Do these bacteria make my thighs look fat?

Believe it or not, you have a bacterial infection in your intestines right now. And it's OK. We all have bacteria in our guts, ones that live with our bodies in a mutually beneficial (or "symbiotic") relationship. We provide a nice, safe, warm environment, and in return they help us digest our food. There are certain foods that we just couldn't digest without our helpful little microbes, and certain proteins, amino acids, and other nutrients we need that we would have a hard time absorbing if they weren't preprocessed.

Now it appears that they may also influence how well we absorb sugars and store them...and when we store sugars, we store them as fat. Researchers at Washington University inoculated germ-free mice with different microorganisms or a combination of microorganisms and measured how they digested their food. The mice given the combination of bugs digested the sugars within their feed more efficiently, but instead of burning them off, the mice stored them as fat, causing them to gain more weight.

The researchers look at the study as a "logical extension of the human genome project - one designed to define the microbial side of ourselves." They even managed to drop the word "microbiome." (Add that one to the list.)

The take home message? While dieting and exercise are still the best ways to lose and control weight, the bugs in your gut may have something to say about it. The researchers hypothesize that one day treatments that alter the microbial composition of our intestines could be a vital aspect of nutritional control.

[Many thanks to EurekAlert and LiveScience.]

Genetically carnivorous?

Twin studies are often used to probe the relative contributions of nature and nurture - that is, heredity and environment - to behavioral and other traits. The results can be eerie at times; the popular and scientific literature are rife with descriptions of twins who are separated at birth and meet decades later to find that they have followed the exact same career paths, have the same likes and dislikes, and have similar personality traits.

How about food preferences? Researchers in England surveyed the parents of hundreds of sets of identical and fraternal to determine the heritability of food preference. The results? Kids are more likely to inherit a taste for fish or meat, while preferences for vegetables - and dessert(!?) - are more heavily influenced by availability and/or parental choice.

Does this mean we can breed out vegans?

Believe it or not, this research does have a good purpose. The leader of the research group, Professor Jane Wardle of the Health Behavior Unit at University College London, is keenly interested in what shapes children's food preferences so as to better understand why kids diets are so, well, bad. If you can mold their diet when they're young, maybe you can keep them from getting cancer and heart disease later.

[Check out Yahoo for more, but if you really want to get to the meat of the story, check out Prof. Wardle's UCL faculty page.]

Ropeless jump rope patented

Yes, you read that correctly. A ropeless jump rope. As in a jump rope, sans rope. Which, in my mind, isn't really a jump rope, rope being the fundamental component, the very essence, of a jump rope. For at the core of a jump rope is, well, rope. That one can jump over. Thus, what we really have here is a pair weighted jump handles, which you can't really jump over.

Come to think of it, what it looks like we really have here is a pair of hollow donuts on sticks.

Coming next to a playground near you: hoopless hula hoop (aka hula dancing), square-free hopscotch, and dodge (same as dodgeball, but without the ball; you just throw yourself to the ground when someone on the other team waves their arms at you).

[Thank you Engadget and Globe and Mail! You can also view the patent, #7,037,243, on the USPTO website.]

The sleeping pill that puts you to sleep AND wakes you up

Advertisements and PR for sleeping pills (and other medications, too) crack me up, like the one for Lunesta with the freaky glowing butterfly that floats into everyone's bedroom. (Word to the wise: if you're lying in bed and you see a radioactive moth hovering over your head, don't close your eyes. Swat that unholy thing and run.)

But the makers of Ambien seem to be experiencing some mixed PR of late. First came the stories that arrests for driving while under the influence of Ambien are on the rise. Most of the drivers arrested while sleeping behind the wheel didn't even realize they were driving.

You can tell just how powerful Ambien's wake up kick must be, because now there are a limited number of reports of coma patients being temporarily roused by the drug. Three men in England who had been diagnosed as being in a permanent vegetative state (PVS) started interacting with their environment or showed other improvements for short periods of time when given Ambien as part of a research study. The question remains whether the men were misdiagnosed to begin with; supposedly it is impossible to rouse patients in a true PVS by any means.

Ambien: Helps you get a full night's sleep, makes you sleepdrive, and can potentially wake the comatose. I think I'll stick with my long time favorite sleep aid.

[You can read more at New Scientist.]

Can you hear me now? Not if you're over 30.

I love it when a technology gets turned on its head, but this one could cause some serious consternation among educational professionals. Some students apparently have started downloading a ringtone to their cell phones that is of such a high frequency that adult ears don't pick it up. Thus, if kids have this ringtone on their phones, teachers will never hear the constant beeping as they text message each other with the answers to that math quiz.

It's a simple byproduct of aging - as we get older, we lose the ability to pick up on high-frequency sounds.

The ironic thing? The ringtone is a spin-off of a technology designed to drive off teenagers loitering in front of shops without bothering the older, more genteel shopping clientele.

[Check out the New York Times for more.]

You can almost taste the sonar

Let's go down the list of ways in which we've enhanced our senses. We have night vision goggles, as well as plain old eyeglasses like mine, for the eyes. There's even a bionic eye in the works. We have sensitive microphones and headphones/earbuds for the ears. There are guys out there with magnets in their fingertips that supposedly let them "feel" magnetic fields. Smell? Not so much done on this as far as I know, although if anyone knows of technological enhancements for the old schnoz, I'd love to hear about them.

How about taste? Well, how would you like to taste the fact that you're about to walk into a wall? For some 30 years the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition has been working the BrainPort - a neural tongue interface. It works like this: the device has a grid of 144 electrodes that sit on your tongue and send impulses through the sensitive nerve endings that you usually use for taste. The result? Your sensory perception is augmented by whatever sensing technology (sonar, radar, IR, etc.) is hooked to the system. The US Navy is supposedly interested in a sonar version for divers, but apparently the visually impaired can also use the system to "see" their surroundings.

[Thanks to Engadget for bringing this to light. Apparently, they like'd it so much they've written about it twice, unless there are 2 different BrainPorts floating around out there.]