Antiquated thinking posits that you shouldn’t mix work and play. But the truth is, your personal interests have a lot to do with your success, particularly if you’re in an idea-centric field — which means just about every job that has problems which require creative thinking.

It’s no coincidence some of the most profound and popular scientists are also musicians: Albert Einstein played the violin. Numerous bios of Steve Jobs cite his schooling in calligraphy as a driving factor for why the early Mac computers were so far ahead in terms of graphics. Think about what skills you have that aren’t officially job responsibilities, but get applied nonetheless.

Do this fun exercise:

1. On the left-hand side of a piece of paper, write a list of your favorite career moments
2. Beside it on the right, write a list of your hobbies and activities off the job
3. Draw circles around something in the left column that happened because of something on the right, and join them with a line

The connections are now much clearer. By recognizing how various parts of you falsely appear miles apart but are actually adjacent in their applicability, you stand a much higher chance of succeeding at what’s important.

ROBERT BUTLER | GOING GREEN | August 13th 2008 John LeGear/flickr Some call it climate change, others prefer global warming. But does either name capture the seriousness of the problem? Robert Butler looks for alternatives … From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, Summer 2008 Scientists have come up with plenty of good phrases to frighten us. They did well with “ozone depletion”, “acid rain” and “h5-n1″. But when it comes to finding shorthand terms to express the full scariness of the predicame

For reasons scientists cannot yet explain, Utah’s Great Salk Lake is laden with toxic mercury. Exactly where the poison is coming from, and how much danger it poses to the millions of migratory birds that feed on the Great Salt Lake, are now under investigation.

Three years ago, tests by the federal Geological Survey showed the lake had some of the highest mercury readings ever recorded in a body of water in the United States. The state warned people not to eat certain kinds of ducks because of the mercury.

The mercury may be accumulating naturally, from some as-yet-unknown source in the ground, or it could be the result of industrial pollution. Mercury released into the atmosphere from coal-fired power plants, gold mines, or industrial facilities may be settling in the lake.

Mobile phones have been around for more than 20 years, and are now used by more than 3 billion people. Yet questions linger over whether mobile phones can contribute to health problems, including cancer. Cell phones have only been mainstream products for 10 years or so, and it may take much longer than that for adverse effects to show up.

New studies on health and cell phones are tough to get going. In the United States, most research on the topic was discontinued at the beginning of the decade, largely because industry groups and government considered the questions resolved and haven’t been willing to finance new studies.

But scientists are concerned that cutting off studies could be a mistake. “It was 15, 20 years after people began smoking that we saw concerns associated with it,” says Michael Kelsh, principle scientist and epidemiologist for Exponent, a scientific consulting firm. “Down the road, the same could happen with phones.”

The latency period for brain tumors can be 10 to 15 years.

A study that shows that dogs can “catch” human yawns provides evidence that dogs may be able to read the mind of their owners.

Scientists have known for decades that yawns are infectious among people, so much so that simply thinking about them can trigger a chain reaction of “contagious yawning”. The phenomenon is thought to be linked with empathy and the ability to read the thoughts of another individual.

Now the first ever study to report that human yawns induce yawning in dogs found that 21 out of 29 dogs yawned in response to human yawning, showing that “dogs possess the capacity for a rudimentary form of empathy.”