President Bush today told Americans to get off the couch and exercise because it’s good for the body and mind. Unless he was reading LiveScience earlier today, he probably didn’t know how right he was.

Swedish researchers announced today that exercising mice grew new brain cells. Mice function similarly to humans, so the scientists figure this might explain why exercise works so well as an anti-depressant, something fit folks have long known. After all, what could be more uplifting than new brain cells for an old brain?

So do what your president says, and more:

Another study out today strengthens the case that mental exercises, from reading to attending a play, help stave off Alzheimer’s.

While genetics, modern medicine and luck all play roles in our well-being, it’s clearer than ever that a little mountain biking (perhaps while reading the newspaper) goes a long way. Don’t suggest that to Mr. Bush, however.

The Leaning Tower of Pisa doesn’t lean so much anymore. It has been straightened 18 inches, getting it back to its 1838 position, so it won’t fall over.

There’s a ton of interesting detail about the project and the tower’s history, here. �

Better nutrition, better conditioning, and the ability to fix body parts is helping many people live healthier longer. The shift was noted today by an AP sports writer Rob Maaddi, who found that a record seven pitchers in their 40s were scheduled to Major League Baseball games today:

Yankees’ Roger Clemens (44), Philadelphia’s Jamie Moyer (44), Detroit’s Kenny Rogers (42), San Diego’s Greg Maddux (41), the New York Mets’ Tom Glavine (41), Houston’s Woody Williams (40) and Atlanta’s John Smoltz (40).

Modern surgeries play a role, and exercise (once a joke in baseball) helps, too.

While much of America grows obese and develops preventable illnesses owing to lousy diets and lack of exercise, these old timers show that indeed, life does not end at 40 as many thirty-somethings used to think.

Keep an ear and eye out for some new developments from the outer space world of Virgin Galactic - the suborbital spaceliner group financially-fueled by Sir Richard Branson.

During last week’s Flight School 2007 held at the Aspen Institute in Colorado, Alex Tai, Chief Operating Officer for Virgin Galactic, hinted that there’s new news regarding that dynamic duo: SpaceShipTwo/White Knight 2. Both are under construction at Scaled Composites in Mojave, California.

Tai said the lawyers were having a final go at a “major supplier arrangement” for Virgin Galactic’s spaceship system. Word in the hallway is that the announcement likely revolves around an engine supplier for the huge White Knight 2 carrier plane.

Also, Tai spotlighted Virgin Fuels and laboratory level propellant that “burn green” - that is, they are more environmentally friendly.

Another tidbit wound up in my notes too. Tai suggested that something is forthcoming about the g-load profile on passengers riding SpaceShipTwo on future suborbital jaunts. Maybe less “grunt work” for those onboard in taking on reentry forces?

As science and the accompanying political debate on stem cell research, cloning, and “animal-human embryo” research moves forward, expect things to just get weirder and weirder.

Case in point from a Reuters story today: Hybrid animal-human embryos created for medical research should be viewed as human and permitted to develop into children, Roman Catholic bishops have urged the British parliament.

Take that to the water cooler.

See also this recent, semi-related story: Dolly creator Ian Wilmut suggests injecting human DNA into animal egg cells as a workaround to ethical and legal roadblocks. Want more? Lab Freaks, Interspecies Cloning, and the always combustible idea of Human Cloning.

While June is a month when torrential rains sometimes come from hurricanes (where are those hurricanes, by the way?) instead just a good-old-fashioned storm brought 18 inches of rain to parts of Texas.

Here in Arizona, just the width of New Mexico away, it hasn’t rained for weeks and weeks, adding to the 12-year drought that, perhaps, ought to be called the new norm rather than a drought.

Nature is fickle, always has been. But this is a wild week. Chicago also got a tropical-storm-like downpour yesterday. Britain got a deadly drenching this week and expects more.

While a single week like this does not necessarily have anything to do with climate change, it illustrates the sort of thing we may see more of: Scientists expect weather to become more extreme, with more intense storms, more rain in some place, and more intense droughts elsewhere.

Some 72 percent of respondents to a “poll” run by a publisher called Pocket Issue say global warming is a natural occurrence, according to a press release issued by the publisher and a now-popular story based on the release on a UK web site.

But the poll is bogus.

Real polls survey a cross-section of society in a random but controlled fashion in an effort to find out what the broader public actually thinks.

The results of Pocket Issue’s online poll, as with any uncontrolled poll of this sort, can be skewed wildly depending on who hears of it and who votes.

Other real polls have come up with quite different results. One in January by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that 47 percent of Americans think human activity is mostly to blame for global warming. A Fox News poll in February found 41 percent of Americans think humans are fully to blame, while 38 percent think global warming is caused by a combination of human action and normal climate patterns.

A Harris poll early this year found 61 percent of Spanish people, 56 percent of French, 55 percent of British, 54 percent of Germans and Italians, and 59 percent of Americans think “the responsibility for global warming is shared between governments, industry and people in general.” That’s not the same question as “are humans causing global warming?” but it does shed light on what various Western societies think.

Whatever your beliefs on this issue, don’t buy into the results of uncontrolled, innaccurate online polling. You might, however, invite some friends to join you in trying to skew the poll.

Americans have big hearts. They give and give.

Last year, in fact, they gave 4.2 percent more than the previous year. Charitable donations soared to $295.02 billion, the third straight record year.

True, a good chunk of this money was given by corporations trying to look good and by people who won’t miss it, like Warren Buffet ($1.9 billion). But 75.6 percent of the total was donated by individuals. And 65 percent of this individual giving “comes from homes with less than $100,000 in annual income,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

So is charitable giving truly altruistic, as many givers would like to believe? (Altruisim: unselfish concern for or the devotion to the welfare of others.)

Some who give in big ways no doubt enjoy the warm and fuzzy press they receive and their increased status in the eyes of others. In short, they gain, so their giving is not truly altruistic. While individuals giving $100 here and there don’t enjoy much public adoration for their deeds, they can derive emotional benefit simply because the act of giving makes them feel good. If they tell a friend or loved one, the increased status thing kicks in.

So by definition most charitable giving is not altruistic unless one sees altruism as having degrees rather than being an absolute principle.

Meanwhile, a new study out today suggests altruism (or whatever it is) is as old as humanity and even older. Chimpanzees, our close relatives on the primate family tree, have been known to exhibit altruistic behavior in lab settings. In the new research, chimps were found to help other chimps (as well as humans) retrieve something that was out of reach so long as the other chimp (or human) demonstrated a desire to have the object. The altruistic chimp had to expend some energy to help and got nothing in return.

In the wild, however, altruism among chimps is rarely noted. And a hungry chimp tends not to help another but rather feed itself with little or no altruistic effort. Could be, researchers say, that “one difference between humans and chimps might be the ability to read the intentions of others and discriminate whether help is needed or not.”

Worth noting, however, that charitable giving by humans tends to go up or down depending on how well-off people are. The increase this year, the Journal reports, “partly reflects the growing number of high-net-worth households.”

No surprise there. But that means that for humans, as with chimps, altruism is based on whether their own needs are first met, which is anything but unselfish.

A “bolt from the blue” killed a Florida man yesterday. David Canales, 41, was outside landscaping and had no warning of any thunderstorm activity, according to The Miami Herald.

The phenomenon, called a “bolt from the blue” by the National Weather Service, is rare but unknown. See a photo of one.

Lightning kills about 66 people in America every year. Many of them are golfers or others who do not heed obvious signs to go indoors and lose a one-sided game of chicken with Nature. Canales, however, is just one very, very unlucky person.

New air transportation ventures are being born, just at the time when the private space travel business is, quite literally, taking off.

That’s the overall message from Flight School 2007, being held here June 20-22 at the Aspen Institute in Aspen, Colorado.

Top aviation and space entrepreneurs are showcasing projects demonstrating that now is a time of rebirth, rethinking and growth in both enterprises.

People can now make “true creative leaps to say, not so much how can we improve on air travel, but how can we envision a whole new age of air and space travel,” said Walter Isaacson, President and CEO of the Aspen Institute.

Esther Dyson, Chairman of EDventure and host of the Flight School, sees a nexus between the air and space communities. “There’s the whole optimization of air travel on one hand…and private space travel on the other. You have many, many problems in common, starting with financing, finding customers, running your businesses. So while, to some extent, you are a different market…in many ways you can learn a lot from one another,” she told the audience gathered here on Thursday.

The very light jet and private aviation market is being born almost at the exact same time — and for many of the same reasons — as the personal spaceflight industry,” said Peter Diamandis, Chairman and Co-founder of the X Prize Foundation.

“People want the chance to personalize aviation and personalize space…there are people who are demanding it,” Diamandis told me.