Health & Science

A skeptic verifies climate change

A noted skeptic of global warming has changed his mind after conducting an exhaustive new study of land temperatures. Richard Muller, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, had been among those questioning previous studies by NASA, NOAA, and the U.K.’s Climatic Research Unit that show the Earth heating at a rapid rate. The skeptics have argued that too many temperature-recording stations are located in cities, which trap far more heat than rural areas do, and that there aren’t enough reliable measuring stations to support claims of climate change. So Muller and his colleagues did their own analysis, using five times the amount of temperature data of previous studies and creating new statistical models to analyze them. Their finding? “Global warming is real,” Muller writes in The Wall Street Journal. He and his team found that land temperatures have risen by 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit since the 1950s—the same conclusion the groups they criticized had reached. But there’s still plenty for climate-change scientists and skeptics to squabble over. “How much of the warming is due to humans and what will be the likely effects?” Muller says. “We made no independent assessment of that.”

Teens’ plastic brains

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Teenagers’ IQ scores fluctuate wildly as their brains change during their teen years, a new study has found, making IQ a poor predictor of future success. Researchers from University College London ran IQ tests on 33 healthy teens between the ages of 12 and 16 and simultaneously scanned their brains. When they tested them again four years later, they found that the IQs of some students had changed by as much as 21 points—“a huge difference,” study author Cathy Price tells WebMD.com. In fact, some students moved from the category of “average” to “gifted,” while others went the other way. Brain scans revealed physical changes tied to the changes in IQ. Students who improved on the verbal part of the test, for example, were found to have developed denser gray matter in regions linked to speaking. There was no overall pattern to the changes; scores rose and fell for high and low scorers alike, while the average didn’t change. “If a teenager has poor nonverbal skills, this doesn’t mean they don’t have the potential to improve these skills,” says Price. On the other hand, good performers won’t necessarily “maintain these skills without practice.”

The HPV vaccine for boys

Not just girls but also 11- to 12-year-old boys should be routinely vaccinated against human papillomavirus, or HPV. That’s the new recommendation of a panel of advisers to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which previously urged only girls to get the shots as protection against HPV-caused cervical cancer. The panel broadened its recommendation because the sexually transmitted disease can afflict men with anal, neck, and head cancers, all of which are on the rise in the U.S. “This is cancer, for Pete’s sake,” Vanderbilt University medical professor William Schaffner tells The New York Times. “A vaccine against cancer was the dream of our youth.” So far, only about a third of girls have received a complete dose of the vaccine, partly because many parents worry that vaccinating their children against a sexually transmitted disease will encourage them to have sex. But experts say it’s crucial to protect kids from HPV before they start to become sexually active. More than three quarters of people who become infected with HPV over the course of their lives are exposed within just a few years of their first sexual experiences.

Passing on your habits

Our genes may not be the only biological legacy we pass on to our offspring. A new study suggests that lifestyle choices, such as what we eat and where we live, could affect the life spans of our children and grandchildren. Researchers studying roundworms found that when they altered the protein packaging around a stretch of DNA linked to aging, the worms lived up to 30 percent longer than usual. The manipulation didn’t change the genes themselves, yet when researchers bred the long-lived worms with normal worms, their offspring also lived longer. What’s more, the same longevity appeared in their offspring. The relevant proteins are also present in humans, Stanford University geneticist Anne Brunet tells the London Daily Mail, so the study reinforces earlier evidence that “our bodies could have a memory of the lifestyles of our ancestors.” In this emerging field of epigenetics, scientists have found that environmental factors can switch genes on and off, altering our genetic programs. Brunet says her study suggests that gene expression may be affected by “diet, pollution, smoking, all sorts of medications, exposure to radiation, and stress.”