Small sales taxes on soft drinks are insufficient to reduce consumption of soda or curb obesity among children, according to a new a new study in Health Affairs.

Such small taxes may reduce consumption in some subgroups, such as children at greater risk for obesity. But to reduce overall soda consumption, the taxes would have to be downright draconian, structured as excise taxes that would increase the shelf price of the product rather than sales taxes collected at the cash register.

An 18 percent soda tax proposed and then dropped from New York's Executive Budget last year, for example, could help prevent excessive weight gain between third and fifth grades by 20 percent, the authors say.

Geologists have long thought that the rapid global cooling period nearly 13,000 years ago known as the Younger Dryas (Big Freeze) was triggered by the melting Laurentide ice sheet. But geological evidence for that theory has been lacking so far.

Now researchers writing in Nature say they have identified the mega-flood path across North America that channeled melt-water from the giant ice sheet into the oceans,  triggering the Younger Dryas cold snap.

Researchers from Uppsala and Stockholm Universities say that the hunter-gatherers who inhabited the southern coast of Scandinavia 4,000 years ago were lactose intolerant.

The conclusion suggests that today's Scandinavians are not descended from the Stone Age people in question but from a group that arrived later. Results of the research have been published in the journal BMC Evolutionary Biology.

"This group of hunter-gatherers differed significantly from modern Swedes in terms of the DNA sequence that we generally associate with a capacity to digest lactose into adulthood," says Anna Linderholm, formerly of the Archaeological Research Laboratory, Stockholm University.

Silicon is the basic material for most microprocessors and memory chips. But for a long time the electronics industry has been pursuing novel organic materials to create semiconductor products—materials that perhaps could not be packed as densely as state-of-the-art silicon chips, but that would require less power and cost less.

According to scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), an organic semiconductor may be a viable candidate for creating large-area electronics, such as solar cells and displays that can be sprayed onto a surface as easily as paint.

How quickly the Andes Mountains reached their current height, an average elevation of 13,000 feet, has been a contentious debate in geological circles. Some researchers claim the mountains rose abruptly and others maintain that the uplift was a more gradual process.

Paleoclimatologists writing in Science suggests that the quick-rise view is based on misinterpreted evidence. What some geologists interpret as signs of an abrupt rise are actually indications of ancient climate change, the researchers say. The confusion results when ratios of oxygen's two main isotopes, oxygen-18 and oxygen-16, are used to estimate past elevation.

However cute they may be, fat babies are likely to develop motor skills slower than their thinner counterparts, says a study just published in the Journal of Pediatrics.

The findings are based on observations of 217 African-American first-time mothers who participated in the Infant Care, Feeding and Risk of Obesity Study. The project is examining – in a population at risk of obesity – how parenting and infant feeding styles relate to infant diet and the risk of babies becoming overweight.

Eternity Soup, by Greg Critser

Harmony Books, 2010


Scientific Blogging's own Greg Critser has tackled the science and business of eternal youth in his latest book. It's an engaging and excellent read. Critser is a fine storyteller, mixing his discussion of science with the lively personalities of the people involved. The book covers the latest science behind aging, the people who have shaped their lifestyles around that science, and the businesses that are trying to capitalize prematurely on the science.

The month of April is National Autism Awareness month. Because this is a subject that touches many, and is frequently a topic of discussion not only on this site - but across the entire world of media and journalism – ScientificBlogging will be presenting a special series of articles focused on autism during the month of April.

We will be exploring the scientific perspective of autism: the research, the studies, the medical advancements made in its diagnosis and treatment. But we will also be presenting several articles and posts of a more personal nature. What is life like with autism, both from a parenting and a personal perspective?

The Mother Of Inquiries: Parliamentary CRU Report

The UK's House of Commons is often called the mother of parliaments. In reality that would be Tynwald, the parliament of the Isle of Man.  However: a cross-party commitee, the House of Commons Science and Technology Commitee, has just published its report on the CRU affair.  The two pdfs, free to download, come to about 2.7Mb of data.

31 March 2010  Eighth Report   HC 387-I 387i.pdf and 387ii.pdf

The big news in biotech this week is the court ruling against Myriad Genetics and gene patents. As Genomics Law Report discusses, this was an overwhelming win for the plaintiffs (which included the ACLU and various research and patients' organizations). The judge issued a summary judgement, which means 1) that both sides of the case agreed on the basic facts, and 2) the law was judged to be overwhelmingly on the plaintiff's side: