Best of the Week #110

Dear readers,

It’s the end of the week, and what a week it’s been!  As you can see from Mollie’s posts (she’s traveling non-stop, with intermittent access to the interwebs, yet she still manages to write more frequently, and better, than I do) from Laos, she and Andy spent the week dirt biking through the Lao countryside.  The beauty is indescribable, but I can’t for the life of me actually pronounce any of those places.  Hooray Mollie and Andy!

As for me, my brother came home today!  After about 24 hours of travel (he lives really, really far away), he arrived to our local airport this morning.  You know that this means?  Time to make the pilgrimage to upstate NY to spend some quality time with the family! 

But that’s enough about me.  It’s time for your Best of the Week! 

First, a word about running:  Running isn’t always fun.  In fact, sometimes it’s awful, especially when you first start.  Marathon training?  THE WORST.  But that’s not stopping Mollie’s sister, Jeannie!  She’s running the Napa Valley Marathon in March!  And, in keeping with the family tradition (maybe it's genetic?), she’s writing about it!  Good luck Jeannie and Geoff! 

On to the Science & Technology section.  There really isn’t a Science & Technology section here at Eat, Run, Read, but humor me.  It’s Friday. 

First, 3-D printers and NASA!  Let me repeat:  3-D printers!  And NASA!  It’s like the BBC wrote this article just to make me happy. 

NASA has announced it has successfully tested a 3D-printed rocket engine part.

. . .

NASA said the component would normally have taken a year to make because of the exact measurements involved, but by using SLM [selective laser melting] the manufacturing time was cut to less than four months and the price reduced by more than 70%.

Also better than a 3-d printed gun.

Any of you who’ve ever biked into the wind know that biking into the wind is the worst!  It’s like biking up a hill, but without the satisfaction of actually biking up a hill.  And biking up a hill into the wind?  Forget it.  I’ll walk.  But riders in the Tour de France don’t have that option.  So what do they do?  They engineer themselves and their bikes to be as aero as possible.  And here’s how.   

Following 14 years working in Formula One, he brought his biomechanical expertise to cycling and founded Smart Aero Technology - a company based in Brackley, an English town not far from Silverstone racing circuit, and one that lives and breathes motorsport.

I think I saw these guys out on Hains Point last week.  SLOW DOWN!!

If you’ve ever wondered, perhaps on a particularly slow day at the office, how to build your own glacier, or what one would do with their very own glacier, here you go.  Turns out glaciers can be very useful.  Who’d have thought?  Probably everyone.    

Chewang Norphel, a retired civil engineer who lives in the area, thinks he has the answer: if the natural glaciers have gone, why not build artificial ones? That is what, for the past decade or so, he has been doing. Moreover, he has built the new glaciers in places where they will thaw at exactly the right time, and debouch their contents directly onto farmers’ fields.

If need another reason to get lace up and get out, turns out exercise may alter the way certain cells behave, specifically fat cells. 

In a paper published in the Public Library of Science, Dr Ling and her colleagues report the effects of six months of moderate exercise on 23 male couch-potatoes who were in their 30s and 40s. The men were supposed to attend three workouts a week. In the event, they managed an average of 1.8. Nevertheless, besides finding the usual effects—reduced heart rate, lowered blood pressure and a drop in cholesterol levels—the researchers also observed changes in the men’s adipose tissue, the place where fat is stored. Specifically, the way fat cells in this tissue expressed their genes had altered. 

. . .

Dr Ling, who is interested in adult-onset diabetes (often associated with too much body fat), knew that exercise stimulates epigenetic changes in muscle cells. These alter how muscle processes sugar. When she and her colleagues looked for similar alterations in their charges’ adipose tissue, they found lots—18,000 markers distributed across 7,663 genes. This matters, because adipose tissue is not just a passive store of energy, it is also an organ in its own right, producing a range of biologically active chemicals that have all manner of effects on the rest of the body.

This sandwich is going straight to my guns! 

That’s it for today’s Science & Technology section.  As always, hooray science! 

On to the Lifestyle section of this week’s Best of the Week. 

We don’t live in NYC, and there’s no way in hell I’d wait 9 hours in this heat (or any heat, for that matter), but this might be one of the neatest art installments I’ve ever seen. 

Since May 12, Mr. Guo and tens of thousands of others — art lovers, technology buffs and the merely curious — have trooped to the Museum of Modern Art for a chance to experience “Rain Room,” a temporary installation in which water rains down except where sensors detect people, giving visitors the illusion of walking between the drops.

Gimmicky?  Probably.  Awesome?  Definitely.

As many of you probably know, I love the city of Detroit.  It’s not entirely clear why.  I just do.  And so it made me really, really sad to read this morning that Detroit filed for bankruptcy protection last night, especially because some folks are working really hard to make Detroit cool again.    

This guy is amazing!  I mean it! 

Lieutenant-General Sir Adrian Paul Ghislain Carton de Wiart VC, KBE, CB, CMG, DSO (5 May 1880 - 5 June 1963), was a British Army officer of Belgian and Irish descent. He fought in the Boer War, World War I, and World War II, was shot in the face, head, stomach, ankle, leg, hip and ear, survived a plane crash, tunneled out of a POW camp, and bit off his own fingers when a doctor wouldn’t amputate them. He later said “frankly I had enjoyed the war.” 

What have you done today?

And this is just plain fun! 

How long do you think it would take for you to travel to every subway station in Manhattan? College students James Doernberg and Kai Jordan found an answer to that question this past Wednesday, when they travelled to all 118 subway stations in Manhattan to take selfies. “The whole trip took 9 hours almost to the minute, and was quite a challenge, as we had to hop off the train, find a sign, take a photo, and get back on the train before the doors closed,” Doernberg told us.

Where can I buy that hat?

It’s hot out there.  Like really hot.  You know what the perfect solution to this ridiculous heat is?  Ice cream.  Lots of it.  So if you’re in DC this weekend, let your tongue be your guide, and go on an ice cream tour.  You’ll thank me on Monday!  And so, with the heat index expected to hit 110 degrees today, ice cream is, without question, your BEST OF THE WEEK! 

I scream.  You scream.  We all scream WHY IS IT SO DAMN HOW OUT HERE???

 Happy weekend, folks!!

Best of the Week #109

Let’s start this week’s Best of the Week with Football in Kabul, because it’s amazing, and I encourage you to read it. 

In other news, it’s been a slightly weird week here in DC.  On the mostly awesome and not so weird front, the Washington Monument is now aglow.  It would have been amazing if it was lit in time for July 4, but, alas, it wasn’t to be.  But, I must say that driving into DC at night is a lot cooler now. 

Not so bad!

On the mostly weird and not at all awesome side of things, someone car-jacked an ice cream truck this week.  Yes, you read that correctly.  An ice cream truck.  Like an ice cream truck that sells cold, delicious treats.  Someone car-jacked one of those.  You’re better than this, DC.   

Oh, hey, let me just car-jack this ICE CREAM TRUCK.

Also, this guy’s back in jail, and not a moment too soon.  I guess that whole let me take video of myself possessing a loaded gun in Freedom Plaza and post it to the interwebs thing didn’t work out for him.  Oh, and turns out the drugs didn’t help his case at all.

Regular readers know that since I’ve taken over the Best of the Week while Mollie’s off adventuring, I’ve used it as a platform to encourage folks to bike DC.  We live in a city that is pretty bike accessible, and we might as well take advantage of it!  But I’m also aware that biking can seem scary.  I got my start on the streets of Boston, so I’m probably not as sensitive to the “I don’t want to get hit by a car” factor as I should be.  That’s why this map is amazing!  It’s filled with reader-contributed helpful hints that make biking around DC easier (read:  more convenient and less sweaty).      

This could be you!

Changing gears (bike metaphor, get it?), I, for one, love shameless corporate sponsorships and product placement (my shameless promotion of bikes (see above) probably clued you in to this long ago).  Will Smith’s sunglasses from Men in Black?  Fantastic.  James Bond reaching for a Heineken instead of a vodka martini, shaken, not stirred?  Even better.  This scene from Talledega Nights:  The Ballad of Ricky Bobby?  The pinnacle of cinematic achievement.  Well, there many things that make this scene amazing, but the shameless product placement is one of them.

And so I was interested to read this week that health insurance companies might be next up in the product placement bandwagon.     

"Their product is essentially the same," he said. "You cannot really differentiate one insurance company from another. But you can differentiate who has the wackiest mascot, or scenarios that are fun to watch." Essentially, Percelay says, we may soon see health insurance versions of the Geico gecko.

In particular, health insurers will have to craft a message to attract healthy, young customers. "There could be product placement of Oxford [Health Plans] within a Jackass movie," Percelay says. "So subliminally, when Steve-O is bungee jumping with a rubber band off the roof of a building, perhaps that rubber band has an Oxford logo on it." (Yes, we know it's whether there will be another Jackass movie. This is a hypothetical.)

Speaking of health (kind of), the human body is a beautiful thing.  The professional athlete’s human body?  An even more beautiful thing.  And that’s why The Body Issue, in which professional athletes show off their naked professional athlete bodies, is, without question, your BEST OF THE WEEK!    

Decent view...

Happy weekend, folks! 

Best of the Week #108

Dear readers:

I apologize for my absence over the last couple weeks.  My hope is that you haven’t given up on me, but I can’t say I blame you if you have.  In my defense, I was in beautiful Colorado last week, where I, among other things, backpacked, biked, hiked, and tore up the dance floor at my friend’s wedding!  By the way, I think Get Lucky just barely beats Blurred Lines for the Song of Summer title, but neither holds a candle to the timeless Call Me Maybe.  Agree?  Disagree?           

Either way, let’s start this week’s Best of the Week with a moment of silence for the Wendy’s T-Rex Burger. 

It's so tall, I got two patties in my mouth and one of the top patties hit me in the eye. I like a burger that requires protective eyewear.

In the words of Emeril Lagasse:  Oh yeah, babe!

Also on the subject of taking one’s life into one’s hands (see what I did there?), this short video is incredible. 

What Cezanne did for apples, Rob Whitworth does for city traffic.

I, for one, enjoy chaos of all shapes and sizes, especially roundabout-induced chaos.  But roundabouts in DC are just dangerous:  It’s the only place in DC where I’ve been hit on my bike.  The Logan Circle of Death!    

It’s been a great couple weeks for science.  First, you may remember this guy from your childhood.  It’s Bill Nye the Science Guy! 

He takes on those who would demand that the public schools teach alternative theories of evolution and the origins of the earth — most famously, in a video clip from the site BigThink.com that has been viewed some five million times. In it, he flatly tells adult viewers that “if you want to deny evolution and live in your world — in your world that’s completely inconsistent with everything we observe in the universe — that’s fine. But don’t make your kids do it, because we need them. We need scientifically literate voters and taxpayers for the future."

3-D printers!  These things are on the brink of revolutionizing industry, and it makes me very happy to see that folks are already using them for good. 

I'll take a 3-D printed hand over a 3-D printed gun any day of the week!

NASA!  I may or may not have shed a tear when NASA retired the shuttle program, but NASA’s not resting on its laurels.  Instead, they’re doing things like this.

In 2006, Cassini managed to do this in a mosaic that is routinely cited as the most popular picture ever taken by the satellite. It shows Saturn as a translucent orb surrounded by its rings, with Earth - a speck so small you could almost miss it - sitting in the upper-left of the frame. It is visible just inside the planet's faint G-ring.

Dr Porco believes her Ciclops team can improve on the 2006 picture, especially if they use their high resolution camera to picture Earth during the 19 July opportunity.

If you look closely, you can see The Donald's hair!

Let’s hear it for science!  Hooray science! 

Also awesome, though not necessarily related to science, IKEA (yes the Swedish firm implicated in the horsemeat meatballs scandal (apparently they also make furniture)) has partnered with UNHCR (UN High Commissioner for Refugees) in an attempt to improve shelters at refugee camps. 

Packaged inside iconic Ikea flat-packs come all the parts needed to put together a refugee housing unit, the result of more than two years of research by the , the Swedish retailer's philanthropic arm, in partnership with, part of the U.N. refugee agency. Panels of lightweight plastic snap onto a metal frame held together by wires.

In, Johan Karlsson, who oversaw the project, notes that the lightweight plastic is durable — lasting up to three years, compared with about six months for the canvas tent that has been the standard at refugee camps for decades. And unlike canvas, it also has insulating properties and provides privacy.

Bravo, IKEA and UNHCR! 

In case you needed another reason to go to the zoo, this guy arrived a couple weeks ago.  He’s no red panda, but he’s pretty damn cute! 

Look at that face!

Babies cry.  And they smell.  And they’re kind of funny looking.  But watching them fumble their way through their first everything is magical, and, without question, your BEST OF THE WEEK!

This is what I look like every time it snows.  And I'm from Upstate NY.  Snow never gets old!

Happy weekend, folks!