25 August 2010 (pm)

Training: here is why exercise can take away your hunger (though swimming often makes me MORE hungry…eventually):

Researchers behind the new work found that “physical activity reorganizes the set point of nutritional balance through anti-inflammatory signaling,” they reported in their paper, which published online August 24 in PLoS Biology.

The key to the signaling seemed to be interleukin-6 (IL-6) and IL-10, which are proteins secreted by immune cells. The compound IL-6 gets released from muscles when they contract and has been found to “play a central role in the regulation of appetite, energy expenditure and body composition,” the researchers noted. But just how these compounds might be acting on the nervous system’s components, such as the hypothalamus, remained murky.

To further explore this association, the Brazil-based research team examined energy use in both lean and obese rats that swam or ran on a treadmill. After the exercise, both the lean and the obese rats had lower insulin levels, but the rats that had been fed to become obese went back to eating more like their lean peers. By sampling the biological profiles of some of these animals, the scientists found that the exercise had changed the obese rats’ hypothalamic chemistry, which included boosting IL-6. Rats that were given an antibody to inhibit IL-6 before exercise did not show the same biochemical or feeding patterns afterward.

“These molecules were crucial for increasing the sensitivity of the most important hormones, insulin and leptin, which control appetite,” José Carvalheira, of the Department of Internal Medicine at the State University of Campinas in São Paulo and coauthor of the new study, said in a prepared statement.

Although the intense bursts of exercise seemed to spur these noticeable shifts in chemical profiles, in this study the activity only reduced the food intake in rats that were already obese, and the activity did not seem to directly relate to immediately apparent weight loss. But this chemical change alone suggests that physical activity “could help to reorganize the set point of nutritional balance and, therefore, aid in counteracting the energy imbalance induced by overnutrition-related obesity,” Carvalheira and his colleagues noted in the study.

Oil eating microbes they are stepping it up in the gulf!

Petroleum-eating bacteria – which had dined for eons on oil seeping naturally through the seafloor – proliferated in the cloud of oil that drifted underwater for months after the April 20 accident. They not only outcompeted fellow microbes, they each ramped up their own internal metabolic machinery to digest the oil as efficiently as possible.

The result was a nature-made cleanup crew capable of reducing that reduced the amount of oil amounts in the undersea “plume” by half about every three days, according to research published online Tuesday by the journal Science. [...]

The findings point to a different conclusion from that drawn by readers of a study published last week, also in the journal Science. That research by scientists at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute found no reduction in the oxygen content of the gigantic oil plume, suggesting that microbes were consuming the oil very slowly.

The Berkeley team study published Tuesday also indicates indirectly that dispersants used to break the wellhead stream of oil into a mass of submicroscopic particles might have speeded the cleanup. By increasing the surface area between oil and water, the dispersants seem to have provided the deep-sea microbes greater access to this unusual food source. [...]

Inside the plume, researchers found about twice as many bacterial cells per milliliter of water as outside it. There was also twice as much “phospholipid,” a type of compound in cell membranes. Both findings pointed to an oil plume teeming with life. In fact, the researchers detected 951 subfamilies of bacteria containing more than 10,000 distinct species. Curiously, 16 of those 951 subfamilies were especially abundant in the plume samples compared with specimens outside the plume.

They were of a type called gamma-Proteobacteria (and dominated by the order of bacteria called Oceanospirillales) known to be able to degrade oil-like substances in cold water.

The scientists then looked at the roughly 5,000 genes active in the bacteria. They found that the 1,600 genes involved in “hydrocarbon degradation” were cranked up to much higher concentrations in the plume bacteria than in the bacteria outside it.

From a purely Darwinian point of view, this was no surprise. About 500,000 barrels of oil get into into the gulf’s water each years through seafloor seeps. (In comparison, the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska was 260,000 barrels.) Natural selection has favored microbial species able to quickly use oil as a nutrient when it is around. It’s particularly favored ones that can use it in very cold, bottom waters – conditions generally not conducive to rapid bacterial growth. Many of the species flourishing in the samples taken by the Berkeley group actually consume oil better at 40 degrees Fahrenheit than at 70 degrees.

Natural selection in action! Of course, the woos and religious nut-jobs will probably say that they prayed to Jesus for this to happen.

Frogs: new micro frogs are discovered; they are tiny but adorable!

Economy
Paul Krugman: he remembers what they predicted. He lets us know that he remembers.

Sorry, can’t resist. That was the title of this Business Week article a few months ago. The tone made it pretty clear that if you had any sense, you’d ignore the bearded academic and go with the market wizard:

If [Krugman] makes you want to head for the hills with your shotgun and turnip seeds, consider another view, expressed the week prior at the London School of Economics. The speaker was not a decorated academic with visions of 1873, he was a profit seeker, pure and simple: John Paulson, the hedge-fund manager on whose behalf Goldman Sachs (GS) cooked up those killer collateralized debt obligations designed to pay off handsomely in the event of a housing crash. He was right about that one, you’ll recall.

“We’re in the middle of a sustained recovery in the U.S.,” Paulson declared in London. “The risk of a double dip is less than 10 percent.”

[...]

So, how’s it going? I’m sure that if Paulson had proved right, there would be a followup article mocking yours truly. Wanna bet that there won’t be a piece saying that maybe professors know something that traders don’t?

Tee hee. Well sort of; I really wish that Dr. Krugman had been wrong.

Racism and right wingers
Leonard Pitts: won’t let them get away with claiming MLK’s legacy. Read the whole thing; here is a snippet:

`This is a moment,” said Glenn Beck three months ago on his radio program, “…that I think we reclaim the civil rights movement. It has been so distorted and so turned upside down. . . . We are on the right side of history. We are on the side of individual freedoms and liberties and damn it, we will reclaim the civil rights moment. We will take that movement, because we were the people that did it in the first place!”

Beck was promoting his Restoring Honor rally, to be held Saturday at the Lincoln Memorial, 47 years to the day after Martin Luther King famously spoke there. You’ll notice he didn’t define the “we” he had in mind, but it seems reasonable to suppose Beck was speaking of people like himself: affluent middle-aged conservatives possessed of the ability to see socialism and communism in places where it somehow escapes the notice of others.

If you agree that assumption is reasonable, then you must also agree Beck’s contention that his “we” were the architects of the civil rights movement is worse than nonsensical, worse than mendacious, worse than shameless. It is obscene. It is theft of legacy. It is robbery of martyr’s graves.

We’re in an odd moment. Having opposed the freedom movement of the 20th century, some social conservatives seek, now that that movement stands vindicated and venerated, to arrogate unto themselves its language and heroes, to remake it in their image.
[...]
The fatuous and dishonorable attempt to posit conservatives as the prime engine of civil rights depends for success on the ignorance of the American people. Sadly, as anyone who has ever watched a Jay Walking segment on The Tonight Show can attest, the American people have ignorance in plenitude.

This, then, is to serve notice as Beck and his tea party faithful gather in Lincoln’s shadow to claim the mantle of King: Some of us are not ignorant. Some of us remember. Some of us know very well who “we” is.

And, who “we” is not.

Advertisement