Explore the Brain with fun games, videos and quizzes in an Alice in Wonderland themed world

Wondermind – If you have kids, and naturally they’re better at using the internet than you are, make sure you direct them towards this wonderful site. This is modern, online education for kids, as it should be.

Food Pairing – Chocolate & Chili: Yay or nay? It would appear the great chefs of the world are bored with the usual food combinations we’ve come to expect (fish ‘n’ chips anyone?). They’re exploring ways to make our culinary experiences more interesting, diverse and tasty; pairing foods, ingredients and flavors that we never knew could go together. And FoodPairing is at the forefront of this tasty trend.

Food Pairing is a great looking, interactive website created lovingly by the chefs and food scientists at research company ‘Sense for Taste’. It generates a dynamic ‘FoodPairing Tree’ for any ingredient, with all the possible flavor combinations that would go well with that ingredient circling around it. The closer another ingredient is to it in the tree, the better the combination will taste! Below is a tree for cucumber. You can see that Beijing roast duck goes slightly better with cucumber than country ham, because it’s positioned closer to the center, but they would both still work as flavor combinations! It’s currently being used by more than 200,000 professional chefs, food enthusiasts and mixologists per year, so if it’s good enough for them, imagine how impressive you’re going to look with your imaginative recipes at your next dinner party! Click here or on the Cucumber FoodPairing Tree below to discover a whole new world of flavor combinations.

This is a dynamic 'food pairing tree' for cucumber. There's so many cool new flavor combinations to try!

If you love cooking, but are looking for new recipes, why not try our All My Faves Homepage for the Top Recipes Sites? I guarantee you’ll find something tasty on there, although whether it will sound as fun as cucumber and Costa Rica dark chocolate remains to be seen 😉

Tested – Tested.com is for clever people who want to buy smarter, tweak better, hack harder, and watch them destroy bad gear.

Foldit – Solve Puzzles for Science – Foldit is a revolutionary new computer game enabling you to contribute to important scientific research. Foldit is a puzzle videogame, in which you play to solve tricky 3D puzzles, they test your structures to find new drugs that could cure cancer, AIDS, and a host of diseases.

Singularity Hub – Singularity Hub is a blog and news network covering the latest in robots, genetics, longevity, artificial intelligence, aging, stem cells, and more.

The singularity is the point in mankind’s future when we will transcend current intellectual and biological limitations and initiate an intelligence and information explosion beyond imagining.

The impossible is becoming possible. The future that you thought would not come in your lifetime is coming sooner than you thought. Singularity Hub is here to tell you about it.

CogniFit – CogniFit Brain Fitness is a revolutionary technology that lets you explore your brain, assess your cognitive skills, train the abilities that are important to you and gives you an efficient mind training.

You will instantly know how fit your brain is and what can be done to boost it.

Codeacademy – HTML, CSS anyone? The bewildering world of programming seems so far fetched to most non-engineers, including myself. But I do know programming brings magic in terms of website appearance and infrastructure. Codeacademy is here to make the frightening and peculiar world of coding a simpler topic to learn. It offers “a better, more interactive way to learn how to program.” Thanks to Codeacademy creators Ryan Bubinski and Zach Sims, learning to code is now more accessible -and fun- than ever.

The lesson framework in Codeacademy is a step by step process that ensures high retention rates and increases your chances of learning while having fun! Although these lessons are quite basic they meant the world to me, a common Java illiterate! And look, I managed to code an alert message as you can see below.

Start with Codecademy’s eight lesson plan, and then sign up to online courses to maintain and perfect your training. You know, I never thought I’d ever say this but programming is fun!

One Life – Aside from being one the world’s leading news providers, BBC is also well known for its natural world and wildlife series and films. One Life is yet another beautifully shot film about planet Earth and its rich diversity of organisms and ecosystems. Brought to us by BBC Earth, the One Life website is the brilliant introductory venue for the soon-to-be-out film.

The breathtaking trailer you will find here is not the usual play and watch video. While watching, you can use your mouse to pause the video and transition to the behind the scenes section (showing videos of the film’s production crew, each telling their inside story about making the film and the animals shown in it). When you’re done, simply drag your mouse upwards and the trailer will play where it left off. This is a mesmerizing experience, and I’m anxious to see the One Life film once it’s out. BBC Earth always delivers top-notch, mind-blowing films with rare shots and unbelievable close ups.

Not Exactly Rocket Science – The vast and often complicated world of science is also enchanting and inspiring. But showing the wonders of science is not limited to BBC or National Geographic films and series. Discover Magazine’s Not Exactly Rocket Science blog is here on a mission: “Rocket Science is his attempt to talk about the awe-inspiring, beautiful and quirky world of science to as many people as possible.” Written by the young, award-winning Ed Young, Rocket Science is a fascinating blog worth checking into every week.

Here’s an interesting post I’ve found here in this insightful blog: a video of a mandrill monkey in the Chester Zoo in the UK, caught giving itself a pedicure with tools it made by itself. How amazing is that?

Well – As with most of the NYTimes.com blogs, this one about health & wellness is also a superb source of content. Well offers engaging posts on a number of relevant topics including food, pets, exercise and personal achievement, the science of fitness, and “Patient Voices.” Well has a commendable size of active, responsive readership that likes to comment on the blog’s interesting posts and further elaborate the discussion.

One particular post I found intriguing on Well is Tara Parker-Pope’s A Dual Portrait of American Fatherhood, discussing the radical changes in the paternal role of today’s America, compared to pops’ levels of engagement a few decades ago (just in time for Father’s Day). Well is a last week’s Weekly Blog winner and a personal favorite for both my mind and soul. Enjoy.

WolframTones – For those of you unfamiliar with Wolfram|Alpha, it is Stephen Wolfram’s computational knowledge engine based on the British scientist’s New Kind of Science approach. WolframTones is an intriguing experiment based on the same scientific premise, and “works by taking simple programs from Wolfram’s computational universe, and using music theory and Mathematica algorithms to render them as music. Each program in effect defines a virtual world, with its own special story–and WolframTones captures it as a musical composition.” In other words, Wolfram Tones creates music from algorithms.”

The nice thing about WolframTones is you don’t have to be a computer science graduate to appreciate the beauty of composing melodies based on computational processes. The user interface is fun and easy, and the WolframTones magic really shines when you add more variations to your creation. Another great perk this experiment offers is a free download of your music creation which can be applied as a ringtone. To learn more about how to compose music on WolframTones, consult the FAQ page.

SkyView – This amazing iPhone app (compatible with 3GS, iPhone 4 and iPad 2) offers a unique planetary experience using cool augmented reality technology. Watch your favorite stars and constellations fade in and out of your camera view, search for stars and planets’ current location, and track celestial objects’ path through the skies in a 24 hour period (including satellites and the space station!) Tilting your iPhone to landscape view prompts the SkyView’s scientific mode which gives real-time azimuths and elevation of starts.

SkyView not only offers captivating images of celestial objects and zodiac constellations, but also offers a fantastic way to learn astronomy and physics. Available on the App Store on iTunes.