Fat people require more food and that requires more farming and greenhouse gas emissions.  Therefore, maintaining a healthy body weight is also good for the environment, according to a study which appears today in the International Journal of Epidemiology.

They highlight poor, third world countries like Vietnam as a model because they they can't afford food so they consume almost 20% less of it (and therefore cause fewer greenhouse gases to be produced) than a population in which over 40% of people are obese, where the USA and a few nations in Europe are heading by 2020.

Global warming gets all the press today but there was a time when pollution-caused global cooling was the concern - and if you map the planet's recent history, 90,000 out of every 100,000 years were ice ages and it's been 12,000 years since the last one so the historical reason for concern was not unfounded.  A new book, "The Late Eocene Earth - Hothouse, Icehouse, and Impacts" tackles what global cooling was like.

New evidence gleaned from CT scans of fossils locked inside rocks may flip the order in which two kinds of four-limbed animals with backbones were known to have moved from fish to landlubber.

Both extinct species, known as Ichthyostega and Acanthostega, lived an estimated 360-370 million years ago in what is now Greenland. Acanthostega was thought to have been the most primitive tetrapod, that is, the first vertebrate animal to possess limbs with digits rather than fish fins. 

WASHINGTON, April 17 /PRNewswire/ --

- Industry comments submitted to California Air Resources Board underscore sugarcane ethanol's recognized carbon reduction levels

Sugarcane ethanol's carbon intensity is even lower than initially calculated by the California Air Resources Board (CARB), according to comments submitted today by the Brazilian Sugarcane Industry Association (UNICA). CARB is scheduled to vote on the first-of-its-kind Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS) on April 23-24. The objective of the LCFS is to reduce by 10% the carbon intensity of all transportation fuels in California by 2020.

Health and death have genetic risk factors. International research has linked ten gene variations to sudden cardiac death (SCD). What is SCD? It is death resulting from an abrupt loss of heart function -- cardiac arrest. Was this perhaps what the first famous poly-marathoner suffered?

Recent - The American Heart Association (AHA) says about 850 Americans die each day without being hospitalized or admitted to an emergency room. Most are sudden deaths caused by cardiac arrest. Death occurs within minutes after symptoms appear. Yet this health problem has received much less publicity than heart attack.

LONDON, April 17 /PRNewswire/ --

Northrop Grumman Corporation (NYSE: NOC) will highlight its integrated secure broadband wireless, and public safety national security capabilities at the British Association of Public Safety Communications Officers (BAPCO) annual conference and exhibition to be held at 21-23 April 2009 at the Business Design Centre, Islington, London.

LONDON, April 17 /PRNewswire/ --

LONDON, April 17 /PRNewswire/ --

Chiltern International Limited (Chiltern), a global Clinical Research Organization (CRO) providing clinical development and staffing services in Europe, the Americas and India, today announced the acquisition of Vigiun, a full service Clinical Research Organization located in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Established in 1999 by Eduardo Forleo, MD, and Elisa Halker, BSN, Vigiun has extensive experience conducting clinical trials in a variety of therapeutic areas, in particular infectious disease, oncology, and respiratory.

Many computational biologists are interested in taking gene expression data, and using that data to computationally infer the underlying regulatory network that controls the observed pattern of gene expression.

Why? Because doing the experiments to determine the structure of these regulatory networks is hard; if we could use more easily obtained data to reliably tease out the network structure, we'd be able to quickly characterize networks in unexplored cell types or in poorly studied microbes.

Kepler has First Light. It is On! Team is a Go! Photons are Arriving!

This provocativly-titled NASA release states "NASA's Kepler Captures First Views of Planet-Hunting Territory", and has a good explanation of Kepler's capabilities. What I wish to tackle is why Kepler matters.

Kepler is a new space telescope with an awesomely wide field of view, seeing a huge 100 square degrees in a single frame, then zooming in closer with two other 'scopes. It is primarily a planet-hunting mission, but there will be much good science coming from Kepler-- some of which we can't even imagine yet.