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"These traits no longer increase, despite further continuous nutritional, medical, and scientific progress ..."

Perhaps not as much progress has been made as our scientists say then?

It's more a claim that human health has an asymptotic limit that we're approaching.

When it comes to athletics there's basically three ways to beat records, improve the talent pool (more healthy people), improve the training, improve the equipment, and doping.

If Daniel Epstein is to be believed Usain Bolt was only slightly faster than Jesse Owens, which suggests it's almost all equipment and the talent pool, training, and even doping don't make much of a difference for male sprinters.

For any sport there's an optimal physique, and outside of fundamentally changing human biology you can't really do much better.

For longevity most of our improvements have come from nutrition and fixing things that go wrong. But at a certain age we exceed the design specs and a ton of really important things start going wrong at the same time. To really start changing things we'll need to figure out how to replace whole systems, how to replace worn out parts of brains.

Now, I think the study is missing one big thing on the longevity side, obesity. I suspect it's cancelled out a ton of the medical advancements of the past few decades. At some point we're going to solve obesity and at that point we're going to see a big jump in longevity.

The science to it is basically this: When sitting, your metabolism slows, you burn less calories, and all the fun that goes with that - higher likelihood to be overweight, thus higher blood pressure, cardiac issues, and so on. We have studies that prove this too.

So, don't sit right? Well, standing isn't very good for you either, not for long periods of time. We're lacking any really hard science on what the optimal time period really is, although we know that it's variable depending on the person. We do know that you're more at risk for immediate health problems from long periods of standing rather than sitting (which results in longer term, less immediate issues). For example, even with a soft gel mat, after a few weeks, one stander ended up with medical conditions.. They're not just an anomaly either; back pain, carotid atherosclerosis - a circulation issue, varicose veins, pinched nerves, and more are associated with long periods of standing.

The fact is that we don't really know how much standing is enough to ward off the dangers of sitting, and worse, we don't know how much standing is too much and will result in health problems. There's probably an optimal healthy point, but we don't have any studies that show where that optimal healthy point is on average, much less how it needs to be adjusted for an individual.

It's also important to note that positive claims associated with standing desks that are not associated with physical well-being, such as increased mental capacity, creativity, memory, attentiveness, productivity and so on, are largely due to recirculating personal anecdotes, which we know carry a strong bias and use no objective measures for comparison. What few studies there have been show no evidence of benefit, nor of detriment. In a obvious note though, they show that treadmill or cyling desks DO reduce attention and productivity by a significant amount, and they haven't been shown to result in any impressive health gains either - users average weight loss of only about 3 lbs a year, for example, and that's about the only study you'll find on the subject!

What this all means is that, scientifically speaking, advocating for the health benefits of a standing desk is about the same as advocating for the health properties of barefoot running, clay cleansing (or really any cleanses, including charcoal, pickle juice, and others), and the whole genre of fad diets.

There's no scientific proof that shows they are a net benefit, which means you shouldn't assume they provide one. They are just standard junk science until then - taking a fact or finding and running with it past the point and on to speculation and pure fantasy. In fact, these are more akin to the fad diets, in that you're not only not gaining a benefit, you're that much more likely to cause harm to yourself. Standing desks are the new fen phen.

If you're worried about staying healthy, skip the fads and just add an exercise plan to your day. Take a 40 minute walk at lunch. Maybe workout a few times a week. Eat healthy, but more important in most western countries, eat a proper portion size. That's all it really takes.

If you want to understand why Armstrong never failed a drug test and his results can now be discarded in favor of testimony, read this : USADA charges Lance Armstrong: Pieces worth reading.

Don't miss all the linked pieces, the letter sent by USADA to the ringleaders, the ESPN article by Bonnie D. Ford, best of all the Prof. Michael Ashenden interview and so on. These are must reads.

We have to stop being delusional and gullible. Sad but true Armstrong will now join the ranks of other infamous cheats like Marion Jones, Ben Johnson or all those East German athletes. By quitting now he will avoid just one thing, worse than cheating: perjury!

On the contrary there is good evidence that he does have an advantage.

The 'Science of Sport' blog wrote about this in 2009 : http://www.sportsscientists.com/2009/11/oscar-pistorius-gets-10-second.html Back then, two scientists hired to look at the case found that the artificial limbs would take 10 or more seconds off his 400 meter time. http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-11/smu-opa111709.php

not really. most halfway competent cyclists can put out 200W for hours on end.

Good ones can continuously generate around 5W/kg: http://www.sportsscientists.com/2010/07/power-outputs-from-tour-de-france.html

Noone gets to appeal this decision in court.
Yes, they do. It's called the CAS. Court Arbitration for Sport (or something like that)

several riders are kicked out of the race and stripped of any stage victories after failing a doping test.
They do this differently now. They let the race finish, then kick them out of whatever results they had for the race. No one is paying attention after the last stage.

the winner failing a drug test smeared the reputation of the tour even further.
Landis just got caught. Previous Tour winners have admitted to systematic performance enhancing drug (PED) use. (Riis) It's important to note, the tests are nowhere near perfect and are subject to a great deal of political interference. For example, how is it Marion Jones who started systematically using PED at 16 (16!) was never caught. I'd argue it was a combination of poor testing and USA Track and Field. At the top of any given sport, it's a very small community. In Jones' case you are telling me visits to BALCO resulting in fantastical improvements wasn't widely known?

Stage racers have bad days. It is unlikely that one bad day can be followed by a heroic, **crush** the field, ride the next day. PED's make it very likely.

The doping tests are a huge invasion of privacy,
In exchange for getting paid to ride *very* nice bikes, you have to pee in a cup. I'd take that trade. It's not an invasion of privacy. The basic point is MANY athletes will cheat given the opportunity. And many cyclists were cheating a whole lot. They still do. So, the consequences are, every Pro Tour rider pees in a cup.

Now the question whether this treatment professional cyclists get is fair is another matter
The back story here is EPO use in cycling was extreme. http://www.sportsscientists.com/2009/02/cyclist-dies-in-sleep.html Cycling got what was coming to them. Given the Olympics are going on, one has to wonder what PED's the cross-country skiers/biathletes have. Same kind of performance demands as cycling. Hopefully, other sports like biathlon have done their walk of shame already.