Word: browning
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...What's going on here? Church calls it compensation, but you and I might know it as the lip-licking anticipation of perfectly salted, golden-brown French fries after a hard trip to the gym. Whether because exercise made them hungry or because they wanted to reward themselves (or both), most of the women who exercised ate more than they did before they started the experiment. Or they compensated in another way, by moving around a lot less than usual after they got home. (Read "Run For Your Lives...
...Fundamentally, humans are not a species that evolved to dispose of many extra calories beyond what we need to live. Rats, among other species, have a far greater capacity to cope with excess calories than we do because they have more of a dark-colored tissue called brown fat. Brown fat helps produce a protein that switches off little cellular units called mitochondria, which are the cells' power plants: they help turn nutrients into energy. When they're switched off, animals don't get an energy boost. Instead, the animals literally get warmer. And as their temperature rises, calories burn...
...Because rodents have a lot of brown fat, it's very difficult to make them obese, even when you force-feed them in labs. But humans - we're pathetic. We have so little brown fat that researchers didn't even report its existence in adults until earlier this year. That's one reason humans can gain weight with just an extra half-muffin a day: we almost instantly store most of the calories we don't need in our regular ("white") fat cells...
Emma Watson may have chosen Brown, but Harvard still might be the destination for another Hollywood hopeful...
...Britain's banks is 2.4%.) Plans to split the bank into its "good" and "bad" halves - savers' deposits and new lending in the former, existing loans in the latter, as a prelude to reprivatization - still await the E.U.'s stamp of approval. (Watch an interview with British PM Gordon Brown...