If anyone has any doubts about the intrinsic strength of the human spine, Erique, just take a drive down to Ocean Beach and visit the primate cage in the San Francisco Zoo and take a gander at those leapin' lemurs. They can swing by their "degenerating" shoulders and do back flips all day with their "degenerating" spines and vertebrae without laying in their dens moaning about their aches and pains. Heck, human beings are primates like lemurs too. All the talk in that article about a 60 lb stress on the neck from the weight of the head leading to "degeneration" sounds completely ridiculous to me. Too bad such nonsense, as you point out, will get disseminated among the general public who will repeat it until it acquires the force of fact. Talk about monkey see, monkey do!