Arctic Ice May 2010

The Arctic melt, already more rapid than average this year, has begun to accelerate.


I have no doubt that by the end of this month, May 2010, there will be much less sea ice than there was in May 2007.

I have no doubt either that the anti-science propagandists will continue to insist either that the ice is recovering or that Arctic melt is perfectly normal.

If you want your kids to slim down, a residential summer weight-loss camp might be the answer you're looking for. A new study in Pediatrics found that such camps can significantly improve children's weight, body mass index (BMI), physical fitness and blood pressure.

Researchers say the camps are effective because they get children out of the social environment that keeps them fat. Obese children struggle with their body's awkwardness in running, jumping and playing, which causes them to withdraw from these physical activities and make unhealthy lifestyle choices. This can be reversed when obese children are placed together to focus on losing weight and improving physical fitness.

After extracting ancient DNA from the 40,000-year-old bones of Neanderthals, scientists have obtained a draft sequence of the Neanderthal genome. The effort revealed evidence that shortly after early modern humans migrated out of Africa, some of them interbred with Neanderthals, leaving bits of Neanderthal DNA sequences scattered through the genomes of present-day non-Africans.

"We can now say that, in all probability, there was gene flow from Neanderthals to modern humans," said the paper's first author, Richard E. (Ed) Green of the University of California, Santa Cruz.

The results of the study appear this week in Science.

Following a drop in public confidence in climate scientists as a result of the 'Climategate' emails, two hundred fifty-five members of the National Academy of Sciences have joined together to defend the rigor and objectivity of climate science.

Their signed statement, appearing  tomorrow in Science, explains the scientific research process and confirms the fundamental conclusions about climate change based on the work of thousands of scientists worldwide.

A new study in the Journal of Consumer Research has found that shoppers often expect to buy a certain number of unplanned items, and most have a fairly accurate estimate as to how much they will spend on them. The authors use the term "in-store slack" to describe the room shoppers leave in their budget for unplanned purchases.

The researchers conducted a field study at several grocery stores in Texas. Shoppers were asked what they intended to purchase, how much they expected to spend on the planned items, and how much they intended to spend total. After shopping, participants provided their receipts and answered questions about themselves and their purchases. More than 75 percent of the participants included room in their mental budgets for unplanned purchases.

Washing your hands can cleanse you of past immoral behavior, it can also eliminate traces of buyer's remorse by reducing the need to justify past decisions, say psychologist writing in Science.

"It's not just that washing your hands contributes to moral cleanliness as well as physical cleanliness, as seen in earlier research" said U-M psychologists Spike W. S.. "Our studies show that washing also reduces the influence of past behaviors and decisions that have no moral implications whatsoever."

The ESA's Herschel infrared space observatory is capturing new images from thousands of distant galaxies as they furiously build stars and beautiful star-forming clouds. The photographic evidence reveals previously hidden details and challenges old ideas about of star formation.

The new findings were presented today during a major scientific symposium held at the European Space Agency (ESA).

Previous research has suggested that the best approach to significant weight loss is a slow and steady one. But a new study in the International Journal of Behavioral Medicine indicates that the key to long-term weight loss and maintenance is rapid weight loss in the initial stages of obesity treatment.

Successful weight loss in obese individuals is defined as a reduction of 10 percent or more of initial body weight maintained for at least a year. The jury is still out, however, as to whether fast or slow initial weight loss is the best approach for long-term weight control in obese patients.

Teenage girls are more willing than boys to communicate with their parents when it comes to talking about most dating issues, and both sexes generally prefer to talk to their mothers, according to a new study in the Journal of Adolescence.

The new study also found, however, that girls and boys are equally close-mouthed about issues involving sex and what they do with their dates while unsupervised. And in this case, teens were no more eager to talk to their mothers than they were their fathers. Results showed that the amount of information parents hear from their teenagers about dating depend on a variety of matters, including age, gender, and what aspect of dating the topic involves.

Two new studies conducted by scientists at Emory University have found that simple peptides can organize into bi-layer membranes. The finding suggests a "missing link" between the pre-biotic Earth's chemical inventory and the organizational scaffolding essential to life.

"We've shown that peptides can form the kind of membranes needed to create long-range order," says chemistry graduate student Seth Childers. "What's also interesting is that these peptide membranes may have the potential to function in a complex way, like a protein."

The results were recently published in Angwandte Chemie.


Photo Credit: Emory University)