Battery-charging body parts, mighty mice, and some scary stats from the newswire
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I’ve spent more time sharing news articles than writing about them this week. So today I thought I’d do both at the same time and highlight a few specific tid-bits that were especially juicy…
A knee brace that generates electricity from walking
Furthermore, the electricity is enough to power a GPS or a cell phone. Invented by researchers at University of Michigan, the device works like a “regenerative break”: it harvests the kinetic energy lost when a human breaks the knee after swinging the leg forward to to take the next step. The knee brace is a little clunky, but efforts are underway to make it smaller and lighter. This could be totally sweet for hiking … GPS, flashlight, electric kettle… all kinds of things that need the power…
Lifting weights burns fat and improves the metabolism… still
At least it did for a sample of mighty mice in a study at Boston University. Weight lifters have been telling us this for years. Great, another article for beef cakes to refer to when they want to say that weight lifting is better than cardio for fat burning. Don’t get me wrong, weight lifting is rad, but people get gung-ho about one thing or the other and swear that their chosen activity is the ultimate fat-burner/muscle-builder/mood-enhancer/sex-driver… whatever. All this article says is that resistance training increased the muscle mass and lowered the body fat of some mice. Oh, you didn’t need yet another research study to tell you that? I didn’t think so.
Lower-income neighborhoods are associated with higher obesity rates
No shock here. What’s a little more interesting is this survey from 2007 which found that for each additional $100,000 in mean price of homes, the obesity rate in a given ZIP code dropped by 2%. And on that note, here’s an obesity map of England and a similar obesity map of the United States.
27% of intensively-farmed chickens have difficulty walking because their bodies can’t support their weight
This came out of a Bristol University study of 51,000 chickens aimed at identifying risk factors for poor locomotion in broiler chickens (young chickens raised for their meat). Primary risk factors are those associated with high growth rate: bird age, bird type, shorter dark daytime dark periods, higher stock density, absence of antibiotics, diet… the research appears in the journal PLoS ONE, and includes video samples of chickens with various mobility levels. It’s pretty shocking; I had no idea that this was going on (aren’t we vegetarians supposed to know these things?). I say, if it’s not good for the chickens, it can’t be good for us.
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