The new Leonardo da Vinci app looks like it’s going to be enthralling, especially for Dan Brown and/or people with an actual iPad. The app, which accompanies the “Leonardo da Vinci: Anatomist” exhibition at Buckingham Palace, lets you explore hundreds of da Vinci’s anatomical drawings. The incredible accuracy of the depictions’ details marks a huge milestone in anatomical science. For those who don’t realize how dark the dark ages were when it came to medical knowledge, here’s a little bit of the fascinating history.

Before da Vinci, the knowledge of what lay inside a human body was rough at best. Most medieval doctors adhered to the four humor theory created by the Greeks. In their understanding, balance between the four bodily fluids determined perfect health. The now-barbaric practice of leaching didn’t seem odd at the time because it aided in getting rid of “excess” blood.

My favorite case of anatomical mistakes, however, took place during medical school exams in the Middle Ages. Medical teachers expected their students to identify various organs and glands within a body. One catch, though. Medical scholarship at the time often relied on autopsy work done on animals. At least one of the glands students had to find doesn’t exist in humans but in monkeys. I don’t know about you, but if they ever invent a time machine, I’m going back to a time when I’m confident doctors can identify which body parts are mine, and which are the monkey’s.

Enter the Renaissance. Autopsies on humans–yes, completely gruesome, but beneficial to both science and art–became prevalent and allowed more people to observe the human body. Da Vinci himself studied some 30 different bodies, and advanced quite far in his knowledge of how the human body works. A century before William Harvey published his surprisingly cutting-edge essay on how the heart pumps blood around the body, da Vinci had made a model of the heart to investigate the chambers and one-way valves. Da Vinci’s drawings, with notes written in his odd mirror script explaining his observations, captured more than the cardiovascular system. Intricate, elegant, accurate, the drawings mark yet another achievement of the Italian genius and highlight his futuristic mindset.

So the question becomes, is the app worth the kind of pricey $14.00? The description promises 3D models of da Vinci’s work, a “mirror spyglass” for reading the text and the complete story behind the pictures. You can also view some of the images, with fewer bells and whistles, on the exhibition website.

At the very least, do check out New Scientist’s awesome preview of the images. Their gallery has translated fragments of da Vinci’s jotted notes, which put you into the mind of Leonardo da Vinci. Even if only for a moment.

I’ve been watching a lot of the Discovery Channel show “Frozen Planet.” Ripe with stunning cinematography, the program chronicles the trials and tribulations of the Arctic’s inhabitants (both animal and human) as they navigate the changing icy landscape. I often spend the majority of each episode yelling at my television set in an attempt to warn seals, walruses and penguins of approaching predators. I know it’s the cycle of life, but I can’t help but see them as plush, cuddly toys from the aquarium gift shop.

But these days, even the predators face serious threat as climate change wreaks havoc on their delicate eco-system. And recent research by climate scientists at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research reveals another “weak point in the Antarctic ice sheet” that could lead to an additional rise in the global sea level of 4.4 millimeters per year.

Rising temperatures in the air above the Weddell Sea could lead to an “inflow of warmer waters” beneath the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf, according to the study, which was published in the journal Nature. This would lead to water temperatures in the ice shelf cavity increasing by more than 2 degrees Celsius. Making an already grim situation look even grimmer, scientist Jürgen Determann said the melt rate for the Filchner-Ronne would likely rise from 5 meters per year to up to 50 meters per year.

Why is this surprising? Scientists know that global warming is taking a toll on the western part of Antarctica, particularly the Amundsen Sea. But the southeastern part was thought to be fairly stable until this recent discovery, according to the institute. “The Weddell Sea was not really on the screen because we all thought that unlike the Amundsen Sea its warm waters would not be able to reach the ice shelves,” said Dr. Hartmut Hellmer, an oceanographer at the institute who lead the study. “But we found a mechanism which drives warm water towards the coast with an enormous impact on the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf in the coming decades.”

Now, this likely would not begin to happen until 2070, and it will take an additional 20 years after that for the temperature to increase to the predicted amount. But the discovery refutes what the scientists are calling a “widespread assumption” that ice shelves in the Weddell Sea are mostly impervious to climate change.

This news leaves me feeling a bit helpless and disheartened. But I’m also hopeful that in the next 50 years we may be able to reverse a portion of the damage we’ve done, so the parts of our planet that are frozen remain as such. If you ever need a reminder of why this is so important, you can tune into Discovery’s penguin cam. If that doesn’t convince you, I don’t know what will.

Remember the arduous undertaking of learning to read? You spent hours grueling over sentences like, “My dog is brown. I love my dog. He is a good dog.” Or, if your childhood was anything like mine, making complex squiggles on a Magna Doodle and watching the gibberish gradually evolve into E’s and M’s. Words seemed like a foreign art form, discernible only to adults who had memorized the endlessly long alphabet—“What comes after E? Um, A, B, C, D, E, F…F!”

Babysitting my cousin the other day, I marveled at the reading process. Although my cousin has thousands of words in her vocabulary, she still hesitates at certain letters while writing her alphabet and always thrusts pieces of paper in my face, demanding to know what the mystical figures say. How strange that for years of our life we cannot make heads or tails of the characters, and then suddenly we’re flying through Eric Carl, Dr. Seuss, J. K. Rowling and Tolstoy?

(Photo: Richard Bartz)

Astonishingly, scientists have yet to elucidate the mysterious mechanism, though with the help of baboons, they’re beginning to understand how we learn how to read. Recently, researchers in Marseille published a study with the adorable title “Monkey See, Monkey Read.” The experiment was simple. Displaying four-letter combinations on a touchscreen, the scientists taught the monkeys to touch an oval shape if the letters formed a word. If the arrangement had no meaning, the monkeys touched a cross shape.

Just like the process of word recognition for humans, the baboons needed several thousand tries before they began to memorize English word combinations. Rewarded with a piece of cereal for every correct answer—you know they probably got Cheerios—the baboons learned dozens of words. Within a few days the monkeys could not only recognize memorized words, but could correctly discern between true English words and nonsensical ones. While the baboons couldn’t string the words together to actually read—or to type the complete works of Shakespeare faster than the monkeys of the infinite monkey theorem—their remarkable progress in recognizing word organization patterns means scientists might have to think differently about how people learn how to read.

Prior to this study, scientists held a general hypothesis that the phonetic sounds learned during oral language development guided the spelling and reading processes. Children, the idea went, underwent a sort of additive approach to language, putting together, for instance, the hard C sound, the “ah” of an A and a T’s “tuh” to spell out C-A-T. But the baboons’ successful testing suggests that word organization patterns play a greater role than originally thought. Because the baboons accurately identified words they hadn’t seen before, the scientists say the monkeys didn’t simply memorize word shapes. Instead, the baboons used their knowledge from previous tests to identify common letter arrangements. The data suggests that pattern recognition predates speech. Learning to read might not be a strictly linguistic skill, as strange as that sounds.

Of course, I was a little disappointed that scientists hadn’t taught the baboons how to actually read—though perhaps they should try them on “Curious George.” One baboon, however, has excelled brilliantly and can now recognize nearly 300 written words. If that’s more than my little cousin can currently recognize, I’m not saying anything.

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

I once heard that the average person consumes four spiders during a lifetime while sleeping. Whether urban legend or fact, this tidbit is likely to keep you breathing through your nose during even the shortest of siestas. As a kid we used to vacation in New Hampshire on idyllic Squam Lake (Golden Pond for cinephiles). The spiders that inhabited our rustic cabins (and my bed sheets) kept me holding my breath each night. How many ventured past my lips I can’t say.

But human bug consumption isn’t only unintentional, and you may be surprised to learn you frequently snack on insects – whether you intend to or not.

Coffee giant Starbucks made headlines last week when it announced it will be discontinuing the use of a red dye made from crushed cochineal insects, and replacing it with tomato-derived lycopene.

Cochineal insects like these are crushed and used as a red dye in food and beverages (Photo: Zyance)

Wait, what?! If that was your reaction just now, then you were likely unaware your Venti Strawberries and Creme Frappuccino (no whip) harbored this secret ingredient. And, like me, you probably thought that appealing red hue only came from actual strawberries.

But cochineal extract is a common additive in the food and beverage industry, and can be found in everything from yogurt to liquor. According to the FDA the ingredient must be listed on labels as either “cochineal extract” or “carmine,” after the carminic acid extracted from these South American bugs. It is also often referred to as Red 4.

Consumers have reported allergic reactions to the additive. The Good Humor SnoFruit popsicle is noted in literature as evidence that carmine can induce anaphylaxis. Others oppose its use for ethical and religious reasons (it’s not kosher), while many simply find the notion unappetizing.

But while Entomophagy, or the consumption of insects, in the Western world may be limited, populations across the globe regularly dine on such critters, and even consider them to be delicacies. From scorpions in China to mealworms in Mexico, insects provide a vital source of nutrients for many.

In fact, 80 percent of the global population eats insects and more than 1,000 species are being consumed around the globe, according to Marcel Dicke, an agricultural entomologist whose 2010 TED talk “Why not eat insects” garnered more than 344,000 views online.

Dicke says bugs could help solve the global food shortage, providing protein and vitamins for the malnourished. He also notes that each of us is already consuming 500 grams of insects per year, as processed foods like peanut butter and tomato soup contain bits of bugs that traveled from crops to production plants, as allowed by the FDA’s Food Defect Action Levels.

This got me to thinking about what other unexpected ingredients may be lurking in our favorite foods. So I did a little digging and uncovered some information I probably should have left unturned. But if you’re too curious to resist, this article will make a little sprinkling of bugs seem like nothing.

And if you’re keen to crunch on a grasshopper you can get your fix in Chicago, if you know where to look.

We get billions of dollars worth of free labor each year from the bees that pollinate the crops we eat, but these hard workers started vanishing a few years ago. The sudden and massive decline in the number of bee colonies, now called Colony Collapse Disorder, still has no clear cause. Many potential causes have been suggested — everything from pests to parasites to pesticides to electromagnetic radiation — but so far the evidence hasn’t been strong enough to definitively link any of these to Colony Collapse Disorder.

There have been studies suggesting that commonly used neonicotinoid pesticides, found on the flowers upon which they feed, might lead to adverse effects in bees. But determining how real-world doses of these compounds affect real-world bee behavior has been difficult to study in the lab.

Bees leave their colonies to forage for food in the form of nectar and pollen found on flowering plants, venturing up to one to two kilometers from their colonies. Meanwhile in the colony, the worker bees pamper their queen so she can perform the important task of laying thousands of eggs to constantly replenish the population of the colony. This well-orchestrated life of the bee requires that foraging bees find flowers, collect food and then successfully find their way back to the colony. Life at the colony likewise depends on the queen, without which the colony doesn’t stand a chance.

Two recent studies published in the journal Science last week looked at whether behaviors important for bees foraging in the field were influenced by low doses of commonly encountered pesticides, and found that indeed they were. Both studies fed bees realistic doses of these pesticides and then tested how well these pesticide-intoxicated bees performed at everyday tasks necessary for survival.

One of the studies found that colonies of bumblebees fed low doses of a widely used pesticide called imidacloprid gained less weight while foraging in the field. The weight measured included both the weight of bees — surviving adult bees and developing bees that haven’t yet matured — along with their food stores, which are both important markers of a healthy colony. There was little difference between the pesticide-fed colonies and unexposed control colonies during the first two weeks of the experiment while they remained in the cage, but over the remaining six weeks in the field large differences became apparent. Also important for colony survival, the pesticide-fed bee colonies produced far fewer queen bees.

A study by a separate group of researchers stuck radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags on the thorax of honeybees to test their homing abilities. They found that bees fed a low dose of a neonicotinoid pesticide called thiamexoxam were significantly less likely to return to the colony after foraging in the field than control bees that were not exposed to the pesticide. The difference was even more dramatic when they were released into an unfamiliar field to forage, meaning that such pesticides likely lead to even greater defects in the real world than previously appreciated.

While these studies still don’t support a causal role of pesticides alone leading to Colony Collapse Disorder, they do give us something to think about when deciding just how safe a pesticide needs to be. The regulatory agencies might be listening too. The European Food Safety Authority is trying to incorporate risks to bees into their evaluations of pesticide safety, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is planning to schedule a scientific advisory panel for similar reasons. (Read more about the new studies and what they mean here).

It started innocently enough.  A neighbor left me a voice mail, asking for help at his daughter’s birthday party. The last line of his message: “…we’ll need your help getting the alligator inside.”

The alligator turned out to be a Bubba, an 8-foot, 250-pound American Alligator, part of Jim Nesci’s Cold Blooded Creatures show. Jim visits schools, nature centers, park centers, pet shows, schools, and, yes, birthday parties.

Jim’s theme is conservation through education – and let me tell you, it worked. Nearly two dozen first, second, and third graders listened intently to Jim’s every word. He brought 6 animals: a ball python, 3-foot alligator, Black Throat monitor lizard, African Spurred Tortoise, albino Burmese python (~10 ft long), and Bubba. All were available for the kids to hold and touch.

As each animal was shared with the kids, Jim provided a short lesson about their habitat, lifespan, role in our ecosystem, and unique history. These animals were all rescued from former pet owners who no longer wanted them. The smaller of the two gators came to Jim as an 8-incher, recovered at a water reclamation plant where it ended up after someone flushed it down the toilet.

In somewhat scary “hands on” learning twist, Jim offered the birthday girl a ride on Bubba. Yes, a ride on the back of an alligator. Jim has worked with alligators for years, and has developed a method for training them to respond to his commands.

While I was impressed that Bubba did exactly as Jim instructed, I couldn’t help but wonder what might happen if the gator grew tired of schlepping kids around. I guess Jim’s unblemished safety record and dozens of public presentations speaks for itself.

I’ve seen a lot of science and nature demonstrations, but having this collection of reptiles available in one’s living room was definitely a first. I can already hear my son’s request for next year’s party…

Photo: A BDD thumb (left) and a normal thumb (right)

by Rosa Lin/Medill News Service

“What happened to your thumb?”

“Did you accidentally smash it in the door?”

A thumb was outstretched in the circle of sixth-graders. It had a most peculiar shape, being relatively thin and normal near the base, and then suddenly capped off with a bulbous, short tip, reminiscent of a slightly flattened pearl onion.

The thumb belonged to 10-year old me.  And I was showing it off proudly among my bemused friends.

“See, the other one’s like this too!” I stretched out its equally short and bulbous sister. Everyone gaped, laughed, and held the thumb up for inspection.

“You must’ve bitten your fingernails too often when you were little!”

“Did you jam your thumb playing basketball?”

Why, no, I was born this way.  If you’re like me, you probably fielded these questions in your youth and wondered whether anybody else in the world has thumbs like yours.

Wonder no more – these thumbs are known in scientific circles as brachydactyly type D, a type of thumb characterized by a shortened distal phalanx (the bone at the tip of the digit) – and we are about to plumb the history, prevalence, myths and genetic basis behind these thumbs.

Most people have a straight, upright thumb, with a nail bed equal to or longer than the nails on their fingers. Some people have a “hitchhiker’s thumb” where the tip can bend back almost 90 degrees. Finally, a few people – from 0.10 to 3 percent of a population – have a shortened thumb, a feature colloquially known as club thumb, stub thumb, toe thumb, potter’s thumb, hammer thumb and most unappealingly, murderer’s thumb. Fortunately the thumb has been christened neutrally by scientists as brachydactyly type D, so henceforth we shall stick with the designation BDD.

BDD was first characterized by fortune tellers practicing palmistry. According to Angelfire.com’s page on Indian palmistry:

The Murderer’s Thumb Unveiled —- The clubbed thumb was traditionally called the ‘murderer’s thumb’ denoting the powerful temper of those who carried it. This thumb has a short first phalange (section) and is broad. The tip of the thumb is fleshy and the thumbnail is short and broad. According to those who know, people with clubbed thumbs [however] are strong willed and can control their emotions.

Such a description is rather more palatable than Palmistrylines.com’s take:

This thumb is in a shape of a club. People possessing this type of thumb are animalistic in nature and thought system. They bear brutality of Elementary type. They can harm or murder out of callousness. They lack premeditation and depth.

Ouch! This leads the meeker among the BDD carriers to wonder: why such a dark reputation among chirologists? For the record, chirologists are fortunetellers.

“When these [traits] started getting studied in the late 19th century … there was a push to link [physiological] traits with personality traits. There’s no real scientific connection between BDD and any personality trait though,” said Dr. Nathaniel H. Robin, an active clinical genetics practitioner and professor at University of Alabama at Birmingham, who authored a paper on BDD.

BDD is so named because it is one of many traits of brachydactyly, the term given for shortened fingers and toes due to underdeveloped bones in hands and feet. For example, there is brachydactyly type A, where middle phalanges of one, several, or all of the fingers and/or toes are shortened; brachydactyly type B, where distal phalanges and nails of the fingers and/or toes are small or absent; and so forth up to type E. Usually brachydactyly is an isolated trait, meaning that it is not associated with other medical conditions and is generally harmless.

Contrary to what many people with BDD think, BDD “is a fairly common trait,” Robin said. It stays in the population because “it’s a benign variant,” meaning it is neither advantageous nor detrimental to those that express the trait.

According to “Abnormal Skeletal Phenotypes,” published in 2005 by Alessandro Castriota-Scanderbeg and Bruno Dallapiccola, two prominent radiologists, BDD occurs in 0.4 percent of whites and 0.1 percent of blacks in the United States, with a higher incidence in Israel (1.6 percent of Jews, 3 percent of Arabs) and Japan. In three-quarters of cases, BDD occurs bilaterally, which means it appears on both thumbs, while in the rest of the cases it only appears on one thumb, with the other thumb normal.

There is also a skew among genders. The pioneering human geneticist Julia Bell found in a 1951 study that 60 percent of those affected with BDD were female, while 40 percent were male. The geneticist Robert Stecher confirmed the preponderance for females in a 1957 study. The reason for this may be due to incomplete penetrance, a genetic term that means that a trait fails to express itself even though a person carries the necessary genes. In the BDD case, there is evidence to suggest that the trait has complete penetrance in females and incomplete penetrance in males. BDD is also an autosomal dominant gene, which means a person only needs to inherit it from one parent in order to express the trait.

In the past 10 years, scientists have been able to gain more insight into the genetic basis of BDD. In a 2003 study published in The American Journal of Human Genetics, researchers reported that two mutations in the gene HOXD13 may contribute to BDD.

So who has this trait? One of its most famous carriers is Megan Fox, an actress starring in the “Transformers” movies. She carries the trait on only one thumb, signaling incomplete penetrance. Due to her profile as a celebrity, discovery of her BDD thumb was highly publicized. Russian author and Nobel laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn is also purported to have at least one BDD thumb. Other people with the trait include: Malin Akerman (US actress), Tory Mussett (Australian actress), Ashley Lynn Cafagna (US actress), and Kristen van Der Noot (Germany DJ and model).

The most speculated of BDD carriers, however, is past European royalty. Despite valiant efforts, I did not find which royals exactly are implicated, so we shall briefly suspend any curiosity along those lines. The European royalty had higher than normal incidence of inbreeding due to a desire to keep their bloodlines “pure.” This resulted in any abnormality or mutation, such as hemophilia, reappearing in higher rates in descendents, instead of being flushed out by a set of significantly different genes. BDD is claimed by some to be a marker of descent from European royalty. However, as BDD occurs all around the world and is both the result of inheritance and random mutation, this, if true, would only apply to a small subset of those with BDD.

“I have no idea” if BDD is linked to European royalty, Robin said. “It may be true – I have no idea.”

At least I have an idea whether mine is linked to European royalty – I’m 100 percent East Asian!

When I talk to fellow nonscientists about my job here at SiS, I find that many folks are most interested in topics that span the murky divide between things like nature and nurture, the conscious and unconscious, what we can control and what we cannot. Basically, which parts of us are governed by things like active decision-making and willpower, and what is simply controlled by our biology.

To get even murkier, that distinction is not cut and dried. Most things are controlled by…both. One of the best examples of this is weight loss. At first glance, it really should just be simple math – control your intake, burn more calories than you consume on a daily basis, and you will lose weight. At the very root of the issue, this is true.

But there are complicating biological factors, as covered by NPR’s Morning Edition today. Even though our active minds might be telling our body one thing, hormones could be telling it something different. One of these hormones, called leptin, is produced by fat cells. When you start dieting and begin depleting your fat reserves, leptin levels drop. This tells your brain to brace itself for starvation. While our conscious brain knows this isn’t true – we’re not starving at all, just trying to become more healthy – our biology overrides and slows down our metabolism, which makes losing weight even more difficult. Then, to kick us while we’re down, the brain sends a signal to stimulate the appetite. So, while one part of our brain is sending you to bed without dessert, the other is sending you screaming to McDonald’s. Thanks, biology.

The researcher interviewed for the piece, Donna Ryan of the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, said that this biological disconnect amounts to what she calls a “caloric handicap” for people who diet. Essentially, if someone loses 50 pounds to hit a goal of 150, that person can’t eat the same amount of calories in a day to maintain that weight as a friend who has always weighed around 150. So it’s not about hitting a target once and then resuming past behaviors; it’s about adopting a lifelong strategy of healthy eating and exercising. This, of course, requires a lot of willpower.

If you’d like to learn more about our frenemy leptin, check out this video from the Center for Genetic Medicine’s Silverstein Lecture Series. It features Jeffrey Friedman, a professor at The Rockefeller University who first discovered the hormone.

The Bubonic Plague has for centuries been relegated to the grimmest annals of the history books, one of humankind’s gorier chapters and often said to be the grisly muse for the children’s nursery rhyme, “Ring Around the Rosie” (though this is of questionable veracity).

Whatever the case, most people would be surprised to discover that the bacteria responsible for what has come to be known as the Black Death, or simply plague, is still around today.

According to the CDC’s webpage, the World Health Organization reports between 1,000 and 3,000 cases of plague each year, most commonly in the western and southwestern parts of the United States, as well as South America, Africa and Asia.

Because plague is so much less virulent today – with slighter symptoms and without the killer capacity for transmission it possessed in the late 1340s – researchers have wondered if perhaps the medieval version is different from that which we now see.  That, however, does not appear to be the case.

By extracting DNA from teeth found in London plague victims, they were able to extract about 99 percent of the bacteria’s genome, reports Elizabeth Weise in her article “Researchers trace the roots of Europe’s Black Death plague.”  While the genome is not fully complete, it is enough to establish that the plague of yester-century wasn’t much more virulent than today’s strain.

From this, researchers have theorized that perhaps the Black Death’s unbelievably massive fatality rates resulted not from the plague’s virulence but from a cooler climate, which led to malnourishment and poor immunity.

The parallels with today, while remote, are not ruled out.  Climate change is always a factor where human health is concerned. Like all animals, we need time to adapt to variations in food supply, temperature, disease and weather.  The Black Death may not, after all, be the story of an unconquerable killer but rather the timely lesson of a society ill-prepared to deal with a massive population and a moderate threat.

There is a revolution underway in my apartment.

I suppose you might call it a foot revolution.  Or a knee revolution.  Or perhaps a pelvis revolution…I’m not really sure.  But I do know one thing: it’s working.

Ladies and gentlemen, meet the newest member of the shoeless running club.  Yours truly has kicked off the kicks and is now going au naturel.

Since high school, I’ve loved to run.  When I met my husband, we started running together, then got a few dogs and started running with them.  When the rainy Oregon weather drove us indoors for days at a time, we kowtowed and bought a treadmill.  Running was awesome – sweaty, cathartic, easy.

There was only one problem: my body hated it.  A weak ankle here, some knee pain there.  A trick hip that acted up viciously in cold weather, going up stairs, or when I wore heels.  For three years, I stopped running almost entirely.  When I sporadically took it up every now and again, in fits of I-don’t-care-I-simply-must-have-it, I was rewarded with joints that ached and clicked in a creepy way.  Not good.

Then, about a year and a half ago, my mother-in-law gave me Christopher Douglass’s book Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen.  The premise is simple: modern running shoes are bad.  Their fancy cushioning devices, arch support, flex grooves, carbon rubber, split heels, what have you – all this mumbo jumbo really does is prevent your feet from feeling the ground.  And feeling the ground is how we protect ourselves, how our exquisitely tuned toes, heels, ankles, shins, knees, hips help us find a rhythm that works long-term, without injury.

It seemed like a pretty good theory, but like all things my mother-in-law suggests, I regarded it at first with extreme suspicion.  And like most things my mother-in-law suggests, I finally tried it.  And liked it.  Don’t tell her.

It turns out that running without shoes has given me a strange, intense freedom.  I step more lightly than I could ever have imagined.  I’ve found that my natural, unshod gait hits the ground toe-first, which further cushions blows to the rest of my foot and leg.  I can run longer, farther, and faster, with less pain.

Although it remains to be seen whether this solution will continue to work for me in future, I am committed to finding out.  Strength training and a proper running style are still important, as is eating a healthy, joint-friendly diet (I’ve gotta curb that cake habit).  But with practice, according to Douglass, I can learn to run in ways that won’t deteriorate my bones and cartilage, bend me or cramp me, or prevent my system from doing what it does best: finding balance.

In other words, if all goes well, I can learn to run…forever.  Like I was born to.