Heavy snacking after exercise may have little to do with hunger or appetite hormones. In a new study, people who rode a bike for an hour ate more for lunch than those who just sat around ate, despite similar levels of hunger and short-term appetite-suppressing hormones. The urge to gobble after exercise, it turns out, may be a more complicated mixture of psychology and body chemistry. Continue reading Work Out, Chow Down
Category Archives: News
Country Cooking
A wood-burning stove that uses sound to generate electricity and refrigeration could one day make waves in developing countries. That’s the hope of an international team headed by engineer Paul Riley of the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom. This month, the U.K. government and the U.S.’s Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico awarded the team almost $4 million to develop a Stove for Cooking, Refrigeration, and Electricity (SCORE). The appliance would rely on external combustion, such as a wood fire, to heat one end of a tube of compressed gas, inducing sound waves that can be harnessed to generate enough electricity to power a light bulb and a small refrigeration unit.
The principle isn’t new, but the technology has been too expensive for general use, says thermoacoustician Steven Garrett of Pennsylvania State University in State College. The SCORE team hopes to make it cost-effective with cheaper materials: Compressed air could replace high-pressure helium, for example. “If anybody can pull this off, it’s got to be these guys,” says Garrett. The device may not cut down on wood consumption, but tests suggest that it will make use of up to 30% of a wood fire’s energy, much more than a typical stove’s 7% efficiency.
Originally appeared in Science Magazine as a Random Sample: [html] [pdf]
A Swift Understanding of Flight
Robotic aircraft of the future, used for reconnaissance or communication, may need to rely on wing morphing, a trick mastered ages ago by birds for long flights. By measuring how ultraversatile swifts morph their wings to double their gliding time or triple their turn rate, researchers have given both biologists and engineers a greater understanding of the secrets of efficient flight.
Northern Borkoldoy, first ascents
The Harvard Mountaineering Club, celebrating its 80th anniversary, sent a team of 8 climbers to the northwestern region of the Borkoldoy.
Read the original [pdf] or read the story behind the story here…
This was the formal blurb summarizing the expeditions results for the American Alpine Journal. My teammates and I posted a more complete record at borkoldoy.harvardmountaineering.org and I also wrote a more personal narrative [pdf] about the expedition for Harvard Mountaineering.