If you’ve ever been sore a day or so after a workout, you’ve probably “known” that the cause of the pain was a build-up of lactic acid in your muscles.After all, that’s what “they” always told us. Well, turns out, “they” were wrong. (NY Times article; registration required.)Not just a little wrong. Really, really wrong. Not only is lactic acid no culprit where post-exercise muscle soreness is concerned. On the contrary, lactic acid is a good thing. Lactic acid is actually a fuel, not a caustic waste product. Muscles make it deliberately, producing it from glucose, and they burn it to obtain energy.

Somebody once said that the World Wide Web is like the biggest library in the world — too bad all the books are on the floor.That quote is from a long time ago in Internet years; improvements in search engine technology have made that library a lot easier to negotiate. But apparently our techno overlords think we still have info needs they haven’t met. An article in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal (subscription required) by Kevin Delaney reports on a new trend in in web search engine services: for a nominal fee, you can pose questions directly to other human beings.The idea is that this will work better than typing in a bunch of keywords and hoping your question will be answered by some web page that sproings onto your screen.After giving an overview of a couple of these services, Delaney looks at some questions and answers from Yahoo’s Answers.

Tara Parker-Pope, a personal health columnist and reporter at the Wall Street Journal, snagged the front page of the March 20 Journal Report with an article titled “The Case Against Vitamins” (subscription required).Parker-Pope is The Alt Health Voice of the WSJ. Irony intended. The WSJ is pretty pro-pharma — after all, they’re pro-business and pharmaceuticals make people a ton of money — so of course they aren’t going to bring a rabid alt advocate on board for anything like a regular gig.Not that she’s overtly hostile. She’s somebody’s idea of the new mainstream.