What would you prefer in an exercise regime? A longer workout of lower intensity, that will likely require you to leave the house and go along to the gym, or one that may constitute “seven minutes of steady discomfort”, but allow you experience said discomfort from the comfort of your own home?
In 12 exercises deploying only body weight, a chair and a wall, it fulfills the latest mandates for high-intensity effort, which essentially combines a long run and a visit to the weight room into about seven minutes of steady discomfort – all of it based on science. “There’s very good evidence” that high-intensity interval training provides “many of the fitness benefits of prolonged endurance training but in much less time,” says Chris Jordan, the director of exercise physiology at the Human Performance Institute in Orlando, Fla., and co-author of the new article.
If you wish to try the workout, this website will help you step through each of the exercises inside the seven minute time frame.
News that a Burger King restaurant in the United Kingdom planned to add a gourmet burger, costing around £85, to their menu caused quite a stir a few years ago, but that didn’t stop Mark Post, a researcher at Maastricht University, in the Netherlands, from developing a burger costing in the order of US$325,000 to create.
Producing a burger that potentially requires a diner to take out a mortgage to pay for though, wasn’t the intention however:
The hamburger, assembled from tiny bits of beef muscle tissue grown in a laboratory and to be cooked and eaten at an event in London, perhaps in a few weeks, is meant to show the world – including potential sources of research funds – that so-called in vitro meat, or cultured meat, is a reality.
Why is red paint plentiful? Because it is relatively inexpensive to produce. So where do the main ingredients of red paint come from? If you somehow thought that nuclear fusion, and supernovas, had some part in the supply process, then you would be correct:
So it’s because of the details of nuclear fusion – the particular size at which nuclei stop producing energy – that iron is the most common element heavier than neon. And as we saw before, you have to be a d-block element to make a decent pigment, which means that iron is going to be, by far, the most plentiful pigment for any species which lives on a star that isn’t about to blow up. And it’s going to bond to oxygen, the most plentiful thing around in planetary crusts for it to bond to (only hydrogen and helium are more common, and they tend to evaporate), to form iron oxides: those rich, red ochres that we mix with oils to form a cheap, stable, red paint.
Fracture mechanics sounds like a fascinating field to work in… careful study of a fracture, say a crack in a car windscreen, can narrow down the sort of object that hit the screen, and the velocity that it was travelling at:
In the field of fracture mechanics, an important parameter is the fracture energy, which is a measure of the amount of energy it takes to form a crack. It is related to the surface energy of the material, because a crack creates new surface. Researchers typically assume that cracks form when a material is stressed to a point where the fracture energy is less than the corresponding elastic energy, or in other words, when breaking costs less energy than bending. Materials with the lowest fracture energies are the most brittle.
The vortex created each time an aircraft lands comes into view as an Airbus A340 touches down on the runway at Zurich airport, Switzerland’s largest international airport, thanks to the presence of fog.
The universe came to be after a collision between two branes, being three-dimensional worlds or membranes, while the Big Bang wasn’t so much of an explosion, as it was the beginning of the stretching, or expansion, of space. This according to The Ekpyrotic Model of the Universe, that is:
The model is based on the idea that our hot big bang universe was created from the collision of two three-dimensional worlds moving along a hidden, extra dimension. The two three-dimensional worlds collide and “stick,” the kinetic energy in the collision is converted the quarks, electrons, photons, etc., that are confined to move along three dimensions. The resulting temperature is finite, so the hot big bang phase begins without a singularity. The universe is homogeneous because the collision and initiation of the big bang phase occurs nearly simultaneously everywhere.
I would come back and say yes to a girl. That’s all. Actually, I find the whole idea of traveling back in time to be profoundly depressing. Because I know the future. Living in the past, it would feel weird to know what’s going to happen next. You couldn’t escape it. That future’s already in your head. You know it doesn’t get better. The future is about hope. If you travel from the present to the past, you don’t have that hope anymore. You know how everything turns out.
“You know how everything turns out”. Really? Not if you go potentially changing the time lines, by saying yes or no, or whatever, you won’t.
The most startling claims, however, are based on electron microscope images of structures within the stones. Wallis and co. say that one image shows a complex, thick-walled, carbon-rich microfossil about 100 micrometres across that bares similarities with a group of largely extinct marine dinoflagellate algae. They say another image shows well-preserved flagella that are 2 micrometres in diameter and 100 micrometres long. By terrestrial standards, that’s extremely long and thin, which Wallis and co. interpret as evidence of formation in a low-gravity, low-pressure environment.
The first detailed study of skin strength was carried out in the 1860s by Karl Langer, an Austrian anatomist working in Vienna. He mapped the natural lines of tension within skin by puncturing the skin on a cadaver with a circular tool and then measuring the shape of the resulting hole. The tension within the skin makes these holes elliptical in a direction parallel to the tension. Consequently, a simple measurement of the orientation of these ellipses allowed Langer to map out lines of force in the skin over the entire body. Today, these lines are known as Langer lines.
I would like to think that our skin is strong enough and serves its purpose… without subjecting it to extremes of force or treatment.
