Thinking Harder
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Decoded Platypus Genome Spells Out 'Hybrid'
Continue reading… 10 CommentsThe duck-billed platypus looks and acts like an animal with an identity crisis. It swims a bit like a duck and walks like one, too (on those webbed little feet), but it's certainly no bird. It lays eggs, as if a bird or reptile, yet it nurses its young like the mammal that it is. Now, it turns out the animal looks like a hybrid even at the most minute level, its DNA. Along with today's announcement that the platypus's genome has been sequenced comes the revelation that its genes reflect its odd ancestry.
It's not that the platypus has mixed ancestry, so it's not a true hybrid. Rather, it's thought that the ancestors of the platypus evolutionarily diverged from the rest of the mammals about 166 million years ago, so it retains some of the genetic and physical characteristics that other mammals may have had at that time but have since lost.
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High-Fat Diet Found to Fight Seizures in Kids
Continue reading… 0 CommentsA diet high in fat—extremely high in fat, that is—has just been shown in a clinical trial to cut seizure frequency in children with severe, drug-resistant epilepsy. It's not a cure, and it's not an easy treatment to stomach, but it works, British researchers reported Friday in the journal Lancet Neurology.
Dr. Atkins himself might have gagged on the therapeutic regimen, which is called the ketogenic diet. It's so fatty that carbohydrates and protein combined aren't permitted to account for more than 25 percent of total calories. Each patient needs to have his or her diet specially designed by a dietitian, who calculates how many calories of fat, carbs, and protein need to be eaten each day. By comparison, fat can constitute "only" 50 percent of the caloric energy in the Atkins diet.
