Bookups

An exercise for bookworms!


(via the ragbag)

Posted By: Alex - Fri Mar 02, 2012 - Comments (2)
Category: Exercise and Fitness, Books

Hefnawi the Pyramid Climber

Back in the day -- the 1950s and 60s -- Hefnawi Adel Nabi Fayed was known as the Champion of the Great Pyramid, because of his skill at running up and down the pyramid. According to the short bio of him on champion-sportswear.de, he was working as a pyramid guide in the 1940s when it first occurred to him to run up the thing:


Eventually he got his time down to five minutes running up it, and two minutes coming back down. That's got to be the ultimate hill training. Check out his legs in the picture below.


(I found the picture on eBay)

Posted By: Alex - Thu Feb 23, 2012 - Comments (5)
Category: Exercise and Fitness

Pit Bull Treadmill

If your pit bulls aren't mean enough, some time on this should change that.


(via Pit Bull Extreme)

Posted By: Alex - Fri Feb 03, 2012 - Comments (7)
Category: Animals, Exercise and Fitness, Dogs

A Switch on the Witch: Exercising with Broomsticks

For witches-in-training concerned about their figures, Jayne Mansfield offered some tips on how to exercise with a broomstick. From the Long Island Star-Journal, Nov. 3, 1961.



The exercises:

Unfortunately the article didn't include pics of Jayne exercising with her broomstick. So here's a few gratuitous shots of her in exercise-like poses. Just imagine the broomstick is there:

Posted By: Alex - Sat Jan 21, 2012 - Comments (8)
Category: Exercise and Fitness, Hollywood

Follies of the Mad Men #165

Be patient: the special Japanese calorie-burning underwear shows up onscreen eventually.

Posted By: Paul - Tue Oct 25, 2011 - Comments (2)
Category: Business, Advertising, Products, Exercise and Fitness, Underwear, Dance, Asia

Weird Science – Yet More Robots

In a strange case of the left manipulator not knowing what the right manipulator is doing, here are two more robots that I somehow managed to miss off yesterday’s post.

First up is the obvious and long overdue companion to yesterday’s beer fetching robots; a robot that can flip pancakes. Obviously there have been automated pancake makers around for a while now, but this robot from the Italian Institute of technology has learnt how to flip a good pancake by seeing how humans do it. Please, Dr. Kormushev, teach it to fry bacon next (Vimeo).



But if some groups are concentrating on robots that ply you with beer and pancakes, Autom’s mission in life is to help you lose weight and live healthily. The brainchild of Cory Kidd, who had the idea while at MIT, Autom first asks you for details of your diet, fitness and exercise regime, then it has daily 'conversations' with you during which it will dispense diet and exercise advice. Apparently a major insurance company intends to trial Autom in the US sometime next year, so we can all look forward to having one of these nag us each morning as a mandatory requirement of our health plan (Engadget).



Hmm, perhaps I could teach the pancake robot to flatten the annoying little thingamajig with its frying pan before making my breakfast stack?

Posted By: Dumbfounded - Fri Jul 23, 2010 - Comments (5)
Category: Exercise and Fitness, Futurism, Health, Inventions, Robots, Technology

Weird Science – From Whales To Sails

Sperm whales are among the biggest living things on the planet and, surprisingly for these gentle giants, once must have been among the most fearsome. Palaeontologists working in Peru have uncovered the remains of an extinct long lost relative of today’s sperm whale that had 30-40 cm long teeth in both jaws (the modern form has much smaller teeth in the lower jaw only). With jaws more closely resembling those of a killer whale than its thrust/suction feeding relative, scientists believe the newly named Leviathan melvillei was a 15 m long hunter of large prey, probably other whales. Its size, jaws and undoubted intelligence would have made this marine monster more than a match for the giant shark Megalodon with which it shared its home (Science [article], Nature [paper]).

Sperm whales are still the largest animal ever to have teeth, but today their diet consists mostly of squid – including the infamous giant squid – and therein lies a problem. Whereas most land dwelling creatures live on plant material, or some juicy meaty derivative thereof, and hence are essentially “carbon-neutral”, marine animals from penguins to whales feast upon carbon that was probably sequestered in the oceans hundreds if not thousands of years ago, or has weathered out of rocks that are millions of years old. One upshot of this is that carbon dating is notoriously inaccurate on marine organisms, what scientists call the “reservoir effect”, another is that unlike water breathers such as fish, who return this carbon to the oceans, air breathing animals like whales will release this carbon to the atmosphere as CO2 and so contribute to global warming. However in new research published by the Royal Society of London, researchers have calculated that whales have actually offset their carbon emissions with emissions of another kind. Whale poop is iron rich and comparatively liquid, hence returns the excess iron in the whale’s diet back to the oceans in a form that is readily usable by phytoplankton. The team, led by Trish Lavery of Flinders University in Australia, estimate that sperm whales are responsible for removing 200,000 more tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere annually than they actually emit (Royal Society).

But it’s not all good news for the tree-huggers for while whales might be a boon in the fight against climate change, their free-range, organic farming practices of preference are almost certainly not. In a paper published by the National Academy of Sciences, Jennifer Burney of Stanford University and her colleagues have found that intensive farming is by far the most land and carbon efficient method of agriculture. Because agricultural land use is a major contributor to global warming, increasing the yields from farmland, and thereby reducing the amount of land farmed, strongly outweighed the extra carbon emissions of the intensive farming needed to achieve this. Doing the sums on farm outputs since 1961, the team found that increased yields have produced the same as cultivating an additional area the size of Russia at 1961 levels, which would have led to the release of 590 billion more tonnes of CO2, equal to about a third of all man-made emissions since the industrial revolution (PNAS).

And modern farming may be coming to our rescue in another way, as a source of cheap batteries. Almost since Ben Franklin gave up kite-flying, kids in schools the world over have been making batteries out of apples or a potatoes. Now a trio of researchers from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, led by Alex Goldberg, have found a way to turn these vegetable power sources from classroom curiosities into a viable product. What’s more amazing is the method they discovered to generate a tenfold increase the output of their potato power-pack, they boil the potato first. How did no-one think of this before (AIP)?

Another new idea, albeit a less welcome one, is that one should prosecute scientists for not knowing everything. At least that seems to be the approach taken by the public prosecutors of the Italian city of L’Aquilla, which last year was hit unexpectedly by an earthquake that killed over 300 people and injured 1600 more. The defendants include the head of Italy’s National Institute of Geophysics and the director of the National Earthquake Center along with four other equally prominent scientists and Bernardo De Bernardinis then deputy head of the Civil Protection Agency, who together are looking at being tried for manslaughter for not alerting the population to the imminent disaster at a meeting held one week before the quake struck. It was Bernardinis, a government official, who claimed in a press conference held immediately after the meeting that the scientists had said there was “no danger”, despite the minutes of the meeting clearly showing that at no time was the chance of a major shock ever ruled out (Nature).



More in extended >>

Posted By: Dumbfounded - Fri Jul 02, 2010 - Comments (7)
Category: Agriculture, Animals, Dinosaurs and Other Extinct Creatures, Farming, Disasters, Exercise and Fitness, Food, Government, Health, Nature, Natural Resources, Science, Psychology, Excrement

Good News!

For those of us who are too tired to try and get back into shape (if we ever were in shape... I think I was in shape in high school twenty-some years ago). A recent study published in the journal Body Image claims that chubby men are as attractive as men with six-packs. The University of Queensland, in Australia, had participants rate mock-up advertisements for jeans, skin-care products and cologne featuring muscular male models and average looking men. Neither the men or the women in the study responded more favorably towards the muscular models. You can read more about the study here.

Posted By: Nethie - Thu Jun 03, 2010 - Comments (6)
Category: Body, Exercise and Fitness, Health, Science

Some Crazy Contests

These contests were made for us WUvians! Let's start with the the International Birdman Competition, held each year in Worthing, England. Contestants have to design a personal flying machine and jump off a pier to see who can get the most air time. Don't like to fly? Then you should look into The One-Foot High Kick, an event that is part of the annual Eskimo-Indian Olympics in Fairbanks, Alaska. Atheletes have to kick a suspended object (some as high as a basketball net) with one foot and then land on that same foot. But if strenuous exercise is not for you, there's always the Papa Look-Alike Contest, held in Key West, Florida, in July each year. This contest only requires that you be a mature, heavy-set man with a full beard (in other words, look like Ernest Hemingway). And ladies, if you can't conjure a beer belly and a full beard, you can participate in The Sauna World Championships, held in Heinola, Finland in August. We can take the heat! For more crazy contests, check out the slideshow on Travel and Leisure Magazine's website.

Posted By: Nethie - Sun May 23, 2010 - Comments (5)
Category: Awards, Prizes, Competitions and Contests, Contests, Races and Other Competitions, Daredevils, Stuntpeople and Thrillseekers, Exercise and Fitness

Parasail landing under a bridge—luckily no traffic!!

From the number of different angles of this landing at the end of the video, this was thoroughly planned -- I'm just glad I wasn't driving!!



If you run over a paraglider in your lane, will you still get a ticket for following too closely?

Posted By: gdanea - Wed May 05, 2010 - Comments (2)
Category: Exercise and Fitness