The Tall Toll of High Heels

Jan. 27, 2012 -- An obsession with wearing high heels may take a toll on women’s muscles as well their pocketbooks.

A new study offers a scientific explanation for why walking in high heels can be so painful: It changes the basic mechanics of how women walk.

The results show that women who regularly wear high heels walk with shorter, more forceful strides and recruit more muscles to walk, compared to women who favor flats. These changes persist even when the women kick off their heels and go barefoot.

“This represents a potential injury risk, and may partly explain the fact that high-heeled shoes are often associated with discomfort and muscle fatigue,” researcher Neil Cronin, PhD, of the University of Jyvaskyla in Finland, and colleagues write in the Journal of Applied Physiology.

Slideshow: The Worst Shoes for Your Feet

High Heels Change How Women Walk

Researchers looked at how walking in high heels affected the mechanics of walking in nine young women who wore high heels for 40 hours per week or more for at least two years, compared with 10 young women who rarely wore high heels.

All of the women walked at their own pace along a 26-foot, flat walkway while wearing electrodes on their feet and legs to measure muscle activity. The walkway was also equipped with a plate to gauge ground reaction forces, and cameras recorded their gait.

Both groups walked down the walkway 10 times in their bare feet. Then the high heel wearers walked it another 10 times in their favorite high heels.

As the researchers had suspected, the women who regularly wore high heels walked differently than those who didn’t, even when they were in their bare feet.

The results showed that the high heel wearers had shorter strides and mostly used their muscles to walk rather than the more efficient combination of muscle and tendon stretching employed by the women who wore flats.

Because their feet were stuck in a flexed, toes-pointed position for so long, the calf muscles of the women who wore high heels had also shortened and were under more strain.

For example, the study showed the muscle strain rate in high heel wearers was about six times higher than in the other women.

Researchers say these sorts of adaptations from long-term high heel use may compromise muscle efficiency in barefoot and high heeled-walking and increase the risk of injuries.

Chinese Workers’ Problems

This New York Times story, telling ugly stories of human suffering at Chinese outsourcers, isn’t about
Apple. It’s pure politics and economics.

It’s Simple

The management of well-connected Chinese companies needn’t
worry much about regulation or law enforcement, because China is governed by a
corrupt autocracy. They needn’t worry much about unions or other worker
activism because that government has as a matter of industrial policy
disempowered labor, making
real unionism impossible.

We’ve seen this movie before. The description of 21st-century Chinese
political reality applies pretty well to 19th-century Europe. Not
surprisingly, so do the descriptions of the sufferings of
industrial laborers.

History says: The systemic pressures of capitalism will
always, in the absence of countervailing forces, lead to brutal
exploitation.
Fortunately, history also teaches that capitalism can still create
prosperity even when fenced in with safety, environmental, and labor-law
regulation.

Some will push back, pointing out that China’s policies have lifted the
best part of a billion people out of grinding rural poverty; also that people
take Foxconn jobs eagerly because they are an escape from the village.

I stand by my point; Europe’s industrial revolution’s backdrop was a mass
migration out of the countryside, and people lined up for jobs in Dickens’ dark
satanic mills because it was better than starving down on the farm.

That’s not good enough. It seems to me that it should hardly need saying
that just because there are worse alternatives, it’s not OK to brutalize
people so that people in my timezone can pay less for electronic
lifestyle baubles.

Something’s Gotta Give

In the short term, the most likely outcome is: no change. In a society
where there’s no transparency and no rule of law, it will remain possible, and
immensely profitable, to sweep the problems under the rug, dodge
accountability, and continue with Business As Usual.

But not for long, where “long” is measured in generations. I suspect that
the longer we go on with Business As Usual, the more violent will be the
inevitable breakthrough to modernity.

But I’m optimistic. Europe figured out that messy, petty, parliamentary
politics leading to a messy, petty, regulatory framework are sort of optimal,
if by “optimal” you mean “we haven’t been able to figure out anything
better”. I haven’t seen any evidence that the Chinese aren’t as smart or
courageous as my ethnic group; given the same opportunities, there’s no good
reason they shouldn’t get the same or better results.

Prediction

I totally guarantee this one: Eventually, the cost of buying anything that
requires
human intervention in the manufacturing process is going up. The sooner the
better.

Photo: Male Bowerbirds May Use Optical Illusion to Woo Mates

Photo: Male Bowerbirds May Use Optical Illusion to Woo Mates:

A male bowerbird's gesso. Photo: L.A. Kelley/Science

By Sarah C.P. Williams, ScienceNOW

It takes some trickery for a male great bowerbird (Ptilonorhynchus nuchalis) to hold a female’s attention. He spends a majority of his time building and performing upkeep on an intricate structure called a bower to attract members of the opposite sex. Two stick walls arch over the east and west sides of the bower, and a courtyard filled with trinkets—such as rocks, sticks, shells, and bones — stretches from south to north. Last year, researchers discovered that the male organizes these trinkets, or “gesso,” so that the largest ones lie farthest from where the female stands. From the female bowerbird’s perspective, the objects all appear to be the same size, an illusion called forced perspective by filmmakers and photographers. Now, researchers who recorded the scene at the bowers of 20 males in northern Australia have shown that the better the gesso objects are arranged in this way, the better a male’s chances of mating with a female. The illusion may hold the female’s attention for longer than a poorly arranged gesso, the researchers suggest online today in Science, giving the male time to mate with her. Or the pattern may hint that the male has other qualities the female is looking for in a mate.



This story provided by ScienceNOW, the daily online news service of the journal Science.

Genetically Engineered Stomach Microbe Converts Seaweed into Ethanol

SEAWEED TO BIOFUEL: Brown seaweed grows fast, is chock full of sugars to turn into biofuel and doesn't compete for land with food crops. Image: Courtesy of BioArchitecture Lab

Seaweed may well be an ideal plant to turn into biofuel. It grows in much of the two thirds of the planet that is underwater, so it wouldn't crowd out food crops the way corn for ethanol does. Because it draws its own nutrients and water from the sea, it requires no fertilizer or irrigation. Most importantly for would-be biofuel-makers, it contains no lignin—a strong strand of complex sugars that stiffens plant stalks and poses a big obstacle to turning land-based plants such asswitchgrass into biofuel.

Researchers at Bio Architecture Lab, Inc., (BAL) and the University of Washington in Seattle have now taken the first step to exploit the natural advantages of seaweed. They have built a microbe capable of digesting it and converting it into ethanol or other fuels or chemicals. Synthetic biologist Yasuo Yoshikuni, a co-founder of BAL, and his colleagues took Escherichia coli, a gut bacterium most famous as a food contaminant, and made some genetic modifications that give it the ability to turn the sugars in an edible kelp called kombu into fuel. They report their findings in the January 20 issue of the journalScience.

To get his E. coli to digest kombu, Yoshikuni turned to nature—specifically, he looked into the genetics of natural microbes that can break down alginate, the predominant sugar molecule in the brown seaweed. "The form of the sugar inside the seaweed is very exotic," Yoshikuni told Scientific American. "There is no industrial microbe to break down alginate and convert it into fuels and chemical compounds."

Once he and his colleagues had isolated the genes that would confer the required traits, they used a fosmid—a carrier for a small chunk of genetic code—to place the DNA into the E. coli cells, where it took its place in the microbe's own genetic instruction set. To test the new genetically engineered bacterium, the researchers ground up some kombu, mixed it with water and added the altered E. coli. Before two days had gone by the solution contained about 5 percent ethanol and water. It also did this at (relatively) low temperatures between 25 and 30 degrees Celsius, both of which mean that the engineered microbe can turn seaweed to fuel without requiring the use of additional energy for the process.

An analysis from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (pdf) suggests that the U.S. could supply 1 percent of its annual gasoline needs by growing such seaweed for harvest in slightly less than 1 percent of the nation's territorial waters. Humans already grow and harvest some 15 million metric tons of kombu and other seaweeds to eat. And there's no reason to fear the newly engineered E. coli escaping into the wild and consuming the seaweed already out there, Yoshikuni argues. "E. coli loves the human gut, it doesn't like the ocean environment," he says. "I can hardly imagine it would do something. It would just be dead."

The microbe could turn out to be useful for making molecules other than ethanol, such as isobutanol or even the precursors of plastics, Yoshikuni says. "Consider the microbe as the chassis with engineered functional modules," or pathways to produce a specific molecule, Yoshikuni says. "If we integrate other pathways instead of the ethanol pathway, this microbe can be a platform for converting sugar into a variety of molecules."

The fact that such a one-stop industrial microbe can turn seaweed into a variety of molecules has attracted the attention of outfits such as the U.S. Department of Energy's Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy, or ARPA–e, which has funded BAL work with DuPont to produce other molecules from such engineered microbes. "Because seaweed grows naturally in the ocean, it uses the two thirds of the planet that we don't use for agriculture," ARPA–e program director Jonathan Burbaum wrote in an e-mail. "ARPA–e is directing a small portion of the remaining funding toward an aquafarm experiment to measure area productivity and harvest efficiency."

Is It Time to Overhaul the Calendar?

Egyptian calendar of Kom Ombo temple, in Egypt. Image: Flickr/guillenperez

Forget leap years, months with 28 days and your birthday falling on a different day of the week each year. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland say they have a better way to mark time: a new calendar in which every year is identical to the one before.

Their proposed calendar overhaul — largely unprecedented in the 430 years since Pope Gregory XIII instituted the Gregorian calendar we still use today — would divvy out months and weeks so that every calendar date would always fall on the same day of the week. Christmas, for example, would forever come on a Sunday.

"The calendar I'm advocating isn't nearly as accurate" as the Gregorian calendar, said Richard Henry, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins who has been pushing for calendar reform for years. "But it's far more convenient."

New versus old

The trouble with designing a nice, regular calendar is that each Earth year is 365.2422 days long, leaving extra snippets of time that don't fit nicely into a cycle of 24-hour days. If this time isn't somehow accounted for, the calendar "drifts" relative to the seasons, and the next thing you know, Christmas Day is coming after the spring thaw.

The Gregorian calendar deals with this by adding an extra day (Leap Day) to February about every four years, correcting for the seasonal drift.

"It's really incredible that in the Middle Ages, they were able to invent a new calendar that was so accurate," Henry told LiveScience. What bothers him about the Gregorian calendar, though, is the frustrating tendency for days of the week to jump around. Because 365 is not a multiple of seven, 7-day weeks don't fit evenly into the Gregorian calendar. That means that each year, dates shift over one day of the week (two during leap years).

"Everybody has to redo their calendars," Henry said. "For sports schedules, for schools, for every damn thing. It's completely unnecessary."

Under the Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar (named after Henry and Steve Hanke, a Johns Hopkins economist who also advocates calendar overhaul), every date falls on the same day of the week — forever.

The calendar follows a pattern of two 30-day months followed by one 31-day month. That means the old rhyme, "30 days hath September, April, June and November," would need to be revised to "30 days hath September, June, March and December."

To account for extra time, Hanke and Henry drop leap years and instead create a "leap week" at the end of December every five or six years. This extra week, dubbed "Xtr", would adjust for seasonal drift while keeping the 7-day cycle on track.

"The new calendar can be fairly often off as much as three days on the seasons, but looking out, could you tell?" Henry said. "Of course you couldn't tell."

The economics of time

For Henry, the new calendar is worth it because of how much time and effort goes into revising the calendar each year. He first got into the idea of calendar reform while having to yet again update lecture dates and syllabi for his students. He quickly discovered that there were calendar-reform advocates with suggestions on how to do away with that problem, he said.

"My heart sank, and I thought, 'Oh my god, I don't want to get involved in calendar reform. It's the stupidest waste of time. It's hopeless,'" Henry said.

---

But he put the Hanke-Henry calendar online anyway, weathered a storm of publicity, and watched nothing come of it. This time, he said, he's hoping that the influence of Hanke, the economist, will spur real interest in change.

To Hanke, the need for a new calendar goes beyond the annoyance of out-of-date syllabi. Calculations for interest payments, for example, are complicated by the irregularity of months. Different financial entities deal with these irregularities differently, meaning that the amount of interest accrued depends not just on time, but on who did the calendar-related math. The Hanke-Henry calendar would do away with these irregularities, streamlining the process,Hanke and Henry wrote in the January 2012 issue of Globe Asia magazine.

The new calendar would also be more business-friendly, the researchers wrote. Meetings and holiday time off would be easier to schedule. Other businessmen's attempts at calendar reform, including one by Eastman Kodak founder George Eastman, failed because they didn't always maintain Sundays as weekends,disrupting the Sabbath for Christians. The Hanke-Henry calendar doesn't have that problem.

"The natural date for the introduction of these changes is 1 January 2012, because it is a Sunday in both the current Pope Gregory calendar and the simple, new calendar," the researchers wrote.

While that would not be enough time to update computers to the new calendar, he said, the target for complete technical adoption could be January 1, 2017, when the Gregorian year again begins on a Sunday.

When's my birthday?

But no matter how simple Hanke and Henry's suggestion is, it faces high psychological barriers.

"My favorite reason it shouldn't be done is, 'But my birthday will always be on a Wednesday!'" Henry said. "Of course the answer to that is you can celebrate your birthday whenever you want."

Another problem: "To my extreme annoyance, my calendar contains four Friday the 13ths each year," Henry said. "Isn't that awful?"

Nonetheless, Henry has some hope for a simpler calendar. After all, he said,smoking has gone from completely acceptable to often banned in public, in just a few short decades. The federal government once managed to institute a nationwide speed limit of 55 miles per hour. And despite centuries of habit, no one says "Peking" anymore when they mean "Beijing."

"Real change is possible," Henry said.

You can follow LiveScience senior writer Stephanie Pappas on Twitter @sipappas.Follow LiveScience for the latest in science news and discoveries on Twitter@livescience and on Facebook.

Copyright 2011 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Today Is Boxing Day, A Great Idea That Turned into Wretched Excess

Today Is Boxing Day, A Great Idea That Turned into Wretched Excess:
The holiday used to have a real meaning.

The original idea made some sense; the Victorian gentry couldn't do anything without servants, certainly not cook up a Christmas dinner, so all their staff worked Christmas Day and got the next day off to spend with their families. They took away their annual bonuses, gifts and leftovers, while gentry ate cold cuts prepared the day before.

The churches opened up their alms boxes and distributed the contents to the poor; there was also a tradition of keeping one unopened gift and donating it to charity. Many people today work in food banks, donate excess gifts to the poor and make a point of polishing off leftovers.

Wikipedia/CC BY 2.0

It was a holiday about equity- ensuring that everyone got a day off, even those who had to work on Christmas. It was a real buy-nothing day; you were supposed to use up what you had left over and give away what you didn't need. It was the exact opposite of the orgy of consumption that it has become.

Perhaps Australians, at one time a more egalitarian culture, had no need of such a tradition. But now, the idea of boxing up the leftovers and the sweaters we don't need (or the ones that are replaced) for delivery to the homeless and hungry might not be a bad tradition to start.

Scientists create first solar cell with over 100 percent quantum efficiency

Scientists create first solar cell with over 100 percent quantum efficiency:

Researchers over at the National Renewable Energy Lab have reportedly made the first solar cell with an external quantum efficiency over 100 percent. Quantum efficiency relates to the number of electrons-per-second flowing in a solar cell circuit, divided by the number of photons from the energy entering. The NREL team recorded an efficiency topping out at 114 percent, by creating the first working multiple exciton generation (MEG) cell. Using MEG, a single high energy photon can produce more than one electron-hole pair per absorbed photon. The extra efficiency comes from quantum dots 'harvesting' energy that would otherwise be lost as heat. The cell itself uses anti-reflection coating on a transparent conductor, layered with zinc oxide, lead selenide, and gold. NREL scientist Arthur J. Nozik predicted as far back as 2001 that MEG would do the job, but it's taken until now for the concept to leap over from theory. The hope is, of course, that this will lead to more competitively priced solar power, fueling the transport of the future.

Scientists create first solar cell with over 100 percent quantum efficiency originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 19 Dec 2011 06:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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