Fat: What is it good for?

By: | November 25, 2016

fatmouse

Infant mortality in the Arctic has always been a bit of a mystery. Yes, the usual suspects are present — high smoking rates, overcrowding — but the same is true of many communities in the south where far fewer babies die. Nunavut’s infant mortality rate, for example, is four times that of the rest of Canada.

In recent years, a missing factor has emerged in Inuit genetics across the circumpolar world from Siberia and Alaska to Greenland. If a baby is born with two copies of the CPT1A Arctic Variant, his body cannot turn fat into energy when his blood sugar is low. The Arctic variant enzyme carnitine palmitoyltransferase (CPT) — the protein that does the fat-transforming work — only functions about 10% as well. Continue reading →

Thankful? Oh, Really?

By: | November 24, 2016

15390669275_cafc8ea61e_zAnn:  It’s been a fairly dreadful year, personally and nationally, and giving thanks is going to be a stretch.  But even when I was a kid, I was thankless.  When my grandfather said grace at Sunday dinners — “Bless, oh Lord, this food to our use and us to thy service” — I thought the words were pretty but didn’t see the point of saying them.  When the aunts and uncles and cousins sat around the long Thanksgiving table and said that before we could eat the food, we had to say our thankfuls,* I said, “I’m not going to say I’m thankful for anything because it’ll just be taken away,” graceless adolescent that I was.  In the decades since, I’ve figured out that if I’m going to say my thankfuls at Thanksgiving, I should pay close attention to what I have to be thankful for.  But now that I think about it, why would anyone need to say thankfuls at all?

Emma: Well, a lot of people these days are expressing gratitude because it is supposed to make them happier (E.g. http://www.health.harvard.edu/healthbeat/giving-thanks-can-make-you-happier) But then again, I think this relentless pursuit of happiness is kind of screwed up in the first place.

Ann:  Didn’t Erik’s post on Monday say something like this — bad things have more power over us than good?

Jenny:  We do tend to remember the bad over the good…and the details of those memories are usually more accurate. Here’s one article that discusses this concept. Note that bad stuff is pushy and can knock good memories out of the way to make room for itself. How unfortunate.

Michelle:  Or maybe it’s narrower, maybe we remember criticism more clearly than praise. Anyway, I think we might be able to argue that gratitude is a way of correcting our skewed perception of reality. Continue reading →

A Tale of Two Fish

By: | November 23, 2016

triops_closeupI am taking care of two fish this weekend. One is a nice, respectable goldfish. It’s orange and black, it lives alone in a bubbling tank with some seaweed and a little fake wooden log to swim through. It eats a few pellets of food every few days.

The other has three eyes, and it eats its companions.

Oh, the triops. Fine, it’s actually a crustacean, but it does swim in a little bowl at a friend’s house. It—along with several others—arrived there unexpectedly as a charming souvenir, brought by someone who now refers to it as “creepy.” At first the triops seemed like a modern day sea monkey—cute-ish, small, and not likely to survive for very long.

True, most of them did not survive. In October, there were three medium-sized ones. Then one of them ate another, while my friend looked on in horror. Then there were two. The small one seemed very feisty and inedible. Then one day, the smaller one was gone, too, and little triops leftovers were floating around the floor. Continue reading →

Where should research chimps grow old?

By: | November 22, 2016

chimpanzee

In 2015, the National Institutes of Health announced the end of invasive chimpanzee research in the US. The agency had dramatically scaled back the program in 2013, and NIH director Francis Collins reported that due to lack of demand, he had decided to allow the remaining animals to retire as well. “It is clear that we’ve reached a tipping point,” he wrote. “I have reassessed the need to maintain chimpanzees for biomedical research and decided that effective immediately, NIH will no longer maintain a colony of 50 chimpanzees for future research.”

Collins explained that all NIH-owned chimps would be transferred to Chimp Haven, a chimpanzee sanctuary in Louisiana, “as space is available and on a timescale that will allow for optimal transition of each individual chimpanzee with careful consideration of their welfare, including their health and social grouping.”

But enacting that plan has proven more difficult than anticipated. According to a 2016 report from the Government Accountability Office, as of January, Chimp Haven housed less than a third of all the chimps owned or supported by NIH. Part of the problem is space. The facility can only accommodate about 230 animals. But there’s another, thornier issue: Not everyone agrees that Chimp Haven is the best place for these apes to spend their golden years. Continue reading →

Fear and Loathing in Elections

By: | November 21, 2016

msb-532322modcolorAfter months of promising, cajoling, negotiating, threatening, inspiring, inciting, confusing, shaming, glorifying, fibbing, flubbing, blustering and exulting, the election is over and we have a winner. Donald J Trump.

This was truly an historic election for a lot of reasons that no doubt my colleagues in the political media have, and continue to thrum on about better than I. But there is one element that I as a science writer found especially fascinating. Never in recent history has an election been so charged with emotion and had such an unexpected outcome. And never has an election offered a potential glimpse into the relationship between voting day and health.

In addition to electing Trump, voting day also brought my first book, called Suggestible You, onto the shelves. The book deals with the power of our minds to affect change in our bodies – hypnosis, snake oil, healers, charlatans, geniuses, quacks, witch doctors, and psychologist of every stripe, they’re all in there. I even worked in a couple UFOs and ghosts, just for good measure.

The overarching message is this: our minds and moods have an incredible effect on our bodies and even our sense of what reality is. It’s all about expectation. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | November 19, 2016

137305676_1516a08c1e_z-1This week started with a guest post from Jenny Cutraro who on election day took her father and two young daughters to Walden Pond where Thoreau still offers lessons of civil disobedience.

I chimed in on the election by finding similarities between the catastrophic end of the Ice Age and Donald Trump’s electoral victory.

In a respite from election mania, Christie tells the story of how she as a vegetarian suddenly became a ravenous gobbler of buffalo meat.

Cassandra put a cringe in the day with her recounting of the bizarre agony of calcified pebbles forming in your salivary glands.

On her path to becoming a better human being, Rose created a new personality chart where you’ll find yourself in the nuances between optimism and pessimism. She answers the question of where journalists fall on the chart, but leaves us all wondering how Disney villains must score.

 

Image credits:  Eddie on Flickr.

The POOS Personality Matrix

By: | November 18, 2016

poos scale

I’ve got a confession to make. Despite living in the age of the BuzzFeed quiz, I’m not one for personality tests. I don’t know what Harry Potter house I would be in, what Myers-Briggs type I am, what “Big 5” personality type I have, or what Disney Princess I would be.

But recently I have been thinking about my personality, my shortcomings, and how I might try to think about changing things about myself that I don’t like. I don’t mean things like “remember to take off your makeup even if you’re really tired you garbage monster.” I’m talking about bigger things like “be less quick to dismiss things out of hand.”

In order to really change something like that, I need to understand my baseline personality, and figure out where that quick judgement comes from. So I’ve developed my own little personality matrix, which I am very maturely calling POOS. As in, many poops.  Continue reading →

Redux: This Too Shall Pass

By: | November 17, 2016

This post originally ran on June 11, 2014. But the tale of one woman’s battle against the dreaded sialolith is so horrifying you’ll no doubt want to read it again.

mouthpainMaría Juan’s pain began eight years ago, at lunchtime. She was dining with her parents when suddenly she felt a sharp jab under her tongue. “Like an aguja,” she says — a needle. Each time she tried to swallow, she felt another poke. After the meal ended, the pain subsided. At dinner, however, it returned. And now the right side of her neck was a swollen. A couple of days later, María decided to see a doctor.

The doctor stuck one finger in her mouth and placed another finger on her neck, probing. He could feel something in her salivary gland. Something hard and strange. Something that wasn’t supposed to be there. He tried to pinch it out with his fingers, but it wouldn’t budge. There was nothing to do but wait. María left with some pills to make her salivate, and orders to drink lemon juice — a surefire way to produce spit. Amazingly, the regimen worked. The pain disappeared.  Continue reading →