Author: Shelley Schlender

We bring you a look back on the world of science, from our colleagues with a pulse on the world-wide science news of the year, the producers at BBC Science in Action.

Headlines:  

1. Chemicals that make drinking water cleaner, might increase allergies to food
2. Rumors run amok about “historic” Mars Mission press conference
3. West Nile Virus, Lyme’s disease, and Dengue fever on the rise

Main feature (6 minutes in):  We’re in that time of year when animals hibernate.  Before they started their long winter’s nap, they fattened up, so they can make it through the winter.  According to CU Health Sciences researcher, Richard Johnson, we humans also evolved to put on weight to make it through leaner times.  But for us, it’s not a change of seasons that gets the weight gain started.  It’s a specific trigger, called, “Sugar.”  Specifically a kind of sugar called fructose, found in honey, fruit juice, corn syrup, and even regular table sugar.  In his new book, The Fat Switch, Johnson traces the increasing availability of this fructose sugar among humans and how it has now made people fat, and sick for thousands of years.  For instance, you think the pharoahs were all buff, and skinny?  Many mummies have lots of skin folds, which means that, as living humans, many were fat.  Johnson also talks about kings who loved sugar so much, sometimes they made sugar statues . . . and ate them . . . leading many to be very fat and prone to modern diseases such as diabetes and heart attack and stroke. Now let’s listen in, as How on Earth’s Shelley Schlender talks with Dr. Richard Johnson, about how sugar affects children.  They begin with how too much sugar can make a person’s body get stuck, storing the sugar as fat.

Hosts: Joel Parker and Susan Moran
Producer: Shelley Schlender
Engineer: Shelley Schlender
Executive Producer: Jim Pullen

Listen to the show:

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 24:47 — 34.0MB)

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Last month, CU Nobel Prize Winner Tom Cech (Check) and colleagues announced a breakthrough in their quest to stop cancer.  It involves an enzyme known as telomerase (tell-AH-mer-aze), which helps cells divide almost endlessly – helpful when a child is growing.  In adults, most cells stop responding to telomerase.  Instead they save up a limited number of cell divisions timed to last through old age.  Cancer cells are different.  They are great gobblers of telomerase.  That’s where CU discovery comes in.  It’s a way to possibly prevent cancer cells from tanking up on telomerase.  Cech says that while human trials are years off, the discovery looks promising.  For more, here’s How on Earth’s Shelley Schlender, talking with CU Nobel Prize winner, Tom Cech, in an extended version of this interview on cancer:

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 12:03 — 9.7MB)

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We talk with Travis Metcalfe, of Boulder’s Space Science Institute, where he is searching for Sister Earth and also part of the Blue Dot Project.  As for why, the past two decades have witnessed accelerating progress on one of the most fundamental questions in astronomy: Are we alone in the Universe? Astronomers have already discovered hundreds of planets around distant stars. Some of them are nearly as small as the Earth, and orbit in the “Goldilocks zone” of their parent star where liquid water can exist.

 

We congratulate Boulder’s David J. Wineland for winning the 2012 Nobel Prize in physics.     Wineland, a physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology and CU-Boulder, shares the prize with and Serge Haroche of France.  They are credited with making breakthroughs in quantum physics by showing how to observe individual quantum particles without destroying them.  These, in turn, are the first steps toward building superfast computers based on quantum physics.

Hosts: Joel Parker, Beth Bartel
Producer: Shelley Schlender
Engineer: Jim Pullen
Executive Producer: Jim Pullen

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 24:17 — 33.4MB)

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We’ll talk about the World of a tiny particle called the Higgs-Boson, with CU Physicist Uriel Nauenberg.  Nauenberg also speaks tonight at the Boulder Cafe Scientifique.

Hosts: Joel Parker and Ted Burnham
Producer: Shelley Schlender
Engineer: Jim Pullen
Executive Producer: Susan Moran

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 23:49 — 32.7MB)

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