Inside Science News Service

A collection of brief stories from the world of science

August 15, 2008
By Chris Gorski
Inside Science News Service

Is the Brain Too Well-Developed?

The power of the human brain gave people language, art, and the ability to think abstractly. New research demonstrates that along with these abilities might come the cause of modern neurological disorders such as schizophrenia. Research by a group of scientists from Cambridge, Leipzig, and Shanghai compared the brains of healthy and schizophrenic humans with the brains of chimpanzees and rhesus macaques, finding that changes in brain processing power were “accompanied by adaptive changes in brain metabolism, potentially pushing the human brain to the limit of its metabolic capabilities,” according to their paper, published in the journal Genome Biology. The researchers compared the way that genes are expressed and metabolites in the brain are used in people with schizophrenia with changes that happened during human evolution and found that their results are consistent with the idea “that schizophrenia is a costly by-product of human brain evolution.”


Marinate Before Barbequing for Taste, but Also for Health

If recent reports that grilling meat develops cancer-forming compounds in addition to that beloved juicy, smoky flavor have you concerned, food chemists may have found your solution. Researchers at Kansas State University found that marinating meats can decrease the creation of chemicals known to increase cancer risk. The chemicals are called heterocyclic amines (HCAs), formed when high heat sears compounds like amino acids on the outer edges of your lovely steaks and chops. According to Dr. J.S. Smith, who published his results in the Journal of Food Science, the key to decreasing the amount of HCAs in your barbecue is to use a marinade rich in antioxidant-laden spices and herbs. Many common herbs and spices are high in anti-oxidants, such as oregano, dill, rosemary, and turmeric. While not every marinade would necessarily reduce the amount of HCAs, including these herbs and spices will likely make your meat tasty -- and healthier.


Actually, Marmite is Strange

Marmite is not just a thick, brown, viscous yeast extract spread popular as a toast topper in the United Kingdom. It’s also a prime subject for scientific research. Made from the byproducts of beer-brewing, Marmite has a distinctive flavor. It inspires such a mix of fierce loyalty and revulsion that it’s advertised using the slogan “Love it or Hate it.” It also has a complex rheology, meaning that its properties of deformation and flow are complicated.

Researchers from Cambridge University investigating the yeasty spread have defined just what is so strange about it. They found that Marmite is thixotropic, meaning that stirring decreases the viscosity of the item, and that when you stop stirring or spreading it, it does not quickly regain its initial thick texture. Many common items do stiffen back up when the stirring speed is decreased. For example, yogurt tends to become firm again soon after being loosened by stirring. Understanding these strange properties is important to manufacturing and packaging efforts as well as to tempting the palate of Marmite addicts.

World's Slipperiest Insects

In the United States it’s not only summer, it’s insect season. While flypaper is among the many items used to keep the buzzing to a minimum, in South Africa, they don’t need it. Hanging a few leaves of the Roridula gorgonias plant from the rafters will take hold of pests. Insects stick to the plant like, well, flypaper. Once bugs land on it, they do not escape. The odd thing is that each plant is populated by a group of Pameridea roridulae, or mirid bugs, which roam around the leaves with ease, feasting on the stuck bugs. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Metals Research in Germany recently investigated the reason that this one type of bug does not stick to the R. gogonias plant. They found that the insect was completely non-stick. As described in their paper in the Journal of Experimental Biology, the scientists performed several experiments to investigate why. Many insects have an oily coating, but there is something special about the mirid bug. Under a cryo-scanning electron microscope the researchers found that mirid bugs have a greasy covering thirty times thicker than the blowfly they compared it to. This key adaptation keeps it feasting, while other insects merely struggle in vain to break free.

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