This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this page. Terms of employ.

Sugar_cubes

DOIs, or Straight Object Identifiers, are fantastically useful fiddling strings of text that serve to uniquely identify research papers, so that no matter what database you're querying and no matter what paper you're linking to, you lot'll get the correct matter back. Unlike books in a library, which can accept later editions or have their call numbers change, a DOI is the aforementioned number for the aforementioned document, period. Handy. In much the same way PR outfits and legal beagles tin can monitor the Spider web for mentions of sure strings of text like "09 F9…," an outfit called Altmetric looks for Web pages that link to research papers by their DOI, and tallies upwards mentions by what kind of site is doing the mention: sites similar ExtremeTech, aggregators like Reddit, tweets, and so on. Based on the Altmetric stats, here'south what really got people talking this twelvemonth:

Sweet little lies

Scientists and the food industry clutched their commonage pearls at the revelation, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) that dorsum in 1964, a group of sugar lobbyists talked (past which I mean paid) some scientists from Harvard into using their scientific authority to mislead healthcare professionals and the public about the relative health risks of carbohydrate. It was a classic salvo in this food fad war we take, where every twelvemonth an manufacture-sponsored research grouping brings one food into vogue or demonizes another. The lobbyists wanted the Harvard researchers to suppress data demonstrating that sugar is positively associated with coronary artery illness. Because there weren't mandatory conflict-of-involvement rules at the New England Journal of Medicine, and considering the Harvard researchers were respected in their fields, the lobbyists' fraudulent studies were able to slip through the sanity bank check.

JAMA said, JAMA said

Fitbits are hot. I have a Fitbit, and I utilise it to put a little information into my life using their sleep and activity tracking. (Nobody gave me anything for talking virtually Fitbits; I bought mine secondhand from a professor friend.) Many people who take Fitbits, including me, aspire to lose weight. This summer, the JAMA too reported — to the surprise of exactly nobody — that vesture trackers similar Fitbits are non like the weight-loss pills sold by Adipose Industries, and having such a device is not itself enough to brand you lose weight. The report found that amid a group of people following an otherwise identical diet and exercise government, those who were randomized to wear the discontinued BodyMedia Fitcore armband trackers did non lose more weight than those who did not take the trackers. It turns out that you lot accept to do more than own a glorified pedometer to take off the pounds.

The report concludes that wearable tech like the Fitcore, and therefore past allusion trackers similar the Fitbit, "may not offer an reward over standard behavioral weight loss approaches." Merely the researchers didn't give the participants any pedagogy on how to utilise the Fitcore trackers and website effectively. To my mind, that's important because amidst the few things that are proven to help people lose weight, "accountability buddies" rank high; Fitbits accept a buddy system where you tin can challenge friends and gamify the procedure of getting fit. The authors didn't fifty-fifty mention diet, exercise, or lifestyle patterns known to influence weight loss or gain in their report. As well, they were still collecting data with the Fitcore in Dec 2014, but Jawbone bought BodyMedia and had discontinued the Fitcore in Oct of that year, deprecating back up and allowing the website's usefulness to erode. The company formally killed the Fitcore in January of 2016. So what these researchers really proved is that, when handed a limited tool yous don't know how to utilise, you don't become much additional do good.

Imagine that.

Some devil

Robin Williams was only one more dearest casualty of the carnage that has been the past few years. Even and then, fifty-fifty in death, he manages to shed his ain particular light. Williams' particular demise, while grim, lit a burn down nether neuroscience'southward collective butt — kindled and fanned in no small function by the indomitable Susan Williams, Robin's wife. Her plea for more research this year into Lewy torso dementia galvanized donors and researchers, and those who are interested in such enquiry.

Blue genes

Scientists congenital a "synthetic leaner" in the lab this twelvemonth. Well, actually, what they did is start with Mycoplasma mycoides, which has amid the simplest and smallest genomes of all bacteria, and then carefully pared abroad its genome in experiment after experiment until they arrived at a "minimal set" of genes essential to life. The resulting independent single-celled organism happily multiplied in its sterile, comfy nutrient bath, but manifestly wouldn't have done then well in a less-controlled environment. I don't know what this proves, exactly, simply it sure does imply that the data necessary to laissez passer on life certain doesn't have upwards much disk space.

Joy to the fishes in the deep blue ocean

Everybody's heard of Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster. Some accept fifty-fifty heard of local legends similar Champy, the Champlain monster. Cryptozoology is fun, in the style that reading the rest of Weekly World News is fun — and what will Bat Boy call back upward next? Only there are some creatures, especially those that live in the deep, whose truth is stranger than fiction. Meet the Tully Monster:

nature16992-f1

Chomp chomp chomp. Fig. ane, Briggs, McCoy et al, 2016

The Tully Monster was first constitute in Illinois, not too far from Chicago. Illinois is pretty far inland, but back when the Tully Monster lived, water levels were very unlike. During that time, while the whole Slap-up Plains was an inland saltwater sea, Tullimonstrum swamped effectually the marine Midwest, derping its way around the depths eating plankton. Scientists first dug it upwardly in the 1950s, in a bed of fossils just due south of Terre Haute, and promptly saturday in that location for almost sixty years scratching their heads at what kind of a animate being it was at all.

A lot of the crazier-looking beasties of the deep bounding main are afar cousins to the lamprey, an eldritch horror that evolved early, cruel out of the ugly tree and hitting every stick on the way downwardly. The Tully Monster was a close relative of the lamprey. Forensic assay of more a m dissimilar partial or whole sets of Tully Monster remains has too revealed the presence of pockets of paint cells that evolved on a particular, late branch of the tree of life, proving that the Monster was a vertebrate. Somehow there was a performance skeletal system in that schnozz. Skeletal-ish. Scientists think that's how it used its beaky proboscis to grab food.

Tiny dancer

Permit united states not forget the tardigrades. They proceed to be fabricated of indestructible win, and scientists have started to piece together why. It's mostly in their genes. Tardigrades are exquisitely specialized to deal with atmospheric condition that would be lethal to most things; they tin survive freezing, aridity, radiation and even the vacuum of space. Long live the tardigrade. Live tiny, dice never.