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Our readers sound off on why we shouldn’t trust the ancient Mayans( or their calendar) and a vote is cast in favor downtown pooches—but not their poop.

The inside of a sensory deprivation tank feels exactly the way it sounds: like absolutely nothing. It’s been over an hour and I’m floating at Be and BE Well in a dark chamber filled with water and 800 pounds of Epsom salt—literally as much salt as the water will hold. There is nothing in here to see, hear, smell, taste or even feel.

Logan Christopher, the owner of Legendary Strength, on tearing up phone books, pulling vehicles by his hair and the one thing he can’t stand.

Inside the classroom in the Louden Nelson Center, the Wednesday afternoon traffic is a distant hum. It’s not that Center Street has gone quiet, by any means—it’s just been absorbed into a great stream of concentration and a calmness that fills the room. Time itself appears to have slowed.

Our readers sound off on the dog poop blues, modern astrology, and our future according to the Long Count Mayan calendar.

A team of snorkelers, boogie boarders and life jacket-clad activists will wander Pacific Avenue for an ocean-themed, only-in-Santa Cruz parade this Tuesday, Jan. 24. And it’s all in the name of climate change education. If temperatures continue rising, experts say much of downtown Santa Cruz could one day be underwater. “All of this is very, very hard to imagine because it’s so scary,” says Transition Santa Cruz’s Michael Levy. “One way to think about it is by laughing.”

Behind the George Lucas film Red Tails is a group of black pilots who battled on two fronts—against the enemy overtaking Europe and the enemy undermining them at home.

The message came last fall from a secretary at the Chopra Foundation in Carlsbad, Calif. Deepak Chopra wished to speak to them. Would it be all right if he called? UCSC lecturer Nancy Ellen Abrams and professor Joel Primack—she’s a philosopher, he’s an astrophysicist—aren’t your standard readers of Chopra, whose 60–odd published books include titles like Ageless Body, Timeless Mind and Manifesting Good Luck Cards: Growth and Enlightenment.  Chopra, however, had become a reader of Abrams and Primack. Their books on cosmology, The View from the Center of the Universe  and The New Universe and the Human Future , had made an impression on him, and he wanted to get the word out.