inkycircus

Beans, beans ...

(PHOTO: CANONCAN)

A little poem for you.

Beans, beans, they're good for your heart.
Beans, beans, they might make you...

Well, not any more. The humble baked bean is one of my favourite foods. Fab on toast, tasty on a baked spud, not too fattening, cheap. Winners all round. The only problem with baked beans is the, er, side effect. Now those clever scientist folk have figured out a way to reduce their, er, gas inducing tendencies by fermenting them with friendly bacteria. Hooray. Both for me and my diet and for the people around the world who depend on beans as a great source of protein. And hooray also because if beans are making you, er, gaseous, they're not being properly digested so their nutritional goodness is being wasted.

Via BBC News, and Scientific American and also CBC (Thanks Sara!).

Starfish tragedy

(PHOTO: DS1NFO)
I heart starfish and I heart Canada so this story makes me sad. Starfish always seem like one of those creatures that dont really hurt anyone, they're just cute. Not fuzzy cute, star shaped cute.

Anyway, hundreds of purple sea stars washed up in Trail Bay north of Vancouver. The Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans were unable to determine how they died, and brought in an expert, Bruce Leighton. He noted that

The die-off coincided with the peak of the starfish reproductive cycle, when the creatures are most vulnerable to Orchitophrya stellarum, a protozoan that feeds on sea stars' sperm.

East Coast starfish usually survive such infestations, scientists said. I can only assume that the East Coast starfish are hardcore and can beat off the parasites, but that the soft happy-go-lucky West Coast starfish are altogether more gentle and vulnerable. Sad.

Via Yahoo!

But I like fat babies

The WHO is releasing new growth charts for child development based on breast-feed babies. Compared to chubby formula-fed babies, breasters tend to be leaner and grow slower. The WHO predicts that the new growth charts will show off just how big n' fat us Westerners really are, even as tots. A further 20 to 30 percent of kids will now likely fall on the "overweight" section of the growth curves for their age. The old standards were based on limited set of kids from the US, who most ate formula. This new growth curve is based on "optimum" kids from the US, Norway, Ghana, Brazil, India and Oman (optimum = mom's don't smoke, have good nutrition and breast feed).

The old growth curves maybe have encouraged parents to overfeed their kids with protein and fat-rich formula to make sure they kept up to speed. This is a practice likely to stop. Of course the new standardised curve with help the WHO - who is currently trying to measure the world's obesity crisis - figure out what growth patterns in childhood lead to obesity and type II diabetes later in life.

So farewell fat baby. I'll miss your humongous chubby face and rolly polly legs. So squishy.

The Pill. Redux

The male contraception pill has been in the works for ages and ages. Similar to the regular pill, it works by using sex hormones to cut off fertility - instead of estrogen it's androgens and instead of suppressing ovulation it is suppressing sperm production. Kind of like a reversible, chemical vasectomy.

But reversible was the big hitch. In the first trials of male contraception a few years back, all the men became sterile. Permanently. Ouch.

Recent trials have been much more promising.  And now a meta-analysis of nearly 1500 participants from 30 studies has found that men can get their fertility back, usually in around 3 months. Fertility being judged as 20 million sperm/milliliter (who knew?).

So yes, boys be comforted. The pill won't nuke your willy. Also be pleased that your partners will no longer have to suffer the sometimes psychotic side-effects of estrogen swings. But I just want to know if anyone would actually take it? Pros and cons for both sides of the gender coin here. Drug companies are supposedly thinking the same thing..

Milk, again

(PHOTO: BROOKE NOVAK)

Drinking at least one cup of milk a day while pregnant leads to healthier, heavier babies, according to team of doctors from McGill University in Montreal. They found that for each 8 oz. of milk drunk daily, mums could expect an extra 41 grams of baby birth weight. Higher birth weight babies have far few health problems as newborns and may even grow up to be smarter and less obesity-prone than their scrawny neonatal chums.

No rocket science here. Calcium and vitamin D are absolutely essential to our bodies. And milk has loads of both. But check out this quote from the study authors:

The findings are important "because increasing numbers of women are restricting milk consumption during pregnancy, believing that it will lower fat intake, minimize weight gain, treat self-diagnosed lactose intolerance, or prevent their children from developing allergies," the authors said.

Whoa. The authors found that 14% of the women in their study were avoiding milk on purpose. This is dumb: First off, I firmly believe that skim milk is the best diet food ever created. Refreshing, full of protein, low in calories and tastes great with espresso. Moms worried about a little extra preg-paunch should also keep in mind the next milky phase of motherhood; the phase where you are sucked dry of body fat by your nursing offspring.

The allergies thing really is also worrying, because, if true, it means that mom aren't getting the real info about milk allergies. TONNES of kids are allergic to milk when they are born, and most grow out of it by age 3 to 4. What's more, we don't really know if what you eat/drink/how much when pregnant gives your kid to allergies. And to be honest, milk just isn't the one to be scared of. Stave off the peanut butter, maybe.

But here is where things get complicated. The authors aren't saying that milk is the pregnancy dream food, they are merely saying it's a really easy way to get protein, calcium and vitamin D. And guess what? There are other ways of getting protein, calcium and vitamin D. A four oz. salmon steak has 4 times the vitamin D as does a cup of milk. Though there are those pesky heavy metals to deal with. Shrimp is really high in vitamin D, too. And then there are supplements, which are never as good as food, but what can you do, eh?

So really, the message of this story is not DRINK MILK YOU IDIOTS (as the headline "Avoiding Milk During Pregnancy Linked to Lower Birth Weight" implies), it is get enough calcium, protein and vitamin D. Oh and we actually have no idea how much vitamin D is good.

Cause to doubt

Seems that a team of Chinese scientists have produced a cloned cow that is resistant to mad cow disease. Or so says Reuters.

Reasons to be cautious:
1) The team was lead by totally disgraced former cloning maestro Woo-Suk Hwang. Sure he did good work, but then he faked the rest.
2) RESISTANT to mad cow disease? Mad cow disease or BSE is caused by infectious and misshapen prions that degrade brain tissue. You can get it from a) eating someone else bad brains, b) having a gene that predisposes you to forming freaky prions or c) forming freaky prions totally spontaneously. Where does the immunity come in exactly? And why don't you explain these things to me?
3) This was the "Chinese scientists have succeeded in cloning a cow with gene cells resistant to mad cow disease, the official Xinhua news agency said on Wednesday." What is a gene cell anyways?
4) Source = Xinhua

Okay so here's the real deal. You can, in theory, make BSE-resistant cattle. A team in Japan did it in 2004 and here's the press release (which was obviously written in Japanese and then translated) and here is the New Scientist story. It's kind of confusing, but all prion stuff is really. The gist is that they engineered cow embryo with both prion genes knocked out. We all have normal prion genes that go all wacky-haywire when exposed to an infectious prion or sometimes just do it themselves. Blah blah GM beef better or worse that possible BSE blah blah blah.

And now the Chinese have done it too. Maybe. But that story sure ain't gonna convince me they did.

Science newsflash 27.4.2006

• China to release panda into the wild (MSNBC)
• Bury it, and bury it deep (BBC)
• Gravity dance tilted the planets (ABC)
• I spy with my insect eye (New Scientist)
• Marburg virus vaccine? (CBC)

The answer to my mum's prayers

ANNA'S BAG DOESN'T NEED LIGHTS BECAUSE IT'S YELLOW AND LOVELY AND SHE'S SUPER ORGANISED...

My mum's handbag is the trapdoor to a parallel universe. I'm convinced of it. She swears blind that she puts her keys in the same part of the bag each time, and yet each time she's standing at the front door fumbling in the selfsame bag, she finds her wallet, the earring she thought she'd lost months ago, an old sweet, four thousand tissues and no keys. The keys are clearly waiting in the next universe until she starts looking for that earring and then they are miraculously right where they should be. So this bag might be right up her street. It lights up to remind you which of your important belongings are not safely inside.

It's a handbag (called a LadyBag) that has an illuminated icon for a phone, a wallet and a set of keys on the side. When each item is safely stowed, the light goes off. Genius. Of course there is one flaw for my mum. The keys may be *somewhere* in the bag, but until the icon represents a blueprint of the intricate pattern of pockets IN the bag, it's not really going to help her all that much...

Via ABC News, and also Shiny Shiny (complete with a picture).

Busting out all over China

(PHOTO: ALLAN FERGUSON)

I really should have left this to Anne, our resident radio expert on the physics of bras but I couldn't resist. Seems that the average cups size of Chinese women is on the up and up. Most Chinese women - especially young ladies - used to wear and A or B cup and many bra manufacturers only made those sizes. But now bra-makers are reporting an increase in demand for C, D even E cups. Way to go girls.

Of course the best part of the article was the explanation for the trend.

The Beijing Institute of Clothing Technology released a report last week saying the average chest circumference of Chinese woman has hit 83.53 centimeters, up nearly 1cm from the early 1990s. The growth trend is credited to women eating more nutritiously and taking part in more sports.

I guess China is developing in more than one way. But I am thinking its not more sports. More silicon and McDonald's, maybe.

Milk it.

Researchers at the Aussie Department of Primary Industries have just scanned Wallaby milk, of all things, for do-good compounds. Lo and behold  walla-babies' immune systems are armed to the gills. The researchers found more than 30 ingredients that help bolster our immune system in their milk, reports the Sydney Morning Herald. But the star component by far is the innocuously named AGG01. It's 100 times more effective at battling bacteria than penicillin. PLUS, it fights off that antiobiotic resistant uber-nasty bug MRSA. So you think the wallaby is cute huh? Try kickass.

So what else is there going down in the milk department? Camel milk, that's what. Mmmm. According to the UN, there's a $10 billion camel milk market waiting to be explored:

“The potential is massive. Milk is money,” FAO’s Dairy and Meat expert Anthony Bennett said in a review of camel milk potential, noting that the agency is hoping donors and investors will come forward to develop the sector not only at the local level but helping it move into lucrative markets in the Middle East and the West.

While demand is booming, supply is rudimentary at best. But Bennett is confident such bumps will be ironed out with some cash injections. Take, for example, the cocoa camel train getting going this fall. Viennese chocolatier Johann Georg Hochleitner, backed by the Abu Dhabi royals, is launching a low-fat camel milk chocolate. I'd be curious to taste the stuff seeing as camel milk has more salt and three times more vitamin C than the bovine stuff.