Science

Meat and cheese may be as bad for you as smoking

That chicken wing you're eating could be as deadly as a cigarette. In a new study that tracked a large sample of adults for nearly two decades, researchers have found that eating a diet rich in animal proteins during middle age makes you four times more likely to die of cancer than someone with a low-protein diet – a mortality risk factor comparable to smoking.
Not only is excessive protein consumption linked to a dramatic rise in cancer mortality, but middle-aged people who eat lots of proteins from animal sources – including meat, milk and cheese – are also more susceptible to early death in general, reveals the study published on March 4 in Cell Metabolism. Protein-lovers were 74 percent more likely to die of any cause within the study period than their more low-protein counterparts. They were also several times more likely to die of diabetes.

Are you smarter than a 5-year-old?

Millions of high school and college algebra students are united in a shared agony over solving for x and y, and for those to whom the answers don't come easily, it gets worse: Most preschoolers and kindergarteners can do some algebra before even entering a math class.
In a just-published study in the journal Developmental Science, lead author and post-doctoral fellow Melissa Kibbe and Lisa Feigenson, associate professor of psychological and brain sciences at Johns Hopkins University's Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, find that most preschoolers and kindergarteners, or children between 4 and 6, can do basic algebra naturally.
"These very young children, some of whom are just learning to count, and few of whom have even gone to school yet, are doing basic algebra and with little effort," Kibbe wrote. "They do it by using what we call their 'Approximate Number System:' their gut-level, inborn sense of quantity and number."
The "Approximate Number System," or ANS, is also called "number sense," and describes humans' and animals' ability to quickly size up the quantity of objects in their everyday environments. Humans and a host of other animals are born with this ability and it's probably an evolutionary adaptation to help human and animal ancestors survive in the wild, scientists say.

A shocking diet: Researchers describe microbe that 'eats' electricity

There have been plenty of fad diets that captured the public's imagination over the years, but Harvard scientists have identified what may be the strangest of them all – sunlight and electricity.
Led by Peter Girguis, the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Natural Sciences, and Arpita Bose, a post-doctoral fellow in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, a team of researchers showed that the commonly found bacterium Rhodopseudomonas palustris can use natural conductivity to pull electrons from minerals located deep in soil and sediment while remaining at the surface, where they absorb the sunlight needed to produce energy. The study is described in a February 26 paper in Nature Communications.

Outside the body our memories fail us

New research from Karolinska Institutet and Umeå University of Sweden demonstrates for the first time that there is a close relationship between body perception and the ability to remember. For us to be able to store new memories from our lives, we need to feel that we are in our own body. According to researchers, the results could be of major importance in understanding the memory problems that psychiatric patients often exhibit.
The memories of what happened on the first day of school are an example of an episodic memory. How these memories are created and how the role that the perception of one's own body has when storing memories has long been inconclusive. Swedish researchers can now demonstrate that volunteers who experience an exciting event whilst perceiving an illusion of being outside their own body exhibit a form of memory loss.
“It is already evident that people who have suffered psychiatric conditions in which they felt that they were not in their own body have fragmentary memories of what actually occurred," writes Loretxu Bergouignan, principal author of the current study. "We wanted to see how this manifests itself in healthy subjects."
The study, which is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, involved a total of 84 students reading about and undergoing four oral questioning sessions.