Blogs / Discoblog

The next time you think about making that cocktail a double, wait—it might already be one.

William Kerr, along with colleagues from the Alcohol Research Group at the Public Health Institute, took a scientific bar crawl—no, not the kind where you visit science-themed drinking establishments. The researchers visited 80 places in northern California, mostly bars and restaurants, to find out the alcohol content of their drinks—by analyzing them, not by partaking. Compared to the scientific standard of one drink—12 ounces of beer, 5 ounces of wine, or one and a half ounces of 80-proof liquor—the bars and restaurants were pretty generous with their liquor, giving out stronger booze than the researchers expected, and more of it.

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American men are getting heftier, but worries that their waistlines and sperm counts are inversely related might be a little overrated.

Nanette Santoro from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx just finished a study finding that men with very high body mass indexes did not show decreased sperm counts or lowered sperm quality, contrary to conventional wisdom. She and her colleagues studied nearly 300 overweight men between the ages of 18 and 50, and found that while many showed lower testosterone levels, the subjects’ sperm production was no different than ordinary men.

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Some say athletic success is more mental than physical, and cheating in sports might be, too.

Along with steroids, growth hormone has become one of the hot-button banned substances in professional sports. The Mitchell Report, released in December, outed 86 Major League Baseball players as steroids or growth hormone users. But according to Jennifer Hansen, a researcher at Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Sydney, Australia, the edge athletes receive by taking growth hormone might be mostly in their minds.

Hansen’s study gathered 64 young volunteers who played recreational sports, and in an eight-week double-blind experiment, researchers gave some of the athletes growth hormone and gave others a placebo. Male subjects, she says, were especially likely to believe they’d received growth hormone even if they hadn’t. But the athletes of both sexes who were wrong—who thought they were on growth hormone but had actually taken the placebo—believed that the substance had helped their performance, and they showed slight improvements in several athletic tests.

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Last month, British microbiologist Peter Wilson released his revolting finding that a person’s keyboard could harbor five times as many bacteria as a toilet seat. That’s a recipe for sickness in any office, but it could be downright deadly in a hospital, with doctors and nurses passing germs as they type data into the computer. So Wilson is trying to change that, along with other researchers at University College London Hospital and American company Advanced Power Components. Specifically, they have designed a keyboard for the U.K.’s hospitals that notifies you when it’s dirty.

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Advocates of “organic” or “natural” foods get up in arms about some of the practices at big commercial hog farms—especially putting antibiotics into the livestock feed to make the animals grow faster. The idea simply makes some people uncomfortable, but more importantly, the overuse of antibiotics in animals, just like in hospitals, can worsen the problem of antibiotic resistance in bacteria. According to a study out of Ohio State University, however, pigs that went without antibiotics were more likely to carry human pathogens like salmonella and trichinella.

The team of scientists led by Wondwossen Gebreyes studied around 600 pigs. About half lived in indoor commercial hog farms and received antibiotics; the other half lived the old-fashioned way, outdoors and antibiotic-free. The non-treated swine showed more salmonella infections, 54 percent compared to 39 percent of the treated pigs, and more infections of toxoplasma and trichinella.

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You’ve probably heard that you can’t get tomato on your Big Mac right now—restaurants like McDonald’s have stopped serving them because of the current salmonella scare, in which almost 150 people have gotten sick from eating tainted tomatoes. Federal officials haven’t isolated the source of the outbreak yet, but according to New Scientist, it could have started because the fruits in question—raw red plum, red roma, and round red tomatoes—were cleaned too much.

Like our own bodies, tomatoes and other fruits are often crawling with other bacteria that don’t make us (or them) sick. These other microbes, however, are competitors for salmonella, and keep the pathogen from multiplying out of control, according to Keith Warriner, a microbiologist from the University of Guelph in Ontario. He says that overzealous cleaning of tomatoes can kill off the benign bacteria and make it easier for pathogens like salmonella to proliferate. In a lab experiment, he coated tomatoes with another kind of bacteria that doesn’t make people sick, and those fruits tested positive for salmonella less often than regular one.

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A hair trail has now shed light on a two-centuries-old historical question.

Napoleon Bonaparte, the famous dictator of France, died in exile on the island of St. Helena in the southern Atlantic Ocean. While doctors at the time cited stomach cancer as the cause of death, some historians believe that arsenic did him in—high levels of the toxic substance were found in hair samples after he died. But not so fast, says a team of Italian scientists—the arsenic in Napoleon’s hair probably didn’t kill him.

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Picture trying to hit a 95 mile-per-hour fastball. Now picture trying to do it with jet lag. Don’t worry—it gets even harder for the pros, too.

In a study funded by Major League Baseball, Christopher Winter of Martha Jefferson Hospital Sleep Medicine Center in Charlottesville, Virginia, studied the circadian sleep rhythms of professional ball clubs traveling around the country over a decade. He said today at the Associated Professional Sleep Societies meeting that he found whichever team was better adjusted to the time zone they played in won more often.

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We may not be aware of it, but the cells in our bodies are communicating all the time, gabbing away as part of a complex community that sends signals and messages nonstop. But while scientists have been studying cell signaling for years, one question remained: Would we ever be able to learn the cells’ language?

Now, it appears, we have an answer. Dr. Cameron Alexander and PhD student George Pasparakis at the U.K.’s University of Nottingham have successfully facilitated a conversation between natural bacterial cells and artificial polymer vesicles, using strategically-placed groups of sugars on the vesicle surface to mimic the surfaces of an actual cell.

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A good week for drinkers may have just gotten better.

First, Venezuelan scientists said they’d identified the chemicals that make beer spoil and were working on a way to keep them out of the bottle. Then researchers announced that a chemical found in red wine could help keep your heart young and strong. Now, Swedish scientists published a study declaring that drinkers were much less likely than non-drinkers to ever develop rheumatoid arthritis.

The researchers surveyed about 2,700 people—around 1,600 of whom had arthritis. When the scientists compared subjects to people of their own age, sex, and hometown, those who said they were “heavy drinkers” had developed arthritis about 50 less of the time than those who did not partake as frequently.

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