When was the last time you dreamed? I'm not talking about what went down last night while you were sleeping. I'm talking about really letting your mind think over something major you want to make happen in your life. Can't remember? Don't have time for such follies? You need to change that, starting today. Sounds obvious, but the first step toward making a dream come true is to actually have a dream. At some point in your life, you probably wanted something with your whole heart and it didn't happen. And that hurt. You might have stopped dreaming. Maybe you didn't do it consciously, but you began to avoid letting yourself go after scary goals. It's a universal occurrence ― it happens to almost everyone. But you can overcome this common limitation and start dreaming again.

Many predators direct their initial attack at the head of their prey. Some prey species have taken advantage of this tendency by evolving false heads located at their posterior end. Individuals of the species Thecla togarna, for example, possess a false head with dummy antennae at the tips of their hindwings. Upon landing, the butterfly moves its hindwings, and thereby the dummy antennae up and down while keeping the true antennae motionless. Thecla togarna's second trick occurs at the instant of landing when the butterfly quickly turns so that its false head points in the direction of previous flight. An approaching predator is thus confronted with a prey that flutters off in the direction opposite to that expected. Experimental tests have demonstrated that markings associated with false heads misdirect the attacks of avian predators and increase the possibility of escape of the prey.

There is no way that we two-legged creatures can keep up with many four-legged animals in a head-to-head sprint, but in recent years, some anthropologists have suggested that the human species has evolved in such a way as to be built for marathon running. Researchers from Harvard University and the University of Utah point to our long legs and short arms as being suited to running ― necessary for our early hunter-gatherer lifestyle on the African savannah. More specifically, the scientists highlight the abundance of tendons in our legs used little in walking but essential for running; our large leg joints for shock absorption; and our relative lack of body hair for minimizing rises in body temperatures. These characteristics demonstrate that the human body as a whole is comparatively well suited to endurance running compared to other animals.

Bruce Adolphe first met Yo-Yo Ma at the Juilliard School in New York City. Although Ma was only fifteen years old at the time, he was already an established performer. Even at the age of seven, he had played at the White House. Meanwhile, Adolphe was a promising young composer who had just written his first cello piece. He had shown a draft of his composition to a Juilliard instructor, who told him that the piece featured a chord that was impossible to play. Before Adolphe could correct the music, however, Ma decided to rehearse the composition in his dorm room. He played through his friend's composition, sight-reading the whole thing. And when that impossible chord came, he somehow found a way to play it and his bow was straight across all four strings.

An ambiguous term is one which has more than a single meaning and whose context does not clearly indicate which meaning is intended. For instance, a sign posted at a fork in a trail which reads Bear To The Right can be understood in two ways. The more probable meaning is that it is instructing hikers to take the right trail, not the left. But let us say that the ranger who painted the sign meant to say just the opposite. He was trying to warn hikers against taking the right trail because there is a bear in the area through which it passes. The ranger's language was therefore careless, and open to misinterpretation that could have serious consequences. The only way to avoid ambiguity is to spell things out as explicitly as possible: Keep left. Do not use trail to the right. Bears in the area.

If you place in a bottle half a dozen bees and the same number of flies, and lay the bottle down horizontally, with its base to the window, you will find that the bees will continue their endeavor to look for an exit through the glass till they die of exhaustion; while the flies will soon escape the bottle through the neck on the opposite side. It is the bees' love of light, it is their very intelligence, that causes their failure in this experiment. They evidently imagine that the exit from every prison must be there where the light shines clearest; and they act in accordance, and they persist in too logical action. The flies are careless of logic. They flutter wildly here and there disregarding the call of the light and end up discovering the opening that restores their liberty to them.

The graph above shows the advertising revenue trends in Television, Internet, Newspaper, and Radio in Canada from 2002 to 2011. All the media's advertising revenues in 2011 except Newspaper's increased compared to the year of 2002. Television advertising revenue ranked the highest each year throughout the period between 2002 and 2011. During the given period, the gap between Television advertising revenue and Newspaper advertising revenue was the smallest in 2002, but the gap was over 1,500 million dollars in 2011. In 2002, Internet advertising revenue was smaller than any other media but it began to outgrow Radio advertising revenue after 2008. Radio advertising revenue was less than half of Television advertising revenue in 2011.

Vivian Malone Jones was the first African-American woman who entered the University of Alabama in 1963, along with fellow black student James Hood. Their entry resulted in then Governor George Wallace standing in the door of the university in an attempt to halt their admission. They entered the university but only after an agreement was reached between the White House and Wallace's aides. Ms. Jones further distinguished herself as the first African-American to graduate from the University of Alabama in 1965. She moved to Washington, DC and joined the U.S. Department of Justice as a staff member of its Voter Education Project. Following that assignment, she moved to Atlanta and took a position with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), where she was director of civil rights and urban affairs. She retired in 1996 remaining active in civil rights organizations.

It is not a new idea that cooking is an activity that defines humans. In 1773, the Scottish writer James Boswell, noting that no beast is a cook, called Homo sapiens the cooking animal. Fifty years later, in The Physiology of Taste, the French gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin claimed that cooking made us who we are; by teaching men to use fire, it had done the most to advance the cause of civilization. More recently, Léi-Strauss, writing in The Raw and the Cooked in 1964, reported that many of the world's cultures entertained a similar view, regarding cooking as the symbolic activity that establishes the difference between animals and people.

When we begin each book, we roll up our sleeves and do everything we can to ease students into academic reading. This means that we frame the text before students read it. We provide a specific purpose for reading each chapter. We design close readings that enable kids to explore more deeply than surface-level reading. We model to students how we would read the text. About halfway through the novel, we should begin to step out of the process and begin requiring our students to take the journey on their own. Teachers should not hold the hands of their students all the way through the novel. If the front half of the book is taught properly, students should be equipped to read the second half of the book with much less assistance from the instructor. Students should be encouraged to transition from the guided tour into the solo tour.

Consider the power of a baseball bat. All the energy gained by the bat is supplied by the batter. The bat is just an instrument that helps send the ball on its way. If it does its job well, then we usually say that the bat is powerful. In physics terms, we should really describe the bat in terms of its efficiency. An efficient bat would be one that allows the batter to transfer the energy in his arms to the ball without too much loss of energy in the process. In fact, all bats are very inefficient in the sense that only a small fraction of the energy in the arms is given to the ball. Most of that energy is retained in the bat and in the arms as a result of the follow through after the bat strikes the ball.

Actors sometimes jump at the chance to play a huge response to some big news. One character says to another, You just won a million dollars! And the actor immediately jumps up and down and yells about winning a million dollars. But what would a person do? Stanislavski, a famous Russian theater director, spoke of reflective delay. It often takes time for a person to process information ― whether it's very good or very bad. Think back to a time in your life when some big news was delivered. What did you do? Did you immediately jump up and down, scream with joy or pain? Or did you just sit down for a moment, saying nothing? How long did it take to really understand that you won that award before you responded? Be a person. Don't just go for emotion or the obvious response.

There is no frame-free way to evaluate anything. Consider this example. College students were asked whether they would support a multimillion-dollar safety measure that would save 150 lives at risk. Is 150 lives a lot or a little? Well, compared with what? Other students were asked whether they would support a safety measure that would save 98 percent of 150 lives at risk. These students were more favorable toward it than the students who were told it would save 150 lives. Obviously, saving 150 lives is better than saving 98 percent of 150 lives, but a measure that saved 98 percent of the lives seems clearly cost-effective. The 98 percent figure provides the students with a frame that 150 lives by itself does not. Whether the money spent on safety is seen as a wise decision or not will depend on the context of comparison. When people are told that a safety measure will save 98 percent of 150 lives, a frame is created between 150 lives and 98 percent of 150 lives.

The danger that the human population poses to the environment is the result of two factors: the number of people and the environmental impact of each person. When there were few people on Earth and limited technology, the human impact was primarily local. Even so, people have affected the environment for a surprisingly long time. It started with the use of fire to clear land, and it continued, new research shows, with large effects on the environment by early civilizations. For example, large areas of North America were modified by American Indians, who used fire for a variety of reasons and modified the forests of the eastern United States. The problem now is that there are so many people and our technologies are so powerful that our effects on the environment are even more global. This could cause a negative feedback ― the more people, the worse the environment; the worse the environment, the fewer people.

A decision can be rational without being right and right without being rational. This has been illustrated through many examples in history. For instance, in the battle of Narva (on the border between Russia and what we now call Estonia) on 20 November 1700, King Carl of Sweden and his 8,000 troops attacked the Russian army, led by Tsar Peter the Great. The tsar had about ten times as many troops at his disposal. Most historians agree that the Swedish attack was irrational, since it was almost certain to fail. Moreover, the Swedes had no strategic reason for attacking; they could not expect to gain very much from victory. However, because of an unexpected snowstorm that blinded the Russian army, the Swedes won. The battle was over in less than two hours. The Swedes lost 667 men and the Russians approximately 15,000.

We're creatures of habit. In all the years I've been hearing that old expression, I've never heard anyone dispute it. Probably because there's so much truth to it. In fact, we're even more the result of habit than most people realize. Some psychologists believe that up to ninety-five percent of our behavior is formed through habit. While someone might argue that particular figure, I doubt that anyone would disagree that our habits have a powerful hold on us. Most of them start innocently and unintentionally. At the beginning they form a kind of invisible thread. But through repetition, that thread becomes twisted into a cord and later into a rope. Each time we repeat an act, we add to it and strengthen it. The rope becomes a chain and then a cable. Eventually, we become our habits.

Psychologists have noted that people driving a car react in a manner that is often completely unlike their normal social behavior as regards their territories. It seems that a car sometimes has a magnifying effect on the size of a person's personal space. In some cases, their territory is expanded by up to ten times the normal size, so the driver feels that he has a claim to an area of 9 to 10 meters in front of and behind his car. When another driver cuts in front of him, even if no danger is involved, the driver may go through a physiological change, becoming angry and out of control. Compare this to the situation that occurs when the same man is stepping into an elevator and another person steps in front of him, invading his personal territory. His reaction in those circumstances is normally apologetic and he allows the other man to go first. This is remarkably different from what happens when another driver cuts in front of him on the open road.

One of the companies I work with gets thousands of calls every day to its customer support center. Sometimes the problems can be solved right away, but often the service representative has to look into the matter and call back later. When the company subsequently surveyed its customers to see how satisfied they had been with the support center, one of the results was something intriguing: 58 percent of customers whose problem had been solved right away remembered that their call had been answered immediately or very quickly, while only 4 percent remembered having been kept waiting too long. Meanwhile, of those customers whose problem had not been solved right away, only 36 percent remembered their call had been answered immediately or very quickly, while 18 percent recalled they had waited too long. In fact, the company had an automated answering system and there was no difference in waiting time between the two groups.

In the early fifteenth century, Prince Henry the Navigator of Portugal sent his sailors to explore Africa and open it to Portuguese trade. Portuguese expeditions began to work their way down the western coast, always within sight of land. Upon reaching Cape Bojador, a rocky stretch of desolate coast with terrifying currents, the Portuguese sailors would inevitably turn back, convinced that this was the end of land and that no ship would ever pass it. Prince Henry sent out 15 expeditions between 1424 and 1434 until finally one succeeded by sailing a few kilometers out to sea and going south for a few kilometers, thereby passing the dangerous rocks and currents. As a navigation feat, this change of direction was trivial. While it is true that their ships were not strong and their navigation tools were primitive, the major barrier was not technological but the fear of losing sight of land. We can say that the feat of Christopher Columbus was far more difficult technically, but he too faced a major barrier of fear, both in his sponsors and in his crew. Once the Atlantic was crossed, this fear was swept away and only the reasonable fears of shipwreck, disease, and sea monsters remained. Many barriers are of this type. They are not merely unknown, but unimaginable. Major development can be achieved by having the courage to recognize and overcome mental barriers, just as the Portuguese and Spanish sailors did.