Good morning and a warm welcome to another week.

In this week’s email I hope to offer up some positive vibes to get the week off to smiley start. And if you’re one of the many who are working from home this week due to the tube strikes, perhaps you’d like to use it as a good excuse to come and see us for a tune-up during your “lunch break”?

There’s a silver lining in every cloud…

Concrete cabbage
Team “University of Tokyo” managed to manufacture a type of concrete from leftover foods that’s stronger than traditional concrete. They found that Chinese Cabbage was particularly tough, while pumpkin was less so – read into that what you will. Perhaps one day we’ll live in a house made of food. Geek out (leek out?) here.

Coffee is good
Not that coffee drinkers need another reason or supportive study to inspire cranking up the coffee pot further, but here’s one anyway. This one dug into a relatively large population of 172,000 UK peeps over seven years and discovered that black coffee drinkers with a little sugar had a 29-31% reduced chance of dying prematurely. They were however pretty quick to point out that a litre of “coffee” from fast-food joints loaded with sugar seemed to have the opposite effect. Grab a cup and read this.

Trying hard to relax
Or as the super zen masters at zen habits call it, "effortless effort". This great little experiment prompts you to relax your face, head, neck and shoulders as much as is safely possible whilst going about your daily business. Often it’s not until we do actually relax that we then realise just how tense we’ve been. Check it out here.

Q&A with a real TOPGUN pilot
1. If you haven’t seen the new Top Gun film, do yourself a favour and book a ticket. It was totally worth the wait and is a great reminder that cinema can be fun without blood, sex and bad language.

2. Then have read of this interview with a real life TOPGUN instructor to get the lowdown of real life in the danger zone.

And finally…

When the time comes to set your work emails to “out of office” auto reply, I hope you consider asking for help from Visit Iceland. They provide this most excellent service that involves horses writing emails and keeping your inbox under control. Lol.

Have a great week!

Big love,
Luke