Scientists unearth bacteria from stomach of 5,300-year-old iceman

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STAT, January 7, 2016

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In 1991, a German couple hiking in the Alps came across the body of a middle-aged man lying face down in a snowfield. It took days for a recovery team to hack him out of the ice and haul him by helicopter and truck to a lab in Austria. There, scientists determined the man had died 5,300 years ago.

Ötzi, as the man was nicknamed (after the nearby Ötztal Valley), has kept scientists very busy for the past 24 years. They’ve even built an entire research center — the Institute for Mummies and the Iceman in Bolzano, Italy — to house Ötzi and study him. They’ve slowly extracted one clue after another about how Ötzi died and, more importantly, how he lived.

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Seeking the Gears of Our Inner Clock

Posted on by Lori Jia

The New York Times, December 28, 2015

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Throughout the day, a clock ticks inside our bodies. It rouses us in the morning and makes us sleepy at night. It raises and lowers our body temperature at the right times, and regulates the production of insulin and other hormones.

The body’s circadian clock even influences our thoughts and feelings. Psychologists have measured some of its effects on the brain by having people take cognitive tests at different times of day.

As it turns out, late morning turns out to be the best time to try doing tasks such as mental arithmetic that demand that we hold several pieces of information in mind at once.

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Science in 2016: Separating the hype from the promise

Posted on by Matt Kristoffersen

STAT, December 23, 2015

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In science, the future is a treacherous place.

Each time researchers publish an exciting new study, we’re all too tempted to extrapolate far beyond the initial findings to imagine all sorts of tremendous benefits very soon. In medicine, these giddy predictions can be downright cruel. They may offer false hope to people grappling with all-too-real disorders.

Yet the future isn’t going to leave us high and dry. Researchers are unquestionably making important advances in their understanding of how our bodies work — advances that might indeed someday change the practice of medicine. As we round the corner toward the start of 2016, here’s what we may reasonably expect in a couple of high-profile biomedical fields.

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Friday’s Elk, December 18, 2015

Posted on by Matt Kristoffersen

Greetings–

Like many of you, I’m in a final scramble to finish off a ridiculous to-do list before the holidays hit me like a falling grand piano. So this will probably be the last issue of Friday’s Elk I’ll send out for 2015. I’ll be up and running again on January 8, 2016. So here’s a quick look at the old and the new. Continue reading “Friday’s Elk, December 18, 2015” →

Down From the Trees, Humans Finally Got a Decent Night’s Sleep

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The New York Times, December 17, 2015

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Over the past few million years, the ancestors of modern humans became dramatically different from other primates. Our forebears began walking upright, and they lost much of their body hair; they gained precision-grip fingers and developed gigantic brains.

But early humans also may have evolved a less obvious but equally important advantage: a peculiar sleep pattern. “It’s really weird, compared to other primates,” said Dr. David R. Samson, a senior research scientist at Duke University.

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