Oldest Person ~ Rectangularization of Mortality!

David Goldenberg at FiveThirtyEight writes Why The Oldest Person In The World Keeps Dying...

"The cutoff for mortality has remained relatively firm. Robert Young, a guy with a remarkable name considering he’s the senior claims researcher for the Gerontology Research Group and the senior gerontology consultant for Guinness World Records, refers to this phenomenon as the “rectangularization of the mortality curve.” People are getting older on average, but the oldest are still dying around the same age as ever. Thus, when one of them does take over as the oldest, she doesn’t have much time left. The average age of the oldest-ever people has increased over the past 40 years from around 112 to around 114."

Plus lovely ageless infographic... Of course, that plot doesn't show "rectangularization" -- for this we need the actual Mortality Curve which is discernibly rectifying...

A City Upon a Hill ~ Beautiful Boston Timelapse!

Sean Collins, Julian Tryba, and colleagues share A City Upon a Hill...

Unknown Soldier ~ Portraying Resilience & Pride

NPR's Elizabeth Blair spotlights photographer David Jay's Unknown Soldier series of images of severely injured warriors...

"Jay believes these wounds belong to all of us: "You can imagine how many times each of these men and women have heard a parent tell their child, 'Don't look. Don't stare at him. That's rude.' I take these pictures so that we can look; we can see what we're not supposed to see. And we need to see them because we created them." Jay believes seeing is one step closer to understanding."

Starburst ~ NASA APOD Spots Galaxy M94!

Lovely image by Leonardo Orazi of Galaxy M94 on NASA APOD! Click through to see the full image!

US in NL ~ Honoring American WWII Liberators...

Ian Shapira writes in the Washington Post how Americans gave their lives to defeat the Nazis. The Dutch have never forgotten...

"The U.S. military needed a place to bury its fallen. The Americans ultimately picked a fruit orchard just outside Margraten. [...] Right from the start, Margraten embraced the Americans. The town’s mayor invited the company’s commanders to sleep in his home, while the enlisted men slept in the schools -- welcome protection against rain and buzz bombs. Later, villagers hosted U.S. troops when the men were given rest-and-recuperation breaks from trying to breach the German frontier defenses, known as the Siegfried Line. "After four dark years of occupation, suddenly [the Dutch] people were free from the Nazis, and they could go back to their normal lives and enjoy all the freedoms they were used to,” explained Frenk Lahaye, an associate at the cemetery. “They knew they had to thank the American allies for that. [...] To the Dutch, the Americans were liberators.”

Liberation is the essence and enduring ethos of the US of A and why we Dutch, both locals and expats, remember those who paid for our freedoms with their lives today on Memorial Day since 1945...

From Egg to Insect ~ A Bee's First 21 Days...

Rebecca O'Connell spots photographer Anand Varma partnership with the bee lab at UC Davis...

Making Meaning ~ Tyson on Life & Happyness...

Neil deGrasse Tyson on making one's meaning in life...

MIT $100K 2015 ~ 25 Years of Student Venturing!

Pop by this Wed night 5/13 for MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition LAUNCH Finale! This marks a quarter century of MIT student-led entrepreneurial venturing Tickets are going fast and I expect Kresge to be fully packed, so I highly recommend signing up via the mechanism below! Plus check out the 8 Finalist mini-descriptions. Excellent tag-team keynote w/ Langer & Fuller plus multi-year winner Z Holly as MC! This is going to be great!

GO ~ MakeyMakey's DIY I/O with Things Stick!

JoyLabz MakeyMakey GO is Kickstarting now!

LVL 1 ~ CyPhy's Easy Drone for Rest of Us;-)

CyPhy's LVL 1 is Kickstarting now!

"It brings a new perspective that makes drone flying accessible to everyone. Thanks to technological advances like our Level-Up Technology, Swipe-to-Fly capabilities, Real-Time sharing to social media, Geo-Fencing and more, you no longer need to learn how to fly."