Can caffeine enhance athletic performance?

This depends on the user. Caffeine will certainly hurt the athletic performance of individuals who are sensitive to the effects of caffeine. So if you get “caffeine jitters,” don’t use it. Caffeine is also a mild diuretic. If you are not well hydrated to begin with, caffeine may exacerbate your dehydration, which will hurt performance. Caffeine is also a natural cathartic, so if you are getting ready to compete in a long race and are sensitive to this effect of caffeine, it may not be very helpful, either. Caffeine is the most widely used drug in the world. In the athletic world caffeine has been touted as an energy-promoting and fat-burning aid. In athletic competition, caffeine is a “controlled or restricted drug” and is banned by the International Olympic Committee if urine levels exceed allowable limits. It is also banned by the NCAA in amounts that exceed urine levels of 12 micrograms of caffeine per milliliter of urine. Numerous research studies have examined the influence of caffeine on athletic performance. The results are not crystal clear, but laboratory studies have shown that moderate doses of caffeine (3 to 9 milligrams per kilogram of body weight) at least one hour prior to exercise can enhance exercise performance. (A typical 5 to 6 ounce cup of brewed coffee contains approximately 100 milligrams of caffeine.) Note that the research has shown positive impacts on performance primarily when the subjects have been trained athletes who habitually use caffeine. The majority of this research has been done in laboratories rather than at actual competitions, so no one is really sure if it works in the field the same way it does in the laboratory. According to the researchers, many factors can affect exercise performance and the physiological response to caffeine during exercise, including a person’s typical or habitual caffeine intake. Caffeine appears to increase fat oxidation (burning) at rest, but it does not increase fat oxidation after the first few minutes of exercise. The use of caffeine as a significant fat-burning aid during exercise is not supported by the scientific literature.

Happy Halloween to All

Happy Halloween, annual celebration to honor the spirits of the dead, observed in Mexico and other Latin American countries on November 2, although in some regions it is observed on November 1. The Halloween also known as Day of the Dead—known in Spanish as El dia de los Muertos—coincides with the All Souls’ Day, a holiday of the Roman Catholic Church to commemorate the deceased so they might “rest in peace.” According to popular belief, on the Day of the Dead the spirits of the dead return to commune with the living. Families leave offerings for these spirits, attend fiestas (festivals) dressed in costumes and clean or decorate the graves of deceased family members. The Day of the Dead is similar in many respects to Halloween, a holiday that also commemorates the spirits of the dead. Some Day of the Dead ceremonies are sanctioned and presided over by representatives of the Catholic Church. Observances vary from region to region, and often between different social groups within the same community. Some communities hold multiple Day of the Dead celebrations during the last week of October and the first week of November. In these elaborate observances, specific days are usually set aside for various classes of spirits, such as those of people who died violently or who died within the last year. Most Day of the Dead activities take place in the home. Paths of flower petals and burning incense lead spirits to the houses of their living relatives. Many families construct elaborate offerings, tables heaped with gifts of food and drink for the spirits of the dead. Special loaves of bread are baked for the holiday and are often included in offerings to the spirits. Other food offerings are selected with the spirit of a specific individual in mind, including dishes the deceased person enjoyed in life. After the spirits have been given an opportunity to partake of the offerings, the celebrants eat the food. Leftover food is placed on the graves of dead relatives or distributed to living relatives and other members of the community. According to custom, ill fortune, such as sickness or death, may befall those who do not make offerings. Halloween decorations typically feature imagery associated with supernatural beings such as witches, werewolves, vampires, and ghosts. Images thought to symbolize bad omens—such as black cats, bats, and spiders—are also commonly featured in Halloween decorations. Dressing in costume is one of the most popular Halloween customs, especially among children. Traditional costumes usually represent witches, ghosts, and other supernatural beings.

The Fate of Old Growth Forests. Will We Save Our Own?

For more than a year I have lived with troubling vistas of a realm that once made me serene: a realm of trees, among them the world’s biggest and tallest and almost its oldest … valleys and slopes and mountaintops of trees, sheltering wildlife, nurturing lesser foliage, regulating watersheds … factories for solar energy, purgers and rechargers of our dynamic atmosphere … mature giants of trees that once gave our continent the monarch forests of the world, but lately those forests have become so shrunken that creatures formerly thriving there are nominated for the endangered list. We live in an age of endangered lists. The specter of plants and creatures made extinct by our civilization haunts our collective conscience. Losses of unknown value to life’s genetic pool trouble our minds. Endangered Species or jobs? Its vulnerability raises a question for Filipinos already concerned for tropical rain forests: Will we save our own? Increasing efforts to save viable remnants of our temperate rain forests spark confrontations, lawsuits, legislative offensives, logging-community rallies, sit-ins high in trees by environmental activists. Late 1990 find more voices calling for new approaches to the problem. Favor rises for a new forestry in phase with nature’s cycles of growth, with wood harvests pulled back toward the tempo of nature’s pruning. The vision of sustained yield enlarges to embrace sustained ecological systems. But we work with an ever shrinking resource, with fading options. Are we already too late? It’s a war out there in the greatest temperate rain forest in the world, and it is no mere metaphor that clear-cuts look like battlefields. First I saw the sweeping undulations of ever higher ridges beneath low clouds, drifting, broken, doing glorious things to the sunshine’s play on Muir’s “range of light.” Then increasing altitude gave me a vantage that revealed many patches in the forest’s cloak—the numerous clear-cuts that have become a fact of life in most of our national forests. I saw forests as living systems, would trade hopeless fragments of old growth for combinable remnants. And there should almost never be a total clear-cut. Some old trees, snags, and logs should remain for continuity of dependent communities. If you want life to survive, you have to build a bridge. We’re in trouble as soon as we focus on our own limited goals and lose the broader view. When we destroy all our ancient forests, we will have thrown away nature’s blueprint. We must have that blueprint if we are to save forests for the future. There must be less cutting and more consolidating of remnants into viable entities. What the balance will be is a subject for study and negotiation. But the need to seek that balance is not negotiable. Nature itself is constantly cutting and pruning the forests, through fires, blow-downs, blights, and volcanic eruptions. While we pursue hopeful visions, our options shrink daily, and somewhere in what remains there stands a tree of no return. It is not a specific spruce or fir but a specific number in the sequence of cutting, beyond which the remaining old growth will have shrunk below what natural processes can repair. Then creatures and plants dependent on the ancient woodland’s moist multilayered canopies and rich ground covers, on the shelter and nurture bequeathed by its fallen patriarchs, will limp toward extinction amid the once great forest’s crazy-quilt vestiges. At last on a conifered slope I stood under the blue-green needles and spreading arms of a cedar of Lebanon, one of seven on the hill. King Hiram of Tyre gave King Solomon the wood from the cedars that once clothed the Lebanon Mountains for building the Temple in Jerusalem. Other trees built the prospering ports and great trading fleets that made the Mediterranean a Phoenician lake. In about four centuries Phoenicia ran out of fleets and forests, setting a pattern that would overtake Greece and Rome and nations into our own time. As I hope for good and prompt answers that will prevent our joining the sad recessional, I recall lines from the 104th Psalm:

The trees of the Lord are watered

Abundantly,

The cedars of Lebanon which he planted.

In them the birds build their nests;

The stork has her home in the fir trees.

The Spirit of Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneur the one who assumes the responsibility and the risk for a business operation with the expectation of making a profit. Most of the world’s great business leaders start with a humble beginning as young entrepreneur.  An entrepreneur is basically a risk taker type of person.  They are the one with bold and aggressive ideas who assumes the responsibility and risk for a business operation with the expectation of making a profit. An entrepreneur is a gambler, a risk taker.  If the business succeeds, the entrepreneur reaps the reward of profits; if it fails, he or she takes the loss and starts all over again. The entrepreneur generally decides on the product, acquires the facilities, and brings together the labor force, capital, and production materials. If the business succeeds, the entrepreneur reaps the reward of profits; if it fails, he or she takes the loss. In his writings, the Austrian-American economist Joseph A. Schumpeter stressed the role of the entrepreneur as an innovator, the person who develops a new product, a new market, or a new means of production. One important example was Henry Ford. Henry Ford an American industrialist best known for his pioneering achievements in the automobile industry. Advancing age obliged Ford to retire from the active direction of his gigantic enterprises in 1945. He died on April 7, 1947, in Dearborn. In the industrialized economies of the late 20th century, giant corporations and conglomerates have largely replaced the individual owner-operator. There is still a place for the entrepreneur, however, in small businesses as well as in the developing economies of the Third World nations.