Rip The Core…

SCAN Health Plan Arizona is helping seniors start off the year on the right foot … literally. The not-for-profit Medicare Advantage plan is offering 23 health and fitness classes in January.
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Beauty is not just in the eye of the beholder–it is also in the eyes of the beholder’s friends. A study published in April in Psychological Science found that men judge a woman as more attractive when they believe their peers find that woman attractive–supporting a budding theory that groupthink is not as simple as once thought.

Researchers at Harvard University asked 14 college-age men to rate the attractiveness of 180 female faces on a scale of 1 to 10. Thirty minutes later the psychologists asked the men to rate the faces again, but this time the faces were paired with a random rating that the scien­tists told the men were averages of their peers’ scores. The men were strongly influenced by their peers’ supposed judgments–they rated the women with higher scores as more attractive than they did the first time. Functional MRI scans showed that the men were not simply lying to fit in. Activity in their brain’s pleasure centers indicated that their opinions of the women’s beauty really did change.

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A free webinar, “Fitness Empire Formula: Making Your Mark in the Fitness Industry,” is now available online. Offered by fitness and personal development guru John Spencer Ellis, the webinar focuses on getting started and succeeding in the industry.Rancho Santa Margarita, CA (PRWEB) December 19, 2011 The fitness industry continues to grow and evolve, offering a variety of career opportunities and …
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“Desserts” spelled backward is “stressed.”Isn’t life like that? Even the good things in life–fine wine, rich food, sex–can stress you out.

There is just no escaping stress, and some experts even suggest that a little stress is good for you. In my view, that idea is flawed–the misleading result of ­averaging data across many individuals. Yes, high levels of stress are harmful to most people, adversely ­affecting health, mood and productivity. And yes, most people perform and feel better when faced with moderate levels of stress. And sure, very few people know how to be productive when they are not being pushed by stressors–but it can be done. Just as some people are able to perform well under highly stressful conditions (think Olympic athletes), it is also possible to perform well when relaxed (think masters of kung fu). That should be the goal, in my opinion: a life that is productive but also virtually stress-free.

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A North Shore fitness trainer has been accused of forging a customer’s signature on a credit card charge for $3,000 worth of training sessions.
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People can change — but how? This is the central concern of “Redirect,” a new book by Timothy D. Wilson, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia. Wilson offers a tour of recent scientific work on psychological change, with a focus on techniques that help a person who is struggling — bad behavior, bad grades, bad attitudes — find a new, better path. Again and again, Wilson asks: What actually works? The answers can be surprising. He spoke recently with Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook.

COOK: A central concept in your book is “story editing.” Can you please explain what you mean by this?

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LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM– – Freestyle football champion Daniel Cutting has set yet another record to add to his bulging CV, as he performed 1534 keep-ups with a Swiss ball, which was caught on camera at …
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Laughing with friends releases feel-good brain chemicals, which also relieve pain, new research indicates.

Until now, scientists haven’t proven that like exercise and other activities, laughing causes a release of so-called endorphins.

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John Spencer Ellis, founder of a leading national fitness and personal development solutions company, now offers a free Fitness Business and Marketing 101 Video Training online. The training video lesson focuses on the fundamentals of succeeding in the fitness industry today.Rancho Santa Margarita, CA (PRWEB) December 12, 2011 A successful fitness pro can enjoy a great schedule, helping clients …
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Animal corpses rarely defy the dictate of "ashes to ashes, dust to dust" to become fossils–and even if they do, they don’t remain sturdy for long. By the time paleontologists get their hands on ancient remains, the fossils are incredibly fragile. So for decades, researchers have tended to do their close analyses with replicas instead. But in the past decade, 3-D printing has enabled a new solution: printing out copies of skulls and bones.

"My research is in the evolution of higher primates ," says paleoanthropologist Eric Delson, who uses digital models and an Objet Eden260 printer housed at Lehman College in New York City to produce models of primates’ skeletons. 3-D printing allows him to make accurate replicas without damaging the originals, and to generate larger versions of fossils and even reconstructions of lost bones. In fact, the digital models that 3-D printers use as templates make it possible to re-create the remains of long-lost ancestral primates, putting classical model-making methods to shame by printing calculated re-creations of bones that failed to form fossils.

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A workout video featuring the folk singer Justin Vernon, who records as Bon Iver, has recently been making the rounds.
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In October 2009 a small group of robotic space exploration geeks decided to venture out of our comfort zone and began brainstorming different approaches to flying people into space. We were spurred into action when the Augustine com­mission, a blue-ribbon panel that President Barack Obama set up earlier that year to review the space shuttle and its intended successor, reported that “the U.S. human spaceflight program appears to be on an unsustainable trajectory.” Having worked in an exciting robotic exploration program that has extended humanity’s reach from Mercury to the edge of the solar system, we wondered whether we might find technical solutions for some of NASA’s political and budgetary challenges.

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LA Fitness is making its debut in the Bay Area with two health clubs in San Jose that will be the vanguard of up to 30 fitness centers that combined would employ hundreds of people.
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Big Picture : Blackburn has extended her Nobel Prize–winning work on telomeres to develop measures that aim to assess overall risks for heart disease, cancer and other chronic illnesses.

A molecular timepiece that resides inside each cell still makes headlines, decades after Elizabeth H. Blackburn conducted pioneering studies into how it works. The most recent experiments by Blackburn and other researchers have demonstrated that these cellular clocks, known as telomeres, may act as barometers of whether a person will remain healthy or not.

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NEW YORK (Reuters) – Santa’s fitness elves have affixed smartphone technology to home equipment, programmed Tour de France terrain into stationary bikes and stuffed holiday stockings with trendy and functional workout toys. Home treadmills, those stalwarts of basement exercise intentions, are becoming so sturdy, smart and sophisticated that they’re giving the fitness center machines a run for …
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For millions of diabetes sufferers, life is a constant battle to keep their blood sugar balanced, which typically means they have to test their glucose levels and take insulin throughout the day. A new generation of “artificial pancreas” devices may make tedious diabetes micromanagement obsolete. In healthy people, the pancreas naturally produces insulin, which converts sugars and starches into energy. People with type 1 diabetes, however, do not produce any insulin of their own, and those with type 2 produce too little. All type 1 and many type 2 diabetics have to dose themselves with insulin to keep their bodies fueled–and doing so properly requires constant monitoring of blood sugar because appropriate dosages depend on factors such as how much patients eat or exercise. Stuart Weinzimer, an endocrinologist at Yale University, has devised an artificial pancreas that combines two existing technologies: a continuous glucose monitor, which uses an under-the-skin sensor to measure blood glucose levels every few minutes, and an insulin pump, which dispenses insulin through a tube that is also implanted under the skin. The glucose sensor sends its data wirelessly to a pocket computer a little bigger than an iPhone that is loaded with software developed by Minneapolis-based Medtronic. The program scans the incoming data from the glucose monitor and directs the pump to dispense the correct amount of insulin.

At an American Diabetes Association meeting in June, Weinzimer and his colleagues reported that 86 percent of type 1 diabetics they studied who used the artificial pancreas reached target blood glucose levels at night, whereas only 54 percent of subjects who had to wake up to activate an insulin pump reached their target levels. Other, similar systems are in development at Boston University, the University of Cambridge and Stanford University.

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California health-club chain LA Fitness has acquired all four Bally Total Fitness health clubs in Arizona, including two in the Phoenix area, as part of a deal for 171 Bally clubs throughout the United States.
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When speaking about science to scientists, there is one thing that can be said that will almost always raise their indignation, and that is that science is inherently political and that the practice of science is a political act . Science, they will respond, has nothing to do with politics. But is that true?

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Instead, they work with recreational runners who want to get faster, they inspire virtual clients online and they make fitness classes innovative and challenging.
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Women who drink water contaminated with low levels of the weed-killer atrazine may be more likely to have irregular menstrual cycles and low estrogen levels, scientists concluded in a new study.

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