Vitamins vs exercise

So many people still think that vitamin C helps against colds; others pop vitamin E supplements, putting their faith in antioxidants -- even as that particular credo is crumbling:

About forty healthy young male volunteers took part in the study, which involved four weeks of identical exercise programs. Half of the volunteers were already in athletic training, and half weren't. Both groups were then split again, and half of each cohort took 1000 mg/day of vitamin C and 400 IU/day vitamin E, while the other half took no antioxidants at all. So, we have the effects of exercise, plus and minus previous training, and plus and minus antioxidants.

And as it turns out, antioxidant supplements appear to cancel out many of the beneficial effects of exercise. Soaking up those transient bursts of reactive oxygen species keeps them from signaling.

Further discussion at FuturePundit as well. I stopped taking multivitamins years ago, and I get plenty of vitamin C and E from a good diet. The only supplements I now use are calcium and vitamin D.

ADDENDUM: Another study showing widespread Vitamin D deficiency here.

Lenovo Thinkpad X61 hard drive replacement

My just-over-a-year-old Thinkpad's hard drive abruptly started giving a loud "clack clack clack" sound and became unusable. I let it cool down and tried again, only to get the same loud clicking and no boot. Called Lenovo for a replacement drive and a set of disks to restore the system (not supplied with the computer, and I hadn't burned a set since the X61 doesn't have an optical drive), and picked up an external DVD burner in preparation. While waiting for the replacement drive, tried the computer again, and this time it started up fine. Putting an ice pack over the hard drive, I quickly made a full backup to an external hard drive and burned restore disks as well.

Lenovo sent me a used drive as a replacement, and it came screwed into a metal slide that must have been for some other model of notebook. The slide had to be removed before I could install the drive, which was annoying. Then I found that the restore disks from Lenovo didn't work; perhaps not surprising, since they were labeled as being for the older X60 series. Luckily, the boot disk I had burned when my defective drive came back to life worked just fine, and I was then able to do a full restoration of my hard drive and all its contents from the backup.

The procedure was straightforward, but neither the Lenovo website nor extensive Googling gave me definitive, step-by-step instructions -- so here they are, for all of you who may need to replace or want to upgrade your Thinkpad's hard drive:

Use the Thinkvantage Rescue and Recovery utility to make a full system backup to an external hard drive. Go to Start > Programs > ThinkVantage > Create Recovery Media (for XP) and burn recovery disks, if you haven't already. If you have any encrypted partitions, format them after moving their contents elsewhere. Restart and press F1 on startup to go into Setup; change the boot order so that the external DVD/CD drive is on top. Open the tray on your external DVD/CD drive and leave it open. Shut down your computer, disconnect the power cord (none of this should be done on battery power), remove the battery, and do the hard drive swap. Put the battery back in place, put the bootable recovery startup disk in the external DVD/CD drive and close it up and plug it in, and plug in the external HD with your system backup. From here on it's easy. Turn on the power, and the computer should boot to the recovery utility. Follow the instructions, and all should go remarkably quickly. Note that you will not be given the option of restoring from a backup if you start without having plugging in your external HD first -- the only option shown will be a fresh installation of the factory original contents, which of course can be done with the other recovery disk(s) you burned before starting out.

Michelangelo to the Kimball

In an extraordinary coup, the Kimbell Art Museum has acquired the earliest known painting by Michelangelo, one of only four easel paintings by the Renaissance master in the world.

The Kimbell's purchase, The Torment of Saint Anthony (1487-88), will be the only painting by Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564) to enter the permanent collection of a U.S. museum.

Full article here.

Museum of Scientifically Accurate Brain Art

Chaperoning my daughter's recent class trip to the Boston Museum of Science, I was quite taken by a knitted model of a human brain on display. I had somehow missed this writeup about its creation from earlier in the year. It's also on display online -- in excellent company -- at the Museum of Scientifically Accurate Brain Art.

Where, oh where, did my basking shark go?

The migration patterns of basking sharks have long mystified marine biologists, but new research has finally revealed where the world's second-biggest fish hide out for half of every year. . .

Using new satellite-tagging and a new geo-location technique, the researchers found that basking sharks make long migrations through tropical waters of the Atlantic Ocean during the winter, traveling at depths of 200 to 1,000 meters.

The researcher's data show that the sharks sometimes stay at those depths for weeks or even months at a time.

"In doing so, they have completely avoided detection by humans for millennia," Skomal said in the report.

From CNN.