When we eat may be just as important as what we eat. A new study shows that mice that eat when they should be sleeping gain more weight than mice that eat at normal hours. Another study sheds light on why we pack on the pounds in the first place. Whether these studies translate into therapies that help humans beat obesity remains to be seen, but they give scientists clues about the myriad factors that they must take into account.
Observations of overnight workers have shown that eating at night disrupts metabolism and the hormones that signal we’re sated. But no one had done controlled studies on this connection until now. Biologist Fred Turek of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and graduate student Deanna Arble examined the link between a high-fat diet and what time of day mice eat. A control group of six nocturnal mice ate their pellets (60％ fat by calories, mostly lard) during the night. Another group of six ate the same meal during the day, Turek says, which disrupts their circadian rhythm—the body’s normal 24-hour cycle.
After 6 weeks, the off-schedule mice weighed almost 20％ more than the controls, Turek and Arble report today in?Obesity, supporting the idea that consuming calories when you should be sleeping is harmful. Turek and Arble acknowledge that the disrupted mice ate a tad more and were a tad more sluggish, but the differences could not account for all of the weight gain.
In the second study, a different team of researchers investigated the link between weight and the immune system. Hundreds of genes seem to affect the accumulation of fat, but one that helps protect us from infection might help us lose weight with little effort, biochemist Alan Saltiel of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and colleagues suggest today in?Cell. The researchers tested me weight-adding abilities of a protein called IKK∈, which is linked with obesity, diabetes, and chronic, low-1evel inflammation. For 3 months, the team fed six mice missing IKK∈ genes a diet of high-fat chow.
Because IKKE’s main job is immune defense, Saltiel’s team didn’t expect to find weight differences between knockout mice and controls. But the knockout mice did gain significantly less. Best of all, the girth the animals did add was less harmful to their overall health. “The knockout mice don’t gain as much weight but also don’t get diabetes, don’t get insulin resistance, and don’t get accumulation of lipids on the liver,” Saltiel says, all of which contribute to the suite of health problems associated with being overweight. Saltiel calls IKK∈ “an especially appealing drug target for the treatment of metabolic disease.”
Tom Maniatis, a molecular biologist at Harvard University praises the study but remains skeptical about any drug that would inhibit IKK∈. He helped develop the mice used in the experiment and notes that they are vulnerable to the flu. He suspects that suppressing IKK∈ may help people with diabetes or obesity, “but the first time the swine flu comes along, that’s it.”
Researchers are also enthusiastic about the circadian rhythm paper Frank Scheet, a neuroscientist at Harvard who studies sleep, was struck that “you could see something happening [to the disrupted mice] in the first week already. That’s consistent with human studies where we found changes in just 3 days.”
Together, the papers suggest that there’s no simple answer to why people gain weight. Says Turek, “It’s clearly not just calories in versus calories out.”
Which of the following statements is CORRECT according to Fred Turek’s research?
题目考查Fred Turek’s research，可将范围限定在第二、三段。第三段第一句清楚表明，在六周之后，那些饮食时间不规律的老鼠体重增加了百分之二十。off-schedule表示“不规律”。答案D正确。A选项错误，由第二段最后一句可知，其它的老鼠在白天吃的东西和夜间吃的一样。第三段最后一句可知，那些吃猪油越多的老鼠，行动越呆滞，排除B。实验表明只有正常的饮食才对身体有好处，C选项错误。
科学与技术都是无禁区的。
全球性生态危机是人口剧增造成的。
牛顿曾经说过：“如果我看得比笛卡儿远一点的话，那是因为我是站在巨人的肩上。”这句话充分体现了科学技术的社会规范中“无私利性”的内涵。
自然资源的供应是无限的，目前人类存在的资源短缺、土地、粮食、污染问题等全球性问题，完全可以通过技术的进步来解决。
由于制度创新与技术创新的关系总是处在匹配与失配的相互交替之中，所以经济发展呈现周期性是必然的。
只要依靠科技进步就能限制或消除科技应用可能带来的负效应。
技术创新即技术上的改进或发明。
技术像人类一样古老。
构成某个特定的科学共同体，需要以下哪几方面的素（ ）
哲学认识方法的基本特征是（ ）。
