Continued from Part 6: I interviewed Gary Taubes by phone a few weeks ago, shortly after he gave a talk about the main ideas of his new book — Good Calories, Bad Calories — at UC Berkeley. The interview lasted about 2 hours. This is part 7. SETH ROBERTS: I was a member of the Center for Weight and Health. But the other members didn’t know what I was up to, and had no idea it could have anything to do with actual weight loss.

GARY TAUBES: That’s one of the things I’ve found most amusing about obesity research, that you have this disconnect from pre-World War Two, when the people doing it were clinicians who were treating obese patients, to post-World War Two, where first, it’s nutritionists, who do rat experiments. Then, by the 1960s, obesity is considered an eating disorder and it’s being treated by psychologists and psychiatrists. So today, if you looking at some of the major obesity centers in the country — at Yale, at University of Cincinnati, they’re all run by psychologists or psychiatrists. Here’s a physiological disorder of the body, and it’s being studied by psychologists and psychiatrists. They’re not interested in anecdotal evidence, unless it agrees with their preconceptions.

Lice from 1,000-year-old mummies in Peru may unravel important clues about a different sort of passage: the migration patterns of America’s earliest humans, a new University of Florida study suggests.

“It’s kind of quirky that a parasite we love to hate can actually inform us how we traveled around the globe,” said David Reed, an assistant curator of mammals at the Florida Museum of Natural History on the UF campus and one of the study’s authors.

DNA sequencing found the strain of lice to be genetically the same as the form of body lice that spawns several deadly diseases, including typhus, which was blamed for the loss of Napoleon’s grand army and millions of other soldiers, he said.

Over 70 percent of high school teachers are female and girls in high school take as many math courses as boys, yet it's believed female interest in math and science still wanes considerably in high school and college.

A new study conducted by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Pennsylvania, and Michigan State University published in Child Development says girls, more than boys, look to their close friends when they make important decisions such as whether to take math and what math classes to take, confirming how significant peers are during adolescence.

There are two mistakes you can make when you read a scientific paper: You can believe it (a) too much or (b) too little. The possibility of believing something too little does not occur to most professional scientists, at least if you judge them by their public statements, which are full of cautions against too much belief and literally never against too little belief. Never. If I’m wrong — if you have ever seen a scientist warn against too little belief — please let me know. Yet too little belief is just as costly as too much.

At today’s IEEE International Solid State Circuit Conference, IMEC introduced its prototype of a 60GHz multiple antenna receiver, and invites industry to join its 60GHz research program. The 60GHz band offers massive available bandwidth that enables very high bit rates of several Gbits-per-second at distances up to 10 meters (about 33 feet).

To make the 60GHz technology cost-efficient to manufacture, low power and affordable in consumer products, IMEC has built its RF solution in a standard digital CMOS process thereby avoiding the extra cost of alternative technologies or dedicated RF process options.

The second industry goal is to overcome high path losses at mm-wave frequencies by using a phased antenna array approach.

Thousands of times a year, a single cell extraction from an embryo is performed to screen for genetic diseases. As of January 2008, the cell could be allowed to divide and the copy used for research without harm to the embryo. Current federal funding is prohibited for experiments that injure or destroy human embryonic stem cells and is limited to cells extracted before President Bush's declaration of August 9, 2001. Meanwhile, four hundred thousand embryos are sitting in clinics waiting to be implanted in the mother's womb or to be discarded – a practice of which no one has raised a disapproving eyebrow. However, rapid advances in stem cell extraction methodology are quickly laying ethical issues to rest. As of January, 2008, stem cell research has laid a golden egg. Thousands of times a year a single cell is taken from an embryo to screen for genetic diseases. Advanced Cell Technology now has the capability to allow the cell to divide in a laboratory dish and use the copy for stem cells.

A new study documents malformations seen in an infant born to a kidney transplant recipient who had taken mycophenolate mofetil (MMF), a widely used immunosuppressant available commercially as Cellcept®. The findings suggest a specific birth defect pattern particular to this drug, reinforcing its potential to harm to the fetus.

Approximately 14,000 births to organ transplant recipients, primarily kidney transplant patients, have been reported worldwide. Although pregnancy was initially ill-advised for these women, the American Society of Transplantation concluded in 2003 that pregnancy is usually safe following the first year of a transplant, provided that organ rejection or other complications have not occurred. The fetal side-effects of several immunosuppressant drugs have been studied, though not for widely used newer medications, such as (MMF).

A study by UC Irvine ecologists finds that excess nitrogen in tropical forests boosts plant growth by an average of 20 percent, countering the belief that such forests would not respond to nitrogen pollution.

Faster plant growth means the tropics will take in more carbon dioxide than previously thought, though long-term climate effects are unclear. Over the next century, nitrogen pollution is expected to steadily rise, with the most dramatic increases in rapidly developing tropical regions such as India, South America, Africa and Southeast Asia.

Nitrogen fertilizer, applied to farmland to improve crop yield, also affects ecosystems downwind by seeping into runoff water and evaporating into the atmosphere. Industrial burning and forest clearing also pumps nitrogen into the air.

Scientists from the University of Bonn are researching which plants giant dinosaurs could have lived off more than 100 million years ago in order to find out how they were able to become as large as they did. Such gigantic animals should not have existed.

Their recipe; take 200 milligrams of dried and ground equisetum, ten milliliters of digestive juice from sheep's rumen, a few minerals, carbonate and water. Fill a big glass syringe with the mix, clamp this into a revolving drum and put the whole thing into an incubator, where the brew can rotate slowly.

In this way they obtained an artificial 'dinosaur rumen'. With this apparatus (also used as a ‘Menke gas production technique’ in assessing food for cows) Dr. Jürgen Hummel from the Bonn Institute of Animal Sciences (Bonner Institut für Tierwissenschaften) is investigating which plants giant dinosaurs could have lived off more than 100 million years ago, since this is one of the pieces still missing in the puzzle involving the largest land animals that ever walked the earth. The largest of these 'sauropod dinosaurs' with their 70 to 100 tons had a mass of ten full grown elephants or more than 1000 average people.

Dr. Jürgen Hummel (c) Frank Luerweg, Uni Bonn

Quantitative modeling of a biological pathway normally involves intense computer simulations to crunch all available data on the dozens of relevant reactions in the pathway, producing a detailed interaction map.

Now an MIT team has used an engineering approach to show that complex biological systems can be studied with simple models developed by measuring what goes into and out of the system. Such an approach can give researchers an alternative way to look at the inner workings of a complicated biological system-such as a pathway in a cell-and allow them to study systems in their natural state.

The researchers focused on a pathway in yeast that controls cells' response to a specific change in the environment. The resulting model is “the simplest model you can ever reduce these systems to,” said Alexander van Oudenaarden, W.M. Keck Career Development Professor in Biomedical Engineering and Associate Professor of Physics and senior author of the paper in Science.