Gizmorama - October 22, 2014

Good Morning,

For years it's been said that soda is bad for you, but now it seems that the carbonated beverage may also be causing your cells to age faster than normal. Read the article before you take another sip.

Learn about this and more interesting stories from the scientific community in today's issue.

Until Next Time,
Erin

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*-- Cells of soda drinkers age faster --*
SAN FRANCISCO (UPI) - Soda has already been demonized by health officials for its role in encouraging obesity. But a new study suggests consumption of the sugary drinks may promote disease rates independent of obesity-related health problems. The reason: sugar-sweetened soft drinks encourage cells to age faster and replicate less.

The study looked at the DNA of soda drinkers and found a strong connection between soda and cell aging. Specifically, the more sugary beverages a study participant reported drinking, the shorter the telomeres. Telomeres are the protective ends of chromosomes that protect strands of DNA and promote cell replication. The shorter the end cap, the less the cell is able to reproduce.

"Regular consumption of sugar-sweetened sodas might influence disease development, not only by straining the body's metabolic control of sugars, but also through accelerated cellular aging of tissues," researcher Elissa Epel, a professor of psychiatry at University of California, San Francisco, warned in a recent press release.

"It is critical to understand both dietary factors that may shorten telomeres, as well as dietary factors that may lengthen telomeres," explained lead study author Cindy Leung, a researcher the university's Center for Health and Community. "Here it appeared that the only beverage consumption that had a measurable negative association with telomere length was consumption of sugared soda."

Already linked with problems like obesity, metabolic syndrome, type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease, sodas are quickly becoming enemy number one of public health officials -- inspiring almost as much condemnation as cigarettes and trans fats.

The study -- which relied on DNA samples from over 5,000 collected as part of the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey -- was published last week in the journal American Journal of Public Health.


*-- Milky Way galaxy robbing its neighbors of hydrogen --*
GREEN BANK, W.Va. (UPI) - The case of the Milky Way robbery involves a greedy cosmic bully and a whole lot of missing hydrogen. The bully in this case is our home galaxy, the Milky Way, and the missing hydrogen once belonged to nearby dwarf galaxies. But guess who has it now? That's right, the bully.

"Astronomers wondered if, after billions of years of interaction, the nearby dwarf spheroidal galaxies have all the same star-forming 'stuff' that we find in more distant dwarf galaxies," Kristine Spekkens, an astronomer at the Royal Military College of Canada, explained in a recent press release.

The answer is no, they don't.

Spekkens and her colleagues say the small galaxies that cluster along the edges of Milky Way's spiral are entirely devoid of star-forming hydrogen gas. The gravity of the Milky Way robs these galaxies, known as dwarf spheroidals, of their gas -- the same gravity that holds them close, part of a bundle of galaxies of which the Milky Way is the largest.

Beyond the grip of Milky Way's galactic pull are dwarf irregular galaxies, which have only recently joined the cosmic block party and aren't made to fork over precious hydrogen to join the fun.

"What we found is that there is a clear break, a point near our home Galaxy where dwarf galaxies are completely devoid of any traces of neutral atomic hydrogen," explained Spekkens, lead author of a paper published this week in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. And beyond that break, which lies roughly 1,000 light-years from the edge of the Milky Way, are galaxies once again rich in hydrogen -- the irregulars.

Researchers came to these conclusions with the help of new and incredibly detailed radio telescope readings provided by the National Science Foundation's Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia.

Milky Way's gravity doesn't simply suck the hydrogen straight from of its neighbors. Its theft is more like a Ponzi scheme than a mugging; it pulls them in slowly and then robs them blind. Researchers say the pressures of the Milky Way's dense gravitational halo -- a hot disk of plasma -- combined with the orbital spin of these small galaxies, causes the neighbors to be slowly stripped of all their hydrogen, thus shutting down their ability to create new stars.

"These observations therefore reveal a great deal about size of the hot halo and about how companions orbit the Milky Way," Spekkens concluded.

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