For the last few months, every long run I’ve done has been on the trails, “barefoot,” in my Vibram FiveFingers KSOs.  The difference between how I feel after a barefoot run versus a shoe run is an ever-widening gap.  Shoes: sore, tight, stiff the next day.  KSOs: some muscle fatigue, but no pain, and a desire to go do it all over again.

I ran last fall in the KSOs on pavement, only two miles.  I forced my body to run like I was in shoes, jamming my heels into the sidewalks.  Big surprise, I hurt.  Once I was on the trails, I let loose a little bit and let my natural body mechanics take over.  Instant difference.

Tonight was an experiment.   After running about 80 miles on dirt, I was ready to try on pavement again.  I set out to do four - and ended up doing five.  I let my feet land the way they wanted to - mid-foot, rolling along the outside, absorbing the shock.  I pushed off from my toes instead of rolling off the ball of my foot.  It took about a half mile to get into the rhythm, but once I found my groove, it was AMAZING.

My back straightened.
My shoulders were loose.
My feet zipped along at 91 strides per minute - the “magic number” of elite runners.  Never before have I been able to keep it higher than 80.  I counted probably 8-10 times, and every minute, exactly 91.
My miles were a consistent 8:10, and I cruised at a perceived difficulty of maybe 4/10.  Maybe that high - maybe.
My breathing was light and even.  I’m sure that if I had stopped, at any point during the run, my breathing would have been barely more than it is at rest.

Can I really credit the Vibrams for this?  Yes, I think I can.  In 1500+ miles in shoes over the last few years, I have never had a run as *perfect* as this one.  I have never experienced the sheer ecstatic happiness that I felt on this run.  I had my epiphany tonight.

This run was glorious.  It was awesome.  It was fun and amazing and full of love of running.  I was a crazy, half naked man running down 80th Avenue, grinning wide and open-mouthed at confused people in their cars.  I passed Mr. Moehrke in his wheelchair on 75th - I said, good evening, and he said, “Hi, how are you?” and I yelled “FANTASTIC!” as I ran past.   “Beautiful!” came the reply from behind me.  This run was glorious.

I might never buy another pair of running shoes again.

NOW PLEASE NOTE
If you have the pressing urge to tell me my feet are going to fall off, that my tendons are going to explode, or whatever horrific injury I am bound to experience unless I wear shoes, please save it.  Seriously.  Running shoes have only been around for about 40 years, and since they were introduced, running-“related” injuries have increased exponentially.

You’d think that after all this time and advanced research, Nike might find a way to reduce shinsplints or ITBS or plantar fasciitis.  But that’s not the case.  I’ll try to reign in the preaching, but I will happily talk my fool head off with anyone who wants to know more.  A great place to start is the book Born to Run, by Christopher McDougall, which I recommend to any runner, even if you’re not interested in barefooting.

Humans ran barefoot for over two hundred thousand years.  Good thing no one was around to tell them they were doing it wrong, or we’d never be able to argue about it on the internets.

Not too long ago I had a conversation with a family member. He related how he had seen a “world-renowned” scientist on TV, and he had said that there was absolutely no evidence for evolution. I was shocked. I knew the scientist he was referring to [though the name escapes me at the moment]. This “world-renowned” scientist who apparently has all the answers is a molecular biologist. Why is this relevant?

First off, how many people believe the Theory of Gravity? That’s right. It’s a THEORY that keeps you from rocketing off the planet. I would venture to guess that everyone who isn’t a Lawsonomist believes that gravity exists. Would you believe that there is almost no evidence for gravity? That’s right. We have no idea how gravity works. We don’t know why it works. But everyone accepts it as truth.

Now take a science like evolution. There are literally billions of pieces of incontrovertible evidence. If you include modern life, the number jumps to incalculable levels. Evolution is so widely documented, so many pieces have been collected, examined, cataloged, argued over, and accepted, it boggles my mind how so many people can just discount it. Just because you don’t like what science has to say does NOT make it any less valid.

Getting back to the relevance. There are really only two kinds of people one should consider “authorities” on evolution. Evolutionary biologists and paleontologists. It’s what they do. A nuclear chemist may be extremely intelligent and hold a PhD, but would you ask him why you pee blood? No. You’d ask a physician, someone who actually studies that sort of thing.

Now this bunk scientist is in biology. He’s sitting on that edge where he should have studied enough evolutionary science to know better. But he claims that evolution has no evidence, that it’s wrong, and that we should all ignore it.

Analogy time! If you were a mathematician, and you concerned yourself with complex differential equations [of course, what diffeq’s aren’t complex?], what would you think of a colleague who considered addition and subtraction as baseless and false? You cannot be a mathematician of any caliber if you deny the very fundamentals of the science, can you?

The very fundamental levels of modern biology are based inextricably in the theory of evolution. Simply put, one cannot honestly call themself a biologist in the modern sense of the word if they do not think that evolution is true.

Evolution is undeniably true - as far as it is possible to know. Evolution is more valid a theory than gravity. Ask physicists to explain gravity, and you’ll get a shrug. Ask a paleontologist to explain evolution, and you’ll get a weeks-long demonstration with mountains of references. There are only two things that evolution does not cover:

1. Origin of life. There are hypotheses, but at this time, we have no way of testing them to a satisfactory conclusion.
2. The process. Is evolution slow? Punctuated? Is natural selection the mechanism or is there something else? Everything we have so far points to a synthesis of all of the above: mostly slow, occasionally rapid change due to natural selection. Those with an advantage persevere. Those with a disadvantage do not.

That evolution occurred and still occurs and will occur as far into the future as we can imagine is as certain as the Earth revolves around the Sun.

Of course, that’s just a theory, too, since no one’s ever seen it happen.

PLEASE STOP.

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Scientists recover T. rex soft tissue
70-million-year-old fossil yields preserved blood vessels
Reuters
Updated: 2:05 p.m. ET March 24, 2005WASHINGTON - A 70-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex fossil dug out of a hunk of sandstone has yielded soft tissue, including blood vessels and perhaps even whole cells, U.S. researchers reported on Thursday.Paleontologists forced to break the creature’s massive thighbone to get it on a helicopter found not a solid piece of fossilized bone, but instead something looking a bit less like a rock.When they got it into a lab and chemically removed the hard minerals, they found what looked like blood vessels, bone cells and perhaps even blood cells.”They are transparent, they are flexible,” said Mary Higby Schweitzer of North Carolina State University and Montana State University, who conducted the study.

She said the vessels were flexible and in some cases their contents could be squeezed out.

“The microstructures that look like cells are preserved in every way,” added Schweitzer, whose findings were published in the journal Science.

“Preservation of this extent, where you still have this flexibility and transparency, has never been seen in a dinosaur before.” Feathers, hair and fossilized egg contents yes, but not truly soft tissue.

Studying the soft tissues may help answer many questions about dinosaurs. Were they cold-blooded like reptiles, warm-blooded like mammals, or somewhere in-between? How are they related to living animals?

“If we can isolate certain proteins, then perhaps we can address the issue of the physiology of the dinosaur,” Schweitzer said.

Of course, the big question is whether it will be possible to see dinosaur DNA. “We don’t know yet. We are doing a lot in the lab now that looks promising,” Schweitzer said.

To make sure she was seeing what she thought she was seeing, Schweitzer, a biologist by training, compared the Tyrannosaur samples with bone taken from a dead ostrich. She chose an ostrich because birds are thought to be the closest living relatives of dinosaurs and ostriches are big birds.

Both the dinosaur and ostrich blood vessels contained small, reddish brown dots that could be the nuclei of the endothelial cells that line blood vessels.

Taking the minerals out of both ostrich bone and the Tyrannosaur bone a simple experiment that can be duplicated by anyone using a chicken bone, for example, and vinegar yielded flexible fibers. Microscopic examination showed what look like bone cells called osteocytes in both.

The finding certainly shows fossilization does not proceed as science had assumed, Schweitzer said. Since the discovery, she has found similar samples of soft tissue in two other Tyrannosaur fossils and a hadrosaur.

The fossil was dug up out of Montana’s Hell Creek Formation, a rich source of fossils.

Paleontologist Jack Horner said it was encased in 1,000 cubic yards (metres) of sandstone. “It’s a fantastic specimen,” he told the briefing.

“The specimen was very far away from road, (so) everything had to be done with a helicopter.” The field team used standard procedure as they excavated the bones, wrapping them in plaster jackets before transporting them..

This particular dinosaur fossil was too big to lift and they reluctantly cracked a thighbone.

Usually paleontologists put preservatives on fossils right away, but Schweitzer has been trying to find soft tissue in dinosaur fossils, so this one was left alone.

Horner said he hoped museums around the world would start cracking open bones and looking for soft tissue in their fossils.

“Dinosaurs are relatively rare and we certainly think of Tyrannosaurus rex as being really rare although it really isn’t so people tend not to want to cut holes into the bone or cut them in half,” he said.

“But to study the cellular and molecular structures of these things you have to do that.” The “good stuff,” he said, is on the inside.
Copyright 2005 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters.

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7285683/

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Jack Horner is a lousy scientist. He’s a big fan of annoucing some great discovery “he” has made, except that they rarely hold up. For instance, about five years ago, Horner was all over the news - and especially Young Earth websites - when he found a “heart” in the ribcage of a dinosaur. Wowee zowee! Fossilized soft tissue! But wait, said the scientific community. Soft tissue doesn’t really fossilize that way, and a heart certainly would not stick around long enough.

And then, Horner had the balls to come out (and this really drove the fundies wild) and say that not only did they find a heart, but they had LIQUID BLOOD.

Let me state that again, just in case you missed it: He claimed to have found liquid dinosaur blood. He was even quoted as saying that this could be some sort of proof that the whole geologic timetable was wrong and that dinosaurs lived only a few thousand years ago.

Uh. Not even close. “Liquid” blood would not survive that long. Ever.

Horner is basically a showboater. Before his highly scientifical papers make it into journals, he likes to scream out “LOOK WHAT I FOUND! THIS TOTALLY REVOLUTIONIZES EVERYTHING!” The public gets all excited. Then the real scientists get to look at his research and basically tell him that he’s a retarded asshole and he really should just knock it off. But the public never hears about that part, since the media really doesn’t cover it with the sensationalism of the initial “finding.” Everyone just goes on assuming that Horner is some awesome paleontologist.

Kinda like how few people know that the famous Tyrannosaur “Sue” was confiscated in an FBI raid on its legitimate owner. And then auctioned off the the highest bidder. Thanks a lot, news people, for forgetting to mention that part.

Remember that heart? Horner’s team provided photos, X-rays, and CAT scans, all purporting to show ventricles and what not. When someone legit actually took the time to look at the “heart,” they found that it was an iron concretion. This amazing discovery was nothing more that some sand with some concentrated iron.

Reading through the article again, you’ll see that this Schweitzer has found “several more” of these samples. So, you’re telling me, that in over 200 years of fossil collecting, this lady is the first one to find this soft tissue - and on top of that - has found SEVERAL instances? Not a chance.

It all boils down to a long string of terrible practices and dishonest science. This all serves to damage the credibility of the field as a whole. We’re fighting a battle against creationism myths in our schools, in our IMAX theaters, and in our very government, and jerkofss like Horner just keep chipping away at the wall of real science.