HOW MANY CALORIES DOES THINKING BURN ?

One of the main reasons humans are the animal equivalent of gas-guzzling SUVs is our giant freak brains. Our grey matter burns a lot of energy, and that means we need a lot of food to fuel them. But if that's the case, why aren't you losing weight just by sitting at your desk? Last time we checked, most work-out programs don't involve complex mathematics or transcendental meditation.

So how many calories does using your brain actually burn?

Different types of documentaries have different conventions. Wildlife documentaries feel compelled to show two of nature's least attractive creatures mating. Historical documentaries are going to find a way to work World War II in, no matter what. And documentaries about human evolution are going to have at least one section in which they talk about the expanding human brain.

These documentaries always show the line up of skulls as brains got bigger, and they always — always — talk about how our large brains must have had an evolutionary purpose, because they sucked down energy like crazy. But the explanations are always somewhat different. When we were capable of eating hunting meat with tools, we could feed our expanding brains. When we started cooking food, the expanded amount of calories we got from it allowed us to feed our energy-hungry brains. And the virtuous cycle of bigger brains and better food continued.

So why don't we have any mental aerobics videos? Why don't computer programmers (or, say, bloggers) have the bodies of Olympians? Did all those documentaries lie to us? How many calories do people burn by using their brains, and can that amount change?

To get an idea of the calories that anyone burns at any time, the entire walking process burns about four calories per minute, above and beyond the 1300 calories a day that most people need to stay alive. Kickboxing, that favorite activity of cage-fighters, burns about 10 calories a minute. Now the brain, all on its own, burns only about a tenth of a calorie per minute. Percentage-wise, that's very high for a resting body tissue. When the brain kicks into gear, though, it really gets impressive. When actively thinking about things, the brain can kick it up to burning a calorie and a half per minute. Considering it's an inert mass of goo that makes up only two percent of a person's body weight, that's impressive.

What's more impressive, though, is a team of scientists found a way to measure when, and how much, a person's brain is thinking. Neurons work by producing and giving off neurotransmitters. These are chemicals that are produced and given off by one neuron. The next neuron takes up the transmitter, and through these signals get past through the nervous system. In order to produce and transmit these transmitters, neurons suck up twenty-five percent, sometimes more, of the total body glucose, and then twenty percent of oxygen from the bloodstream. It gets the sugar in the form of glucose. During a PET scan, people can see the rate of glucose uptake of different parts of the brain. The frontal lobe is what really needs to be engaged while someone is thinking.

Unfortunately, it can't be engaged all the time. While a brain takes up about twenty percent, or 300, of a resting body's 1300 calories a day, and while it has the potential to burn more, it's estimated that most actual thinking only changes the amount of calories that the brain burns by around twenty to fifty calories per day. That tells us a few things about how much time we spend thinking. Given the shape we stay in today, though, we probably won't think too hard about that.

MANIC PIXIE DREAM GIRLS

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Oh, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl. She just won’t go away, will she? The romantic dramedy Seeking a Friend for the End of the World opens in theaters tomorrow, and it seems to be only the newest incarnation of an age-old cinematic trend of young, whimsical women redeeming somewhat depressed and uncertain men with their quirky wiles. But though you know her as Zooey Deschanel, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl is also a literary figure, identified by her charming left-of-center personality, her pronounced (and sometimes left-of-center) beauty, and her function as a usually rather flat character who serves to lead the male protagonist into self-discovery before disappearing (or dying). Click through to read about a few of our favorites, and then look at thisManic Pixie Dream Squirrel for extra credit.

Midori Kobayashi, Norwegian Wood

Haruki Murakami’s novels are filled with Manic Pixie Dream Girls — but to be fair, they’re pretty much filled with Manic Pixie Dream everything, from wells to cats to entire worlds. The most blatant character who fits the mold, however, is Midori, an outgoing and vivacious friend of Toru who distracts him from his emotionally fragile girlfriend with her confidence and sexuality.

Alaska Young, Looking for Alaska

John Green sure loves his MPDGs, but we think the willful, self-destructive, beautiful and “petite (but God, curvy)” Alaska takes the cake. When Miles (aka Pudge) first meets Alaska, she’s surrounded by piles of books, but when he asks if she’s read them all, she laughs: “Oh God no. I’ve maybe read a third of ‘em. But I’m going to read them all. I call it my Life’s Library. Every summer since I was little, I’ve gone to garage sales and bought all the books that looked interesting. So I always have something to read. But there is so much to do: cigarettes to smoke, sex to have, swings to swing on. I’ll have more time for reading when I’m old and boring.” If we didn’t know any better, we’d think the next thing she did was run through the streets for no reason. Oh, wait. That’s what she does next. Like 500 Days of Summer, the first section of this book is a countdown to the moment Alaska disappears, leaving the heartsick Pudge to piece together her psyche. But of course, it’s all really about him, in the end.

Mary Foxe, Mr. Fox

As MPDGs go, Mary Foxe is as magical as they come — being actually magical, of course, or possibly imaginary. As Fox writes and rewrites more and more stories about and for her — the epitome of unrequited or special or perfect love — Mary begins to take corporeal form, complicating Fox’s relationship with his wife and engaging him in a literary challenge, forcing him to examine his own subconscious, not to mention his art.

Leslie Burke, Bridge to Terabithia

Leslie Burke is pretty much the epitome of this trope — but since the characters in Katherine Paterson’s classic novel are fifth graders, there’s none of that sparkling MPDG sexual promise, which is refreshing. Jesse Aarons is a depressed and nervous boy until he meets Leslie, a jocular tomboy who can both run and think faster than anyone else he knows, and the two build a magical world together in the woods. When Leslie drowns, Jesse is heartbroken, but realizes that she has imbued him with a courage and strength he never had before.

Sebastian Flyte, Brideshead Revisited

The Manic Pixie Dream Boy is much less common than his girlish counterpart, but he does exist. Case in point: the flamboyant, self-destructive, exaggerating, teddy bear-wielding Sebastian Flyte, who leads Charles by the hand through the Botanical Gardens and only wants to talk about art and wine, and who Charles thinks is ”magically beautiful, with that epicene quality that sings aloud for love and withers at the first cold wind.” And wither he does.

Camilla Macaulay, The Secret History

When Richard first describes Camilla, he does so in conjunction with her twin, but the description is still as MPDG as they come: “They looked very much alike, with heavy dark-blond hair and epicene faces as clear, as cheerful and grave, as a couple of Flemish angels. And perhaps most unusual in the context of Hampden — where pseudo-intellects and teenage decadents abounded, and where black clothing was de rigueur — they liked to wear pale clothes, particularly white. In this swarm of cigarettes and dark sophistication they appeared here and there like figures from an allegory, or long-dead celebrants from some forgotten garden party.” Though Camilla is somewhat more enticing to Richard than Charles is (we wonder why), and probably the true MPDG here for the way she leads him halfway and has a hand in his education, the pair functions as a dreamy and almost mystical force.

Lux Lisbon, The Virgin Suicides

Somewhat unusually, Jeffrey Eugenides first novel is told from the perspective of a group of boys peering through the curtains at their own personal group of Manic Pixie Dream Girls, the Lisbon sisters, of whom Lux is paramount. Though unlike many characters that fit into this trope, Lux does have something of her own emotional arc, she still functions as the dreamy, disastrous, unknowable figure that titillates these boys and leads them by the hand (not literally, but they wish) through their own coming of age story.

Charlie, High Fidelity

In his first novel, Nick Hornby subverts the trope by showing the results when protagonist Rob Fleming tracks down Charlie, the ultimate Manic Pixie Dream Girl of his youth. Turns out, he’s sort of over it:

“It doesn’t help that Charlie talks bollocks all night; she doesn’t listen to anyone, she tries too hard to go off at obtuse angles, she puts on all sorts of unrecognizable and inappropriate accents. I would like to say that these are all new mannerisms, but they’re not; they were there before, years ago. The not listening I once mistook for strength of character, the obtuseness I misread as mystery, the accents I saw as glamour and drama. How had I managed to edit all this out in the intervening years? How had I managed to turn her into the answer to all the world’s problems?”

It’s called college, Rob. It happens to the best of us.

Sam, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

In this epistolary novel, high school freshman and eponymous wallflower Charlie is introduced to world of sex, drugs, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show by the beautiful Samantha, a senior who helps him learn how best to be himself, yet always holds him at a tantalizing half-arm’s length. In spite of ourselves, we’re kind of psyched for the film version.

Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s

Though the film version of Capote’s novella definitely exaggerated Holly’s Manic Pixie Dream Girl-like tendencies, she still started out as an alluring, mysterious ”American geisha” with strange habits and a love of surprises. That being said, she is the protagonist of the story, which makes her not officially a MPGD — still, we would argue that the figure of Holly Golightly has become a Manic Pixie Dream Girl for the American cultural imagination, and particularly, perhaps, for women.

ALEJANDRO GONZALEZ - WORX

In 'The Portfolio of...' I give you, the photographer/ designer, a chance to share your work with the world. Everyone likes to get some attention for their works, and we're here to help. Submit your portfolio to us and we'll try to publish it. Today it's time to show you the work of Alejandro González.

ABOUT PROMETHEUS

Ridley Scott's Prometheus is one of the year's most visually stunning movies. It's full of astonishing images that live on in your mind's eye after you leave the theater — and every single one of those images was the result of hours of work by a team of designers who worked literally around the clock.

We spoke to six designers who worked on Prometheus, and delved into the untold mysteries of this film's creation. Here are 10 things you absolutely did not know about the design of Prometheus — plus some exclusive concept art.

The exclusive image above comes from Prometheus: The Art of the Film, released by Titan Books. It's a gorgeous look inside the design process of this film, from its conception as a straight-up Alien prequel to the finished movie. It's chock full of beautiful, scary and moody art. See the full version of that image below. All other images below are courtesy of Steven Messing, and some of them have appeared elsewhere.

For this article, we spoke to production designer Arthur Max, concept artistsDavid Levy, Ben Procter and Steven Messing, creature designer Carlos Huanteand senior art director Mark Homes. Plus writer Jon Spaihts.

With that out of the way, here are 10 secrets we learned about Prometheus:

10. We could have gotten to see Mars being terraformed.
The designers did "some very nice work" on the orbiting space station where Peter Weyland has his office, according to production designer Arthur Max. This included "a very interesting space colony that was orbiting around the planet Mars. There was a base for terraforming Mars." This whole sequence got cut before shooting, because it was too lengthy and slowed down the pacing of the film. But you can glimpse a teeny bit of it in the hologram released by the Weyland Corporation.

Writer Jon Spaihts says his drafts involved a meeting in Weyland's office — which at various times was either on a space station, or actually on the surface of Mars, right in the middle of the terraforming project. "Terraforming was much more Mr. Weyland's burning dream in my drafts," says Spaihts.

Oh, and as for why Weyland is played by Guy Pearce in old-man makeup, Spaihts says Damon Lindelof's script showed the android David going inside Weyland's dreams while he was in hypersleep — and in his dreams, Weyland is a young man, on a yacht surrounded by beautiful women. These dream conversations got cut, but Pearce's casting was already locked in. Scott had originally wanted to cast Max von Sydow as Peter Weyland. (In Spaiht's script versions, Weyland isn't aboard the Prometheus at all — instead, there's a hidden squad of company soldiers.)

9. Any resemblance between the Prometheus and Serenity is purely accidental.
"The Serenity was absolutely not a reference," says Ben Procter, who did most of the design work on the exterior of the Prometheus — in spite of some fans' insistence that the movie's ship looks a bit like the famous vessel fromFirefly. But there were hints of the Nostromo in there, and maybe a bit of a shout-out to artist Chris Foss, who worked on the original Alien.

The early work on the Prometheus was done by Steve Burg, who left the project early on. Says Procter:

Steve's early illustrations showcased the major features which were of interest to Ridley and Arthur early on — the four main thrusters which could pivot radically for different modes of flight, a descending airlock which allowed vehicular access to the planet surface, and an overall imposing "oil platform" look when the craft is standing on the ground with all of its work lighting on. There's no question the ship has Nostromo DNA in it, but in continuing Steve's work I also kept in mind Ridley and Arthur's desire for more aeronautical elegance and performance. It's a flagship prospecting vessel, not a "tow truck", and Ridley said it could hover and dive "like a Blackhawk". The final result is meant to look muscular but beautiful, with a speedy look but also enough exposed hardware to feel tough and functional. I explored many color schemes and the one Ridley picked is actually a bit Fossian with its bold black and yellow stripes.

Adds Levy, "As opposed to the Nostromo, a very rudimentary ship, Prometheus is a Rolls Royce." Levy worked on the expedition Rover, with Joe Hiura, and aimed for something that looked "modern, scientific and very well thought out, as opposed to military or derelict." Everyone involved with the film had "a real passion for space travel," and was constantly consulting NASA imagery for the latest designs, adds Levy.

8. The movie's creature designer also worked on Alien Vs. Predator
And Carlos Huante says the two experiences were very, very different. (You can see his designs for AVP here.) Says Huante, "Prometheus was a very serious approach to things that already existed in a successful universe that Ridley himself created. We were imagining the origins of some of those creatures and it was very high minded. I mean, real science fiction, where science played a big part." Meanwhile, the AVP film "was more about what would look cool as a different type of Predator helmet." The guiding principle behind working on AVP was to keep the art direction consistent and everything cool-looking, because it was more about fun than about making a serious film. Huante says he enjoyed working on both, but Prometheuswas special because Ridley Scott was so personally involved in everything.

7. Pretty much all of those sets were built practically and modeled in 3-D.
And that includes the weird caverns and chambers on the moon LV-223, as well as the interiors of the ship Prometheus. Says Ben Procter, "While some sets were redressed as different locations within the ship, there was still a lot of acreage to wander, if you were so inclined. The garage airlock was just enormous — nearly 200 feet long, if I recall correctly. The giant landing foot that explorers crash into during the sandstorm was built practically, up to a height of 28 feet."

And David Levy says that the Med Pod where Noomi Rapace gives herself emergency surgery needed to be "built and function in real life." The Med Pod went through a lot of different versions, including some early, more "opaque and heavy" versions, says Arthur Max.

Arthur Max, the production designer, says he pushed the concept artists to draw set dressings in 3-D so that the set designers could work from those 3-D schematics. The concept artists working on the film had to get used to creating set dressings that could be rotated in 3-D and viewed from every angle, something that they weren't used to doing. "I introduced a kind of 3-D set design process, that ended up on the workshop floor that was very useful," says Max — and this allowed huge and complicated sets to go up in a hurry.

"You can design anything," says Max, but "Ridley wants the set built. He doesn't want surprises. He wants feet and inches." Everything had to be able to fit into the space available, so you would know right off the bat that it was achievable. The only drawback of this method was that it allowed people to work so quickly that sometimes Ridley would ask for changes in a particular set — and the Los Angeles-based artists would rush those revisions to the U.K. set designers, only to find that the set had already been built.

Some of the set pieces were 35 to 40 feet high, and the sculptors needed to be able to cut up huge chunks of polystyrene in bulk, so they could be fit together, says Max. So having incredibly detailed 3-D renderings from the concept artists helped them to know how these should look. Meanwhile, "some of the steel work was very big and curving, and specific shapes that they needed to be able to measure," says Max. "These things were all done in differnet workshops and different stages, and on different days. They all needed to be able to come together and fit together." And it all had to come in under budget, on time.

6. Ridley Scott was constantly sketching and storyboarding.
Ridley Scott is famous for his "Ridleygrams," in which he not only storyboards his movies, but does tons of his own sketches and ideas. At left is a Ridleygram fromPrometheus, via Alien Prequel News. Says Procter, "Ridley draws all the time. It's fantastic. Every meeting left us with a pile of Ridleygrams, often loose sketches rather than formal storyboards. These were always scanned and filed, and often proved invaluable." And Messing says that Scott "would often come in and sit next to us and draw for hours at a time. That truly was a unique experience." According to Levy, the job of the concept artists was often to take Scott's sketches and flesh them out, adding lots of variations for him to choose from but staying close to Scott's original idea. Says Levy, "He is an incredible artist, with an amazing eye for design and compositions."

5. The surface of LV-223 is a mixture of real-life vistas from Earth and NASA images.
Messing worked heavily on the sequence where Prometheus lands on LV-223, based on Scott's storyboards. And there were two huge sources of inspiration for the view as you descend to the moon's surface: NASA reference imagery, "especially vortex cloud structures." And actual aerial plates, shot by Richard Stammers and his team, of real-life locations in Iceland and Wadi Rum. Says Messing, "A lot of the final environment work is a combination of real photography and 3d set extensions. Ridley and VFX Producer Alan Maris wanted to keep the film grounded in reality, and tried to shoot plate elements whenever possible."

As for the actual surface of LV-223, Messing says:

Most of the natural structures were drawn from the original film. The swooping rock pinnacles were toned down a bit as Ridley felt they were a bit too fantastical. He was a bit more reserved in this film and wanted the environment to feel believable. We looked at Olympus Mons on Mars and several large mountain structures on earth for reference. Ridley felt that once the ship broke through the planet's cloud layer we would see an amazing landscape — in the original the ship was shrouded in darkness and a storm with zero visibility — Ridley felt that he wanted to achieve the opposite here — scope and grandeur at a massive scale. We shot a lot of amazing plates in Wadi Rum and different regions in Iceland. I painted over dozens of these plates and gave Art Direction to the VFX team.

Levy adds that the team had a visit from NASA specialists, who talked about the potential look of different exo-planets, and these real-life scientific ideas informed a lot of the artwork. The team also had access to photos of ice being expulsed into the atmosphere of Saturn's moon Enceladus, and Levy talked a lot to the NASA team about different rare phenomena in our own solar system.

4. The Prometheus art team started very, very small.
Originally, says Max, the design team on Prometheus was just himself and artist Steve Burg, who came up with sketchy but "evocative" designs. At one point, they had two weeks to come up with a pitch session that presented the studio with designs for the whole movie, from start to end. "Truth be known, we repurposed some Alien stills that we painted over, because we had no time," says Max.

After Burg left the project, Max hired a few new designers, but it remained a small team, trapped in a conference room 30 feet away from Ridley Scott's office. "Essentially, we had Ben Procter designing the Prometheus ship, David Levy working out vehicles, props, and various set pieces, and me focusing primarily on the planet environment and Alien spaceships/architecture," says Messing. "We all had to be quite versatile in our skill set. There was also Carlos Huante and Neville Page working on creatures remotely." According to Max, they covered every wall in the conference room with art, until they ran out of wallspace and had to resort to covering the windows, "going from a brightly lit room to a black box."

Later, it became a 24-hour art department, with people working in both L.A. and London, collaborating via Skype and sending files back and forth for people in both countries to modify.

3. There's an altar to H.R. Giger inside the "Head Room."
Says Messing:

Another set that I worked on was known as the "Head Room." This was a ceremonial room that contained hundreds of ampules beneath a giant sculpture of an Engineer's head. Julian Caldrow did an amazing job of working out all of the details for this environment and created the set drawings. The final set was built at full scale and was incredible to walk on. I also sculpted an altar area for this set that paid homage to Giger -it is a relief sculpture hanging from the wall and has the impression of an alien form with flowing structures surrounding it. There are a lot of easter eggs in this sculpture — including several hidden Giger motifs that were not used in the original film.

2. A chiaroscuro-style balance of light and shadow is at the heart of the film's aesthetic.
The main guiding idea behind the aliens inPrometheus was their paleness, says Huante, the creature designer:

Once I realized that this film's timeline was taking place before the Giger-esque esthetic would come into effect, I started homing in on a design aesthetic [that] I felt would complement the beautiful Giger style that saturated the first film. I wanted everything white and embryonic. Ridley and I were right in tune with each other on this. I mean, Ridley was looking at paintings that had white ghost like creatures, as reference for the Engineers. I loved the idea of pale white and started developing that as an over-all concept for all the creatures.

And Messing says that some of the iconic shots in this film "pay homage to Chesley Bonestell with strong graphic elements of light and shadow." Other art references include old Giger drawings, national monuments, large installation sculptures — and the Crazy Horse monument in South Dakota.

Click to view

1. The creatures could have been much more monstrous.
Carlos Huante says he came up with some primitive, scary creatures, based on the real-life goblin shark. (At left: Some video of goblin sharks, that Huante says he shared with Ridley Scott.) There was the Deacon, which eventually turned into "that blue thing that comes out of the Engineer" at the end of the film — but Huante's version was very different. Also, there was a creature that everybody called the "Beluga Head," that he really wanted to make the cut, but sadly didn't. Both of these creatures were supposed to have "some of the mouth structure from the goblin shark, or at least the concept of how the mouth shot out," says Huante. "The Goblin is very delicate, and my creatures were not delicate. I wanted them to be elegant but wickedly strong."

Max adds that the designs for the creatures kept evolving into something that was "a bit too monstery." Ridley Scott really wanted to "keep it real" and avoid anything that looked too overtly monstrous. In the end, the creatures in the film were "collages of creatures, that were recombined for anatonmy and skin type," and they stayed "within the realm of the real." There was a lot of time spent visiting Natural History museums. Often, Ridley would decide that he liked the texture of a creature's head, and he wanted it all over the creature's body, which meant a very time-consuming total resculpt. "Yes, but I want it," Scott would reply.

For the creatures in this movie, Carlos Huante says he and Scott also pored over binders full of references, including natural creatures but also paintings by William Blake and J.M.W. Turner, and "books of classical sculpture" for the look of the Engineers. Early, Huante came up with some other types of precursors to the original film's face-hugger and Xenomorph, plus a "primitive Alien creature" that got cu

HAY FATSO !!

Franck Graetz Pokes Fun at Obesity, Gaming Geeks with Fat Gamers

French-born and Belgium-based illustrator Franck Graetz is awfully skilled at social observation, humor, and poking fun at gaming geeks in his Fat Gamers series. He’s so good at creating funny, chubby, awkward little characters, that we’re thinking he should get his own cartoon series. What’s more, he’s also very cultured in the field of gaming and cartoons—check out how he’s re-imagined Mario, Sonic the Hedgehog, Pacman and a whole host of other popular and even iconic video game heroes. This is our whole childhood, right there! Not that we mind how he makes fun of the virus of obesity, as well as the habit of gaming. The man does have a point, you know…

 Source: Behance.net