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Posts Tagged ‘research’

Children, chicken, and aggression

Posted by Richard on May 1, 2014

Breitbart posted a UPI story about a Cornell University research study that sounds like a parody, but isn’t. Researchers had some kids, age 6-10, eat pieces of chicken with their hands off the bone, and had others eat pieces of cut-up boneless chicken with a fork. They determined that eating the cut-up chicken made kids more docile and eating food they had to hold and bite made them more aggressive.

How did they determine the relative aggressiveness? A commenter on the story explained:

… Look at the study’s actual “aggression measure” : Compliance with instructions to say seated after eating or remain within 9′ f table after eating

That is NOT a measure of aggression or disobedience — that is a measure of being a kid or a compliant slave to meaningless instructions!

Study actually concludes that eating boneless chicken makes your kid less of a kid, less independent, less fun, and a mindless idiot who obeys pointless instructions from authority no matter how silly.

No doubt this absurd bit of “scientific research” was paid for by your tax dollars.

Personally, I think it’s raaacist.

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The liberal gene

Posted by Richard on October 29, 2010

According to researchers at UCSD and Harvard, people "with a specific variant of the DRD4 gene were more likely to be liberal as adults." But only if they were also "socially active during adolescence." So there's a gene variant that predisposes people to liberalism.

Rush Limbaugh calls it a genetic defect. I'd have to agree. It clearly seems to impair reasoning ability and higher cognitive functions. 🙂 



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NYTimes story: no warming in a century

Posted by Richard on February 27, 2010

Don Surber pointed out an interesting story from the New York Times. It's about a study by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) scientists published in a journal called Geophysical Research Letters. The researchers examined a century's worth of temperature and precipitation records from U.S. weather stations.

According to the New York Times, they found "no significant change in average temperatures or rainfall in the United States over that entire period" and "no trend in one direction or another."

No, I'm not making this up. It really was a NOAA study, that's really what it found, and it really was reported in the New York Times. On January 26, 1989.

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Boredom kills

Posted by Richard on February 11, 2010

You've heard the expression "bored to death," right? Well, apparently it's not just a figure of speech. According to Asian News International, it really does happen:

Melbourne, Feb 8 (ANI): Boredom can actually kill you, a new study has revealed.

To reach the conclusion, researchers at University College London looked at data from 7524 civil servants, aged between 35 and 55, interviewed between 1985 and 1988 about their levels of boredom.

Civil servants, huh? Well, I suppose if you're researching boredom, you want to study a population where it's prevalent. 

They then found out whether they had died by April last year.

Those who reported feeling a great deal of boredom were 37 per cent more likely to have died by the end of the study, the researchers found.

Those who described their work as exciting and challenging were 42% more likely to have validated the Peter Principle by the end of the study. 

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Another benefit of global warming

Posted by Richard on August 26, 2009

Turn up your air conditioner. Fire up the barbecue grill. Gas up your SUV and take a road trip. If human CO2 production is in fact warming the planet, you'll be helping to make the desert bloom. And millions of Africans will thank you. This happy news comes from those right-wing shills for industry at National Geographic:

Desertification, drought, and despair-that's what global warming has in store for much of Africa. Or so we hear.

Emerging evidence is painting a very different scenario, one in which rising temperatures could benefit millions of Africans in the driest parts of the continent.

Scientists are now seeing signals that the Sahara desert and surrounding regions are greening due to increasing rainfall.

If sustained, these rains could revitalize drought-ravaged regions, reclaiming them for farming communities.

This desert-shrinking trend is supported by climate models, which predict a return to conditions that turned the Sahara into a lush savanna some 12,000 years ago.

The green shoots of recovery are showing up on satellite images of regions including the Sahel, a semi-desert zone bordering the Sahara to the south that stretches some 2,400 miles (3,860 kilometers).

Images taken between 1982 and 2002 revealed extensive regreening throughout the Sahel, according to a new study in the journal Biogeosciences.

The study suggests huge increases in vegetation in areas including central Chad and western Sudan.

The transition may be occurring because hotter air has more capacity to hold moisture, which in turn creates more rain, said Martin Claussen of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany, who was not involved in the new study.

In the eastern Sahara area of southwestern Egypt and northern Sudan, new trees-such as acacias-are flourishing, according to Stefan Kröpelin, a climate scientist at the University of Cologne's Africa Research Unit in Germany.

"Shrubs are coming up and growing into big shrubs. This is completely different from having a bit more tiny grass," said Kröpelin, who has studied the region for two decades.

In 2008 Kröpelin-not involved in the new satellite research-visited Western Sahara, a disputed territory controlled by Morocco.

"The nomads there told me there was never as much rainfall as in the past few years," Kröpelin said. "They have never seen so much grazing land."

"Before, there was not a single scorpion, not a single blade of grass," he said.

"Now you have people grazing their camels in areas which may not have been used for hundreds or even thousands of years. You see birds, ostriches, gazelles coming back, even sorts of amphibians coming back," he said.

"The trend has continued for more than 20 years. It is indisputable."

Sounds pretty good to me. I think I'll go increase my carbon footprint.

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Protect your joints, have another drink

Posted by Richard on June 7, 2008

Need another reason to attend tonight's Blogger Bash? Well, just tell yourself that you need to drink more to protect yourself from a crippling disease. New research suggests that alcohol consumption can cut your risk of developing rheumatoid arthritis in half:

The Scandinavian researchers base their findings on more than 2750 people taking part in two separate studies, which assessed environmental and genetic risk factors for rheumatoid arthritis.

The results showed that drinking alcohol was associated with a significantly lower risk of developing rheumatoid arthritis. And the more alcohol was consumed, the lower the risk of rheumatoid arthritis.

Among those who drank regularly, the quarter with the highest consumption were up to 50% less likely to develop the disease compared with the half who drank the least.

Ladies and gentlemen, tonight let us drink a toast to those Scandinavian researchers! Maybe a toast to each of the researchers!

Among those with antibodies to a specific group of proteins involved in the development of the disease, alcohol cut the risk most in smokers with genetic risk factors for rheumatoid arthritis.

The authors conclude that their research reinforces the importance of lifestyle factors in the development of the disease, and that giving up smoking remains the single most important preventive measure.

Hmm, I don't know. It sounds like taking up drinking is a pretty important preventive measure, even for smokers, and by far the most important for non-smokers. But researchers are always reluctant to say positive things about "vices," no matter how strong the evidence. Bad for their employers' public relations and their chances of getting more grant money.

Nonetheless, good news for those of the imbibing persuasion. Skol!

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Climate news, good and bad

Posted by Richard on March 23, 2008

There is both good news and bad news regarding global warming (which are bad news and good news, respectively, if your goal is to move us toward a command-and-control economy in which we're all poorer). First, the bad news: According to a Princeton study reported by National "Progressive" Radio, biofuels such as ethanol release huge amounts of greenhouse gases (emphasis added):

"The simplest explanation is that when we divert our corn or soybeans to fuel, if people around the world are going to continue to eat the same amount that they're already eating, you have to replace that food somewhere else," Searchinger says.

Searchinger and his colleagues looked globally to figure out where the new cropland is coming from, as American farmers produce fuel crops where they used to grow food. The answer is that biofuel production here is driving agriculture to expand in other parts of the world.

"That's done in a significant part by burning down forests, plowing up grasslands. That releases a great deal of carbon dioxide," Searchinger says.

In fact, Searchinger's group's study, published online by Science magazine, shows those actions end up releasing huge amounts of carbon dioxide. The study finds that over a 30-year span, biofuels end up contributing twice as much carbon dioxide to the air as that amount of gasoline would, when you add in the global effects.

"Right now there's little doubt that ethanol is making global warming worse," Searchinger says.

But the good news is it may not matter much, climate-change-wise, because the world's oceans haven't warmed at all in the last five years and have actually cooled slightly, according to another NPR report (emphasis added):

Some 3,000 scientific robots that are plying the ocean have sent home a puzzling message. These diving instruments suggest that the oceans have not warmed up at all over the past four or five years. That could mean global warming has taken a breather. Or it could mean scientists aren't quite understanding what their robots are telling them.

Oh, dear — I thought the science was "settled."

In fact, 80 percent to 90 percent of global warming involves heating up ocean waters. They hold much more heat than the atmosphere can. So Willis has been studying the ocean with a fleet of robotic instruments called the Argo system. The buoys can dive 3,000 feet down and measure ocean temperature. Since the system was fully deployed in 2003, it has recorded no warming of the global oceans.

"There has been a very slight cooling, but not anything really significant," Willis says. So the buildup of heat on Earth may be on a brief hiatus. "Global warming doesn't mean every year will be warmer than the last. And it may be that we are in a period of less rapid warming."

Describing slight cooling as "less rapid warming" is even more dishonest than referring to a recession as "a period of negative growth." 

But if the aquatic robots are actually telling the right story, that raises a new question: Where is the extra heat all going?

Kevin Trenberth at the National Center for Atmospheric Research says it's probably going back out into space. The Earth has a number of natural thermostats, including clouds, which can either trap heat and turn up the temperature, or reflect sunlight and help cool the planet.

That can't be directly measured at the moment, however.

"Unfortunately, we don't have adequate tracking of clouds to determine exactly what role they've been playing during this period," Trenberth says.

Gee, I guess that means those fancy computer models that "prove" anthropogenic global warming is taking place can't be accurately modeling the role that clouds are playing, can they?

It's also possible that some of the heat has gone even deeper into the ocean, he says. Or it's possible that scientists need to correct for some other feature of the planet they don't know about. It's an exciting time, though, with all this new data about global sea temperature, sea level and other features of climate.

So the science is settled, and we should all get used to the fact that we have to reduce our standard of living. But the planet seems to have stopped warming, the scientists have no idea why, they admit there are many significant aspects of global climate that they aren't able to measure and don't understand, and there may even be "features of the planet" that they don't know about at all. 

Yeah, it's an exciting time for these scientists all right. More grants! More research! Just don't question their conclusions and policy prescriptions, because those have already been "settled." 

Meanwhile, more and more ethanol is being burned instead of poured over ice. A tragedy.

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Soy saves bones

Posted by Richard on February 29, 2008

Two new meta-analyses of soy studies provide strong confirmation that women can improve bone mineral density, inhibit bone resorption, and increase bone formation by supplementing with soy isoflavones. The meta-analyses, one by Chinese and one by Japanese researchers, appear in the February issue of the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition and the journal Clinical Nutrition, respectively. According to Life Extension Foundation (emphasis added):

The first meta-analysis found an average decrease in urinary deoxypyridinoline [bone resorption marker] of 2.08 nanomoles per millimole, and an average increase of 1.48 micrograms per liter of BAP [bone formation marker] in women who received isoflavones compared with those who received a placebo. “Isoflavone intervention significantly inhibits bone resorption and stimulates bone formation,” the authors stated. “These favorable effects occur even if less than 90 milligrams per day of isoflavones are consumed or the intervention lasts less than 12 weeks.”

The second review also found a bone-building benefit for soy. In the clinical trials examined, women who received soy experienced a significant increase of 20.6 milligrams per cubic centimeter in spine bone mineral density compared with those who received a placebo. Bone mineral content also increased, but to a lesser extent. Benefits were greater when more than 90 milligrams per day isoflavones were consumed, or when the trial lasted at least six months. “The results clearly suggested that isoflavones contributed significantly to the increase of spinal bone mineral density, especially in postmenopausal women,” Dr Wang and his coauthors conclude.

… The lower incidence of osteoporosis-related fracture among Asian women who consume 10 to 20 times more soy than Western women may point to a bone-protective effect of soy isoflavones. The authors recommend large randomized clinical trials using graded dosages of isoflavones to measure their long term effects on bone mass as well as fracture risk.

Larger studies would indeed be helpful. But if you're concerned about osteoporosis, you may not want to wait for those. You may want to take soy supplements or add soy milk, edamame, tempeh, or tofu to your diet. The latter, I understand, can be made quite palatable by wrapping it in bacon.  

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Happy birthday, transistor!

Posted by Richard on December 2, 2007

This month, the transistor turns 60. In a mere six decades, it's transformed the world, and it's showing no signs of slowing down. The Sydney Morning Herald has an excellent article by Beverly Head about the past and future of transistors:

IN DECEMBER 1947, Bells Labs scientists John Bardeen and Walter Brattain first revealed what would come to be known as the transistor.

They held the future in their hands – a device that would replace vacuum tubes in 10 years, and 60 years later has transformed electronics.

Inventions change things; great inventions change everything.

That first device was the size of a modern mobile phone. Right now, 2 million transistors could fit in the full stop at the end of this sentence. Intel has just released its new Penryn processors, which have up to 820 million transistors, and soon the standard inch-wide microprocessor will have 1 billion transistors.

At The Speculist, Stephen Gordon quoted from the above story regarding the continuing flood of innovation in computing, and then neatly captured how important and far-reaching this little electronics invention has been:

But here's the too obvious example of how transistors have changed things: I'm a guy sitting in Louisiana commenting on an article in The Sydney Morning Herald to a worldwide audience. And I'm not Walter Cronkite.

I pass it along to you, wherever you are (my last 10 visitors include Montreal, London, Cairo, and Kaoshiung, Taiwan) from a cluttered home office in Denver. And I'm not Eric Severeid.

Here's another mind-numbing factoid from the article: They're making a billion billion (1018) transistors a year now — 10 to 100 times the number of ants on Earth.

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Osama bin rotting?

Posted by Richard on September 14, 2007

I've had doubts about bin Laden being alive for some time now, and the two recent videos just reinforced them. This CNET News Blog post pointed out some fascinating analyses of the videos by Dr. Neal Krawetz at Secure Computing. In As Alive as Elvis, Dr. Krawetz reported his findings regarding the Sept. 7 video, which included:

The video shows Bin Laden in his white hat, white shirt, and yellow sweater. This is the same clothing he wore in the 2004-10-29 video. In 2004 he had it unzipped, but in 2007 he zipped up the bottom half. Besides the clothing, it appears to be the same background, same lighting, and same desk. Even the camera angle is almost identical.

… If you overlay the 2007 video with the 2004 video, his face has not changed in three years — only his beard is darker and the contrast on the picture has been adjusted.

What are the chances of nothing changing (except his beard) in three years? Virtually zero. The clips appear to have been recorded three years ago.

The audio does make reference to relatively current events (people and places). However, these references are ONLY made during the frozen-frame portions and only after splices in the audio track. The animated portions make no references to current events.

The big question is: is the audio from Bin Laden? I'm not an audio expert (yet) and since I don't know Arabic, I cannot tell if there is an accent or if the accent changes. I do know that the room echo and background sounds change during different audio clips. And there are so many splices that I cannot help but wonder if someone spliced words and phrases together.

In a follow-up, Bin Laden Video Image Analysis, Krawetz reported (ellipsis in original):

With regards to Bin Laden's beard… It cannot be detected with any of my tools as being digitally modified. However:

  • The whole inner frame of Bin Laden was resaved at least twice. The number of reseaves does not appear to be enough to distort significant modifications.

  • The colorful border was also saved twice. However…

  • Even though the Bin Laden frame and border were both saved twice each, they were not saved at the same time. I know this because the Jpeg artifacts (8×8 squares) are on the 8×8 grid for the Bin Laden frame, but are shifted over on the border — the border's 8×8 artifacts do not lie on the Jpeg 8×8 grid.

  • The whole video frame (border + Bin Laden) was combined from many parts. Here's the order, starting with the last thing added:
    1. As-Sahab logo, English subtitles, and text below Bin Laden (alternates between English and Arabic) was added last.
    2. "The Solution" and Arabic in the top right corner was the penultimate addition.
    3. The Bin Laden frame and border were combined.
    4. In the Bin Laden frame, there is no indication of manipulation and no indication of a chromakey replacement. In the border, the spinning globe was modified along with the strobing colors.


  • Both saturation and PCA shows fine horizontal stripes on Bin Laden and the background. These came from interlaced video sources. In contrast, the text elements and As-Sahab logo appear to be from non-interlaced sources.

FWIW, interlaced suggests (but only suggests) older video and non-interlaced suggests newer. 

If I had to bet, I'd bet bin Laden is dead, and Zawahiri, the brains behind al Qaeda, is keeping the charismatic figurehead "alive" for his PR value. 

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‘Duh’ study of the week

Posted by Richard on September 4, 2007

I'm shocked, simply shocked. Cutting-edge social science research (probably federally funded) has uncovered a couple of astonishing facts. These findings further confirm the disturbing recent news that men and women are different. The groundbreaking study determined that (1) men prefer good-looking women, and (2) women are choosier than men.

Researchers questioned men and women prior to a speed-dating session about their preferences in a mate, and then compared those with their actual choices of people they'd like to meet with again. In another shocker, it seems that men and women both lie:

Men's choices did not reflect their stated preferences, the researchers concluded. Instead, men appeared to base their decisions mostly on the women's physical attractiveness.

The men also appeared to be much less choosy. Men tended to select nearly every woman above a certain minimum attractiveness threshold, Todd said.

Women's actual choices, like men's, did not reflect their stated preferences, but they made more discriminating choices, the researchers found.

The scientists said women were aware of the importance of their own attractiveness to men, and adjusted their expectations to select the more desirable guys.

I can't wait to see what valuable insights into human nature science will reveal next.
 

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The hands of a mathematician

Posted by Richard on May 25, 2007

Researchers at Britain's University of Bath are bravely exploring the subject that cost Harvard President Larry Summers his job. Fortunately for them, the link they've discovered between math ability and sex is indirect, so they may be spared the full wrath of feminists.

It seems that prenatal hormone exposure helps determine whether you're more likely to be literate or numerate, and your hands give you away:

A quick look at the lengths of children's index and ring fingers can be used to predict how well students will perform on the SAT, new research claims.

Kids with longer ring fingers compared to index fingers are likely to have higher math scores than literacy or verbal scores on the college entrance exam, while children with the reverse finger-length ratio are likely to have higher reading and writing, or verbal, scores versus math scores.

Scientists have known that different levels of the hormones testosterone and estrogen in the womb account for the different finger lengths, which are a reflection of areas of the brain that are more highly developed than others, said psychologist Mark Brosnan of the University of Bath in England, who led the study.

Exposure to testosterone in the womb is said to promote development of areas of the brain often associated with spatial and mathematical skills, he said. That hormone makes the ring finger longer.

Estrogen exposure does the same for areas of the brain associated with verbal ability and tends to lengthen the index finger relative to the ring finger.

Clearly, hormone exposure correlates with the sex of the fetus. Boy fetuses are likely to be exposed to higher levels of testosterone than girl fetuses (their little testes start making it). But both are exposed to estrogen from the mother, and the amount seems to vary quite a bit from pregnancy to pregnancy. So, boys are more likely to end up with longer ring fingers (and more spatial/math aptitude), while girls are more likely to end up with shorter ring fingers (and more verbal aptitude).

But some boys have shorter ring fingers (because they were exposed to more estrogen) and some girls have longer ring fingers (because they were exposed to lower levels of estrogen and/or higher levels of testosterone).

And some kids with short ring fingers really like math and do well at it, while some with long ring fingers do poorly for one reason or another. Aptitude is part of the puzzle, but it's not the whole story.

In any case, whenever feminists bristle at discussions of these differences, I have to wonder at their insecurity and lack of perspective. Shouldn't they celebrate the evidence that women are naturally better communicators, more literate, and better at abstract thought?

Men and women are different, all the way to the tips of their fingers. Can you digit? 

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The health hazards of burning ethanol

Posted by Richard on April 20, 2007

It seems that there's another downside to the latest fad for saving the planet, ethanol-powered vehicles:

Ethanol advocates say that it's a clean-burning fuel that is friendly to the environment. But a study by Stanford University atmospheric scientist Mark Z. Jacobson found that if all U.S. vehicles ran on ethanol, the number of respiratory-related deaths and hospitalizations would likely increase.

Jacobson's work, reported in Environmental Science & Technology, involved the simulation of atmospheric conditions throughout the United States in 2020, with a special focus on Los Angeles. According to Jacobson:

  • Research found that E85 vehicles reduce atmospheric levels of two carcinogens, benzene and butadiene, but increase two others — formaldehyde and acetaldehyde.
  • As a result, cancer rates for E85 are likely to be similar to those for gasoline; However, E85 significantly increased ozone, a prime ingredient of smog.
  • The simulations revealed that E85 would increase ozone-related mortalities by about 4 percent in the United States and 9 percent in Los Angeles.
  • In addition, the deleterious health effects of E85 will be the same, whether the ethanol is made from corn, switchgrass or other plant products.

''Today, there is a lot of investment in ethanol,'' Jacobson said.  ''But we found that using E85 will cause at least as much health damage as gasoline, which already causes about 10,000 U.S. premature deaths annually from ozone and particulate matter."

 More smog and respiratory illness aren't the only problems with ethanol fuel. As subsidies and mandates divert more and more corn into ethanol production, and more and more acres into corn, we'll see much higher food prices, with more hunger and famine in some parts of the world. And don't forget that planting more and more acres of corn leads to cutting — or not replanting — more and more acres of trees.

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Math challenged

Posted by Richard on April 9, 2007

The Large Hadron Collider is a $4 billion proton accelerator project at the Cern complex in Switzerland. It’s intended to mimic the conditions of the Big Bang. Recently, scientists there created a big bang all right, thanks to some embarrassing mistakes in simple math:

The mistakes led to an explosion deep in the tunnel at the Cern particle accelerator complex near Geneva in Switzerland. It lifted a 20-ton magnet off its mountings, filling a tunnel with helium gas and forcing an evacuation.

It means that 24 magnets located all around the 17-mile circular accelerator must now be stripped down and repaired or upgraded. The failure is a huge embarrassment for Fermilab, the American national physics laboratory that built the magnets and the anchor system that secured them to the machine.

It appears Fermilab made elementary mistakes in the design of the magnets and their anchors that made them insecure once the system was operational.

That’s what they get for letting Americans make critical mathematical calculations. Don’t they realize that, when it comes to math, Americans are typically cocky and dumb?  😉

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Health news updates

Posted by Richard on March 6, 2007

Back in September, I warned you to start taking vitamin D supplements as the days grew short. I hope you did, and I hope it helped you avoid the flu this winter. The February issue of Life Extension Magazine (yes, I’m a bit behind in my reading) has an article that goes into much greater depth regarding the connection between seasonally low levels of vitamin D and high rates of influenza. It includes information about how vitamin D helps protect you:

In the past few years, several independent researchers have shown that vitamin D significantly enhances the genetic expression of antimicrobial peptides in human monocytes (precursors to macrophages), neutrophils, and other immune system cells.15,1617-19

For Dr. Cannell, these various clues led to one inescapable conclusion: vitamin D—which is produced when the skin is exposed to summer sunlight, and which, conversely, declines in winter—plays a critical role in our vulnerability to influenza infection. In fact, vitamin D must surely be Hope-Simpson’s mysterious “seasonal stimulus.” Dr. Cannell consulted a number of leading vitamin D researchers, all of whom agreed with his conclusions. They include researchers from such venerable institutions as the National Institutes of Health and the Harvard School of Public Health. One of these scientists, Dr. Michael F. Holick, has been studying vitamin D for three decades.1,7,20

In an interview with Life Extension, Dr. Holick alluded to the special relationship between vitamin D and the body’s primary immune system defenders, the macrophages. “What intrigues me the most,” Dr. Holick noted, “is that we’ve always known that macrophages activate vitamin D.” The form of vitamin D generated through the skin’s interaction with ultraviolet B radiation (from sunshine or artificial sources) is a pre-hormone. It must be converted in the body to its active hormone form, called 1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D3. An intermediary form, known as 25-hydroxyvitamin D, is the major circulating form of vitamin D, and is measured to determine vitamin D status.20

Most of this activation of vitamin D occurs in the liver and kidneys. However, the fact that macrophages facilitate the conversion of circulating vitamin D to its active form,20 and that activated vitamin D in turn regulates the activity of macrophages, suggests an important relationship between the two. These antimicrobial proteins help to destroy invading infectious microbes. With their broad-spectrum activity, they are capable of killing everything from bacteria to viruses. They have been shown to be an important part of the respiratory tract’s defense against invaders, and likewise show promise in fighting the influenza virus.

Life Extension Foundation has also taken aim at the shoddy supplement study I wrote about last week, issuing a consumer alert entitled "Another Flawed Attack against Antioxidants." Among other issues, LEF looked at the ridiculously wide range of nutrient dosages in the studies:

The JAMA review that attacked the value of antioxidants included vitamins A, C, E, and selenium and evaluated these very basic nutrients in a very wide & inconsistent dosage range:

Supplement

Dose range

Vitamin A (synthetic)

1,333200,000*** IU

Alpha Tocopherol (synthetic)

105,000 IU

Vitamin C (synthetic)

60 – 2,000 mg

Selenium (natural)

20 – 200 mcg

As an example of the strange decisions made by the JAMA authors as to which studies to exclude or include in their analysis, they selected a single dose study*** of patients using 200,000 IU of vitamin A, who were subsequently followed for 3 months.8

LEF also found that the authors misrepresented some of the included studies, attributing deaths that didn’t happen, and seem to have intentionally omitted a long list of studies that demonstrated positive benefits from antioxidants from their cherry-picked (68 out of 815) sample. LEF characterized the JAMA study as an "irrational and highly biased attack," and quoted several other respected scientists who dismissed this study as deeply flawed.
 

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