It's Not a Good Idea to Sit Around So Much

Discovered: people stuck in a cramped space for 520 days can get along, no song is really good to perform CPR to, aged mice may be living longer and everyone sits around too much.

Discovered: people stuck in a cramped space for 520 days can get along, no song is really good to perform CPR to, aged mice may be living longer and everyone sits around too much.

• Everyone is probably sitting too much for their own good. By now, we should know that sitting at your cubicle all day is pretty unhealthy--not that there's much that a mostly office-bound person could do with this information. Today, "sitting around" got a little worse for you: "More than 90,000 new cancer cases a year in the United States may be due to physical inactivity and prolonged periods of sitting, a new analysis shows," USA Today reported, noting that the estimate is "conservative." What's the rule on getting up to take a break? "If you've sat for an hour, you've probably sat too long," said one professor to the newspaper. Really, only an hour? [USA Today]

• There isn't any good song to perform CPR to. Because if there was one surefire song that can "keep rescuers on a pace to execute at least 100 chest compressions per minute," a dedicated team of Australian and UK researchers would've probably identified it, The Los Angeles Times tells us. The team cycled through songs like "That's the Way (I Like It), "Achy Breaky Heart" and "Disco Science" by Mirwais, among other titles, and found that "Disco Science" did the best with getting participants into the right compression range. Ultimately, however, they were disappointed with all of them: "the authors are unconvinced that music provides any benefit in improving the quality of CPR." [The Los Angeles Times]
• A few lucky, scientifically-modified mice may be living a bit longer. The hope, of course, is that the process by which researchers used a drug to kill aging cells in mice that have stopped dividing, could one day be accomplished with humans, The Wall Street Journal reported. After being treated, the researchers found "a 'quite dramatic delay' in the development of cataracts and age-related changes to muscle and fat." Which is great for these rodents--which, we'd guess, feel a little whiplash since "the team used mice designed to age faster than normal." [The Wall Street Journal]
• Incredibly long pretend Mars research trip about ready to be over for real. In February, when the six crew members of the Mars500 experiment landed on the fake Mars (complete with planting flags), their fake accomplishment was greeted with humor. So, today--before the six astronauts who've been cooped up for 520 days in a tiny mock spaceship in Moscow officially "lands"--we'll just congratulate the crew. As Reuters points out, a similar experiment "ended in drunken disaster in 2000, when two participants got into a fistfight and a third tried to forcibly kiss a female crew member." No such thing apparently happened to this crew of research astronauts. They came back even learning each others languages: "There were some moments of misunderstanding," said the chief psychologist of the project to The Guardian. "But then the Europeans and Russians asked him to teach them Chinese, and they can all write and speak it now." Pictured below in a Reuters photo is a peek into the very small looking module before the mission started. [Reuters, The Guardian]