Assorted Links

1.) Tim Ferriss and Gabriel Wyner discuss how to learn a foreign language

2.) Another breakthrough in solar-energy efficiency

3.) The rapid growth of Airbnb

'“There used to be a romanticism about ownership, because it meant you were free, you were empowered,” Chesky answered. “I think now, for the younger generation, ownership is viewed as a burden. Young people will only want to own what they want responsibility for. And a lot of people my age don’t want responsibility for a car and a house and to have a lot of stuff everywhere. What I want to own is my reputation, because in this hyperconnected world, reputation will give you access to all kinds of things now. ... Your reputation now is like having a giant key that will allow you to open more and more doors. [Young people] today don’t want to own those doors, but they will want the key that unlocks them” — in order to rent a spare room, teach a skill, drive people or be driven.'

4.) Misconceptions about lactate, lactate-threshold, and training

"A typical training mistake that many athletes and coaches do is training at “lactate threshold” in order to improve lactate clearance capacity. This is not correct as we know that during exercise lactate is mainly produced by glycolytic fibers (fast twitch) which are the ones recruited at “lactate threshold”. However, lactate is mainly cleared by adjacent slow twitch fibers that have a very high mitochondrial capacity and a much higher amount of mLDH enzymes and MCT-1 transporters. Therefore to improve lactate clearance capacity, and although totally counterintuitive, it is key to train those slow twitch muscle fibers to stimulate mitochondrial growth and function as well as increase MCT-1 and mLDH. Training at lactate threshold is essential to improve glycolytic fibers and their machinery (our “Turbo”) and to upregulate the number and function of glycolytic enzymes as well as to increase the number of MCT-4 transporters necessary to transport lactate away from fast twitch fibers to then be cleared by slow twitch fibers. Spending too much time at lactate threshold is very tasking as well, as it is a high effort and can lead to overtraining which is something we constantly observe in our lab."

5.) From August 2010: Japan and the Ancient Art of Shrugging