Obesity slows fat 'turnover' in the body
LIVERMORE, Calif., Sept. 26 (UPI) -- Obese people have trouble losing weight because their turnover rate of fat storage and loss is slower than that for average-weight people, U.S. researchers say.
Researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, writing in the journal Nature, report the turnover rate of fat is on average 1 1/2 years for normal weight people, but for the obese the fat removal rate from fat tissue decreases and the amount of fat stored each year increases.
"There is a slower output of fat in obese people in this study," national laboratory researcher Bruce Buchholz said. "The fat is on average 2 years old compared to 1 1/2 years."
Fat, on average, is replaced six times during the 10-year lifespan of a fat cell in the body, regulating fat storage and movement, researchers said.
"We found that a combination of high storage and low fat removal rates, as in obesity, facilitates fat accumulation within fatty tissue," Buchholz said. "This promotes the development or maintenance of excess body fat mass."
Study: Birds have to learn nest-building
EDINBURGH, Scotland, Sept. 26 (UPI) -- Nest-building by birds is not an instinctive skill but rather something they learn and improve upon with experience, Scottish researchers say.
Scientists from the University of Edinburgh filmed male Southern Masked Weaver birds in Botswana as they built several nests during a breeding season, a university release reported Monday.
Nest-building techniques by individual birds varied from one nest to the next, the researchers said, and some birds built their nests from right to left while others constructed them from left to right.
Their construction skills improved with each subsequent nest, as the birds dropped fewer blades of grass as they worked, suggesting nest building was a learning process.
"If birds built their nests according to a genetic template, you would expect all birds to build their nests the same way each time," Patrick Walsh of Edinburgh's School of Biological Sciences said. "However this was not the case. Southern Masked Weaver birds displayed strong variations in their approach, revealing a clear role for experience. Even for birds, practice makes perfect."
Nobel laureate quits group over warming
COLLEGE PARK, Md., Sept. 26 (UPI) -- A Nobel laureate says he has resigned from a leading scientific organization over the group's stand on global warming he says is unscientific.
Ivar Giaever resigned from the American Physical Society after the organization, which has 48,000 members, adopted a policy statement that states: "The evidence is incontrovertible: global warming is occurring."
"Incontrovertible is not a scientific word," the U.S.-based Giaever, a Norwegian who shared the 1973 Nobel award for physics, told Britain's The Sunday Telegraph. "Nothing is incontrovertible in science."
Giaever, 82, was one of President Barack Obama's leading scientific supporters during the 2008 president election campaign, but has since criticized the president over his stance on global warming. Giaever joined more than 100 scientists in an open letter to Obama saying, "We maintain that the case for alarm regarding climate change is grossly overstated."
"Global warming has become a new religion," Giaever said. "We frequently hear about the number of scientists who support it. But the number is not important: only whether they are correct is important.
"We don't really know what the actual effect on the global temperature is. There are better ways to spend the money."
College physics programs face ax in Texas
AUSTIN, Texas, Sept. 26 (UPI) -- Texas says it will go ahead with plans to phase out some university undergraduate physics programs unless they improve their graduation rates.
The state's Higher Education Coordinating Board said nearly half of the 24 undergraduate physics programs at state-funded universities could be closed if they fail to graduate at least 25 students every five years, an article in the journal Nature reported.
"Until now, most faculty members thought their role was to do research and teach courses they were assigned," Michael Marder, a physicist at the University of Texas at Austin, said. "Now, researchers at institutions in Texas are going to have to take responsibility for students graduating successfully."
Marder was a member of a group from the American Physical Society that met with the HECB to discuss the situation.
Raymund Paredes, the Texas Commissioner of Higher Education, says there is no intention to target science fields in particular, but in an era of tight higher-education budgets he would not give any discipline exemption from the expectations to perform.
"In this budgetary environment, we can't afford the luxury of programs not producing graduates," he says. "It's up to academic departments faced with closure of programs to salvage them."
