Block

Dr. Barbara Block from Stanford University, a well-known comparative physiologist and member of The American Physiological Society, has been in the news recently for her work tracking sharks. She has spent her career studying the physiology and migratory habits of ocean wildlife. In a prior blog, I talked about her work tracking bluefin tuna and posted an audio clip of an interview with her talking about how she measures their body temperature, heart rate, etc, using sophisticated tracking devices. Now you can become part of her exciting ongoing research on shark behaviors through Shark Net,…
I remember being a kid and taking karate lessons. How cool was it to go somewhere for the purpose of learning how to kick ass? It was fun, of course, and one of the things you learned how to do was to attack (strike, kick, and punch) with your entire body, not just with your limbs. Maybe the coolest parlor trick we learned was how to break a wooden board with our bare hands. (I remember surprising the hell out of Leon Hodge years later in High School by doing it in a history class one day; Hi Leon!) We also heard the story that the way this worked was that you compressed air molecules so much…