JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Boysen KNOxOut’s Project Edsa, the murals which make up the world’s biggest air filter, is in contention for the ACT Cannes 2014 prize.

Watch the Boysen Project Edsa video here (leftmost, third from the top) and click on the heart to cast your vote on Facebook.

Voting ends on 19 June.

ACT Responsible is a Switzerland-based, non-profit organization that collects the best ads promoting sustainability, equitable development and social responsibility in a bid to highlight how creativity is used to raise awareness on the world’s major issues.

The day after we were admitted to the hospital, friends told us that several media outlets carried reports of our incarceration mysterious affliction. They all pointed out that being a freelance writer we have no health insurance, and called for donations.

Our initial reaction was embarrassment because we have a horror of being an object of pity. We got over it quickly—it’s not as if we could deny anything.

And then something truly awesome happened.

We knew we could count on the kindness of our friends, who do not even have to be asked. What we did not expect was the generosity of total strangers, people we have never met, random readers and anonymous donors who gave just because they could.

If there is a clearer, more concise way of saying We Got Your Back, it hasn’t occurred to us. Thank you. Your humanity and support are more solid than the backing of the Iron Bank of Braavos itself.

Now let’s take over something.

Na-ospital kami, nag-trending na. Bongga na rin.

13.7 billion years in 45 seconds.

Sherwin Nuland, the brilliant surgeon and author of How We Die: Reflections on Life’s Final Chapter, died in March. (Read Remembering A Surgeon Who Healed With Words. The article has links to his articles at the New Republic.)

Dr. Nuland wouldn’t have written his great works if he hadn’t recovered from a crushing depression leading to his confinement in a mental hospital. When all the available treatments and medications had failed to bring him back from the black pit, a resident suggested electroshock therapy. Those of us who watch too many movies (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Frances) think of electroshock therapy as a form of torture that turns its victims into zombies, but as Nuland recounts in his moving TED talk from 2001, it was his resurrection.

Oddly enough, after watching this TED talk, we picked up Andrew Sean Greer’s The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells, in which the heroine undergoes shock treatment for her depression…and travels through time. (First impression: The plot is very similar to that of Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life, which came out in the same year.)

Photo from NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day

Or as our druid calls it, New Year’s Day.

These infinity loop thingies are analemmas. An analemma is the pattern made by the sun’s movement across the sky.

It’s the first day of spring in the northern hemisphere. Here it feels like summer already.

We get back from vacation and immediately the brain must go from basic sentience to cosmic cramming, because the BICEP-2 experiment at the South Pole has just found something amazing. Essentially it has detected a signal from the very beginning of the universe, at the moment of inflation.

This discovery will rearrange our understanding of everything. It is probably bigger than the first contact with extraterrestrials.

We’ve been waiting for it since we saw this movie.

Read the Nature special on gravitational waves and cosmic inflation.

Albert Einstein predicted this. Read his paper outlining the basics of relativity, via io9.

The Big Bang happened. Cosmic inflation is real. Gravitational waves are real. Next: Gravitons. Next: Quantum gravity. Next: Multiverses. Next: Time Lord as a viable career.