Brent Kearney

This summer I splurged and bought a mountain bike, having endured three years of expressions of disbelief and disapproval from my peers here in Banff. Now I can’t believe that I waited so long to get one — its an awesome sport. It offers an exceptionally fun way to train for fitness and competition, with lung-busting, heart-pounding climbs and hours of leg-burning endurance rides.

The more I bike, though, the less that I run, and I think that there is a price to pay if you’re competing in running races. After my last trail running race, I was sore for days. I think that mountain biking is great training for mountain running, but it lacks the low-grade impact damage that you get from running, which means that race day is going to hurt a lot more when it comes around.

So why not combine the two? That way you get the thrill of mountain biking and don’t miss the conditioning that comes with running. Yesterday I gave it a try, and loved it. I took a 10k trail ride to a spot that had a 6k loop, which I ran. I cabled my bike to a tree, and continued on foot. The 6k loop was on a steep horse trail with a 750m elevation gain over rough terrain that would have been impossible to bike anyways. It was a great workout, and I was surprised at how good my legs felt after going from one motion to the other. When I started off running, it felt a bit like I was floating, and I was moving much slower than my normal pace. After a few minutes though, my pace picked up, and the new activity felt like a nice break from pedaling hard.

Switching back to biking after the run was similar – I started out slowly, but within a few minutes, I was back to pedaling normally, and it felt like a nice break from running. I’m guessing that the “rest” feeling is because lactic acid builds up in different areas of muscle during the different activities. So when running engages different muscle groups, it allows toxins to clear where they had built-up during pedaling, then vice-versa when switching from running back to pedaling.

Now I’m really looking forward to competing in an off-road duathlon! Although the ones that I’ve read about have a running-biking-running format instead of the way I did it. I’ll find out soon whether that makes a difference as far as endurance and pain is concerned. :)

German farmer Heiner Gärtner was having troubles competing in the global marketplace as a pig farmer, but he had the courage to try something new and leading edge: he turned his pig farm into a solar power plant.

Gärtner now has 10,050 solar panels on his land, and pulls in $600,000 per year selling his environmentally friendly electricity to the local town. This should give land owners everywhere something to think about!

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have come up with an impressive new technique for studying live brain activity. The technique allows them to view cellular-resolution live imaging, non-invasively, from a genetically engineered animal’s brain as it moves about its environment. They came up with the technique as a means to study the role of a particular neural protein, “Arc”, however it can be used for a wide range of studies on the brain.

This advance, coupled with other brain disease models, could “offer unparalleled advantages in understanding pathological processes in real time, leading to potential new drugs and treatments for a host of neurological diseases and mental disorders,” said Nobel laureate Susumu Tonegawa, a co-author of the study.

The scientists’ new imaging system revealed that the Arc gene helps strengthen synapses in the hippocampus during the formation of visual memories, and also inhibits the activity of neurons with “low orientation selectivity” for the visual experience being remembered. The strengthening of neural synapses in this area has the effect of sharpening orientation selectivity as particular visual stimuli are experienced. They witnessed a hitherto unknown molecular filtering mechanism in action, the process by which visual memories are created.

The imaging system made use of a genetically engineered mouse and two-photon microscopy. The mouse was engineered so that part of the protein under investigation, Arc, was replaced by a phosphorescent jellyfish gene, which then left a fluorescent trace when neural activities that normally activate the Arc gene occurred. “This allowed the researchers to image neuronal activation patterns induced by visual experience, thus uncovering the Arc protein’s role in orchestrating neurons’ reactions to natural sensory stimuli.”

This will definitely not be the last that we hear of this technology. Many mysteries still remain in brain science, and this new imaging technique promises to unlock many of them. Here is the official MIT press release.

There is a story coming through the Associated Press today about a new generation of anti-smoking drugs. This one is more like a vaccine than the nicotine-replacement therapies presently on the market. Pfizer Inc.’s “Chantix“, and Sanofi-Aventis SA’s “Acomplia” work as a vaccine, stimulating the smoker’s immune system to fight nicotine as if it were an infection. Additional treatments cause the production of antibodies that prevent nicotine from crossing the blood-brain barrier, ridding cigarettes of their most addictive effect. This is promising news for civilization!

The foundation of the first hotel in space was launched this month by the private company Bigelow Aerospace, whose mission command centre is in Las Vegas. They expect it to be commercially available by 2015.

This development has a lot of people considering the implications of sex in space. Zero-gravity nookie is among many people’s fantasies, but according to some space experts, the fantasy is probably better than the reality:

It’s a pretty messy environment…for every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction,” Logan told an attentive audience over the weekend at the NewSpace 2006 meeting in Las Vegas, Nevada, sponsored by the Space Frontier Foundation.

Sex in zero-g is going to have to be more or less choreographed, “otherwise it’s just going to be a wild fling.”

The last thing people would want is a “wild fling”, right? Some people might be unconvinced by these harsh warnings!