Science
Junk Science Or Junk Food Science?
The AP wire is running a story on the results of two studies of weight gain by college students. Apparently prior studies were not very good as they looked only at the first semester of college and men were unrepresented. From the wire service articleOne out of six gained 10 or more pounds during freshman year, and 6 percent gained the "Freshman 15" or more. Men tended to gain weight sharply in the first semester and then more gradually after that, while women gained a lot at first and then tended to plateau, she said. At the end of the freshman year, more than 17 percent were overweight or obese, compared to only 14 percent at the start.Shocking! Absolutely shocking! Until of course one thinks back to their own college years and realizes they too gained weight during college. While the results of these studies may be accurate, what exactly are they telling us? Should we really be shocked that a young adult, typically 17 or 18 years old, would gain 5 to 15 pounds over their first two years of college? While drinking ages are now uniformly 21, all indications are the majority of college students still find ways to consume large amounts of alcohol, a certain way to gain weight. And once students are away from Mom, food selection is almost certain to suffer. We think it unlikely either of these factors has changed significantly during the past 30 years if not longer. But what of the more obvious fact that most people continue to grow and fill out a bit even after high school? While these studies are probably accurate and hence technically not 'junk science', we think speaking of a roughly 10% weight gain over the first two years of college in the alarmist terms they do is junk science.
The second study involved 907 students, 55 percent of them male, at an unidentified public university in the Midwest and was funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Students were weighed four times as in the previous study, but also at the end of their sophomore year. Similar to the first study, students gained an average of 7.8 pounds during the freshman year. More than one-third gained 10 pounds or more, and one-fifth piled on 15 or more. Things got worse the next year. Males were on average 9.5 pounds heavier, and females, 9.2 pounds heavier, than when they started college.
"Students don't appear to be losing weight over this time and in fact they gained additional weight in their sophomore year," Lloyd-Richardson said. Source: AP
Physics Nobel Prize A Reach?
Just announced in Sweden are Physics Nobel prize winners John C. Mather of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and George F. Smoot of the University of California, Berkeley for their work done on analyzing the inhomogeneity of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) using the COBE (Cosmic Background Explorer) space probe from 1989-1992. The CMB, first noted by Penzias and Wilson in the late 1960's (who also won the Nobel prize for their discovery), is the first measurable relic of the Big Bang and is a nearly isotropic radiation field at a temperature of 2.7°K which peaks in the microwave region. Initial data at the time suggested the CMB was uniform, however astronomers felt this was unlikely as then the random clumping of matter into galaxies we see today would not occur. More precise data was needed and eventually was obtained with the COBE experiment in 1992 by Mather and Smoot who showed the CMB varied by parts per hundred thousand. AIP reports that at the meeting these results were announced, the audience fell silent in shock at the degree to which the data matched the expected blackbody spectrum.So why are we under whelmed with this prize? While it is certainly true that COBE and the subsequent data analysis was a technical tour de force, it really only further refined data which was known (the CMB temperature) and confirmed prior expectations (small inhomogeneity). It -more-
