A study of Kenyan long distance runners found that those who ran barefoot landed on the ball of their foot, lessening the impact over runners who wore shoes and landed on the heel of their foot.
Shoes Versus Barefoot Running Gait
Credit: Benton et. al.
I complained at the end of last year that the National Ignition Facility, which focuses 192 powerful lasers on a single point to produce the environment inside a star, has been pretty quiet on news releases, but this week it’s first experiments to use all 192 lasers reveals plasma interference is much less of a problem than anticipated in producing fusion energy with lasers. Way to justify your funding team! Keep it up!
Felix Baumgartner is planning to break the world record, and the sound barrier, in an attempt at the highest base jump ever, with an electrocardiogram monitor recording what happens to his body during the 120,000 foot fall.
Why didn’t the Earth warm more dramatically over the last decade? Because there was less water in the stratosphere.
Running Analysis of Heel Strike versus Forefoot Strike (Same runner, 2 weeks apart):
Wilson A Bentley spent a lifetime photographing snowflakes with a microscope before his death of pneumonia in 1931, now his photos are going on sale in the United States, but the public domain photos are not available online, only through a CD Rom for purchase on a site that claims public domain does not mean you can use their images (Bull Puckeys!). Chet Raymo wonders why no one has come up with a satisfactory explanation for how snowflakes form their symmetrical patterns.
Wilson A Bentley Snowflakes
With the Supreme Court opening the floodgates for corporate political propaganda to overwhelm our media, psychologists would like us to remember just how incredibly effective such propaganda is, with free pens giving us a favorable view of the medication they advertise, people planted in environments can make us question what we see with our own eyes, and advertisements can make us believe we shook hands with Bugs Bunny at Disneyland.
NASA Spirit Rover will stay stuck in the sand, where its mission will refocus on studying the microcosmos of Mars in its immediate surroundings.
Phil Plait has a great slidesof good and bad science in movies worth perusing. I’ve added Destination Moon to my netflix.
Snow Flakes:
NASA’s IBEX (Interstellar Boundary Explorer) map of our solar system’s heliosphere, the bubble of magnetism produced by our sun, revealed a ribbon of particles at the edge of our solar system, which has been identified as a reflection off a strong magnetic field produced by our galaxy’s center.
Heliosphere
Credit: Adler Planetarium/Southwest Research Institute
Old News, but needs reminding: Despite the fact that the grass growing in our lawns soaks up CO2, the mowing and watering of our lawns produces far more greenhouse gas than the lawn soaks up.
Chairman of the UN’s climate science body, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, will not resign over the recent revelation that human error caused the fourth IPCC report on climate change to include a prediction that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035, which makes sense in light of the fact that he corrected the mistake once his team discovered it.
The more widespread a language grows the simpler it gets, meaning that people we tend to consider “simple” tend to speak in much more complex languages.
Heliosphere and Solar Weather montage:
The Sahara Forest Project seeks to build facilities in the desert that will produce biofuels, solar energy, and grow forests.
Sahara Forest Project test facility
Credit: Sahara Forest Project
Frank Luntz, the publicists who came up with Newt Gingrich’s “Contract With America,” has advice for environmentalists seeking to battle Climate change: stop talking about Polar Bears and start talking about job creation.
Developing teen brains appear to carry long-term damage from alcohol abuse.
The NASA HiRISE project wants your suggestions for what on the red planet they should image next.
Documentary: Space Tourists
