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To get an inkling of what a well-designed hospital garden can mean to a seriously ill child, watch the home video posted on YouTube last August of Aidan Schwalbe, a three-year-old heart-transplant recipient. The toddler is shown exploring the meandering paths, sun-dappled lawn and gnarled roots of a branching shade tree in the Prouty Garden at Children’s Hospital Boston. “He loves to be out in the garden feeding the birds and squirrels,” wrote Aidan’s grandmother in an August blog entry

Perfectly sanitized dimpled spinach leaves or tender greens like baby lettuce has been high on the wish list of the $3.1-billion bagged salad industry since its inception.

“That’s not FAIR !” This is the line that rings through most houses with at least one kid. We all know when something’s not fair. That car that drove up the shoulder while you waited in traffic (rrrrr)

House mouse; courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/George Shuklin Four-legged stowaways hitched a ride aboard the wooden 10th- and 11th-century Viking ships that braved the northern seas.

My heart leaps up when I behold A rainbow in the sky: [More]

Fifteen terawatts. That's 150 billion 100-watt light bulbs burning 24/7 for a year

For my book Brain Trust , I interviewed Keith Devlin, NPR s Math Guy, a World Economic Forum fellow, and math professor at Stanford.

Is intelligence innate, or can you boost it with effort? The way you answer that question may determine how well you learn. Those who think smarts are malleable are more likely to bounce back from their mistakes and make fewer errors in the future, according to a study published last October in Psychological Science .

Think you can stay focused on this podcast for the next 60 seconds? [More]

High status confers a rosy worldview, according to research available online last August in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes . Psychologists asked college students to write essays about having more prestige than others or being low on the totem pole, thus priming them to think of themselves as having either high or low status

Receding Himalayan glaciers Almost six years ago, I was the editor of a single-topic issue on energy for Scientific American that included an article by Princeton University’s Robert Socolow that set out a well-reasoned plan for how to keep atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations below a planet-livable threshold of 560 ppm. The issue came replete with technical solutions that ranged from a hydrogen economy to space-based solar. [More]

New images of a weird weather phenomenon known as a roll cloud have surfaced from Richland, Miss. [More]

Even making this image for this blog post violates Pinterest's rules. The Promise – a bold credited, copyright future [More]

Editor's note: The following is adapted from the Rocky Mountain Institute's Reinventing Fire: Bold Business Solutions for the New Energy Era . [More]

Click here for Part One: An Interview with Sarah Blaffer Hrdy on Mother Nature