Open Threads

Have at it. I have no energy to do anything. Heat is sapping my will to live.

Open ThreadPost + Comments (104)

If this creature’s right, I think someone in Oberhausen, Germany is going to have krake for dinner.

Germany v SpainPost + Comments (157)

SamKitten demonstrates the best way to deal with the East Coast’s current triple-H (hot, hazy, humid) weather. You do good work, RedKitten.

And last night’s dinner here involved the first of this year’s basil crop and the end of last year’s slow-roasted tomato sauce, so there are some consolations to weather more typical of the Mediterranean than the North Atlantic, or so I tell myself.

Also, scientists are giving us a new excuse for the way last summer’s outfits seem to spontaneously shrink while in storage, because maybe it’s the bacteria that makes us fat:

… The bacteria-made-me-fat idea has been gathering steam since 2006. In that year, Jeffrey Gordon of Washington University and colleagues reported in a paper in Nature that obese mice and slim mice have different populations of gut bacteria. Crucially, they showed that the bacteria caused obesity, rather than obesity producing a specific mix of bacteria. When the scientists plucked bacteria called Firmicutes from obese mice, then put them in the bacteria-free guts of mice raised in a sterile environment, the latter bulked up within 10 to 14 days—even though they ate less.
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Why? Firmicutes, it seems, are more adept at liberating calories from food than are bacteria from the other common lineage, Bacteroidetes. Firmicutes can digest complex sugars that neither the mice’s own enzymes nor Bacteroidetes can, breaking them into simple sugars and fatty acids that the mice’s intestines then absorb and turn into more mouse. People harbor bacteria from these same two lineages, with the obese among us having more Firmicutes and fewer Bacteroidetes than slim people, exactly as in fat and lean mice. When Gordon’s team had 12 obese people follow either a low-fat or a low-carb diet to lose weight, the result was more Bacteroidetes and fewer Firmicutes—the profile of slim people. The more Bacteroidetes, the more weight the volunteers lost.
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[…] Not surprisingly for a field this new, the precise way in which gut bacteria affect weight is a matter of intense dispute. The idea that different bacteria extract more or fewer calories from the food we send their way, as Gordon’s studies suggest, is only one possibility. Another possible explanation is that gut bacteria contribute to obesity (as well as to type 2 diabetes, which often goes along with being overweight) by altering the immune system. The idea here is that gut bacteria interact with intestinal cells in a way that causes them to secrete cytokines, molecules that can cause low-grade inflammation. This inflammation can, in turn, trigger insulin resistance (the mark of type 2 diabetes) and increased appetite, which is an effective way to put on weight.

Is it just me, or is there something ironic about something called Firmy-cutes leading to an outbreak of Flabby-but-such-a-nice-personality?

Early Morning Open Thread: Firmicutes!Post + Comments (28)

Have at it. I’ve been under the weather for several days, and the heat is not helping.

Open ThreadPost + Comments (93)

Who will be the first finalist?

A trivia question: what geographic fact makes Uruguay unique among South American Countries?

Netherlands v Uruguay Open ThreadPost + Comments (235)