Thursday Things: Stairway to Spiders Edition
2 May 2024. Vol 6 No 18. By Dan McGirt. #247
It’s Thursday Things! This week we take the stairs and watch the spiders of Mars.
If you enjoy this edition, please click the heart icon in the header or at the end of the post to let me know.
Does sitting on the stairs count? Photo by Bin Thiều on Unsplash
Technical difficulties
The Substack platform through which I publish Thursday Things seems to be having some technical difficulties today, so this will be an attenuated edition of Thursday Things.
Take the stairs
Do you take the stairs whenever possible? I usually do, unless I’m carrying awkward or heavy items, or extremely tired. I’ll modify that by saying I usually take the stairs if I’m only climbing two or three floors. For that distance, the stairs are my default, unless I have to go way out of my way to reach the stairs rather than a more conveniently located elevator.
For greater climbs, my habit varies. In my building, for two or three floors, I can probably get there as fast or faster than the elevator, if we factor in wait time for the elevator car to arrive. At four or five floor, the elevator will probably beat me, but not always. Above that – yeah, I’ll just wait for it to arrive.
I like taking the stairs. And, as it turns out, that’s a good thing!
Taking the stairs may up the odds for a longer life
Folks who regularly climb stairs have a 24% reduced risk of dying from any cause, and a 39% reduced risk of dying from heart disease, compared to those who always take the elevator, researchers found.
Those are pretty good numbers. That’s a decent payoff for stair climbing, I’d say.
Stair climbing also is associated with a lower risk of developing heart disease or suffering a heart attack, heart failure or stroke, results show.
"If you have the choice of taking the stairs or the lift, go for the stairs as it will help your heart," researcher Dr. Sophie Paddock, of the University of East Anglia and Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital Foundation Trust in Norwich, U.K..
It is always heartening and satisfying to find that science backs up a habit I already have!
The American Council on Exercise has more information about the benefits of stair climbing and how to get started if you want to incorporate stairs into your fitness routine (as opposed to the more casual “take the stairs when there’s stairs” approach I take):
Stair climbing exercise can be a strenuous, says Alexandra Lempke, PhD, a clinical assistant professor of applied exercise science and the codirector of the Michigan Performance Research Laboratory at the University of Michigan School of Kinesiology in Ann Arbor. When you climb stairs, your heart rate and breathing will increase.
“Stair climbing for exercise targets the cardiovascular and respiratory systems,” Dr. Lempke says. It takes a lot of work to move your body mass vertically against gravity.
The physiological systems targeted during stair climbing also depend on how you’re doing it. For instance, says Lempke, if you’re walking or slowly jogging the stairs, this lower-intensity movement will be more of an aerobic endurance exercise.
Stair sprinting, on the other hand, is an anaerobic exercise that targets muscular power, she says. Anaerobic exercise is when muscles use glucose for energy rather than oxygen (which occurs in aerobic exercise), per the International Sports Sciences Association; a HIIT workout is an example of anaerobic exercise.
In addition, stair climbing also heavily recruits muscles of your posterior chain — the glutes and calves — as well as hip flexors and muscles in the ankle, which are required to raise your foot up onto each stair, explains Lempke. So the workout will help strengthen all those muscles.
I’ll see you upstairs!
Paging Ziggy Stardust
I have to admit, this headline made me do a double take:
Hundreds of black 'spiders' spotted in mysterious 'Inca City' on Mars in new satellite photos
Which makes it a good headline, because it caught my attention. That’s what headlines are supposed to do. What made it startling was that it wasn’t a headline from Weekly World News or some other tabloid of the “I married Bigfoot” variety, but from LiveScience, which covers actual science news.
An Inca city on Mars? An Inca city on Mars overrrun by swarms of spiders? Tell me more!
Alas, no actual Inca cities or Martian spiders were involved in this article.
Arachnophobes need not fear: A new European Space Agency (ESA) image of Martian "spiders" actually shows seasonal eruptions of carbon dioxide gas on the Red Planet.
The dark, spindly formations were spotted in a formation known as Inca City in Mars' southern polar region. Images taken by ESA's Mars Express orbiter and ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter show dark clusters of dots that appear to have teeny little legs, not unlike baby spiderlings huddling together.
The formations are actually channels of gas measuring 0.03 to 0.6 miles (45 meters to 1 kilometer) across. They originate when the weather starts to warm in the southern hemisphere during Martian spring, melting layers of carbon dioxide ice. The warmth causes the lowest layers of ice to turn to gas, or sublimate.
Which, okay, sure, is still interesting, I guess.
Just not as interesting as what sounded like the plot of a lost John Carter of Mars serial.
Oh, well, maybe the Flying Sharks of Venus will be real.
Thank you for reading!
Please click the hearts, leave a comment, and use the share feature to send this issue to a friend who might enjoy it. See you next Thursday!