MALE PATTERN FITNESS: science Archives

March 29, 2007

Freeze Now, Or Forever Fall to Pieces

If you haven't already frozen some of your stem cells, you could be behind the curve:

Some doctors and researchers say that in a few years the use of primitive stem cells from infants’ umbilical cord blood could grow new knee ligaments or elbow tendons creating a therapy that becomes the vanguard of sports injury repair.

Already, some sports agents are preparing to advise clients about banking stem cells from their offspring or from tissue taken from their own bodies as an insurance policy against a career-ending infirmity. Stem cell blood banks are promoting the benefits of stem cell therapies for the practical healing and rehabilitation of tendons, ligaments, muscle and cartilage.

I love the line I put in bold -- could any statement possibly be more speculative than "preparing to advise"? I mean, I'm preparing to advise my publisher to pay me a million-dollar advance for my next book. And if my talent and popularity increase a hundredfold in the near future, I just might follow through.

This, though, is the scariest part of the New York Times piece:

“If you have a child who has exceptional athletic talent at the age of 5 or 6, you might want to get a muscle or fat biopsy to draw and freeze some young stem cells,” said Dr. Johnny Huard, the director of the Stem Cell Research Center of the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh and a leading gene therapy researcher. “To have a pool of stem cells already removed would be enormously valuable. The practical use might be years away, but that’s the future of sports medicine.”

I hope that would qualify as child abuse.

Posted by LouSchuler at 10:38 AM | Comments (1)

March 23, 2007

New Blood

If vampires really existed, they'd replace the entire human race in 30 months, according to a paper written by physicists at the University of Central Florida and analyzed at the Collision Detection blog here. (Here's the PDF of the study; hat tip to Rachel Sklar.)

Here's the argument:

Anyone who has seen John Carpenter’s Vampires or the movie Blade or any of the host of other vampire films is already quite familiar with how the legend goes. The vampires need to feed on human blood. After one has stuck his fangs into your neck and sucked you dry, you turn into a vampire yourself and carry on the blood-sucking legacy. The fact of the matter is, if vampires truly feed with even a tiny fraction of the frequency that they are depicted to in the movies and folklore, then the human race would have been wiped out quite quickly after the first vampire appeared.

It's a fun theory, but we all know that's not how vampirism really works. Vampires don't always turn out their victims; most often, they just suck their blood and kill them on the spot. Unless our distinguished horror and science-fiction literature has been lying to us all these years, it's obvious that vampires are very choosy about the company they keep, since they're stuck with any vampires they create for eternity.

But I wouldn't expect a physics professor to have these insights into the undead world. For that, you need a guy who writes about weight lifting.

Posted by LouSchuler at 09:01 AM | Comments (0)

March 12, 2007

The Louse That Roared

Newsweek's cover story has two fun facts I didn't know about human evolution.

The first is kind of a head-scratcher:

Head lice live in the hair on the head. But body lice, a larger variety, are misnamed: they live in clothing. Head lice, as a species, go back millions of years, while body lice are a more recent arrival. [Mark] Stoneking, an evolutionary anthropologist, had a hunch that he could calculate when body lice evolved from head lice by comparing the two varieties' DNA, which accumulates changes at a regular rate. (It's like calculating how long it took a typist to produce a document if you know he makes six typos per minute.)

That fork in the louse's family tree, he and colleagues at Germany's Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology concluded, occurred no more than 114,000 years ago. Since new kinds of creatures tend to appear when a new habitat does, that's when human ancestors must have lost their body hair for good -- and made up for it with clothing that, besides keeping them warm, provided a home for the newly evolved louse.

I say it's confusing because this story says that humans picked up pubic lice from gorillas 3 million years ago:

Rather than close encounters of the intimate kind, researchers explained humans most likely got the lice, which most commonly live in pubic hair, from sleeping in gorilla nests or eating the apes.

"It certainly wouldn't have to be what many people are going to immediately assume it might have been, and that is sexual intercourse occurring between humans and gorillas," explained researcher David Reed of the Florida Museum of Natural History. "Instead of something sordid, it could easily have stemmed from an activity that was considerably more tame."

For both these stories to be true, then pubic lice (aka "crabs") must be different from body lice, and indeed this paragraph from the second story says just that:

Humans are unique among primates in that we host two different kinds of lice -- one on our heads and bodies (Pediculus), the bane of many schoolchildren, and pubic lice (Pthirus). In comparison, chimpanzees have only head lice and gorillas only pubic lice.

So, based on my very limited (although rapidly increasing) knowledge of louseology, the body lice discussed in the Newsweek article evolved from head lice 114,000 years ago, thanks to that newfangled innovation called "clothing" (aka "threads"), which was necessitated by the loss of our precious follicular material (aka "fur").

Still, both stories suggest that all this sound and fury from the world of parasitic research indicates a data point for the loss of human body hair:

The evidence suggests gorilla lice began infesting humans about 3.3 million years ago. In contrast, humans and gorillas diverged in evolutionary time about 7 million years ago. The fact the lice took up residence where they did may have coincided with human loss of most hair on the rest of their bodies and the lack of any other suitable niche to live, Reed said.

So, while it's great that both theories of parasitic invasion are precise -- 114,000 years ago for body lice, 3.3 million years ago for pubic lice -- we're left with a gap of 3.2 million years for the loss of human body hair.

This paper (pdf) doesn't answer the question of when we lost our hair, but does offer some reasons why, including the idea that without hair we humans became less susceptible to parasites.

So, if you're keeping score at home, lice give us important clues to our evolutionary history, even though we apparently evolved into hairless apes to rid ourselves of lice.

How's that for a paradox?

"Oh, look at Og over there with his big brain and flat face. Does he think he can just evolve into something special? Loser!"

Here's the other bit o' science from the Newsweek article that caught me by surprise:

New research also shows that "progress" and "human evolution" are only occasional partners. More than once in human prehistory, evolution created a modern trait such as a face without jutting, apelike brows and jaws, only to let it go extinct, before trying again a few million years later. Our species' travels through time proceeded in fits and starts, with long periods when "nothing much happened," punctuated by bursts of dizzying change, says paleontologist Ian Tattersall, co-curator of the American Museum's new hall. ...

In 2001, a team digging in Chad unearthed what it claimed was the oldest fossil of an ancestor of humans but not chimps. If so, it must have lived after the two lineages split. Trouble was, Sahelanthropus tchadensis (nicknamed Toumai, the local word for "child") lived close to 7 million years ago. The genetic data, pointing to a human-chimp split at least 1 million years later, suggest that Toumai is not the ur-hominid -- the first creature ancestral only to human and not our chimp cousins -- after all.

If Toumai is not our ancestor, what is he doing with such a humanlike face and teeth, which look like those of species 5 million years his junior? "A 7 million-year-old hominid should be just starting to look like a hominid, not have a trait you see so much later in the fossil record," says paleoanthropologist Bernard Wood of George Washington University.

Amazing that they never even consider the possibility that space aliens made multiple attempts to create the human species on Earth. And they call themselves scientists!

BTW, if you really are trying to keep score, check out this timeline of human evolution.

Posted by LouSchuler at 09:14 AM | Comments (1)

February 12, 2007

Monday Linkage

Just because I'm too busy to organize these stories with a unifying theme ...

Why extreme stress makes you stupid

This story shows that when you lose sleep, your brain stops making new brain cells.

This test was pretty extreme, since it kept subjects awake for 72 hours. In real life, that would only happen in times of war, personal tragedy, or natural disaster. And it doesn't really say anything about what happens to brain cells when people just lose a few hours of sleep here and there.

But the news is still kind of scary: If you're involved in something so traumatic that you don't sleep for 72 hours, it takes two full weeks for your brain to catch up.

Sleep it off

It's not news that sleep is important to weight control. So this short item about kids and sleep isn't surprising, but it reinforces what we already know:

Researchers at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., used detailed diaries kept by families to examine children's sleep behavior and its relationship with weight. They determined that an extra hour of sleep cut the likelihood of being overweight from 36 percent to 30 percent in children ages 3 to 8, and from 34 percent to 30 percent in those ages 8 to 13.

Not a huge difference, but it's still something. Parents, turn off the TV or computer or PlayStation, and enforce a consistent bedtime. And if you have any of those things in your kids' bedrooms, where you can't monitor whether they're on or off, get them out.

And make sure they get a good breakfast when they wake up.

There. I just solved the childhood obesity problem in two easy steps.

Cut it out

I meant to blog last week about the rise in obesity surgeries for teenagers. But like so many things, I never got around to it. So this morning's L.A. Times has a handy roundup story about how weight-loss surgery is getting safer across the board:

What really improved safety, experts say, was the introduction, in 1994, of laparoscopic procedures into weight-loss surgery. Using lasers and cameras, surgeons make a few small incisions and perform procedures without cutting a person's belly.

Between 1998 and 2004, the death rate of patients undergoing obesity surgery dropped 80 percent, according to a 2006 report by William Encinosa of the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality in Rockville, Md. -- probably due to simpler surgery.

Maybe someday surgery will be as common for people tired of being overweight as Lasik is for people who're tired of wearing glasses. If it's truly as safe as it now seems, it's hard to argue against it.

Use it ... and lose it anyway

I spent the weekend watching my older daughter skate. She probably skated four hours on a friend's frozen pond on Saturday, and then another three hours Sunday at an indoor rink -- she had her regular lesson, then tore around on the ice with friends for another hour and change.

At 50, I'm lucky if I get in three hours of exercise a week, but for her that's just a regular old Saturday afternoon.

Of course, I'm only doing what my body tells me to do -- I'm supposed to slow down with age. This is a process that occurs naturally in every species. It's not just activity levels that downshift. Performance declines as well after about the age of 30, even with elite-level talent and serious conditioning.

A new study sheds some light on why our bodies persist in getting older and slower:

The team from the Howard Hughes Medical School at Yale University School of Medicine compared the skeletal muscle of three-month-old rats and two-year-olds. They found that a process called AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK) slowed down in the older animals.

AMPK's role in skeletal muscle is to stimulate the body to burn off fat and to fuel cells, via the production of mitochondria -- cells' power sources. ...

The animals were exposed to a chemicals which stimulates AMPK and were also fed more food, which also stimulates the process. They found that the older rats had lower AMPK activity than the younger animals.

What's funny about this story is that it portrays this loss of muscle function as all-or-nothing:

Dr. Anne McArdle, an ageing specialist at the University of Liverpool, said: "Loss of skeletal muscle mass and function as we age is a major problem which has a significant effect on quality of life of older people." ...

But she added: "The data suggest that the ability to increase AMPK activity is completely abolished and so there is little evidence to suggest that 'working harder' would overcome these deficiencies."

There's still a pretty big gulf between "doing nothing" and "working harder." No one walking around with a 70-year-old body thinks he just needs to work a little harder to make his body perform like a 20-year-old's. But there's plenty you can do that falls in between the extremes. Some exercise is always better than none, and exercise in combination with a good diet will do wonders to delay the inevitable -- to slow the slowdown.

So what'll you bet the next time we see the acronym "AMPK" in a news story, it'll be about a drug company that's invented a product to increase AMPK activity in older people? "It's Viagra for your muscles!"

Posted by LouSchuler at 08:56 AM | Comments (0)

January 29, 2007

Iggy Has Two Pops

Is it my imagination, or was this a big week for news from the animal kingdom

First up is the iguana who needs sexual healing:

Mozart, an iguana with an erection that has lasted for over a week, will have his penis amputated in the next couple of days.

Veterinarians at Antwerp's Aquatopia had sought to treat the animal's problem, but decided removal was the only solution because of the risk of infection. The good news for Mozart and his mates is that male iguanas have two penises.

Mozart, sitting on the shoulders of his keeper as camera crews focused on his red, swollen erection, seemed unperturbed by the news.

"It doesn't bother him. He doesn't know what amputation means," said vet Luc Lambrecht, adding that Mozart's sexual activity should be undimmed by the operation."I don't think so. That's all in his head."

Then there's the prodigal golden retriever:

Cujo was a frisky 7-year-old when he sneaked out of his owners' south St. Louis yard in July 2000. Now, thinner and grayer and with a tale that would be fascinating if only he could tell it, the golden retriever is back with the Barczewski family.

"It's a miracle," Noreen Barczewski, 41, said at Friday's reunion. "We found him!"

Six years and a side trip to Columbia can do a lot to a dog, but it was unmistakably Cujo. There was the heart-shaped patch of white on his forehead, the white fur on his toes, his manner of greeting people by rubbing against them cat-style.

Cujo's homecoming was orchestrated by Dirk's Fund, a golden retriever rescue group that has found homes for more than 900 dogs in the past decade.

Finally, there was this nightmarish catfight last week. The woman in the photo, 65-year-old Nell Hamm, fought off a female mountain lion that was mauling her 70-year-old husband:

A normal hike in a California state park turned near fatal when a 70 year-old man was attacked by a mountain lion. What saved him from certain death? A pen, a branch, and his feisty, 65 year-old wife.

Jim Hamm of Fortuna, CA, and his wife, Nell, were enjoying a hike at the Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park near the California north coast when a female mountain lion suddenly pounced on him. His wife, walking ahead of him was unaware of the attack at first until she heard him call for help. Nell Hamm quickly attacked the lion with whatever she could get her hands on as Jim's head was in the lion's mouth.

Nell first grabbed a branch and began to beat the mountain lion, but it wouldn't let Jim go. Jim told her, "I've got a pen in my pocket and get the pen and jab him in the eye,'" she said. "So I got the pen and tried to put it in his eye, but it didn't want to go in as easy as I thought it would."

When the pen failed to work, Nell picked up the log and began to beat the lion again. The mountain lion released its grip, stared at Nell, and slowly walked away as she screamed at it.

The man isn't doing well; he just had more surgery at a different hospital. Turns out, animal attacks are more dangerous than other types of trauma, even when the actual damage is similar:

Hamm is taking antibiotics to prevent an infection, but his doctors remained concerned about bacteria entering his body from the cat's claws and mouth.

"Infection -- that's our biggest concern," Ayotte said. "You can have exactly the same injuries in a traffic accident or in a wild animal attack, but your chances of infection with a wild animal accident are far greater."

The lioness, meanwhile, paid the ultimate price for picking on an old man. If only she could've been a male iguana, with no concerns beyond softening the wood on one of two reproductive organs.

Posted by LouSchuler at 05:43 AM | Comments (0)

January 26, 2007

Ram-on-Ram

I don't follow pro football closely -- in fact, I follow it so not-closely that I only watch the Super Bowl for the commercials, and take my bathroom breaks when play resumes. But even I know that this is the first Super Bowl involving two African-American coaches.

My older brother and I listened to the Chicago-New Orleans game as we were driving out of St. Louis Sunday afternoon, and one of the first things the radio announcer said when the game ended was that the Chicago coach, Lovie Smith, would be the first black coach to take a team to the Super Bowl.

I think the story line should be that Lovie Smith is the first person named "Lovie" who wasn't laughed out of his profession. But that's just me.

So, with thoughts of identity politics already percolating in my head, I read this in yesterday's New York Times, about the scientist who had the misfortune of studying an obscure subject that somehow turned into a political football:

Dr. Roselli, a researcher at the Oregon Health and Science University, has searched for the past five years for physiological factors that might explain why about 8 percent of rams seek sex exclusively with other rams instead of ewes. The goal, he says, is to understand the fundamental mechanisms of sexual orientation in sheep. Other researchers might some day build on his findings to seek ways to determine which rams are likeliest to breed, he said.

But since last fall, when People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals started a campaign against the research, it has drawn a torrent of outrage from animal rights activists, gay advocates and ordinary citizens around the world -- all of it based, Dr. Roselli and colleagues say, on a bizarre misinterpretation of what the work is about.

According to the Times story, written by John Schwartz, gay activists somehow got the impression Roselli was trying to find a way to end homosexuality in male sheep. (Funny coincidence department: Lovie Smith used to be defensive coordinator of the Rams. Get it? "Lovie"? "Defensive coordinator"? "Rams"? You can't make this stuff up!)

And if you can keep the rams off their fellow rams, well, that's just a short step from breeding homosexual orientation out of humans. It's like Twilight of the Golds, only with sheep!

Except ... that's not what the research is about. Not even close:

Dr. Roselli, whose research is supported by the National Institutes of Health and is published in leading scientific journals, insists that he is as repulsed as his critics by the thought of sexual eugenics in humans. He said human sexuality was a complex phenomenon that could not be reduced to interactions of brain structure and hormones.

On blogs where attacks have appeared, the researchers point out that many of the accusations, like The Sunday Times’s assertion that the scientists implant devices in the brains of the sheep, are simply false.

So where does that leave us? Well, I think it's safe to say that rams will remain free to, as they say, "get wild and woolly" with other rams. And did you hear about the coaches in this year's Super Bowl?

Posted by LouSchuler at 07:50 AM | Comments (0)

January 17, 2007

Is That an Occipital Bun on the Back of Your Head, Or Are You Just Glad to See Me?

I've made no secret of my occasional obsession over Neanderthals, particularly the question of whether modern humans and their big-shouldered cousins ever succumbed to the love that dare not reveal its DNA.

So I thought I'd share this, in case you missed it:

A skull found in a cave in Romania includes features of both modern humans and Neanderthals, possibly suggesting that the two may have interbred thousands of years ago.

Neanderthals were replaced by early modern humans. Researchers have long debated whether the two groups mixed together, though most doubt it. The last evidence for Neanderthals dates from at least 24,000 years ago.

The skull bearing both older and modern characteristics is discussed in a paper by Erik Trinkaus of Washington University in St. Louis. The report appears in Tuesday's issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

To see a Neanderthal skull compared to a modern human, click here. The big differences are in the angles. Our skulls are basically flat, but theirs had prominent brow ridges and a sloping forehead. Another huge difference is something called the occipital bun, a protrusion in the back of the skull that gave their heads more of a football shape. Our skulls have an occipital ridge, which you can feel with your fingers on the back of your head, just above your neck, but no bun.

This newly discovered skull appears to be around 40,000 years old. (To give you an idea of how long ago that was, Robert Byrd wasn't even in the Senate.) It has a mix of modern human and Neanderthal features:

The researchers said the skull had the same proportions as a modern human head and lacked the large brow ridge commonly associated with Neanderthals. However, there were also features that are unusual in modern humans, such as frontal flattening, a fairly large bone behind the ear and exceptionally large upper molars, which are seen among Neanderthals and other early hominids.

It also has the occipital bun, which isn't mentioned in any of the news accounts I found this morning, but was mentioned by a scientist interviewed on NPR yesterday.

Nobody can say whether this new guy is the result of human-Neanderthal carnality or is simply an interesting evolutionary intermediary -- a type of human that hadn't yet fully evolved into our magnificent species.

Still, anything that even suggests our ancestors indulged in a little sex tourism on the other side of the evolutionary tracks is fun to contemplate.

Posted by LouSchuler at 08:35 AM | Comments (0)

November 17, 2006

So Should We Start Testing Athletes for Red Wine?

Is there anything resveratrol can't do? Two weeks ago we learned it can prevent diabetes and heart disease in overweight mice, as well as giving them unusual balancing skills.

Now we learn resveratrol can also boost endurance:

Mice given high doses of the compound were able to run twice as far on treadmills than they normally could, French researchers reported.

Resveratrol might even help the rodents live longer, they say.

"The compound resveratrol, found in the skin of red grapes and cranberries, was known to activate SIRT1, an enzyme known to be involved in lifespan extension," explained lead researcher Dr. Johan Auwerx, from the Institute of Genetics and Molecular and Cellular Biology in Illkirch, France.

These results, published in the Nov. 16 issue of Cell, add to findings from a recent study that showed that resveratrol improved health and lengthened survival of mice placed on a high-calorie diet.

The researchers think that what they found applies to humans as well as mice. SIRT1, they say, works the same way in humans, signaling cells to burn more energy. That not only would help obese people lose weight, it might help patients with neurodegenerative disorders, such as Parkinson's and Huntington's.

This is all coming from Sirtris, the company that's developing the resveratrol-based drug and sponsored the research, so take that for what it's worth.

Posted by LouSchuler at 08:28 AM | Comments (0)

November 13, 2006

Funny Faces

Good news -- science has figured out what facial features are ideal for comedians:

They said soft and feminine features, typified by Ricky Gervais, were more likely to make people laugh. ...

Researcher Dr. Anthony Little, a psychologist, whose work was commissioned by Jongleurs comedy clubs, showed faces with a range of different features to volunteers, and asked them to rate how funny they thought the person was.

He said: "The features most likely to mark male comedians out for success are predominantly soft and feminine. The face is a strong indication of character, and today's study appears to explain why comedians of a certain appearance would have been drawn to their career.

"The characteristics of a feminine face imply that the person may be agreeable and co-operative, which can be causal in our first impressions of comedians as being friendly and funny."

I love Ricky Gervais' reaction:

"All these years I assumed my global success as a comedian was down to my acute observations, expert directorial rendering and consummate skills as a performer. Turns out it's because I've got a fat girly face."

But another comedian has a take that makes a lot of sense:

Comedian Hal Cruttenden said the research was probably on to something. ... "Comics say things that are taboo-breaking, that are on the edge, and quite often the best comedy comes from really uncomfortable stuff.

"So if it is delivered from a big-eyed, round-faced, slightly feminine guy it probably is easier for an audience to take."

The funniest thing about that story from the BBC's website is that I saw it on the same morning as this one, about two unlikely American comedians:

They're separated by more than 20 years, they come from opposing political parties, and one evicted the other from the White House. But Bill Clinton and George Bush act like a team, a pair of touring comedians with a well-honed act.

The two former presidents even have their entrance down pat, striding in with arms aloft, music pounding, lights flashing, the crowd standing and going wild. ...

One problem with retirement, Bush said, is that memories do not fail on certain topics. "After 14 years no one forgets if you throw up on the Japanese premier," he said. ...

Clinton played second banana after Bush's round of jokes.

"You've just witnessed George Bush's revenge for the 1992 campaign," Clinton said of the year he defeated Bush for the presidency. "I'm condemned for the rest of my life to be his straight man." ...

What's more, the 60-year-old Clinton told the crowd, Bush, at 82, is in better shape. "Make no mistake about it," said Clinton, who has undergone quadruple bypass surgery. "George Bush will speak at my funeral."

So which one has the "fat, girly face"?

Posted by LouSchuler at 07:57 AM | Comments (0)

November 10, 2006

Grunt If You're Horny!

Continuing with my Neanderthal obsession (see here and especially here), a new study reopens the debate over whether Brutus and Olive Oyl got their freak on.

Here's how the New York Times describes it:

In research being published online this week by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the scientists reported that matings between Neanderthals and modern humans presumably accounted for the presence of a variant of the gene that regulates brain size. ...

In previous research, Dr. Lahn and associates discovered that a gene for brain size called microcephalin underwent a significant change 37,000 years ago. Its modified variant, or allele, appeared to confer a fitness advantage on those who possessed it. It is now present in about 70 percent of the world’s population.

The new research focused on the two classes of alleles of the brain gene. One appeared to have emerged 1.1 million years ago in an archaic Homo lineage that led to Neanderthals and was separate from the immediate predecessors of modern humans. The 37,000-year date for the other variant immediately suggested a connection with Neanderthals.

Dr. Lahn said it did not necessarily show that interbreeding was widespread. It could have been a rare, perhaps even single, event.

Imagine: A guy who looks like this is walking along the road to extinction when he meets up with her. Nine months later, she gives birth to someone who grows up to look something like this. Their ancestors might look like this happy couple.

And just 37,000 years later, here we are.

Posted by LouSchuler at 08:40 AM | Comments (0)

October 31, 2006

Live Weak, Die Young

I don't often do this, but today I'm going to ask you to click this link before you read my blog post. Opening it in a new window would be ideal.

The story in the New York Times is about calorie restriction as the key to a long, presumably healthy life. But look at the picture of the guy on the left-hand edge of the web page. This is the caption:

Mike Linksvayer, 36, on a low-calorie diet for six years, is 6 feet and 135 pounds, and his blood pressure is 112 over 63.

If you just read that caption, you'd think, "Healthy guy." But if you're actually looking at the picture, you're thinking, "Holy shit! That guy looks like he's about to drop over dead!" You might guess that he has some kind of muscle-wasting disease. I know the angle of the photo isn't flattering to a tall, long-limbed man, but perhaps the fact he's sitting is appropriate. Honestly, he doesn't look strong enough to stand.

I focus on the photo, the very image of weakness and frailty, because it runs next to this text:

This approach, called calorie restriction, involves eating about 30 percent fewer calories than normal while still getting adequate amounts of vitamins, minerals and other nutrients. Aside from direct genetic manipulation, calorie restriction is the only strategy known to extend life consistently in a variety of animal species.

How this drastic diet affects the body has been the subject of intense research. Recently, the effort has begun to bear fruit, producing a steady stream of studies indicating that the rate of aging is plastic, not fixed, and that it can be manipulated.

In the last year, calorie-restricted diets have been shown in various animals to affect molecular pathways likely to be involved in the progression of Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, heart disease, Parkinson’s disease and cancer. Earlier this year, researchers studying dietary effects on humans went so far as to claim that calorie restriction may be more effective than exercise at preventing age-related diseases.

Really? Okay, let's check out this review paper published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition in September this year. The author is Robert Wolfe, Ph.D., a professor of biochemistry at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston and a longtime researcher of the role of protein in metabolism and health.

His paper is titled "The Underappreciated Role of Muscle in Health and Disease," and in it he offers a very different take on human longevity:

Whereas muscle mass plays a key role in recovery from critical illness or severe trauma, muscle strength and function is central to the recovery process. The extent and duration of the debilitation resulting from critical illness is dramatic; [less than] 50 percent of individuals employed before entering an intensive care unit return to work in the first year after discharge. Extensive losses of muscle mass, strength, and function during acute hospitalization causing sustained physical impairment were likely contributors to the prolonged recovery. If there is a preexisting deficiency of muscle mass before trauma, the acute loss of muscle mass and function may push an individual over a threshold that makes recovery of normal function unlikely to ever occur. For this reason, [more than] 50 percent of women older than 65 who break a hip in a fall never walk again.

The passage I bolded isn't subtle. If you have an accident or get sick with cancer or another devastating disease, the amount of muscle you have before the illness or injury could be the difference between life and death. Muscle is your body's personal flotation device in a sea of trauma.

After reading Dr. Wolfe's paper yesterday (which was sent to me by Rannoch Donald, our man in Scotland), I began to search through PubMed for papers on the link between strength and mortality. The more recent papers seem to show that muscle mass itself isn't necessarily correlated with longevity, but strength is. I can't say this for certain, but after reading Dr. Wolfe's paper, I'd guess that the reason there's a disconnect between muscle size and strength is because of obesity. Heavy people carry a lot of extra muscle tissue along with their fat, but it's not functional in the sense that it makes them stronger or healthier. It's just there to haul the fat from the fridge to the sofa.

But the combination of strength and functional muscle mass is important to survival. Strong people do live longer, and those with more functional muscle tissue are more likely to survive severe illness and trauma.

That's what science shows in humans. But there's another side, a perfectly legitimate question raised in animal studies: Will calorie restriction prevent the onset of traumatic diseases in the first place?

“In mice, calorie restriction doesn’t just extend life span,” said Leonard P. Guarente, professor of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “It mitigates many diseases of aging: cancer, cardiovascular disease, neurodegenerative disease. The gain is just enormous.”

In other words, if you never get cancer, then you don't need muscle mass to help you survive it. But just a couple of paragraphs later, another researcher notes that calorie-restricted monkeys do get cancer. They just get it less frequently. And they don't get lifestyle diseases like diabetes.

But we aren't mice or monkeys. We're surrounded by food and assaulted day and night by images of food. We have choices that animals in cages don't have to deal with. For us, there's really no evidence that living thin means living long, and to its credit, the Times article acknowledges this:

After analyzing decades of national mortality statistics, federal researchers reported last year that exceptional thinness, a logical consequence of calorie restriction, was associated with an increased risk of death. This controversial study did not attempt to assess the number of calories the subjects had been consuming, or the quality of their diets, which may have had an effect on mortality rates.

Or it may not. It could turn out that thinness itself -- a lack of muscle mass, probably accompanied by a lack of strength -- is a marker of poor survivability. There's just no margin for error. If anything goes wrong for the calorie-restricted individual, if he zigs when he should have zagged and gets clipped by a taxi, he's defenseless. And you can almost hear his relatives standing over his grave saying, "If only he'd eaten a few more steaks ..."

Posted by LouSchuler at 06:29 AM | Comments (3)

October 22, 2006

Lab Rat

I've written a lot about human metabolism over the years, particularly the biological forces and personal choices that make it speed up or slow down. That led me to studies from Eric Poehlman, which I may not have cited directly but usually at least considered before I completed whatever it was I was working on.

So when Poehlman was exposed as one of the most audacious frauds in U.S. academic history a year and a half ago, I was caught off guard, as I wrote here.

Now the New York Times Magazine has a long feature on the student who first exposed Poehlman.

It starts with lab technician Walter DeNiro's suspicions about data that mysteriously morphs from disproving one of Poehlman's theses to supporting it. Then he looks more deeply into the problem:

DeNino spent the next several evenings combing through hundreds of patients’ records in the lab and university hospital, trying to verify the data contained in Poehlman’s spreadsheets. Each night was worse than the one before. He discovered not only reversed data points, but also figures for measurements that had never been taken and even patients who appeared not to exist at all. In the mornings he would return to the lab and continue working as Poehlman’s technician, waiting for the right moment to confront the principal investigator.

The scientific process is meant to be self-correcting. Peer review of scientific journals and the ability of scientists to replicate one another’s results are supposed to weed out erroneous conclusions and preserve the integrity of the scientific record over time. But the Poehlman case shows how a committed cheater can elude detection for years by playing on the trust -- and the self-interest -- of his or her junior colleagues.

The principal investigator in a lab has the power to jump-start careers. By writing papers with graduate students and postdocs and using connections to help obtain fellowships and appointments, senior scientists can help their lab workers secure coveted tenure-track jobs. They can also do damage by withholding this support.

The entire story by Jeneen Interlandi is terrific, but for me this is the money passage:

The length of time that Poehlman perpetrated his fraud -- 10 years -- and its scope make his case unique, even among the most egregious examples of scientific misconduct. Some scientists believe that his ability to beat the system for so long had as much to do with the research topics he chose as with his aggressive tactics. His work was prominent, but none of his studies broke new scientific ground. (This may also be why no other scientists working in the field have retracted papers as a result of Poehlman’s fraud.) By testing undisputed assumptions on popular topics, Poehlman attracted enough attention to maintain his status but not enough to invite suspicion. Moreover, replicating his longitudinal data would be expensive and difficult to do.

“Eric excelled at telling us what we wanted to hear,” Matthews, Poehlman’s former colleague, told me. “He published results that confirmed our predisposed hypotheses.” Steven Heymsfield, an obesity researcher at Merck Pharmaceuticals in New Jersey, echoed Matthews’s sentiments and added that Poehlman’s success owed more to his business sense and charisma than to his aptitude as a scientist.

“In effect, he was a successful entrepreneur and not a brilliant thinker with revolutionary ideas,” Heymsfield wrote me via e-mail. “But deans love people who bring in money and recognition to universities, so there is Eric.”

If I were to create a unified theory of fraud, that would be it -- no matter if it's science, politics, or journalism, you get away with it by telling people what they want to hear. You do it with style, you alternately charm and bully the people around you, and you do it so convincingly that eventually you fool yourself into believing your own B.S.

That's certainly how the biggest journalistic frauds have gotten away with what they did. Stephen Glass, for example, wrote about a convention of young Republicans in which more than 3,000 Monica Lewinsky-related items were for sale, and computer hackers who become so famous they have agents. Those things weren't true, but they were based on ideas most of us were willing to believe were true.

And in politics ... well, no one wants me to go there. But I will note another reference from the New York Times Magazine, which I blogged about here. It was a story by Matt Bai on why Hollywood liberals were so out of step with East Coast liberals in the run-up to the Iraq war. I quoted this passage:

Hollywood quickly grasped realities about the war that Washington, for all its gravity and accumulated sagacity, did not. From the moment the administration began making its case for invasion in the summer of 2002, most partisans and journalists in Washington found it almost inconceivable, even during the period before a fiercely contested midterm election, that the intelligence used to justify the war might simply be invented. This explains, in large part, why a lot of Congressional Democrats with years of foreign policy experience supported the invasion. To them, the notion that an American secretary of state -- let alone the venerable Colin Powell -- would come before the United Nations Security Council and level fabricated charges, even unwittingly, seemed incredible and even paranoid.

To Hollywood, however, such a story not only seemed credible but also entirely likely. These are people, after all, who flourish in a world of make-believe, who understand the raw persuasive power of narrative arc, moral dilemma and dramatic revelation. They were willing to accept -- in fact, they recognized almost viscerally -- that the president's story about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction was too richly timed and too tightly wrapped, and they understood that once a storyteller began to tinker with facts, there was no end to the scenarios he might invent that he might dubiously claim to be "based on a true story." Hollywood was so out of touch with what seemed like reality that it was, in fact, entirely in touch with the new political ethos of Washington, where facts are elasticized in pursuit of box-office approbation.

That's how you recognize fraud of any kind: When facts are too perfectly aligned with the intended audience's preconceived notions, you have to at least suspect something's up. And it's usually people who're out of the loop who discover it. Stephen Glass wasn't brought down by his colleagues at The New Republic; it was rival journalists at Forbes Digital Tool, guys who specialized in reporting on technology, who first realized he'd made up the story about the hackers.

Similarly, it was a group of rival image-makers in Hollywood who were among the first to recognize that the image-makers in Washington were creating fiction and labeling it as truth.

My thesis isn't perfect; Poehlman wasn't brought down by rival researchers, but by one of his own assistants, a guy who genuinely liked and was liked by his mentor.

But if I just fudge a few details, and turn the whistleblower into someone who was jealous of Poehlman's success, it'll fit right into my preconceived notion of how fraud is exposed. And chances are I'd get away with it, since it's what we all want to believe in the first place.

Posted by LouSchuler at 10:17 AM | Comments (0)

October 18, 2006

I'm Okay, You're the Genetic Equivalent of an Edsel

This reads like the plot of a sci-fi novel, but I have to assume the guy is serious:

Social division might split humans into two sub-species 100,000 years from now, an evolution expert has claimed. The descendants of the genetic upper class would be tall, slim, healthy, attractive, intelligent, and creative.

They would be a far cry from the "underclass" humans, who will have evolved into dim-witted, ugly, squat, goblin-like creatures.

The forecast was made by Dr. Oliver Curry, who spent two months investigating the ascent and descent of man over the next 100 millennia.

He said, within a thousand years, humans will evolve into coffee-coloured giants between 6 and 7 feet tall. But Dr. Curry said centuries of sexual selection -- being choosy about one's partner -- was likely to create more and more genetic inequality. The logical outcome would be two sub-species, "gracile" and "robust" humans.

Dr. Curry said: "Things could get ugly, with the possible emergence of genetic 'haves' and 'have-nots'."

I'm not sure who Dr. Curry is (and I suspect this prediction says more about his personal issues than it does about the future of our species), but he makes Kurt Vonnegut look like an optimist. At least in Galapagos, the remaining humans all evolved into something else together -- the same something else.

Posted by LouSchuler at 02:41 PM | Comments (0)

October 06, 2006

Weird Science

Before I get into the bit about the scientist who cured hiccups with a finger in the rectum, I want to pause to point out my favorite news from the frontiers of scientific observation:

Julia R. Fox, assistant professor of telecommunications at Indiana University isn't joking when she says [The Daily Show with Jon Stewart], which last week featured Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf as a guest, is just as substantive as network coverage.

While much has been written in the media about The Daily Show's impact, Fox's study is the first scholarly effort to systematically examine how the comedy program compares to traditional television news as sources of political information.

The study, "No Joke: A Comparison of Substance in The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and Broadcast Network Television Coverage of the 2004 Presidential Election Campaign," will be published next summer by the Journal of Broadcast and Electronic Media, published by the Broadcast Education Association.

"It is clearly a humor show, first and foremost," Fox said of Stewart's program. "But there is some substance on there, and in some cases, like John Edwards announcing his candidacy, the news is made on the show. You have real newsmakers coming on, and yes, sometimes the banter and questions get a little silly, but there is also substantive dialogue going on ... It's a legitimate source of news."

Which bring me to the Ig Nobel awards, given out at Harvard by real Nobel Prize winners to scientists who dared to push the boundaries of science.

One of this year's recipients is Howard Stapleton, inventor of teenager repellent:

His device, called the Mosquito, emits a high-frequency, siren-like noise that is painful to the ears of teens and those in their early 20s, but inaudible to adults.

The invention grew out of his 15-year-old daughter's trip to the local store last year to buy milk. She came back empty-handed, having been intimidated by a group of teenage boys loitering outside the store.

Stapleton, who has sold and installed security systems for more than two decades, thought back to when he was 12 years old and he visited his father at work.

"I walked into this room with six people doing ultrasonic welding, and immediately ran right back out again the noise was so painful," Stapleton said. "I asked an adult, 'What's that noise.' And he said, 'What noise?'"

Stapleton's company, Compound Security Systems of Merthyr Tydfil, Wales, has sold hundreds of the units to retailers, local governments, police departments and homeowners all over the United Kingdom. The company is shipping its first Mosquito units for sale in the United States next week.

But that doesn't compare to the guy who figured out the ultimate cure for hiccups:

Dr. Francis Fesmire said he wasn't sure whether he was honored or embarrassed when he learned he'd won an Ig Nobel for his paper called -- ahem -- "Termination of Intractable Hiccups with Digital Rectal Massage."

"I'm a serious guy, and something I wrote in 1987 is coming back to haunt me," said Fesmire, an emergency physician and director of the emergency heart center at Erlanger Medical Center in Chattanooga, Tenn.

Fesmire, who stresses he is a real doctor who "someday wishes to be truly be remembered for my cardiac research," tried the technique for the first and last time nearly 20 years ago.

He knew that the technique could be used to slow a rapid heartbeat by stimulating the vagus nerve. The same nerve, when stimulated, can stop hiccups.

"I saw this patient who couldn't stop his hiccups, I tried these other maneuvers, and then I stuck my finger in his bottom," Fesmire said, emphasizing that it was the treatment of last resort. "Will I ever do it again? No!"

One small step for [a] man ...

Posted by LouSchuler at 06:48 AM | Comments (0)

September 06, 2006

Bass Ackwards

The bass swimming near our nation's capital are, increasingly, showing signs of gender confusion:

Abnormally developed fish, possessing both male and female characteristics, have been discovered in the Potomac River in the District and in tributaries across the region, federal scientists say -- raising alarms that the river is tainted by pollution that drives hormone systems haywire.

The fish, smallmouth and largemouth bass, are naturally males but for some reason are developing immature eggs inside their sex organs. Their discovery at such widely spread sites, including one just upstream from the Woodrow Wilson Bridge, seems to show that the Potomac's problem with "intersex" fish extends far beyond the West Virginia stream where they were first found in 2003.

The cause of the abnormalities is unknown, but scientists suspect a class of waterborne contaminants that can confuse animals' growth and reproductive systems. These pollutants are poorly understood, however, leaving many observers with questions about what the problems in fish mean for the Potomac and the millions of people who take their tap water from it.

It may be part of a larger, global problem:

Pollutants that mimic hormones have emerged as a worldwide concern in the past decade, blamed for problems in animals as diverse as alligators, minnows and polar bears. Although scientists say the research is in its infancy, they have identified a large array of pollutants that might affect animals, including human estrogen from processed sewage, animal estrogen from farm manure, some pesticides and additives to soap.

Is there danger to humans? This science is way over my head, and this paper may be a bit outdated (it was published in 2001), but here's something to consider:

Changes in the sexual morphology of fish exposed to sewage effluent have led some scientists to conjecture that humans also live in a "sea of estrogens" and that the apparent increases in the incidence of certain reproductive conditions may be due to exposure to chemicals in the environment. The so called Sharpe-Skakkebaek hypothesis offered a possible common cause and toxicological mechanism for abnormalities in men and boys -- that is, increased exposure to estrogen in utero may interfere with the multiplication of fetal Sertoli cells, resulting in hormonally mediated developmental effects and, after puberty, reduced quality of semen.

Someone save our precious bodily fluids!

Posted by LouSchuler at 08:08 AM | Comments (0)

July 25, 2006

Domesticated Bliss

I've written before about my fascination with how the human species changed the during the Neolithic period, starting around 10,000 B.C. That's when humans invented farming, and started building permanent settlements. With settlements came war, and with war came bigger settlements, and with bigger settlements came the need for a more or less permanent class of warriors to defend them.

(I can't prove this, of course, but I'd suspect that somewhere in that continuum exercise was invented, as a way to train soldiers who didn't have other jobs involving physical labor.)

At the same time humans began farming, they started domesticating animals, selectively breeding the wildness out of them.

How, exactly, did that work?

According to this fascinating New York Times piece by Nicholas Wade, Russian scientists, way back in 1959, set out to see for themselves:

Belyaev decided to study the genetics of domestication, a problem to which Darwin gave deep attention. Domesticated animals differ in many ways from their wild counterparts, and it has never been clear just which qualities were selected for by the Neolithic farmers who developed most major farm species some 10,000 years ago.

Belyaev’s hypothesis was that all domesticated species had been selected for a single criterion: tameness. This quality, in his view, had dragged along with it most of the other features that distinguish domestic animals from their wild forebears, like droopy ears, patches of white in the fur and changes in skull shape.

Belyaev chose to test his theory on the silver fox, a variant of the common red fox, because it is a social animal and is related to the dog. Though fur farmers had kept silver foxes for about 50 years, the foxes remained quite wild. Belyaev began his experiment in 1959 with 130 farm-bred silver foxes, using their tolerance of human contact as the sole criterion for choosing the parents of the next generation.

Sure enough, within a few decades, all the physiological hallmarks of domestication (floppy ears, etc.) emerged in the increasingly tame foxes, even though there was no attempt to select for those traits. They just came along with tameness.

All of which is interesting on its own, but the whole time I was reading about foxes, I was thinking about humans. Is this how we selected traits in our own species?

To my surprise and delight, the story goes there:

Richard Wrangham, a primatologist at Harvard, has proposed that people are a domesticated form of ape, the domestication having been self-administered as human societies penalized or ostracized individuals who were too aggressive.

Dr. Paabo said that if Mr. Albert identified the genes responsible for domestication in rats, “we would also look at those genes in humans and apes to see if they might be involved in human evolution.”

Human self-domestication, if it occurred, would probably not have exactly the same genetic basis as tameness in animals. But Mr. Albert said that if he could pinpoint the genetic difference between the tame and ferocious rats, he would compare the chimp genome and the human genome to see if they showed a similar difference.

The really fun experiment would be to see if it's possible to reverse-engineer humans, to make them progressively wilder generation after generation. Would they turn out any worse than this?

Posted by LouSchuler at 09:19 AM | Comments (2)

July 21, 2006

"My! What a Sloping Forehead You Have!"

Scientists in Germany and the U.S. have set off on an ambitious project to recreate the Neanderthal genome:

Long a forlorn hope, the sequencing, or decoding, of Neanderthal DNA suddenly seems possible because of a combination of analytic work on ancient DNA by Svante Paabo, of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and a new method of DNA sequencing developed by a Connecticut company, 454 Life Sciences.

The initial genome to be decoded comes from 45,000-year-old Neanderthal bones found in Croatia, though bones from other sites may be analyzed later. Because the genome must be kept in constant repair and starts to break up immediately after the death of the cell, the material surviving in Neanderthal bones exists in tiny fragments 100 or so DNA units in length. As it happens, this is just the length that works best with the 454 machine, which is also able to decode vast amounts of DNA at low cost.

Here's what the scientists hope to learn:

One of the most important results that researchers are hoping for is to discover, from a three-way comparison of chimp, human and Neanderthal DNA, which genes have made humans human. The chimp and human genomes differ at just 1 percent of the sites on their DNA. At this 1 percent, Neanderthals resemble humans at 96 percent of the sites, to judge from the preliminary work, and chimps at 4 percent. Analysis of these DNA sites, at which humans differ from the two other species, will help understand the evolution of specifically human traits “and perhaps even aspects of cognitive function,” Dr. Paabo said.

The degree of resemblance between humans and Neanderthals is fiercely debated by archaeologists, and even issues like whether Neanderthals had language have not been resolved. Dr. Paabo believes that genetic analysis is the best hope of doing so. He has paid particular attention to a gene known as FOXP2, which from its mutated forms in people seems to be involved in several advanced aspects of language.

A longstanding dispute among archaeologists is whether the modern humans who first entered Europe 45,000 years ago, ultimately from Africa, interbred with the Neanderthals or forced them into extinction. Interbreeding could have been genetically advantageous to the incoming humans, says Bruce Lahn, a geneticist at the University of Chicago, because the Neanderthals were well adapted to the cold European climate -- the last ice age had another 35,000 years to run -- and to local diseases.

Evidence from the human genome suggests some interbreeding with an archaic species, Dr. Lahn said, which could have been Neanderthals or other early humans.

However, there's a controversy here, and it's enough to make the current blathering over stem cells look like an argument over "less filling" or "tastes great":

If Dr. Paabo and 454 Life Sciences should succeed in reconstructing the entire Neanderthal genome, it might in theory be possible to bring the species back from extinction by inserting the Neanderthal genome into a human egg and having volunteers bear Neanderthal infants. This might be the best possible way of finding out what each Neanderthal gene does, but there would be daunting ethical problems in bringing a Neanderthal child into the world again.

Dr. Paabo said that he could not even imagine how such a project could be accomplished and that in any case ethical concerns “would totally preclude such an experiment.”

Dr. Lahn described the idea as “certainly possible but futuristic.”

The most serious technical problem would be creating functional chromosomes from Neanderthal DNA. But ethical questions may be less surmountable. “My first consideration would be for a child born alone in the world with no relatives,” said Ronald M. Green, an ethicist at Dartmouth College. The risk would be greater if, following the plot line of Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein,” a mate were created as a companion for the lonely Neanderthal. “This was a species we competed with,” Dr. Green said. “We would not want to recreate a situation of two competing advanced hominid species.”

But if we did manage to bring Neanderthals back, there'd be no shortage of Division I football coaches willing to be the first to break the species barrier. Could you imagine one of these guys playing linebacker for your team?

Posted by LouSchuler at 08:22 AM | Comments (0)

June 12, 2006

Dying for Dollars

I've written about the body-parts trade before, but this Associated Press story offers the most complete treatment of its economics that I've seen so far:

Like a gallon of gasoline, the price of a human leg is all about supply and demand. And it's a seller's market. "There's a lot of money to be made on corpses," said Joshua Slocum, executive director of the nonprofit Funeral Consumers Alliance.

Over the past two decades, the tissue industry has exploded into a billion-dollar business, creating a huge demand for ligaments, tendons, bones and other valuable body parts.

The money to be made is pretty sweet:

Money is being made hand (which goes for $350 to $850) over foot ($200 to $400 each), according to the new book Body Brokers, by Annie Cheney.

Executives are earning generous salaries, and the companies for which they work are generating huge revenues thanks to advances in modern medicine that can transform tissue into a variety of implants such as a skin graft or bone chip.

But this is an industry unlike others, comprised of a hodgepodge of players, all of them angling to get tissue from the 20,000 people who donate their bodies a year.

On one side of the industry sits for-profit companies that process the tissue. On the other, competing nonprofits such as tissue banks that make up the backbone of the industry.

Tutogen Medical Inc., CryoLife Inc., LifeCell Corp., Regeneration Technologies Inc. and Osteotech Inc. are among a handful of for-profit companies that dominate the tissue landscape and are publicly traded.

The companies generated more than $363 million in revenues in 2005, and have vast tissue-bank networks that provide cadaver tissue to feed their booming businesses.

Revenues for LifeCell, for instance, grew 55 percent in 2005. And in the first financial quarter of 2006, earnings more than doubled for LifeCell, a New Jersey company that markets a popular product called AlloDerm for plastic reconstructive, general surgical and burn applications.

Given how much money is being made, doesn't it make sense for people to start specifying in their wills that they want their bodies sold to the highest bidder? My current will calls for me to be cremated, but, honestly, why shouldn't I change it to give my family some extra cash after I'm gone?

I don't know what legal issues are involved, but I'd think that a will mandating a body-part auction could put in a clause forbidding any illegal transactions, while including the mandate to be as aggressive as possible in marketing my pounds of flesh at the time of my death.

Yes, I'm being facetious, kinda-sorta. My driver's license classifies me as an organ donor, and I'm all in favor of committing that one last act of altruism as I shed my mortal coil. If my very well-maintained heart or liver or kidneys can save a life or two once I have no further use for them, groovy.

But what about my equally well-maintained muscles and ligaments and bones and skin? If the chances are good that someone's going to steal them anyway, and sell them at market rates, why shouldn't my wife and kids get their piece of the action?

In other words, forget "ashes to ashes"; when I go, I want my heirs to think "cash up front."

All of which would give a whole new meaning to the idea of having skin in the game.

Posted by LouSchuler at 08:50 AM | Comments (0)

May 26, 2006

When the Pot Doesn't Match the Kettle

If smoking tobacco causes cancer, then smoking marijuana should cause cancer, too? Right? But what seems logical doesn't appear to be true:

The largest study of its kind has unexpectedly concluded that smoking marijuana, even regularly and heavily, does not lead to lung cancer.

The new findings "were against our expectations," said Donald Tashkin of the University of California at Los Angeles, a pulmonologist who has studied marijuana for 30 years.

"We hypothesized that there would be a positive association between marijuana use and lung cancer, and that the association would be more positive with heavier use," he said. "What we found instead was no association at all, and even a suggestion of some protective effect."

Federal health and drug enforcement officials have widely used Tashkin's previous work on marijuana to make the case that the drug is dangerous. Tashkin said that while he still believes marijuana is potentially harmful, its cancer-causing effects appear to be of less concern than previously thought.

Earlier work established that marijuana does contain cancer-causing chemicals as potentially harmful as those in tobacco, he said. However, marijuana also contains the chemical THC, which he said may kill aging cells and keep them from becoming cancerous.

I'll take the "suggestion of some protective effect" with a grain of salt; if you've ever met a long-term doper, the idea that the chronic is protecting him from anything other than coherence is laughable.

But still: Now that a big, federally funded study has found that the biggest fear of marijuana is overblown, what's the argument for keeping it illegal?

Here's something else from the study that falls into the "not exactly news" category:

While no association between marijuana smoking and cancer was found, the study findings, presented to the American Thoracic Society International Conference this week, did find a 20-fold increase in lung cancer among people who smoked two or more packs of cigarettes a day.

Finally, a note on methodology:

The study was limited to people younger than 60 because those older than that were generally not exposed to marijuana in their youth, when it is most often tried.

I don't believe I know anyone over 60 who smokes dope. Do you? I guess because I quit smoking it when I was 20 or 21, I've always thought of it as a young person's drug, something you outgrow when you can afford decent wine.

Posted by LouSchuler at 07:21 AM | Comments (1)

May 19, 2006

Shrinkage!

New year, new theory about the bones of little people discovered on the Indonesian island of Flores.

In 2004, we learned of the discovery of the bones, and the startling hypothesis that the bones were remains of a previously undiscovered human species, called Homo floresiensis.

In 2005, we learned of a counter-hypothesis, suggesting that the bones were merely Homo sapiens who'd grown steadily smaller over many generations because they were on an island with limited resources.

Now, in 2006, comes a third hypothesis:

Not all scientists agree that the 18,000-year-old "little people" fossils found on the Indonesian island of Flores should be designated an extinct human-related species. ...

In today's issue of the journal Science, researchers led by Robert D. Martin of the Field Museum in Chicago present evidence they say supports their main argument, that the skull in question is not that of a newfound extinct species, but of a modern Homo sapiens afflicted with microcephaly, a genetic disorder characterized by a smaller than normal brain and head size.

The researchers said the evidence used in previous studies to rule out microcephaly was flawed. They noted that the analysis was primarily based on comparisons with a brain cast made from a poorly preserved skull of a 10-year-old who was microcephalic, not one from an adult.

Telling scientists they need to have their heads examined -- or, in this case, have the skull they discovered re-examined -- is pretty harsh. So, of course, there's a furious rebuttal from Dean Falk, an anthropologist at Florida State University:

"We stand by our original interpretation," she said yesterday by telephone.

Snap!

It's going to take those microcephaly-mongers a while to recover from that one.

Ahead of the game

On another front in the anthropology wars comes this intriguing report:

They don't bring along an umbrella or sunglasses that might be needed later, but researchers say apes, like people, can plan ahead.

Both orangutans and bonobos were able to figure out which tool would work in an effort to retrieve grapes, and were able to remember to bring that tool along hours later, researchers report in Friday's issue of the journal Science.

In a series of laboratory tests the apes were shown the tools and grapes, allowed to retrieve grapes, and then removed from the area where the treats were available.

They were allowed back from one to 14 hours later and most were able to bring along the correct tool to get the treats, report Nicholas J. Mulcahy and Josep Call of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

The researchers said the finding suggests that planning ahead arose at least 14 million years ago, when the last common ancestor of bonobos, orangutans and humans lived.

While the findings do not necessarily imply that the apes are able to anticipate a future state of mind, they are nonetheless groundbreaking, Thomas Suddendorf of the University of Queensland in Australia said in a commentary.

"By identifying what capacities our closest living relatives share with us, we can get a glimpse at our evolutionary past," Suddendorf said.

"Share with us"? Since when has it been determined that humans are capable of planning ahead?

(Thanks to Rannoch Donald, Male Pattern Fitness Scotland Bureau Chief, for sending along the ape story; he also included this link to a report from two years ago, showing another way in which our furry ancestors seem to be more advanced than us.)

UPDATE:

The Washington Post has a much better report on the Hobbit-skull controversy than the one I used above, which is from the New York Times. First, I like this explanation of the controversy:

A research team led by primatologist Robert D. Martin, provost of Chicago's Field Museum, argues that no human ancestor could reach a weight of 64 pounds with a brain size of only 23.2 cubic inches and be able to make sophisticated tools such as those found with the Hobbit remains.

The Martin team said the Hobbit must have been a modern human with microcephaly -- a condition, usually genetic, in which the brain fails to grow to normal size. "This brain is too small for any explanation besides pathology," Martin said in a telephone interview.

Another angle: There were other bones discovered besides the skull. So what do they show?

Rick Potts, head of the Smithsonian Institution's Human Origins Program and an early skeptic, said even newer research, not formally reported, showed in late 2004 that the Hobbit's leg bone, foot and shoulder joint were "quite different from modern humans."

"Martin did not take into account other parts of the skeleton," Potts said. "This is something off the chart as far as being a modern human, or it's a modern human the likes of which we have never seen before. At this point, it's still probably best recognized as a new species. I would say Homo florensiensis still holds."

That seems to flesh out the argument beyond "less filling!" vs. "tastes great!"

Posted by LouSchuler at 07:34 AM | Comments (0)

May 18, 2006

I'll Be a Monkey's Nephew

When humans and chimps split off into separate species, the divorce was messy, with occasional bouts of make-up sex messing up the DNA forever:

"For the first time we're able to see the details written out in the DNA," said Eric Lander, founding director of the Broad Institute. "What they tell us at the least is that the human-chimp speciation was very unusual."

The researchers hypothesize that an ancestral ape species split into two isolated populations about 10 million years ago, then got back together after a few thousand millennia. At that time the two groups, though somewhat genetically different, would have mated to form a third, hybrid population. That population could have interbred with one or both of its parent populations. Then, at some point after 6.3 million years ago, two distinct lines arose.

Some experts in human evolution are skeptical of that precise scenario, but nevertheless impressed with the study.

"It's a totally cool and extremely clever analysis," said Daniel Lieberman, a professor of biological anthropology at Harvard. "My problem is imagining what it would be like to have a bipedal hominid and a chimpanzee viewing each other as appropriate mates, not to put it too crudely."

Come on, Dr. Lieberman, let's put it crudely: We're talking hot monkey love here. Simian seduction. Lemur lust. Gorilla gropes. Hominid hanky-panky.

Of course, if you take a look at the fossil in question, it is kind of hard to see the potential attraction. So what we ought to reconsider is the origin of beer. The earliest written evidence we have of brewing dates just to 7,000 B.C. But mark my words: If, millions of years ago, our ancestors were chasing after monkey tail (or, worse, it was the other way around), there had to have been some beer involved.

Posted by LouSchuler at 09:39 AM | Comments (0)

April 06, 2006

Evolutionary Dentistry

Two recent science stories caught me by surprise. The first is a fish tale:

Scientists have discovered fossils of a 375 million-year-old fish, a large scaly creature not seen before, that they say is a long-sought "missing link" in the evolution of some fishes from water to a life walking on four limbs on land. ...

Several well-preserved skeletons of the fossil fish were uncovered in sediments of former stream beds in the Canadian Arctic, 600 miles from the North Pole, it is being reported on Thursday in the journal Nature. The skeletons have the fins and scales and other attributes of a giant fish, four to nine feet long.

But on closer examination, scientists found telling anatomical traits of a transitional creature, a fish that is still a fish but exhibiting changes that anticipate the emergence of land animals -- a predecessor thus of amphibians, reptiles and dinosaurs, mammals and eventually humans.

The scientists described evidence in the forward fins of limbs in the making. There are the beginnings of digits, proto-wrists, elbows and shoulders. The fish also had a flat skull resembling a crocodile's, a neck, ribs and other parts that were similar to four-legged land animals known as tetrapods.

The discovering scientists called the fossils the most compelling examples yet of an animal that was at the cusp of the fish-tetrapod transition. The fish has been named Tiktaalik roseae, at the suggestion of elders of Canada's Nunavut Territory. Tiktaalik (pronounced tic-TAH-lick) means "large shallow water fish."

Definitely click through on the link and look at the recreation of the creature. That is one ugly sumbitch, like something out of a sci-fi/horror movie.

The second, sent by my friend John Williams, adds a new chapter to the history of one of our oldest professions:

Proving prehistoric man's ingenuity and ability to withstand and inflict excruciating pain, researchers have found that dental drilling dates back 9,000 years.

Primitive dentists drilled nearly perfect holes into live but undoubtedly unhappy patients between 5500 B.C. and 7000 B.C., an article in Thursday's journal Nature reports. Researchers carbon-dated at least nine skulls with 11 drill holes found in a Pakistan graveyard.

That means dentistry is at least 4,000 years older than first thought -- and far older than the useful invention of anesthesia.

This was no mere tooth tinkering. The drilled teeth found in the graveyard were hard-to-reach molars. And in at least one instance, the ancient dentist managed to drill a hole in the inside back end of a tooth, boring out toward the front of the mouth.

The holes went as deep as one-seventh of an inch (3.5 millimeters).

"The holes were so perfect, so nice," said study co-author David Frayer, an anthropology professor at the University of Kansas. "I showed the pictures to my dentist and he thought they were amazing holes."

Yes, he did say "amazing holes."

Posted by LouSchuler at 06:54 AM | Comments (0)

March 27, 2006

Pork: The Other Omega-3

I didn't plan it this way, but it looks like we can continue Friday's discussion about fish and fish oil.

We know that grass-fed or free-range livestock and poultry have much better fat profiles than corn-fed animals. That is, they have more omega-3 polyunsaturated fat -- the healthy fat found in fish and fish oil -- and less saturated fat. The cheese made from the milk of pasture-raised cows has even been shown to be healthier than that of dairy cows fed with grain.

The problem is that modern animal farming is based on the factory model. We can't just turn all the animals loose in a pasture. And getting grass-fed meat through the mail is pretty damned expensive.

But now there's a new hope for a steady supply of omega-3-rich meat:

A group of university researchers said yesterday that they had created what sounds like a nutritional holy grail: cloned pigs that make their own omega-3 fatty acids, potentially leading to bacon and pork chops that might help your heart. ...

Pigs with their own omega-3 fatty acids exist in nature, notably a Spanish breed called Ibérico. But Dr. Jing X. Kang, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and the lead author of the new paper, said pigs were only the beginning, adding that he was also developing cows that made omega-3's in their milk and chickens that had the fatty acids in their eggs.

Of course, there are many reasons why the effort might never result in food on your table. The science is still in its infancy, and the politics of genetically modified food is intense, and rightly so. But even if it all worked out -- if the cloned animals are healthy, the meat they produce is indeed rich in good fats, and the public-health professionals reach some sort of consensus on GM food -- we still don't know if it'll improve anyone's health:

For those who do not object to genetically modified or cloned animals, the question is whether eating such altered foods will make a difference in health. And on that, "all bets are off," said Dr. Lichtenstein of Tufts.

Many questions remain, she said: How important are omega-3 fatty acids to human health? Would getting the fatty acids in meat be the same as getting them in fish? And is it really such a good idea to put omega-3's into foods like pork that contain saturated fats and cholesterol, which could increase risk of heart disease?

Okay, so we have a few wrinkles to iron out. But still: Something exciting and beneficial could emerge from all this, and that's good enough for now.

Posted by LouSchuler at 07:59 AM | Comments (0)

February 26, 2006

When Hairy Met Sally

Just about a year ago, I wrote about scientific speculation regarding the possibility that humans and neanderthals did the paleo polka.

Since then, carbon dating has been recalibrated, and scientists now think that modern humans and our muscular cousins probably spent less time together than previously assumed:

The old radiocarbon calculation is now known to be off by as much as several thousand years, the new research shows. That means that modern Homo sapiens barged into Europe 46,000 years ago, 3,000 years earlier than once estimated. But the radiocarbon dating under the new calculation also shows that their takeover of the continent was more rapid, their coexistence with the native Neanderthals much briefer.

The revised dates reveal an overlap between the species not of 10,000 or more years, as previously thought, but of only 2,000 to 4,000 in many places, perhaps 6,000 in others. The shorter overlap suggests that modern humans held a decisive advantage over Neanderthals after their arrival from Africa. Was that advantage cognitive, technological or demographic? Their personal ornaments and cave art, now seen to have emerged much earlier, are strong evidence for an emergence of complex symbolic behavior among the modern newcomers, a marked advance in their intelligence.

However, writes John Noble Wilford in today's New York Times, all it would've taken is one night of Tarzan-on-Jane action (or, to be realistic, one night of Neandergirl working out her carnal curiosity with Chad) to produce an interspecies love child.

But did it happen?

"Since these two species may have been able to interbreed, as many closely related mammal species can," Dr. Harvati said, "a restricted coexistence interval may be easier to reconcile with the observed lack of Neanderthal genetic contribution to the modern human gene pool and with the paucity of convincing fossil evidence for hybridization."

Sounds like Dr. Havarti has never been to a Vin Diesel film festival.

Posted by LouSchuler at 06:06 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

February 06, 2006

This Is Your Brain on Advertising

As a follow-up to this morning's post about Super Bowl ads, John Williams sent this:

The idea was to do brain imaging of Super Bowl ads, and to do it the very same night the ads were shown for the first time. ...

The participating subjects were interviewed after the experiment, to test whether the brain data collected in the scanner matched what the subjects thought they liked or disliked. ...

Who won the Super Bowl ads competition? If a good indicator of a successful ad is activity in brain areas concerned with reward and empathy, two winners seem to be the "I am going to Disney" ad and the Bud "office" ad.

In contrast, two big floppers seem to be the Bud "secret fridge" ad and the Aleve ad. What is quite surprising, is the strong disconnect that can be seen between what people say and what their brain activity seem to suggest. In some cases, people singled out ads that elicited very little brain responses in emotional, reward-related, and empathy-related areas.

Among the ads that seem relatively successful, I want to single out the Michelob ad. Above is a picture showing the brain activation associated with the ad. What is interesting is the strong response -- indicated by the arrow -- in "mirror neuron" areas, premotor areas active when you make an action and when you see somebody else making the same action. The activity in these areas may represent some form of empathic response. Or, given that these areas are also premotor areas for mouth movements, it may represent the simulated action of drinking a beer elicited in viewers by the ad. Whatever it is, it seems a good brain response to the ad.

For the record, I also thought the Aleve ad sucked, and laughed out loud at the Michelob Amber Bock ad, in which a guy flattens an attractive woman in a touch-football game in one scene, then gets flattened by her in a bar in the next.

Disney World? I don't need an MRI to know the parts of my brain that handle fear were lighting up like pinball machines. After the commercial ran, my older daughter turned to me and said, "Daddy, are we ever going to go to Disney World?"

She might as well have added, "... or will we always be losers like we are now?"

Posted by LouSchuler at 10:51 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 25, 2006

Too Tough to Die

If you've ever wondered why men are naturally ornery and combative, this explains it:

When times are tough, women tend naturally to abort a higher percentage of male fetuses. Researchers call it culling, but they don't know why it occurs.

This much is known: During times of social or economic stress, a woman's liver tends produces more of a hormone called cortisol that proves so damaging to male fetuses they actually kick out in response to it.

Female fetuses, more vital on the whole, seem relatively unaffected by the cortisol. One theory states that damage to male fetuses is a side effect of this hormonal stress response.

But in a new study, researchers provide evidence for the other theory, that the body is purposely culling the males by pumping out cortisol in an effort to get rid of a child-to-be that is less likely to survive the presumably difficult situation outside the womb.

The key to the research is this: Male embryos and fetuses are known to be weaker. So trying to bring a boy into this world under hardship would be disadvantageous, in terms of survival of the fittest, compared to having a girl.

Some of the headlines I've seen seem to be spinning this as a "men are the weaker sex (ha ha!)" angle. But, really, it seems the study is showing that in tough times, men are naturally selected to be warriors. Women aren't. The men who are least likely to survive a long march while carrying sharp objects don't even make it out of the womb.

The study found something else that was surprising:

Those born during bad economic times and other periods of high stress -- male or female -- actually had longer life spans, "suggesting the weaker among them were removed" in the fetal stage, Catalano explained in a telephone interview.

And since more of the males would naturally have been week, slamming them with the hormone would be a biologically beneficial way of quickly preparing the mother for another pregnancy instead of possibly wasting time on a birth that would not produce an ideally healthy child.

For years, scientists have debated whether the decline in male birth rates compared to females during tough times was a byproduct of how a woman's body reacts to stress, or if the stress reaction evolved specifically for the purpose of culling males by changing the standard for survival in the womb.

Catalano said the new results -- the first to look at life span of those who were not culled -- suggest the hormonal reaction to stress was retained by women specifically because it increases the chances their genes will be passed on to subsequent generations.

And the genes that get passed on are the ornery ones.

Are you lookin' at me?

Posted by LouSchuler at 08:39 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 19, 2006

Make the Bad Man Pay

A new study suggests that men like to see cheaters suffer, but women don't:

The scientists scanned the brains of 16 men and 16 women after the volunteers played a game with what they thought were other volunteers, but who in fact were actors. The actors either played the game fairly or obviously cheated.

During the brain scans, each volunteer watched as the hands of a "fair" player and a cheater received a mild electrical shock. When it came to the fair-player, both men's and women's brains showed activation in pain-related areas, indicating that they empathized with that player's pain.

But for the cheater, while the women's brains still showed a response, men's brains showed virtually no specific reaction. Also, in another brain area associated with feelings of reward, men's brains showed a greater average response to the cheater's shock than to the fair player's shock, while women's brains did not.

A questionnaire revealed that the men expressed a stronger desire than women did for revenge against the cheater. The more a man said he wanted revenge, the higher his jump in the brain's reward area when the cheater got a shock. No such correlation showed up in women.

So men are hard-wired to want payback. And in the absence of electrodes, this site offers a few helpful ideas.

(Thanks to John Williams for the tip.)

Posted by LouSchuler at 08:47 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 18, 2006

Royal Flush

I spent a big chunk of my morning yesterday browsing through Edge, a site that solicits scientists to submit their "dangerous idea." Here's the come-on:

The history of science is replete with discoveries that were considered socially, morally, or emotionally dangerous in their time; the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions are the most obvious. What is your dangerous idea? An idea you think about (not necessarily one you originated) that is dangerous not because it is assumed to be false, but because it might be true?

I could fill dozens of blog posts with the provocative ideas the scientists submitted, but here's one I hadn't planned to write about until I came across a related story this morning:

[W]e view as evil people who inflict massive evolutionary fitness costs on us, our families, or our allies. No one summarized these fitness costs better than the feared conqueror Genghis Khan (1167-1227): "The greatest pleasure is to vanquish your enemies, to chase them before you, to rob them of their wealth, to see their near and dear bathed in tears, to ride their horses and sleep on the bellies of their wives and daughters."

We can be sure that the families of the victims of Genghis Khan saw him as evil. We can be just as sure that his many sons, whose harems he filled with women of the conquered groups, saw him as a venerated benefactor. In modern times, we react with horror at Mr. Khan describing the deep psychological satisfaction he gained from inflicting fitness costs on victims while purloining fitness fruits for himself. But it is sobering to realize that perhaps half a percent of the world's population today are descendants of Genghis Khan.

Then there's this story in today's New York Times:

About one in 50 New Yorkers of European origin -- including men with names like O'Connor, Flynn, Egan, Hynes, O'Reilly and Quinn -- carry the genetic signature linked with [legendary Irish king] Niall and northwestern Ireland, writes Daniel Bradley, the geneticist who conducted the survey with colleagues at Trinity College in Dublin. He arrived at that estimate after surveying the Y chromosomes in a genetic database that included New Yorkers.

About 400,000 city residents say they are of Irish ancestry, according to a 2004 Census Bureau survey.

"I hope this means that I inherit a castle in Ireland," the novelist Peter Quinn said by phone from the Peter McManus cafe in Chelsea. Some McManuses also have the genetic signature. ("I hang out with kings," Mr. Quinn said.)

He said his father used to tell him that all the Quinn men were bald from wearing a crown. But he added, "We spent 150 years in the Bronx, and I think we wiped out all the royal genes in the process."

All of which got me thinking about my grandmother.

When I was a kid, I used to get a kick out of her dogged research into her ancestors' genealogy. She belonged to the Daughters of the American Revolution and I don't know how many other WASPy, blue-blood organizations. The only point I could see, from my adolescent perspective, was to prove that we were more special than we really were.

My grandmother was a difficult woman who married an even more difficult man, and then kept him institutionalized when she couldn't control him. (His trade association had him locked up when he made a hollow threat to go postal on their asses because he was too big a jerk to keep a job in his field. When he returned later in the day, unarmed, they had him arrested and shipped him off to the loony bin. My grandmother signed the papers that kept him in there for the rest of his life.)

They had one child, my father, who dropped out of school at 16 to join the Marines. After serving in two wars, he married a Catholic, became an insurance salesman, and settled into a life of solid middle-class averageness with their seven children.

Meanwhile, my grandmother married a lifelong bachelor (they worked in the same office, I think; she may have been his secretary), a solid guy who was mentally and financially stable. We called him "Uncle Charlie" instead of "Grandpa," and I never knew why until I was an adult: Our biological grandfather was still alive and living in a mental hospital a few miles away.

Despite the fact she'd done nothing to distinguish herself, and despite the fact her son was just a regular guy, she was obsessed with insinuating herself into clubs to which she didn't seem to belong. She found an uncle who'd sailed on the Mayflower (actually, he fell off it during a storm, but survived), as well as ancestors who'd fought in the Revolutionary War, had some connection to the U.S. Constitution, on and on.

I remember, as a kid, thinking, "Who gives a shit?" Knowing our direct or indirect ascendants included alpha-WASPs like William Seward and the Byrd family of Virginia wasn't going to help a bunch of Catholics in suburban St. Louis.

Later I began to think of her genealogy pursuits in a more generous way. So much of her life was a struggle that it must've been a comfort to be able to place herself into the mainstream of the great American narrative.

I have to wonder how she would've looked at the DNA evidence linking so many of us back to these conquerors who ran around impregnating every woman who couldn't get away. Really, aren't we all the progeny of kings? And if we're all flush with royal blood, all that really distinguishes us from each other is what we do and how we do it.

Unlike my grandmother, I find that a very comforting thought.

(Thanks, yet again, to Rob Duffield for the link to Edge.)

Posted by LouSchuler at 08:55 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

January 17, 2006

Junk Science

In general, I'm a fan of oddball hypothesis. I'm not a very good conspiracy theorist myself, since I don't think many humans are capable of carrying out grand plots and then, most important of all, keeping them hidden. More often, I suspect the opposite: People screw up royally, and then cover their tracks by suppressing information that would show them to be the horrible incompetents that they are. As soon as real information is denied, suppressed, hidden, or destroyed, the conspiracy theories practically write themselves.

Just to pick