British biological medicine graduate Joshua Cooper has come to Guadalajara to work as a volunteer in the Cruz Verde (Green Cross) Zapopan through a placement with Global Volunteers. Cooper describes the Doctors at the Green Cross as “hard working and compassionate.” Despite the lack of funding and resources available to the Green Cross, the patient care is noted by Cooper as an “improvement on the hospitals throughout the United Kingdom.”

Old-fashioned horse drawn carriages loaded up with sight-seers have been a standard part of the daily landscape in the heart of downtown Guadalajara since the dawn of the 20th century.  But the sound of clip-clopping hooves mixed in with roaring car and bus motors was curiously absent from the city streets on August 20.

The sparkle in Cardell Calhoun’s brown eyes almost matches the polished stone he holds out. 

My phone has been ringing on a regular basis with dozens of calls from internet users who are freaked out over the news of all the government-sponsored spying, and desperate for some simple answer that will let them put a stop to it. I have tried my best to be patient with all these callers, but few of them are willing to accept that putting a stop to Big Brother snooping through your personal business will not be a simple task.

A proposal to create a Geopark in the Bosque de la Primavera has been submitted to the University of Guadalajara with the recommendation that the project be presented to Jalisco State authorities. An ad-hoc committee consisting of ecologists, geologists, Primavera Forest Staff and other interested parties worked for two years to create a plan of action which could result in the creation of a Primavera Caldera Geopark and its eventual recognition by UNESCO. The Guadalajara-based committee worked hand-in-hand with Geopark experts living as far away as Iran and China.

Prime numbers are those numbers divisible only by itself and one.  For centuries mathematicians calculated them hoping to make some kind of a breakthrough that might prove them to be useful.  A Mersenne prime is a prime number that is also all ones in binary (3 is 11 binary, 7 is 111, etc.)  Up until the 19th century, there was little use for either flavor of prime numbers, and calculating these numbers was a purely mathematical exercise until cryptographers discovered how to use them to create nearly unbreakable codes.