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Well: Probiotics: Looking Underneath the Yogurt Label
By TARA PARKER-POPE, The New York Times, September 29, 2009
When the label tells you the food you are buying “contains probiotics,” are you getting health benefits or just marketing hype? Perhaps a bit of both.
Probiotics are live micro-organisms that work by restoring the balance of intestinal bacteria and raising resistance to harmful germs. Taken in sufficient amounts, they can promote digestive health and help shorten the duration of colds. But while there are thousands of different probiotics, only a handful have been proved effective in clinical trials. Which strain of bacteria a given product includes is often difficult to figure out.
( Read More )
Fossil Skeleton From Africa Predates Lucy
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD, The New York Times, October 2, 2009
Lucy, meet Ardi.
Ardi, short for Ardipithecus ramidus, is the newest fossil skeleton out of Africa to take its place in the gallery of human origins. At an age of 4.4 million years, it lived well before and was much more primitive than the famous 3.2-million-year-old Lucy, of the species Australopithecus afarensis.
Since finding fragments of the older hominid in 1992, an international team of scientists has been searching for more specimens and on Thursday presented a fairly complete skeleton and their first full analysis. By replacing Lucy as the earliest known skeleton from the human branch of the primate family tree, the scientists said, Ardi opened a window to “the early evolutionary steps that our ancestors took after we diverged from our common ancestor with chimpanzees.”
The older hominid was already so different from chimps that it suggested “no modern ape is a realistic proxy for characterizing early hominid evolution,” they wrote.
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Evolution Run in Reverse? A Study Says It’s a One-Way Street
By CARL ZIMMER, The New York Times, September 29, 2009
Evolutionary biologists have long wondered if history can run backward. Is it possible for the proteins in our bodies to return to the old shapes and jobs they had millions of years ago?
Examining the evolution of one protein, a team of scientists declares the answer is no, saying new mutations make it practically impossible for evolution to reverse direction. “They burn the bridge that evolution just crossed,” said Joseph W. Thornton, a biology professor at the University of Oregon and co-author of a paper on the team’s findings in the current issue of Nature.
The Belgian biologist Louis Dollo was the first scientist to ponder reverse evolution. “An organism never returns to its former state,” he declared in 1905, a statement later dubbed Dollo’s law.
( Read More )
Finding Order in the Apparent Chaos of Currents
By BINA VENKATARAMAN, The New York Times, September 29, 2009
Suppose a blob of dioxin-rich pesticide is spilled into Monterey Bay. It might quickly disperse to the Pacific Ocean. But hours later, a spill of the same size at the same spot could circle near the coastline, posing a greater danger to marine life. The briny surface waters of the bay churn so chaotically that a slight shift in the place or time an oil drop, a buoy — or even a person — falls in can dictate whether it is swept out to the open ocean or swirls near the shore.
But the results are not unpredictable. A team of scientists studying Monterey Bay since 2000 has found that underlying its complex, seemingly jumbled currents is a structure that guides the dispersal patterns, a structure that changes over time.
With the aid of high-frequency radar that tracks the speed and direction of the flowing waters, and computers that rapidly perform millions of calculations, the scientists found that a hidden skeleton guided whether floating debris lingered or exited the bay.
( Read More )
By TARA PARKER-POPE, The New York Times, September 29, 2009
When the label tells you the food you are buying “contains probiotics,” are you getting health benefits or just marketing hype? Perhaps a bit of both.
Probiotics are live micro-organisms that work by restoring the balance of intestinal bacteria and raising resistance to harmful germs. Taken in sufficient amounts, they can promote digestive health and help shorten the duration of colds. But while there are thousands of different probiotics, only a handful have been proved effective in clinical trials. Which strain of bacteria a given product includes is often difficult to figure out.
( Read More )Fossil Skeleton From Africa Predates Lucy
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD, The New York Times, October 2, 2009
Lucy, meet Ardi.
Ardi, short for Ardipithecus ramidus, is the newest fossil skeleton out of Africa to take its place in the gallery of human origins. At an age of 4.4 million years, it lived well before and was much more primitive than the famous 3.2-million-year-old Lucy, of the species Australopithecus afarensis.
Since finding fragments of the older hominid in 1992, an international team of scientists has been searching for more specimens and on Thursday presented a fairly complete skeleton and their first full analysis. By replacing Lucy as the earliest known skeleton from the human branch of the primate family tree, the scientists said, Ardi opened a window to “the early evolutionary steps that our ancestors took after we diverged from our common ancestor with chimpanzees.”
The older hominid was already so different from chimps that it suggested “no modern ape is a realistic proxy for characterizing early hominid evolution,” they wrote.
( Read More )Evolution Run in Reverse? A Study Says It’s a One-Way Street
By CARL ZIMMER, The New York Times, September 29, 2009
Evolutionary biologists have long wondered if history can run backward. Is it possible for the proteins in our bodies to return to the old shapes and jobs they had millions of years ago?
Examining the evolution of one protein, a team of scientists declares the answer is no, saying new mutations make it practically impossible for evolution to reverse direction. “They burn the bridge that evolution just crossed,” said Joseph W. Thornton, a biology professor at the University of Oregon and co-author of a paper on the team’s findings in the current issue of Nature.
The Belgian biologist Louis Dollo was the first scientist to ponder reverse evolution. “An organism never returns to its former state,” he declared in 1905, a statement later dubbed Dollo’s law.
( Read More )Finding Order in the Apparent Chaos of Currents
By BINA VENKATARAMAN, The New York Times, September 29, 2009
Suppose a blob of dioxin-rich pesticide is spilled into Monterey Bay. It might quickly disperse to the Pacific Ocean. But hours later, a spill of the same size at the same spot could circle near the coastline, posing a greater danger to marine life. The briny surface waters of the bay churn so chaotically that a slight shift in the place or time an oil drop, a buoy — or even a person — falls in can dictate whether it is swept out to the open ocean or swirls near the shore.
But the results are not unpredictable. A team of scientists studying Monterey Bay since 2000 has found that underlying its complex, seemingly jumbled currents is a structure that guides the dispersal patterns, a structure that changes over time.
With the aid of high-frequency radar that tracks the speed and direction of the flowing waters, and computers that rapidly perform millions of calculations, the scientists found that a hidden skeleton guided whether floating debris lingered or exited the bay.
( Read More )
