The obesity epidemic is rampant, and there are many reasons for this big fat problem. Although asking if antibiotics make us fat may initially sound like some type of joke, recent articles in Scientific American and Science magazine shows that some researchers are taking it seriously. Actually, evidence suggesting that antibiotics may make people fat is old (but forgotten and ignored) knowledge. As far back as 1955, research published in a leading nutrition journal showed that weight gain may be linked to prolonged antibiotic usage.(1) It is well-known that farmers supply livestock with frequent doses of antibiotics in the guise of ‘preventing disease,’ but it is also widely known that prolonged antibiotic usage causes such disruption in the digestive tracts of these animals that the food that they eat is not properly assimilated, leading to significant weight gain. Normal bacteria in the gut help animals (and humans) metabolize fat, but the deficiency of these normal bacteria, caused by antibiotic usage, disrupts proper fat metabolism, leading to weight gain. The farmers benefit from being able to sell fatter and heavier meat, even though meat quality is significantly compromised. An article in the December 16, 2009, issue of Scientific […]
China has succumbed to hubris. It has mistaken the soft diplomacy of Barack Obama for weakness, mistaken the US credit crisis for decline, and mistaken its own mercantilist bubble for ascendancy. There are echoes of Anglo-German spats before the First World War, when Wilhelmine Berlin so badly misjudged the strategic balance of power and over-played its hand. Within a month the US Treasury must rule whether China is a ‘currency manipulator’, triggering sanctions under US law. This has been finessed before, but we are in a new world now with America’s U6 unemployment at 16.8pc. ‘It’s going to be really hard for them yet again to fudge on the obvious fact that China is manipulating. Without a credible threat, we’re not going to get anywhere,’ said Paul Krugman, this year’s Nobel economist. China’s premier Wen Jiabao is defiant. ‘I don’t think the yuan is undervalued. We oppose countries pointing fingers at each other and even forcing a country to appreciate its currency,’ he said yesterday. Once again he demanded that the US takes ‘concrete steps to reassure investors’ over the safety of US assets. ‘Some say China has got more arrogant and tough. Some put […]
What if our economy was not built on competition? Nobel Prize winner Elinor Ostrom talks about her work on cooperation in economics. She is the first woman to receive the prize. Her Ph.D. is in political science, not economics (though she minored in economics, collaborates with many economists, and considers herself a political economist). But what makes this award particularly special is that her work is about cooperation, while standard economics focuses on competition. Ostrom’s seminal book, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, was published in 1990. But her research on common property goes back to the early 1960s, when she wrote her dissertation on groundwater in California. In 1973 she and her husband, Vincent Ostrom, founded the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University. In the intervening years, the Workshop has produced hundreds of studies of the conditions in which communities self-organize to solve common problems. Ostrom currently serves as professor of political science at Indiana University and senior research director of the Workshop. Fran Korten, YES! Magazine’s publisher, spent 20 years with the Ford Foundation making grants to support community management of water and forests in Southeast Asia and […]
A quest that began over a decade ago with a chance observation has reached a milestone: the identification of a gene that may regulate regeneration in mammals. The absence of this single gene, called p21, confers a healing potential in mice long thought to have been lost through evolution and reserved for creatures like flatworms, sponges, and some species of salamander. In a report published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from The Wistar Institute demonstrate that mice that lack the p21 gene gain the ability to regenerate lost or damaged tissue. Unlike typical mammals, which heal wounds by forming a scar, these mice begin by forming a blastema, a structure associated with rapid cell growth and de-differentiation as seen in amphibians. According to the Wistar researchers, the loss of p21 causes the cells of these mice to behave more like embryonic stem cells than adult mammalian cells, and their findings provide solid evidence to link tissue regeneration to the control of cell division. ‘Much like a newt that has lost a limb, these mice will replace missing or damaged tissue with healthy tissue that lacks any sign of scarring, said the project’s […]
NEW YORK — Getting people to pay for news online at this point would be ‘like trying to force butterflies back into their cocoons,’ a new consumer survey suggests. That was one of several bleak headlines in the Project for Excellence in Journalism’s annual assessment of the state of the news industry, released Sunday. The project’s report contained an extensive look at habits of the estimated six in 10 Americans who say they get at least some news online during a typical day. On average, each person spends three minutes and four seconds per visit to a news site. About 35 percent of online news consumers said they have a favorite site that they check each day. The others are essentially free agents, the project said. Even among those who have their favorites, only 19 percent said they would be willing to pay for news online – including those who already do. There’s little brand loyalty: 82 percent of people with preferred news sites said they’d look elsewhere if their favorites start demanding payment. ‘If we move to some pay system, that shift is going to have to surmount significant consumer resistance,’ said Tom Rosenstiel, […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
