Humans

Health & Medicine

Few Americans eat right

The Institute of Medicine periodically issues recommendations on what people should eat to be healthy and maintain a reasonable weight. Americans have largely ignored this well-intentioned advice, a new study shows. It reports that “nearly the entire U.S. population consumes a diet that is not on par with recommendations.”

Life

A thousand points of height

A study finds heaps of genetic variants that influence a person’s stature, but even added together they don’t stack up to much.

Earth

Contemplating an Arctic oil spill

The waters off northern Alaska may be “the largest oil province in the United States” after the Gulf, notes Edward Itta, a native of Barrow, Alaska. He is also mayor of the North Slope Borough, an 88,000-square-mile jurisdiction that runs across the upper part of the state. And in a September 27 videoconference with the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling, he tried to impress upon the commissioners just how remote his neck of the tundra is.

Life

A salty tail

Just adding sodium can stimulate limb regrowth in tadpoles, a study finds, raising the possibility that human tissue might respond to relatively simple treatment.

Health & Medicine

How the brain chooses sides

A new study reveals where and how people decide which hand to use for a simple task.

Chemistry

BP oil: Gulf sediment at risk, oceanographer claims

Most of BP’s spilled oil remains in the Gulf — with little sign of degrading, according to Ian MacDonald of Florida State University. And much of this surviving oil could be in sediment or on its way there, the scientist reported at a September 27 meeting in Washington, D.C.

Tech

Poor initial Gulf spill numbers did ‘not impact’ response

In the early weeks after the catastrophic blowout of the deep-water well in the Gulf of Mexico this spring, BP — the well’s owner — provided the government dramatically low estimates of the flow rate of oil and gas into the sea. Did telling Uncle Sam and the public that the flow rate was 1,000 barrels per day and later 5,000 barrels per day — when the actual rate was closer to 50,000 to 65,000 barrels per day — affect the spill’s management?

Humans

Neandertals blasted out of existence, archaeologists propose

An eruption may have wiped out Neandertals in Europe and western Asia, clearing the region for Stone Age Homo sapiens.

Earth

Clean out your medicine cabinet: Today!

For years, people have been chastised for pitching unused drugs into the trash, turning them into potentially toxic pollutants that can leach into the environment. On Saturday, September 25, the Drug Enforcement Administration is offering to take those drugs off our hands. For free. No questions asked.

Health & Medicine

Disease donations

Sometimes organ donors share more than a functioning body part. They can unwittingly bestow quickly lethal infections. That’s what happened, beginning last November, according to a new case report.

Math

Potato chips: A symptom of the U.S. R&D problem

Last year, U.S. consumers spent $7.1 billion on potato chips — $2 billion more than the federal government’s total 2009 investment on research and development. There’s something wrong, here, when Americans are more willing to empty their wallets for the junk food that will swell their waistlines than for investments in the engine driving the creation of jobs, economic growth and national security.

Earth

Gulf spill may have been somewhat bigger than feds, BP estimated

Researchers estimate the oil output using a new technique developed for measuring the output of marine hydrothermal vents.