bookofjoe

BehindTheMedspeak: Chewing Gum Improves Your Posture

Take that, Mr. Bartkowski, my high school P.E. teacher whose remedy for gum chewing was to take the offender's gum and work it deeply into his hair.

And that was in the days of really long hair.

But I digress.

From Keisuke Kushiro and Fumiyuki Goto's paper entitled "Effect of Masticating Chewing Gum on Postural Stability During Upright Standing," published in the journal Neuroscience Letters: "We found that postural stability tended to enhance during mastication of chewing gum."

Read the article's abstract below.

Effect of Masticating Chewing Gum on Postural Stability During Upright Standing

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of masticating chewing gum on postural stability during upright standing. To address this issue, 12 healthy subjects performed quiet standing on a force platform for the posturography study. The subjects were instructed to stand as stable as possible on the force platform in order to record the trajectory of the center-of-pressure (COP). After measuring the postural sway in the initial condition (pre-condition), the subjects were asked to stand while masticating chewing gum (gum-condition). Following the gum-condition, quiet standing without mastication was evaluated (post-condition) to ensure the effect of masticating chewing gum on postural stability. The trajectory and velocity of the COP were analyzed for each condition. We found that the postural stability tended to enhance during mastication of chewing gum. The rectangle area of the COP trajectory significantly diminished in the gum-condition and significantly enlarged in the post-condition. A similar effect was observed in the maximum velocity and standard deviation (SD) of the fore-aft amplitude of the COP trajectory. The values were significantly smaller in the gum-condition compared to those in the post-condition. These findings suggest that mastication of chewing gum affects the postural control by enhancing the postural stability during upright standing.

[via The Wall Street Journal]

Making Tutus for the Royal Ballet's 'Swan Lake'

Behind the scenes, watch the Costume Revival Workroom team make the elegant tutus worn by the dancers.

The "plate", or skirt, of a swan's tutu requires twelve layers of pleated net.

Eight meters of fabric can easily vanish into just one piece.

There is an entire vocabulary of ballet costuming casually used by the experts.

Putty Eats Magnet

Videre est credere.

From the website:

Made with micron-sized iron-based particles distributed throughout, this moldable putty takes on the properties of a magnet itself when placed in close contact with the included neodymium iron boron magnet.

Put it near the magnet and within five seconds, the putty will stretch itself out to reach the magnet, almost as if it were alive.

Press the magnet into it and the whole piece of putty becomes magnetic, able to lift tacks and paperclips on its own after charging in a magnetic field.

$14.