Daniel Dennison

Four weeks of wall squats reduced systolic blood pressure by nearly 10 points in adults with high blood pressure. Researchers then compared continuing three sessions weekly with reducing to two, one, or none for another month. Systolic pressure remained roughly 7 mmHg below starting levels in the once- and twice-weekly groups. Continuing three sessions weekly produced the greatest reduction of about 14 mmHg. In those who stopped completely, blood pressure moved back toward baseline. This fits with a previous analysis of randomized trials that identified isometric exercise, which involves holding a muscle contraction, as an effective way to lower resting blood pressure. What interests me is the practical question - how much of an exercise benefit can we preserve when we temporarily have less time? This study suggests that reducing the frequency can retain part of the benefit for up to a month.

The Denisovans were supposed to be a dead end on the human family tree, and it turns out they stood up to 6 foot 3, hunted woolly rhino on the roof of the world, and are still alive inside millions of people today. You know the old poster. A stooped ape on the left, a man on the right, one straight line between them, and everything that wasn't us filed away as a failed draft. Cavemen. Brutes. Extinct, and therefore irrelevant. The Denisovans were not even on the poster. Until 2010 nobody knew they had existed. Then a finger bone in a Siberian cave gave up a genome that matched no human ever recorded. For fifteen years that was all there was. A finger, a few teeth, and a ghost. Then a skull, dug up beside a bridge in Harbin in 1933 and hidden down a well for 85 years, was confirmed as Denisovan. One of the largest human skulls ever found, holding a brain as big as yours. Then, this August, two leg bones dredged up by fishermen off Taiwan. One man about 5 foot 11 and 83 kilos. The other about 6 foot 3 and 91, taller than most men alive today, more than 30,000 years before the first farm. A ghost turned into a giant in a single summer. On the Tibetan plateau, 3,280 metres up, their cave was full of what built those bodies. Blue sheep. Wild yak. Wild horses. Woolly rhinoceros. Even spotted hyena. Meat cut off the bone, the bones cracked for the marrow, the leftovers made into tools. They lived up there for 160,000 years, on ground where nothing grows that could feed a frame like that. The chemistry in the Taiwan shin bone tells the same story. A big share of that man's diet came from animals. Our ancestors met them, and had children with them. Their DNA runs through Asia and the Pacific today. Some people in Papua New Guinea and the Philippines carry around 5%. In Europeans there is almost none. So much for the idea that Asians were built for rice and Europeans for steak. The meat-eating giants of the Ice Age were Asian. They hunted from Siberia to Taiwan for hundreds of thousands of years, and their blood is in Asian families now. Rice was first farmed about 9,000 years ago. Most Tibetans, and the Sherpas, carry a Denisovan version of a gene that helps the blood cope with thin air. It is part of why they can live and work where the rest of us gasp. Call them a failed draft if you like. Millions of people are breathing through them. The biggest, strongest humans of the Ice Age built their bodies on animals at the top of the world, and handed their lungs down to the people who still herd yak there. Somewhere on Everest this morning, a Sherpa is carrying a tourist's oat milk up the mountain on lungs he inherited from a giant who hunted woolly rhino.

Retail is going to get killed buying the dip 🙄