The Orrery

It's Good to be Tight?

The NYT's Phys Ed blog examines the utility of stretching before and after exercise and concludes, maybe not so much:

For years, flexibility has been widely considered a cornerstone of health and fitness…[snip]…In fact, the latest science suggests that extremely loose muscles and tendons are generally unnecessary (unless you aspire to join a gymnastics squad), may be undesirable and are, for the most part, unachievable, anyway.

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Being fed by an Antarctic leopard seal

Seals are nice and cute and playful, right?

Biblioburro, the Colombian donkey library

Luis Sorriano is a librarian in the small town of La Gloria, Colombia. He delivers books to children in impoverished rural areas - up to eight hours roundtrip - on the backs of his donkeys, Alfa and Beto.

(Via)

Who needs a parachute?

ON A bright day in 1912, an Austrian tailor named Franz Reichelt jumped off the Eiffel Tower in Paris, France. This was no suicide attempt. Reichelt was wearing a special overcoat of his own design that was supposed to let him glide gently to the ground. Sadly, it didn't work.

My latest article in New Scientist looks at plans to land a wingsuit without using a parachute. 

Wingsuits let skydiver glide, kind of, on the way down. Experienced pilots can pull off some pretty amazing maneuvers:

Even with a wingsuit, though, you're still going so fast that you need a parachute to land safely.

But people have always wondered: what if you didn't? What if you could actually glide (or slide) to a landing? Here I look into some of the most promising ideas.

(It's not in the online version of the article, but here is the video of Reichelt's fall.)

Gibbon Ninja

Tiger cubs, swinging gibbon, kung fu sound effects? Comedy gold.

Expedition: Grand Canyon

Water break! The call goes out every half hour, echoing off the rust-colored sandstone cliffs and across the mocha waters of the Colorado River. Puffs of dust rise as the archaeologists drop shovels and clipboards, sit down in the dirt, and rehydrate. Talk stays to a minimum. Even in October, the bottom of the Grand Canyon is brutally hot in the afternoon, and the view is enough to silence most chatter. The river sweeps in a wide curve toward the faint hiss of rapids at Unkar Delta, a low, broad mass of sediment that marks the mouth of Unkar Creek. The cliffs rise straight up almost a mile to the canyon's eastern rim.

My latest article for Archaeology magazine, on a recent series of digs at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. (Abstrast only online, unfortunately.)

Two words: Lion Drome

When the Wall of Death fails to satisfy, add a giant feline predator in a sidecar.

Number five in the list of the most badass things ever done by jungle cats:

Somebody back in the 1920s thought to themselves, “I find the world lacking in badass, and this trend perturbs me. I will place this enormous predator in an exceedingly fast motor-vehicle and fling it about an enclosed pit with reckless abandon, and the people will pay me for it because I am dangerously insane and may turn on them if not humored in this endeavor. ”

In one entertaining variation, "Once the riders were zooming around the wall, trained lions would be released, and would charge after the motorcycles, swatting with their huge paws. (They usually wouldn’t catch the bikes.)"

Via ifightrobots

Let's Say You've Gone Back in Time

All the information you need to completely bork the timestream, in one handy poster.

Remember, insulin can be extracted from the pancreas of dogs and pigs.

Is the Large Hadron Collider being sabotaged...from the future?

Two physicists have  suggested that the problems and delays plaguing the Large Hadron Collider, at CERN in Geneva, may be because some force--maybe...from the future--is keeping it from working.

Specifically, if the LHC were to produce the elusive hypothetical particle called the Higgs bosun, its creation could be so disastrous to, well, existence as we know it, that something (the universe?) is preventing us from discovering it.

Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, and Holger Bech Nielsen of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, theorize that repeated failures to produce the Higgs bosun (remember the Superconducting Super Collider?) aren't just due to chance or bad design.

(Some people even think that turning on the LHC will destroy the planet.)

What could be doing this? Nielson has even tossed around the G-word. “Well, one could even almost say that we have a model for God,” he writes. If so, it seems “that He rather hates Higgs particles, and attempts to avoid them.”

Kite snowboarder gets blown away

A kite snowboarder (snow kiteboarder?) in Algeria gets taken for a hell of a ride.