A lot of mice have gotten fat so someday we won’t have to. Scientists recently discovered that turning off a gene in mice’s genetic code caused them to stop producing an enzyme which caused the build-up of an amino acid which caused cells to make new proteins and then destroy them over and over again burning lots of calories without getting fat. Did you get that? Basically, some people have cells that do a lot of busy work that waste time and energy – just like your office job! But unlike sitting in front of a computer all day, this busy work keeps them thin. It’s a long way of saying that genes do probably play a factor in making you fat and yes there really are some people who can eat cake all day and not gain weight. You can find more information in the easy-to-read MSNBC article or the more detailed Nature.com article or if you have PhD in cell biology you can dive into the original paper published in Cell Metabolism. [...]

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I always run out of quarters to do my laundry. I hardly ever use cash these days, preferring to use plastic cards with magnetic strips to pay for all my goods. But unless I get my cat to start licking all my clothes clean, I’ve got to feed the washing machine its diet of large, circular change. So I found myself in a long line at the bank at 11:30 on Saturday morning along with several other people who were cashing their paychecks or answering their cell phones despite very strict signage that prohibited such behavior.

I picked up a copy of our weekly liberal newspaper to read as I waited. I flipped past all the ads for “island temple healing” (are there islands in Indiana?) and “European whirlpool and body massage” (is there something special about European whirlpools? Does the water whirl in the opposite direction?) to find an ad on the back page for a medical research study asking me, “Healthy, but Overweight?” I don’t know why they needed to capitalize “overweight.” Perhaps the [...]

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