Did he actually say "SILENCE!" at one point? I think he did...

Look, we love Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin. But as this cringe-inducing rendition of "She Blinded Me With Science" painfully demonstrates, he should probably stick to the speaker's circuit.

This surprise duet with Thomas Dolby tragically occurred on June 1st at the recent The Future is Here conference held by the Smithsonian.

[Via @spacefuture]

A new study has revealed that more than a third of new marriages start online. What’s more, couples who meet on the Internet tend to have happier and more enduring marriages.

When online dating first emerged, many people considered it creepy, or even a kind of desperate measure. But owing to the popularity of such sites as OkCupid, Match, and eHarmony, it's pretty obvious that fewer and fewer people consider it strange or something to be embarrassed about. In fact, the idea that we'll just randomly meet our perfect soulmate at a bar or party now seems like an overly romantic notion — if not something completely archaic.

Indeed, much of the appeal and power of online dating resides in the ability to perform targeted searches. Intuitively, we know that we stand a better chance of finding a good match online than through conventional offline channels. Moreover, a person who’s willing to put their profile online, and even pay a bit of money to do so, is probably more committed to getting into a relationship than, say, someone we happened to meet at the gym.

And now we finally have some data to back up these suspicions.

Changing the Dynamics of Marriage

In a study conducted by psychologist John Cacioppo — eHarmony’s scientific advisor — it was found that marriages which begin online, as compared to those which start offline, are less likely to result in a marital break-up (either through separation or divorce). What’s more, these marriages are also associated with higher relationship satisfaction. The differences were slight, but measurable.

“These data suggest that the Internet may be altering the dynamics and outcomes of marriage itself,” writes Cacioppo in the study, which now appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

For the study, Cacioppo and his colleagues surveyed 19,131 Americans who got married between 2005 and 2012. To assess marital satisfaction, participants were asked specific questions like, "Please indicate the degree of happiness, all things considered, of your marriage." They were also asked about the level of “chemistry” that still exists, their degree of affection, and whether or not they are still able to “understand each other’s feelings.”

Interestingly, the researchers learned that a third of all marriages now begin online. Of those, half started through online dating sites, with the rest beginning through other channels like chat rooms, online games, or other virtual worlds (as an aside, couples who met via social networking and multiplayer games reported the highest marital satisfaction scores). Those who met online also tended to be older, were more likely to have a job, and earn more than those who met offline.

As noted, the difference in break-up rate wasn’t huge. The data indicated that 5.96% of those who had met online had divorced by the time they took the survey in 2012, compared to 7.67% of those who had met in real life.

In terms of the marital satisfaction score, respondents who met online had an average score of 5.64, which compares to 5.48 for those who met offline.

Potential Issues

All this said, there have been some criticisms of the study. Writing in Science Now, John Bohannon reports:

Harry Reis, a psychologist at the University of Rochester in New York, is mixed on the findings. "They did control for demographic factors, and that is good," he says. "But they did not control for personality, mental health status, drug and alcohol use, history of domestic violence, and motivation to form a relationship." All are all known to affect marital outcomes, and people who tend to date online may differ in one or more of these factors, he says. "It is entirely possible that when these factors are taken into account, online meeting may have worse outcomes than offline meeting," Reis says. He adds that the only way to prove that online dating has an effect on marital outcomes—positive or negative—is to do a controlled trial in which people are randomly assigned to meet people online or in the real world. "It would be relatively easy to do," Reis says, "but none of the online dating firms are interested."

Some concerns I have include the fact that, out of the 191,329 people who initially responded to the survey, only 10% were deemed eligible for the study. The various reasons for ineligibility included people who had been married three times between 2006 and 2012, or those who fell into categories that were too small to produce meaningful data. Thus, the sample group chosen is likely subject to significant selection effects. What’s more, the study only included survey respondents (again, a selectional bias) and Americans; data from other parts of the world may have produced different results.

Read the entire study at PNAS: “Marital satisfaction and break-ups differ across on-line and off-line meeting venues.”

Image: Pat Cotillo, Jr/Shutterstock.

I'd love to hear about your online dating experiences, and whether or not you feel they're any more effective than meeting through offline channels.

What’s cooler than a quadrotor? How about one that can be controlled by human thought alone?

On the face of it, this achievement might not sound particularly special. It seems that every day we hear about a new EEG advance in which some kind of gadget is controlled by brainwaves. And in fact, it was just yesterday that we reported on the world’s first mind-controlled exoskeleton.

But this accomplishment is unique for a couple of reasons.

First, there’s the order of complexity to consider. This quadcopter has to be navigated across three different dimensions. To make it work, engineers at the University of Minnesota College of Science and Engineering fitted a cap with 64 electrodes. Participants were then asked to imagine using their right hand, left hand, and both hands together in order to instruct the quadrotor to turn right, left, lift, and fall, respectively. The flying device was configured with a pre-set forward moving velocity to make it manageable.

The users sat in front of a screen which showed images of the quadrotor’s flight in realtime as it was being recorded by its onboard camera. The brain signals were recorded by the cap and transmitted to the copter via WiFi.

Incredibly, the copter can be seen zipping around the room as it flies through various sets of rings. It’s wild to think that it’s being navigated by an external, human mind.

Second, the achievement offers yet another example of the potential for remote presence. Thought-controlled interfaces will not only allow people to move objects on a computer screen, or devices attached to themselves — but also external devices with capacities that significantly exceed our own. In this case, a flying toy. In future, we can expect to see remote presence technologies applied to even more powerful robotic devices, further blurring the boundary that separates our body from the environment.

The research team, which was led by Bin He, says the technology could also be used to assist, augment, or repair human cognitive or sensory-motor functions, including hearing, sight, and motor control. Looking ahead, the researchers are hoping to apply the same technology to the external movement of robotic arms.

Check out the entire study at IOP Science, “Quadcopter control in three-dimensional space using a noninvasive motor imagery-based brain–computer interface.”

Image: University of Minnesota College of Science and Engineering

Humans are a genetically diverse bunch. Some of us are born with extraordinary perceptual powers — neurological gifts that biologists might eventually be able to provide for the rest of us. But do we really want to have some of these 'superhuman' quirks?

Most of us are familiar with savants and their remarkable cognitive abilities, or people with seemingly preternatural memorization skills. But there are a handful of other neurological endowments that are somewhat lesser known.

Writing in Aeon Magazine, psychologist Michael Banissy describes several of these "conditions," including mirror touch synesthesia (in which people literally feel the way others experience touch), super-recognizers (an uncanny ability to remember faces), and supertasters (which is exactly what it sounds like).

On the surface, some of these might sound like a neat thing to have. Who wouldn't want to be a supertaster, for example? But like most things in life, too much can often be a bad thing. As Banissy points out, many female supertasters are thin, likely the result of being overwhelmed by their sensations. It's also been said that people with perfect recall have difficulty distinguishing the present from past experiences. And high intelligence is often accompanied by adverse psychological conditions (e.g. obsessive pattern recognition a la John Nash).

On the other hand, some of these neurological quirks can lead to a change in psychology — and not always for the worse.

On the topic of mirror touch synesthesia, Banissy writes:

It is possible that, in people who experience mirror-touch sensations, the levels of excitability of the neural networks governing the ability to distinguish oneself from others leads to a change in normal mirroring mechanisms. Simply put, the brain of an individual who experiences mirror-touch sensations effectively treats the body of another person as though it were her own.

Mirror-touch synaesthetes might be viewed as society’s natural empathisers — people wired to excel at putting themselves in another person’s shoes. This can be a delight, or a burden. Or a peculiarly human, if amplified, mix of the two.

In studies I’ve undertaken with Jamie Ward, professor of psychology at the University of Sussex, we’ve found that people who experience mirror-touch show heightened levels of emotional reactive empathy — that is, the ability to understand and share the affective states or feelings of others. Another study I’ve been involved in, published in the Journal of Neuroscience (2011), indicates that individuals with mirror-touch are significantly better than the rest of us at recognising the facial emotions of others, though not necessarily better at recognising who those people are. Mirror-touch synaesthetes outperform control subjects when tasked with naming the facial emotions of people photographed smiling, fretting, frowning, puzzling, gurning and so forth. We were able to rule out any suggestion that their better scores were the result of greater effort, or that they were better with faces generally, because when tested on their ability to name the people in the photographs, those with mirror-touch performed no better than those without.

Which is quite fascinating, especially as far as moral enhancement is concerned. Perhaps the best way to help people empathize with others is to biologically enhance their ability to put themselves in another person's shoes.

Read Banissy's entire article.

Image: 95792620/Shutterstock.

When invasive species go wild in Australia they really don't hold back. Check out this ridiculously massive feral cat caught in the Northern Territory's Arnhem Land — one of an alarming number of similar cats that are now decimating the local wildlife.

According to the Warddeken ranger group, the cats are getting progressively bigger and there are now upwards of "several thousand" of them in the area of central Arnhem Land. The group is trying to secure funding from the federal government to help them monitor and cull the animals.

Researchers from the National Environmental Research Program have also noticed an increase in feral cats over the last few years. Whenever a cat is caught, they perform a gut analysis — and the amount of animals inside each of them is "staggering."

In one case, a single feral cat was found to have the remains of two sugar gliders, a velvet gecko, a bird and some insects — and that's just one cat, over one day.

In terms of an action plan, the local groups will try to establish the population of cats, determine their range, and get a better sense of their behavior. They may even deploy dogs specially trained to catch cats, with each of them equipped with a GPS collar.

[Source: ABC Rural]

Images: JAKE WEIGL / NT News.

Haha, yeah I noticed that, too.

Oxygen in its liquid state boils at the chilling temperature of −297 °F (−183 °C). And as we all know, fire is fuelled by oxygen. So what would happen if you brought the two together? Watch this slow motion video to find out.

This clip is a part of the Periodic Table of Videos series.

The British Antarctic Survey has produced the sharpest image yet of Antarctica’s rugged topography. And as you can clearly see, without its mile-thick layer of ice, the polar continent would be an incredibly mountainous terrain, indeed.

In conjunction with NASA’s IceBridge mission, the BAS compiled this map by drawing upon millions of new measurements of the continent’s surface elevation, ice thickness, and bedrock topography. Called Bedmap2, it's a significant improvement on the previous collection of Antarctic data (go here to compare the two datasets by using a slider to switch between them).

Back in March, the BAS released this topographic color-schemed Bedmap2 image of Antarctica:

The new images are an attempt to give us a real-world perspective of the Antarctic landmass.

Researchers were able to tap into a decade’s worth of geophysical measurements taken from a variety of sources, including NASA's Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite, known as ICESat. Ice thickness data was collected by Operation IceBridge — a project in which airplanes were flown over the continent equipped with lasers to measure surface height and other features.

Interestingly, the new high-resolution image revealed several smaller features that were previously unknown to geologists. The scientists hope to use the data in an effort to better understand the mechanisms behind flowing and melting ice.

Images: NASA.

It should be within our rights to take our own lives when the circumstances warrant it. That means we must be prepared to accept laws in favor of assisted suicide. This becomes even more important in light of potential technologies that could grant us extreme longevity.

As a supporter of radical life extension, it might seem hypocritical of me to stand up for physician-assisted suicide. Though it might not be immediately obvious that the two are related, they are; both issues pertain to our bodily autonomy and our right to self-determination.

Moreover, as life-extending technologies become increasingly effective, and as we get to live longer and longer lives, we will increasingly insist on taking ownership over our lives. Otherwise, the day may come when we’re forced to live indefinitely — a potentially dystopian state of affairs by any measure.

But before I get too far ahead of myself, here, it’s important to note why assisted suicide is also relevant to the here and now. This is an issue as much for the present day as it is for the future.

How we got here

As it stands, physician-assisted suicide is illegal in most jurisdictions. The only places where it’s sanctioned are Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and four American states (Oregon, Washington, Vermont, and Montana).

That’s it.

So, in most jurisdictions, it is not legal for someone to help you die — even with your informed, willing, and competent consent. Legislation almost everywhere insists that you allow your body and brain to be ravaged by disease until you die from its effects. This, it seems, is seen as being somehow less repugnant or more ethical than the compassionate and considerate act of assisted suicide.

Much of this has to do with historical, religious, and cultural inhibitions against suicide. The notion of respecting the "sanctity of life," while at the same time rejecting people's wishes, is characteristic of the Christian bioethic. Death, Christians would argue, is the exclusive domain of God, a place where humans have no business. From this context, it shouldn't come as a surprise that current laws retain this paternalistic quality; taking ownership of death is still considered taboo.

Western medical practices are also contributing to the bias against assisted suicide. The injunction to “do no harm” has hampered efforts in favor of increasing patient autonomy.

According to the American Medical Association, “Physician assisted suicide is fundamentally inconsistent with the physician's professional role,” and that “ Requests for physician-assisted suicide should be a signal to the physician that the patient's needs are unmet and further evaluation to identify the elements contributing to the patient's suffering is necessary.”

So, it’s not what the patient wants, but what the physician thinks is in the best interest of the patient.

Don’t believe the hype

The most common argument against assisted suicide is that, once legalized, it could eventually get out of control and lead to abuse. Critics also worry that it will increasingly diminish the value of life, that terminally ill patients will be coerced by friends and family into killing themselves, or that it will be seen as an easy way out.

But the evidence simply doesn't support these fears.

Studies carried out in the Netherlands by Paul J. van der Maas compellingly show no evidence whatsoever of a descent down a slippery slope toward non-voluntary assisted suicide.

Another study, this one done just last year, showed that assisted suicide legality does not increase the desire for death in patients with incurable diseases. The study, which was carried out on patients suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) — one of the most common illnesses in which suicide is requested — showed that 94% of patients didn’t have any desire for assisted suicide, but 57% could imagine a time when they might want it done. As Liat Clark of Wired aptly noted, “The findings reveal that patients have a strong desire to take their own healthcare, treatment and fate in their own hands — which is essentially why assisted suicide exists in the first place, to allow those who feel they are losing control of their minds or bodies to regain power and see their own will take shape again.”

And in a study from earlier this year, Elizabeth Trice Loggers and colleagues showed that physician-assisted suicide programs are rarely used. Specifically, they noted that terminally ill patients in Washington state are not rushing to get lethal prescriptions. Almost three years after the state’s Death With Dignity Act was enacted, just 255 people had obtained a lethal prescription from their doctor. Revealingly, the researchers found that the most common reasons cited for wanting to participate in the program were loss of autonomy, an inability to engage in enjoyable activities, and a loss of dignity.

"Each year, there are over 50,000 deaths in Washington state, and cancer is the second leading cause of death,” noted Trice Loggers. “The number who chose to participate in the Death With Dignity program is miniscule. This study shows that people are not making these decisions lightly.”

The study concludes: “Overall, our Death with Dignity program has been well accepted by patients and clinicians.”

Another common argument is that palliative care is improving, and that terminally ill people are therefore no longer in significant pain or discomfort. I only wish this were true.

High-quality palliative care still results in undesirable side effects, including nausea, incontinence and loss of awareness arising from semi-permanent drowsiness. And not only are people still experiencing intolerable levels of pain, they are not receiving adequate healthcare in these days of rampant anti-universal-healthcare sentiments.

As Peter A. Singer of the University of Toronto’s Joint Centre for Bioethics (not to be confused with Princeton University's Peter Singer) has argued, hospitals are not providing enough palliative care. "Go into a ward of your local hospital and unfortunately you should have no trouble finding a dying patient who is in pain, or one who has not been effectively engaged in discussions about life-sustaining treatment decisions," he says.

The right to refuse medical treatment

This issue is also closely related to the right to refuse medical treatment. People should also be able to choose whether or not they wish to undergo painful treatments or radical surgery. Many treatments are uncomfortable, expensive, and far from guaranteed. In the case of terminal illnesses, it’s perfectly reasonable for someone to want to live their final three months with dignity rather than 12 uncertain months in agony — not to mention the risk of bankrupting the entire family.

Which is in-and-of itself extremely problematic — yet another strong case for universal healthcare.

As it stands right now in the United States, the right to refuse medical treatment can be granted on religious grounds (First Amendment) or where a person is deemed to be incompetent and unable to give consent — so consent is instead in the hands of a surrogate. This would imply that a competent person should be able to refuse their own life saving treatment.

As judicial expert William Rehnquist argued, the right to refuse medical treatment is embodied within several other rights, including our right to bodily integrity and the notion of informed consent, the right to self-determination, and the right to privacy.

Ultimately, the law must respect competent personal choice so long as it doesn't harm others, along with the assurance that effective mechanisms are put into place to prevent abuse. If a person is suffering from a terminal illness, is unlikely to benefit from the discovery of a cure in the time remaining, is suffering intolerable pain, has a life that is unacceptably burdensome, has a continuing voluntary and competent desire to die, and is unable to commit suicide without assistance, then there should be no legal or medical provision to deny that right.

People have an interest in making important decisions about their lives. They are the ones who are suffering. They are the ones facing the physical and psychological ordeal of a terminal illness. They know how they want their lives to go.

Death, technology, and the future

Technology is intimately tied to the assisted suicide debate. Future advancements in the health industries are poised to rearrange conventional conceptions of life and death, thereby forcing us to reconsider those laws and practices that lack practical, ethical and logical consistencies.

We are already facing these important issues today.

And indeed, we die differently now compared to previous decades. A report in Legal Medicine by Heleen Dupuis of the Department of Metamedica at Leiden University Medical School noted that people used to die "gently" and relatively quickly from such things as infections.

As the Dupuis report revealed, today's diseases and causes of death are different. Technology has eliminated many causes of quick deaths and are leading to more deaths from age-related illnesses. So, for example, we have people who die from terminal cancer and Alzheimer's after a period of progressive decline.

Accordingly, life-support systems and other life-extension technologies need to be carefully assessed, particularly for their capacity to inflict more harm than good. Just because we can prolong the life of a terminally ill patient does not justify the drawing out of undue pain and suffering —particularly if it’s against a patient's will and informed consent. The popularity of living wills and "Do Not Resuscitate" orders are testament to the fact that people value quality over quantity when it comes to life.

Pending technologies will distort and complicate this landscape even further.

Cryonics, and eventually/possibly brain plastination (or other techniques we don’t know about yet), present the opportunity for recently deceased people to enter into a state of preservation in the hopes that they will be "reanimated" in the future. As each year passes, the theoretical potential for reanimation after death becomes more plausible, not less.

And as some of these prospective corpsicles discover that their brains are under attack from currently irreversible effects of aging or various neurological diseases, they will find themselves dealing with the issue of assisted suicide straight on; it doesn’t make sense to preserve a brain decimated by a neurodegenerative disorder or cancerous tumor. They will not settle for "convenient accidents," nor will they ask doctors to break the law. Instead, they will force the courts to properly re-assess suicide laws.

What’s more, since aging is increasingly coming to be regarded as a kind of disease unto itself, it’s conceivable that at some point in the future we will have overcome this pervasive nemesis, along with death itself.

With the potential for an unbounded lifespan, it would be ludicrous for people not to have a say over when they wish to terminate their lives. Some individuals may discover after a lengthy run of, say, 500 years, that they've had enough life, and wish to die. In such a futuristic scenario, assuming that current sensibilities on assisted suicide still dominate, the state would compel people to live indefinitely. Such a prospect does not sit well with me; it sounds more like a Twilight Zone episode than reality.

And possible future developments, including mind uploading and cyborgization, could complicate the issues of life and death even further.

Informed and free people deserve the right to choose when they wish to die. So while we fight for the right to a long life, we mustn't forget that we need also fight for the right to die with dignity.

Images: Richard Lyons/Shutterstock; everything possible/Shutterstock; Pendleton Panther; Alcor.

Amateur photographer Kyle McBurnie took this dreamy wide-angle photo in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego — a picture that earned him top prize in the 2013 Annual Underwater Photography Contest.

Top image: Best Overall Kyle McBurnie, California Harbor seal (Phoca vitulina) in a kelp forest at Cortes bank, near San Diego, CA.

The University of Miami's Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science recently honored McBurnie's photo, along with a batch of other impressive snapshots. Contestants had to be amateur photographers who earned no more than 20% of their income from photography. Categories included wide-angle, macro, and student-submitted photos.

Here are some others:

Macro 1^st Place, Beth Watson, Missouri: An anemone shrimp in Puerto Galera, Philippines.

Wide-angle 2^nd Place, Joseph Tepper, New York, Spinner dolphins (Stenella longirostris) in a small inlet off the Kona coast, Hawaii.

Fish or Marine Animal Portrait 1^st Place, Steven Kovacs, Florida: A juvenile lionfish during a night dive in Roatan, Honduras.

Plenty more here.

[Via Huffington Post]

Late last week, a group of marijuana enthusiasts claimed that they had used a balloon to send a capsule of pot seeds, a plant, and a joint into space. Yeah, dream on, guys — and lay off the Pineapple kush.

TheSeedHub claims that their balloon reached a final altitude of 95,000 feet (19 miles) before it popped. Which, as you'll see in the video, is pretty damned high. But space? No. And not by a long shot.

According to the Federation Aeronautique Internationale, the Karman line — the point where space begins — is at an altitude of 62 miles (327,360 feet). NASA, on the other hand, gives a generous (if not arbitrary) figure of 50 miles (264,00 feet). Either way, 19 miles falls far short of both.

As aside, Felix Baumgartner reached a height of 128,000 feet (24.2 miles) last year for his world record jump. Also very far, far away from space.

To get into space you kinda need this thing called a rocket...

[Via The Weed Blog]

Ha! Fair enough. I definitely would've approached that differently today.

Ack! Thank you, now fixed. I must be high...

Back in 2011, comet Lovejoy boldly went where no spacecraft has gone before — straight through the Sun’s solar corona. Remarkably, it survived the close encounter and continued along its way to the outer solar system. Now, scientists have used the event to turn the comet into a veritable space probe.

Top image: A visualization of the coronal magnetic field through which comet Lovejoy passed in 2011. The thin magenta arc indicates Lovejoy's path, which travelled through open (orange) and closed (blue) magnetic field lines. Credit: Cooper Downs.

Known as a sungrazer comet, Lovejoy violated the Sun’s violent outer atmosphere on December 15, 2011. Scientists knew in advance that this flyby would happen, so they had their measuring equipment ready, including NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory and twin Stereo orbiters, as well as Japan’s Hinode spacecraft.

By watching a foreign object go through it, the scientists were hoping to glean information about the sun’s intense magnetic field. Needless to say, it was an unprecedented opportunity; no space probe would ever survive a journey that close. And in fact, most scientists suspected that Lovejoy wouldn’t survive either, but it did.

As Comet Lovejoy approached the sun, it moved at a blistering pace — about 400 miles (600 km) per second. It appeared as a bright speck with a long, glowing tail. As it got nearer to the sun, it got progressively brighter, reaching areas where the temperature exceeded millions of degrees Celsius.

But then something interesting happened: The comet’s tail began to swirl and wiggle. For a brief time, the tail did not follow the comet’s head as normally expected. Scientists say it got locked onto the sun’s magnetic field, and then it flicked back and forth. These movements were exactly the kind of thing the researchers were hoping for.

Scientists have since taken this information and applied it to computer models. They concluded that, in order to survive the encounter, Lovejoy had to be at least 1,600 feet in diameter. The research team, which included Cooper Downs, discovered that charged particles in the comet’s tail rippled while passing through the corona as it was affected by the area’s inhomogenous magnetic field. In turn, Downs’ team created a model, and a map, that explained the particles’ movements.

Read the entire study at Science: “Probing the Solar Magnetic Field with a Sun-Grazing Comet.”

It’s a commonly-held assumption that getting in shape requires hours and hours of rigorous exercise. But some fitness experts believe all that’s really required to stay physically fit are short burst workouts performed at a high level of intensity. Here’s why just a few minutes of exercise each day may be all you need.

It’s called high-intensity interval training (HIIT) — and it’s proving to be a surprisingly effective way to stay in shape. It sounds almost too good to true, with workouts typically lasting no more than four minutes at a time. But many trainers and practitioners have found that it works. And it’s the kind of thing that can be easily integrated into any busy schedule.

Top image: Christmas Abbott doing a burpee. Abbott is a business owner, a NASCAR pit crew front tire changer, and an avid CrossFitter — a strength-and-conditioning program that integrates high-intensity interval training. Credit: SHFHS.

The trick, of course — and there’s always a caveat to these things — is that these workouts must be executed at high-intensity. That means balls-to-the-wall full exertion. So if if you don't like to get physically intense, then this workout style is probably not for you. What’s more, if you have a workout routine that you love, it’s working for you, and you’re able to stick with it, then by all means continue with that!

HIIT protocols come in many shapes and sizes, but it all got started in the 1990s with the advent of the now-famous Tabata technique.

The Tabata protocol

Back when he was coaching the Japanese Olympic speed skating team, Izumi Tabata, along with his colleague Irisawa Kochi, began studying the effectiveness of a specific training routine — one that involved a rotation of short burst maximum efforts followed by short periods of rest. More specifically, the coaches were looking at a method that consisted of repetitions of 20 seconds of intense work, followed by 10 seconds of rest. Thus, an entire workout could be performed in only four minutes when repeated eight times. Tabata put his skaters through this routine about four to five times per week.

And it worked brilliantly.

As Tabata’s ensuing paper showed, athletes who do this type of interval training experience tremendous benefits in anaerobic capacity. In addition, high-intensity workouts have also been shown to improve overall conditioning, improved glucose metabolism, and improved fat burning.

Why it works

And indeed, the power of HIIT lies in its ability to facilitate fat burning, even once the training is done. Part of this has to do with having an elevated temperature. But it’s also because our bodies can’t bring in enough oxygen during these periods of strenuous exercise, creating a kind of oxygen “deficit.” This results in post-exercise oxygen consumption, or EPOC, and it helps by boosting our metabolism. EPOC is also associated with hormone balancing, replenishment of fuel stores, cellular repair, innervation (the excitation of organs and muscles), and anabolism (when energy is used to construct molecules from smaller clumps).

So, while conventional wisdom tells us that we need to workout for long durations to burn calories, the EPOC effect shows that it’s also the intensity of the exercise that matters. At least in the case of aerobic exercise. The takeaway here is that, if you want to stick to your low-intensity workouts, that’s fine — but you might want to to incorporate quick, intense bursts every now and then.

Tougher than it sounds

Admittedly, four minutes of work does not sound like much. That is, until you try it.

I’ve integrated the Tabata protocol into my own training and I can honestly tell you it’s tough. And it doesn’t matter what kind of shape you’re in or who you are — when you give a total effort for 20 seconds, and you have to repeat that eight times with only 10 second breaks, it starts to burn, and the cardio picks up quickly and appreciably. I find that I’m pretty gassed by the end of it.

Another advantage of the Tabata protocol is that it can be applied to a host of exercise techniques. Personally, my favorite way to do Tabatas is on a stationary rower, but it can also be done by skating, sprinting, bicycling, and so on. All that’s required is that the motion be physically demanding (i.e. an aerobic exercise) and that it be done at absolute full tilt — specifically, a maximal oxygen uptake (VO2max) of about 170%.

HIIT may also result in less wear-and-tear on the body.

It’s also worth noting that the Tabata protocol is not the only one. There’s also the Gibala protocol (60 seconds of work at 95% VO2max with 75 seconds of rest repeated for 8 to 12 cycles) and the Timmons protocol (three 2 minutes bursts of gentle pedalling on a stationary bike followed by 20 seconds of cycling at total effort).

There’s also the 4x4 12-minute per week workout which recently got some press and is worth reviewing.

The 12-minute per week workout

Late last month, researchers from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology published a paper in PLOS ONE showing that only four minutes of vigorous activity three times a week is enough to be fit and healthy.

The purpose of the study was to determine just how much exercise, and how intense that exercise needs to be, to get the most bang for the buck. The key metric used by the researchers, a team led by Arnt Erik Tjønna, was VO2max, and their efforts focused on the optimal way to improve it among normally inactive men.

Tjønna’s team took 24 men who were overweight (but otherwise healthy) and put them through a 10-week training session that involved three weekly high-intensity interval exercises.

The researchers set up two groups, one that consisted of 13 men who performed four intervals of four minutes at high intensity at 90% of maximal heart rate, interspersed with three minutes of active recovery at 70% maximal heart rate (which is known as 4x4 training, a protocol that has previously been shown to be effective). The second group followed a fitness routine that consisted of one 4-minute interval at 90% maximal heart rate.

The group which performed just one high intensity workout each week saw a VO2max increase of 10%, while the 4x4 group experienced a boost of 13%. Both groups saw decreases in blood pressure.

“Our study demonstrated that slightly overweight and healthy individuals only required brief, duration bouts of exercise with good effort three times a week, to produce large increases in VO2max and work economy and reduce blood pressure and fasting glucose levels,” the researchers wrote in their study. “Additional studies to examine both adaptations at the molecular level and feasibility for public health appear warranted.”

So not only are quick and intense workouts advantageous, they don't even need to be that frequent.

Not quite everything the body needs

While HIIT protocols are clearly effective, it’s my personal opinion that they’re not completely adequate to a well-rounded fitness routine. These regimes are biased towards aerobic exercises, typically at the expense of resistance training. As I’ve noted before, integrating strength work into your workouts is critical.

Obviously, it’s possible to do resistance training in conjunction with HIIT. I do CrossFit, so I get my fix that way. Alternatively, it’s also possible to do strength work in a Tabata style. For example, you could do a three cycle 12-minute workout in which pull-ups, push-ups, and squats are performed at high-intensity. There are many, many other possible combinations.

Another drawback of HIIT is that it can be emotionally tough at times. As noted earlier, if high-intensity is not to your liking, just stick to what works.

Lastly, HIIT may also prove challenging for individuals who are considerably out of shape, obese, or who are dealing with cardiovascular or other health issues. It’s not the kind of thing that can be immediately rushed into, lest there be plenty of wheezing and nausea. For those still keen to do it, my advice would be to take it easy the first few times, and resist the urge to go to full exertion.

Images: Tabata via ritsumei.ac.jp, wall ball image via crossfitpc, VO2 test via Yahoo!.

Google Glass is great, but it's also big, clunky, and exceedingly obvious. What would be more practical is something that could be fitted directly onto the eye, like a contact lens. Korean researchers have taken a major step towards achieving that goal.

A group led by Jang-Ung Park recently embedded an inorganic light-emitting diode directly into an off-the-shelf contact lens. They were able to do so by developing a transparent, highly conductive, and flexible mix of graphene and silver nanowires. And after testing these lenses on rabbits — animals with eyes similar to our own — they found no negative effects or irritation.

The display was only one pixel across, but it served as a good proof-of-concept. The same sort of technology, once refined and developed further, could result in displays similar to what's being achieved with Glass.

This new type of hybrid transparent and stretchable electrode could eventually lead to flexible displays, solar cells, and entirely new kinds of electronic devices.

"Wearing eye contact lenses, picture-taking and scanning, is not science fiction anymore," noted the researchers in a statement.

Check out the entire study at Nano Letters: "High-Performance, Transparent, and Stretchable Electrodes Using Graphene–Metal Nanowire Hybrid Structures."

Image: Ulsan National Institute of Science & Technology (UNIST).

Context is everything. Hi-res images of Mars's mountains and landscapes are all very impressive, but this shot of Curiosity's wheels really drives home the fact that we've got a robot romping around on an alien planet. Mars has never seemed so close.

This image also reminds us how big Curiosity really is. Each of its six wheels measures a half-meter across, about 1.6 feet. The rover is currently making the rounds in Yellowknife Bay.

Image: NASA, JPL-Caltech, MSSS, MAHLI.

Scientists working in the Gulf of Mexico have finally managed to capture footage of a rare and mysterious serpentine-like creature called the oarfish. It's our first glimpse of this camera-shy fish in its natural habitat.

The oarfish (Regalecus glesne), which can reach upwards of 56 feet (17m) in length, has previously only been seen washed ashore or dying on the sea surface. Back in the old days, they were called sea serpents on account of their freakishly long bodies.

The unprecedented footage was taken at a depth of 196 feet (60m) by an ROV (remote-operated vehicle) operated by the SERPENT Project (Scientific and Environmental ROV Partnership using Existing iNdustrial Technology). This clip was one of five different encounters filmed between 2008 and 2011.

You'll get the best view of the fish by skipping to the 3:40 mark.

Back in 1996, US servicemen found a 23 foot (7m) long oarfish on the shore of the Pacific Ocean near San Diego.

The entire study can be read at the Journal of Fish Biology: "Five in situ observations of live oarfish Regalecus glesne (Regalecidae) by remotely operated vehicles in the oceanic waters of the northern Gulf of Mexico."