With a hoist and a sudden mechanical groan, Dan Webb, 44, stands up in the rehabilitation gym at MossRehab in Elkins Park, grinning from ear to ear. You might say standing is not such a big deal, unless, like Webb, who fell from a tree stand while bowhunting in 2010 and suffered incomplete paralysis of…
Music and dance festivals are so last month. Next month New York will have what organizers are calling a “participatory walks” festival. Elastic City an organization that since 2010 has engaged artists in various disciplines to lead walks that are less about sightseeing than about finding fresh ways to think about a city’s history, architecture…
The Nickel Tour: Finland wants to build a connected transit service that lets your phone tell you whether you should bike or hop on the bus to get to work, depending on traffic and the weather. Forget about listening to traffic reports and checking for transit delays, let your personal mobility system on your phone, linked…
Running for as little as five minutes a day could significantly lower a person’s risk of dying prematurely, according to a large-scale new study of exercise and mortality. The findings suggest that the benefits of even small amounts of vigorous exercise may be much greater than experts had assumed. In recent years, moderate exercise, such…
San Pedro’s Gaffey Street is no one’s idea of a quaint village. Cars pour off the 110 Freeway, frequently at high speeds. The street’s palm trees provide little shade. The corridor is dominated by businesses catering to the automobile — KFC, Taco Bell and 7-Eleven, among others. Yet Mayor Eric Garcetti hopes to transform Gaffey…
How we hold our arms affects how we run, but probably not in ways that most of us would expect, according to a new study of upper body biomechanics. The ideal arm swing may be the one that you’re already using, the study concludes. Distance running is, of course, physiologically costly, meaning that it requires…
Author Linda Cracknell explains how walking connects her to the landscape and inspires so much of her work In 1976 I arrived alone in Boscastle for a week’s painting holiday with the sullen steps of a post-glandular-fever, first-time-in-love 17-year-old. “I’ve got here but feel terribly lonely and depressed,” I complained to my diary on the…
In a groundbreaking study that looked at how diet, exercise and other non-drug interventions affect cognitive decline, researchers see some hope for relatively easy dementia-fighting strategies No one believes that a disease as complicated as Alzheimer’s can be warded off by an apple a day or by faithfully hitting the weight room. But a breakthrough…
America’s young people, as a group, are becoming more out of shape with every passing year, regardless of their family’s economic situation, a new study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports. The finding raises troubling questions about the future health and longevity of our children and suggests that parents and other authority…
The village of University Park, in the far south suburbs of Chicago, recently installed a new pedestrian bridge that will make a big difference in the community. Above: the new pedestrian bridge; below: the old, condemned bridge The bridge will make it easier for children to get to their schools on bikes and on foot…