Generously loaned from the Royal Collection by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II for presentation during the Vancouver 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games, this once-in-a-lifetime exhibition will be free to the public during the 17 days of the Olympic Games as the result of a partnership with the Province of British Columbia. Comprised of a series of 18 sheets created during the winter of 1510, 16 of which have drawings on both sides, this celebrated group of exquisitely rendered compositions represents stunning achievements in both art and science. In addition to painting some of the greatest works of western art, including the Last Supper and the Mona Lisa, Leonardo undertook sculptural, architectural and engineering projects, and studied many areas of the sciences, including geometry, optics, geology, botany and hydraulics. During the winter of 1510, he travelled to the University of Pavia , where he collaborated with a professor of anatomy to create one of the finest anatomical investigations of the human body ever committed to paper— “Anatomical Manuscript A. To place the drawings in context, the exhibition will present computer animations of the artist’s numerous inventions and a display of important anatomical drawings by other scientists and artists dating from before the time of Leonardo until the publication of Greys Anatomy in the 19th-century.

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Beauty is not only in the eye of the beholder but also in the relationship of the eyes and mouth of the beholden. The distance between a woman’s eyes and the distance between her eyes and her mouth are key factors in determining how attractive she is to others, according to new psychology research from the University of California, San Diego and the University of Toronto. Female faces were judged more attractive when the vertical distance between their eyes and the mouth was approximately 36 percent of the face’s length, and the horizontal distance between their eyes was approximately 46 percent of the face’s width. The researchers suggest that the perception of facial attractiveness is a result of a cognitive averaging process by which people take in all the faces they see and average them to get an ideal width ratio and an ideal length ratio.

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While most famous for his paintings, da Vinci was more of a scientist, drawing and diagramming hundreds of inventions, including tanks, helicopters, cannons, parachutes, scissors and the bicycle, all in the 1400s. Though he never built many of the inventions he designed, some of the things he envisioned in the late 1400s are in use today, including helicopters and parachutes. Da Vinci, one of the greatest artists in human history, lived at the same time, in the same country â” Italy â” as another of the greatest artists of all time, Michelangelo. Mona Lisa â” yep, the lady with the smile, perhaps the most famous painting in the world â” is the work of da Vinci.

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That sense of doing something without expectation of getting something back is, for the time-giver, a reward. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michaelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson and Albert Einstein. The possibilities of how to cash in our “time coins” are limited only to the giver’s imagination and the receiver’s wants and needs. It may include cooking meals, mowing lawns, going shopping for someone, reading a book to a sight impaired person, a 15-minute shoulder massage, baby sitting, setting aside time to exercise together, teaching how to better use a computer, washing a car, playing board games or cards. Sandra Diaz of Ocean Springs grew up with a family tradition of coupon books for children and adults.

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