Childhood obesity is declining, says the National Center for Health Statistics. But Tabitha M. Powledge thinks there's more to this story: "Greet these data with little glad cries, and hope madly that these kids, and those who come after, can continue to maintain healthful weight as they navigate through the crises of life. But absorb also the fact that it's at best a dent in the obesity statistics. As the paper points out, obesity hasn't declined in other age groups."
Science blogs
It's a delicate issue in more ways than one, Tabitha M. Powledge writes, citing a Nature commentary. How should regulators deal with the odd-sounding but apparently very effective practice of transplanting fecal material from healthy patients to sick ones? "The researchers propose that FDA look upon the feces used in transplants not as a new drug but rather as a tissue product. Or perhaps FDA should even devise a new classification, as the agency has done for blood."
Daytime highs are in the 60s at the Black Sea resort town of Sochi, a fact noted by Tabitha M. Powledge in her science blogs roundup. She quotes Dana Hunter as saying Sochi's weather is like Seattle's, and ponders its future climate: "One of the reasons Russian President Vladimir Putin lobbied so hard to get the Olympics for Sochi was to turn the nearby Caucasus mountains into a trendy spot for a winter sports resort. Putin must be one of those global-warming deniers."
Following up on the now-old news that modern humans carry some Neanderthal DNA, Tabitha M. Powledge explores some of the details. Females may have benefitted from the genome-mixing, she writes, and there are signs that our ability to speak did not come from the Neanderthals. Also, examining the widespread misinterpretations of the Congressional Budget Offices's new Obamacare report. And the frightening news from China about two new bird flu strains appearing in humans.
Tabitha M. Powledge discusses the evidence on whether or not there are too many scientific studies whose results can't be reproduced in subsequent work. Her main point is that you can't put all of "science" in the same basket: "Those of us professionally interested in science are going to know that different fields of science have very different track records." Also, gauging how much of Tuesday's State of the Union speech was devoted to science, directly or otherwise.
Tabitha M. Powledge weighs in about "humaniqueness" and other ideas that surfaced in a discussion of scientific ideas whose time has passed: "Here’s an idea we can all get behind: Dump that left-brain/right-brain hogwash. Cognitive neuroscientist Sarah-Jayne Blakemore points out there is no basis for that beloved misapprehension. Despite the fact that some activities originate in certain brain locales, the two brain hemispheres are normally in constant communication."
There's a recount on that report that 90% of the cells in your body are not human. Tabitha M. Powledge writes that a new report says the ratio may actually be much lower: "I am a bit mournful about this development. The idea of 10 microbes to every human cell is so much cooler than only 3 to 1. I am wondering if I will have to find a new favorite statistic." Also, Twitter as a gauge of scientific impact, and Vitamin E for slowing Alzheimer's.
Tabitha M. Powledge returns from the holidays with a roundup of the year's "best of" science stories, plus some "worst of" lists for good measure. Included are several contributions from the Knight Science Journalism Tracker writers, and two lists of the year's best science-related images from Wired's Betsy Mason. Also, a new New Yorker story that is "a case study in how to place an enormous amount of scientific information before a largely non-technical audience."
"It’s a statistic that belongs in the journalistic category of Too Good to Check," Tabitha M. Powledge writes of the assertion that 90% of the cells in a human body are non-human microbes. In her weekly science blogs roundup, Powledge reviews a bioinformatician's post on the origins of that factoid, and summarizes the debate over its accuracy. Also: Does some new research on transgenerational epigenetics in male mice mean Jean-Baptiste Lamarck was right after all?
Tabitha M. Powledge returns to her weekly science blogs roundup with a piece about a Spanish cave that has yielded the oldest human DNA yet found — along with some thoughts about why the news media keeps treating such discoveries as a big surprise: "These discoveries seem surprising in part because many of us are still in the grip of a now-untenable idea: That human evolution (or, actually, evolution of many organisms) is lineal, a straight line of descent."