Health & Science

How liposuction can backfire

People who try to slim down through liposuction, a new study has found, face a cruel aftereffect: Fat deposits reappear—elsewhere in the body. Researchers from the University of Colorado used full-body scans to chart the distribution of fat in a group of women who underwent liposuction on their lower abdomen and thighs. After surgery, those areas remained slimmer, but the same amount of fat quickly showed up in their upper abdomen, shoulders, and triceps. “The brain senses a loss of fat and restores it,” study author Robert Eckel tells The New York Times. Since liposuction destroys the structures that house fat cells under the skin, the fat cells grow in new areas—sometimes lodging themselves deeper in the torso, where deposits can cause heart disease. Rudolph Leibel, an obesity researcher at Columbia University, says the findings are “another chapter in the ‘You can’t fool Mother Nature’ story.” The 200,000 people who choose liposuction every year, unfortunately, are so desperate to erase their fat thighs and saddlebags that the study may not discourage them. When researchers explained the study’s results to a second group of women, half opted to have the procedure anyway.

Arctic ice melt accelerates

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Arctic ice is now melting much faster than previously projected—raising the possibility of a catastrophic rise in sea levels, scientists say. Four years ago, researchers predicted that melting would cause oceans to rise no more than two feet this century; a new study says the increase may be more than twice that. “It is a major change,” climatologist Konrad Steffen of the University of Colorado tells the London Guardian. “Even the lower end of the projections look to have very serious effects.” Some 600 million people currently live in areas in danger of catastrophic flooding, such as Florida, New York City, London, and Bangladesh. The new data, gathered by the scientific arm of the Arctic Council, reflect improved techniques for measuring ice loss. The researchers found that Greenland’s ice sheet shrank four times faster between 2004 and 2009 than it had in the five years beginning in 1995. They believe that the melting of Arctic sea ice has accelerated due to a known feedback effect: Every decrease in white ice surface allows dark ocean waters to absorb more heat from the sun, thus speeding further ice melt.

The brain’s secret slumbers

You might think you’re awake, but important—and overused—parts of your brain could be asleep right now. That’s the conclusion of a new study by University of Wisconsin researchers, who found that depriving rats of rest causes neurons to start shutting down at random intervals. The rodents appeared to be wide awake, but electrodes in their brains showed that neurons responsible for eye-hand coordination had turned off, making it harder for them to grip sugar cubes than it was for rats whose brains were fully engaged. Scientists suspect the same thing is happening in sleep-deprived humans, and there are plenty of them: Thirty-five percent of Americans don’t get enough rest each night, according to an estimate from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The study suggests that the first neurons to nod off are the ones we use the most. “At a certain point, and we don’t know exactly why, they start saying, ‘I’ve had enough. I’m going off-line,’” study author Chiara Cirelli tells USA Today. The resulting impaired judgment “would be very insidious,” her colleague Giulio Tononi says, “because nobody would be able to tell there was anything wrong with you.”

Family drinking not advised

Many parents think introducing teenagers to alcohol in moderation will teach them to drink responsibly. But researchers from the University of Minnesota have found instead that drinking under parental supervision makes teens more likely to develop serious substance-abuse problems later on. The team surveyed nearly 2,000 teens, about half of them from America and half from Australia, where underage drinking with parents is more common. By the 8th grade, 67 percent of the Aussie kids had tried alcohol with an adult present, compared with 35 percent of the Americans. A year later, 36 percent of the Australian teens said they’d blacked out, gotten in a fight, or otherwise had trouble controlling themselves around alcohol; only 21 percent of the Americans had had similar problems. “The study makes it clear you shouldn’t be drinking with your kids,” lead researcher Barbara McMorris tells MSNBC.com. Parental approval leads to more experimentation by teens, who often lack the judgment to restrain their intake. They’re also more likely to be damaged by alcohol. “The teenage brain is much more vulnerable,” says Mary O’Connor, a behavioral scientist at UCLA. “Repeated drinking can lead to long-term deficits in learning and memory.”