein known as LRR in bees could negatively affect the activity of a protein involved in bees known as NF-κB immune signaling. Sources: