There's no question that our sense of well-being is a significant contributor to our overall longevity. While it may or may not impact directly on aging, it most certainly influences the ways in which we engage in life and with others—and that most certainly impacts on our mental and physical health.

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Fortunately, we have more control over our happiness than we think.

Lately you may have noticed that hard SF is starting to break the rules. Writer Jason Sanford identifies this as the emerging "SciFi Strange" subgenre, and he's curated a list of free stories online that make SF a lot stranger.

Sanford says SciFi Strange reflects a multicultural world where tradition co-exists with multiple, minority perspectives on reality. He continues:

SciFi Strange also flirts with the boundaries of what is scientifically—and therefore realistically—possible, without being bounded by the rigid frames of the world as we know it today. But don't call SciFi Strange fantasy. This is pure science fiction. It's merely an updated version of the literature of ideas. A science fiction for a world where the frontiers of scientific possibility are almost philosophical in nature.

The ostinatos are more ominous. The slow chords hang in the air like wraiths. The one which sounds coolest, to my ears, is the Babylon 5 theme, which is just majestic and echoes through your mind with the thought of our last, best hope for peace. But the Doctor Who theme sounds like alien monks chanting their slow Gregorian observations — plus you can totally hear how Delia Derbyshire made one of the earliest pieces of electronic music by pasting together bits of tape by hand.

The cities of the future will be huge and super-dense — but will they also be alive? Could the increasingly complex systems needed to manage the next generation of megacities become our first true artificial intelligence?

People have speculated before about the idea that the Internet might become self-aware and turn into the first "real" A.I., but could it be more likely to happen to cities, in which humans actually live and work and navigate, generating an even more chaotic system?

More about this artist.

Witness the flurry of books and research projects we’ve seen in recent years exploring Buddhism and neuroscience, Buddhism and physics, Buddhism and psychology, Buddhism and therapy.

But something about this comparison rings false to me. Neuroscience and physics and psychotherapy are the fascinations of scientists and intellectuals, but they are not the dominant forces that have shaped our culture’s religious and philosophical heritage. For better or worse, Christianity still takes that prize: despite waning influence in recent years it remains the dominant spiritual zeitgeist of our era. Even if you grew up Jewish, or a Dharma Brat, you are not completely exempt from Christianity’s influence, just as the most diehard Mac users are still, in some ways, dependent on the much larger world of PCs.

Your increasingly digital lifestyle has left your analog media collecting dust. Save it from obsolescence and digitize your life.

This guide covers many different kinds of media, so feel free to skip to the section(s) that interest you the most: Paper, Images, Audio, Video, and Storage and Organization.

This is the work of Mariano Villalba, a young Argentinian artist whose influences include Edgar Allen Poe, Jan Saudek and Scarface! His dark surreal world is populated with fallen angels, evil clowns (are there any other kinds?) and mysterious women.

For years, we’ve been stuck with the same old fonts: Arial, Georgia, Verdana, Times New Roman — web-safe fonts that a majority of web users have installed on their computer.

But lately, the web design community is abuzz — and the source of the excitement is around web fonts. "Web fonts" is a generic term that refers to the method of serving font files — the same type of files you have installed on your computer — to your website visitors so that you can guarantee they’ll have the appropriate type faces you want displayed on your web pages.

In this guide, we’ll discuss a way of implementing web fonts using free web services collectively called Google Font API.

This month’s fiction from Nancy Jane Moore takes us back to a post-collapse America, but this isn’t your average post-apocalyptic story. “Or We Will Hang Separately” brings together a bunch of favourite Futurismic themes – post-capitalist lifestyles, changes in climate (environmental, political and social), and resilient communities – and dares to dream that the end of an era doesn’t have to be the end of the line, that our technology can rebuild as well as destroy. Quiet, powerful and optimistic, this is where determined people work together to transcend a difficult future. Enjoy!