Breaktime Chair

Quite a lot of workers in the US now operate their jobs from chairs, typing at computers. This is a welcome relief from the jobs of hundreds of years ago, which involved shovels, the hot sun, and misery. The chair jobs have disadvantages too, though, namely that they're awful for your health and eyesight. Ergonomic experts recommend that office workers take a 30 second break every 10 minutes in which you look away from your computer and do finger exercises to prevent carpal tunnel syndrome.
I'm imagining a chair that has a timer, and every ten minutes, it vibrates (to remind you that it's break time), then spins the chair around, looking you away from the computer, and the worker uses this time for finger exercises. 30 seconds or a minute later, it flips back, and you're back to work. I would try to make this chair both cheap and comfortable, so companies want to buy it, and workers want to sit in it.
Ideally, it would reduce health & comfort costs to companies, but pessimistically, it'd be another ill-conceived toy collected by hipsters who want steep discounts.

The Rack is Good for you

Generally speaking, torture is bad for you. The level of pain that a torturer wants you to feel generally only comes about by extreme injury.
Medieval Europe really had a thing for torture, inventing many horrible ways to do it. Things that crushed fingers, things that crushed skulls, things that terrified you with knives before stabbing the living daylights out of you, and "The Rack," which pulled your arms and legs until all your joints dislocated. All agonizing, incredibly evil tortures.
And yet, modern sports medicine practitioners point out that in lesser amounts,"The rack" would actually be good for you. Wait, what? Apparently if you did it slowly and stopped well before the first hint of discomfort, the gentle pull actually relaxed the joints and muscles. A slight pulling was like a chiropractic massage, only more in line with mainstream orthopedics. (The average chiropractor manipulates joints abruptly, whereas orthopedics suggest slow and gentle manipulation.)
Many things are only painful or pleasurable by degree. The brightness of sunlight on a warm summer's day is pleasant to look at. The brightness of sunlight from staring directly at the sun in unbearable. Music played at your favorite volume is something that we actively seek out and pay money for. Music played at twice that volume causes us pain. A jump in a cold pool on a hot summer's day is a welcome relief from the heat, but if I poured liquid nitrogen on you, you'd probably scream in agony, no matter how insufferably hot the day was.
If you need me, I'll be in the back room. Deploy ratchet!

Bee-based Intelligence

I think we could all use a little more intelligence. Nootropics, drugs that improve a person's cognitive function, have been really trendy lately. And now, an all natural, easily harvested substance has been found that works excellently. Namely, bee venom. Wait, what?
Discovery News reports that a study held in Belgium and England reveals that a component of bee venom, Apamin, excites neurons, and injecting onesself with a large amount of this drastically improves neuron efficiency.
Bees probably developed this as a way of magnifying the pain of a sting, to tell the various pesky animals that strive to steal their honey that this is a bad idea for them, and they should persue a different source of food.
Of course, chemical sythesis will probably develop something more effective at this, and cheaper. Milking bee venom is a slow, expensive, and incredibly boring task, but a chemically synthesized version will be saleable by the ton.

Moral Strength

Psychology Central, and many other publications, are reporting today that one way to make yourself at least temporarily stronger is to be extremely moral.
Participants who first either did or imagined something extremely good, like volunteering at a soup kitchen, were able to lift heavier weights, and keep them up for a longer period of time.
Equally curious was the fact that people who imagined themselves doing extremely evil things, (like setting a puppy on fire) also gained this same boost in strength and stamina.
Not sure what to make of this.

Another reason why TV is bad for you

Parents hate TV. It encourages their children to lay about and expect passive entertainment. It encourages them to ask for toys that are advertised. Children that are watching TV probably aren't playing outside, doing their homework, or doing whatever else parents want them to be doing.
Discovery News has a new, more damning, report that a diet of all advertised foods is absolutely hideous for your health. I believe I can readily explain why.
A business wants to buy raw ingredients as cheap as possible, sell the finished product for as much as possible, and sell in as great a quantity as possible, as possible. Cheap food is not good for you. Cheap food processed to encourage greater consumption is worse for you still. But that same cheap processed food is the most profitable type to sell. So its advertised the most heavily. Also, considerable research is done into making it pleasing to the eye and taste bud. Unappealing food just doesn't sell.
So vegetables and other health food just kind of loses out. It's not engineered to be more appealing, what little advertising it has is mostly drowned out by ads for cheap processed food, and sits forgotten at the back of the refrigerator.
I think reversing this will require revising farm bills. Subsidizing broccoli and brussel sprouts instead of corn would result in broccoli and brussel sprouts being cheap, and thus incorporated in as many foods as possible.

Cybernetic Running Suit

Olympic sprinter Oscar Pistorius has been disqualified from running for an interesting reason. His carbon fiber feet give him what the Olympic officials consider an unfair advantage. He only uses a quarter the energy that a biological-legged person would use, and therefore could run four times farther on the same effort.
Mr. Pistorius lost most of his legs as a young child due to a bone deformity, in which his fibula, the longer leg bone, was missing, and the remaining bone did not support his weight. Rather than be saddled with legs that could not function, doctors amputated everything below his knees. Nonetheless, prosthetics have advanced to the point where he was able to play rugby, and his running habit began to recover from a rugby injury, according to CBS news. His limbs give me an idea.
I see a strapped-on device, attached to the lower leg of an ordinary person, which effectively lengthens their leg by 300 centimeters (or so) and ends in a carbon-fiber "foot" like Mr. Pistorius's prosthetic leg. After a brief adjustment period, the user would be able to run further and faster than before, and at the end of the run, the device could be removed. What for? I see it as advantages for people to use more foot-power to travel to where they need to go, and less gasoline. They would be small enough to stow in a locker at the destination, unlike a bicycle, and wouldn't require any more safety equipment than a jog would. With it, I could easily run to the nearest city for work or shopping without using my car.
The main disadvantage of the device would be that it would look slightly silly.

By Your Own Power Exercise

Exercise is the deliberate use of your body's chemical energy, which encourages your muscles to be stronger and uses up the fat stores. But usually, the energy from this is thrown away.
I'm imagining an exercise bike (or this could be adapted to a weight-lifting machine, cardio device, or what have you), that charges up a car battery. One would do an hour or two of exercise, charging the battery at 100 watts. Humans generally use about 150 watts, but I imagine that some energy will be lost in the conversion process. After exercising, one could connect the battery to your house, and for a brief time, your appliances would be charged with human power.
Or this could be used in jails, with inmates charging batteries that power the jail, and perhaps ultimately, society at large. Finally paying back what they stole in the first place, in a way both very direct and indirect. (Direct because they're making electricity from their own efforts, but indirect because this energy...would be sold for public benefit to pay for the victim's needs?)

No thank you for the soda -- soda make you fat

Professor Zeno has published a startling proof a few days ago of Soda calories causing obesity. I look forward to his later proofs of water being wet, and nighttime lacking natural illumination.

Energy Drink Experiment

So blogger Joe the Peacock, a 31 year-old athlete and humor writer, decided to overdose on stimulant drinks and document the experiment. He combined several of his favorite energy drinks into one horrible concoction, which he drank. He said it was like drinking a "fruit-flavored battery" and went stranger from there.
Apparently, this stimulant binge gave him superhuman stamina, the shakes, megalomania, illogical cheerfulness, severe ADD, and chronic insomnia. Which is pretty impressive, considering that the active ingredients in these drinks are caffeine, nicotine, and lots of sugar. All cheaply available.
I've long said that if I could induce the hyperactivity that young children supposedly experience when given sugar in adults, that diet companies would break down my door hungry to sign billion dollar contracts with me, so I'm interested as to if Joe will repeat this, and if so, if he experiences the same effects. I am also curious as to the effects of these substances in older people (40-65), many of whom could benefit from hyperactivity.

Doping League

All the news about Caster Semenya has got me thinking. In sports, the use of chemical alterations to players is banned for just about every sport. It's seen as unfair to boost yourself chemically when other people get their prowess by difficult and demanding training. In short, drugs or hormonal treatments are cheating, k'thanks-for-playing.
I'm thinking, what if there was another league, where 'doping' was permitted? The records would probably be higher, but would it be interesting to watch? What is the true limit of human athletic performance? The 'Doping' league would consists of teams that were permitted to use such substances, which would be banned from the existing leagues, which by retronym are now the 'natural' leagues.
The league would also do medical research on the forensics of doping, so as to enable to natural leagues to better detect it.
The only objection I can think of is ethical. Steroid use does have a negative effect on the athlete's health. While athletes who dope do so of their own free will, I can definitely understand the position of needing to protect them from their own selves -- that victory is not worth ruining one's health. I shall read up on medical ethics.

Exercise by Cheating

If you want to grow your muscles, which almost everyone does, due to the ease of weight loss and increase in good-looking-ness, you need to do two things to make it happen. One, you need to stress and slightly tear your muscles, usually from exercise, and two, you need to rest and sleep so that your muscles can rebuild slightly bigger (which your body does to prevent that from happening again.)

However, the traditional way of doing the first step, repeatedly pushing against a major resistance, such as a weight, strikes me as a tad inefficient. Many repetitions must be done to cause the necessary micro-trauma, and this must be done on a semi-daily basis or myostatin will reabsorb the growing muscle.

This will hurt, but what say we inject ourselves with Activin Type IIB receptors to block muscular re-absorption, and then just before the workout, papaya or pineapple juice, straight to the muscle? The sugars should boost performance, and the enzymes will make the muscle more tear-able under the strain. (Use slightly less heavy weights.)

Nah, that's crazy.