Impressed with the ignorance of fundamentalists..

http://209.85.165.104/search?q=cache:http%3A//www.fstdt.com/fundies/top100.aspx%3Farchive%3D1

seriously.. why not we all list down our favourite quotes from there?

I can name a couple:

Jesus is not a Jew. Jesus was Jewish.

Gravity: Doesn't exist. If items of mass had any impact of others, then mountains should have people orbiting them. Or the space shuttle in space should have the astronauts orbiting it. Of course, that's just the tip of the gravity myth. Think about it. Scientists want us to believe that the sun has a gravitation pull strong enough to keep a planet like neptune or pluto in orbit, but then it's not strong enough to keep the moon in orbit? Why is that? What I believe is going on here is this: These objects in space have yet to receive mans touch, and thus have no sin to weigh them down. This isn't the case for earth, where we see the impact of transfered sin to material objects. The more sin, the heavier something is.

I can sum it all up in three words: Evolution is a lie [I love this. Oh look, 3 words!]

I often debate with evolutionists because I believe that they are narrow mindedly and dogmatically accepting evolution without questioning it. I don't really care how God did what He did. I know He did it.

If your original Hebrew disagrees with my original King James --- your original Hebrew is wrong. If your original Hebrew agrees with my original King James, your original Hebrew is right. [for those not Christians, the original books of the old testaments were Hebrew, original books of the new testaments, Greek. I think English never existed then. Could be wrong though ;D]

o_O I'm not talking about a simple power outage. I'm talking about enriched plutonium which comes from the conversion of uranium into WMD. It is considered the most dangerous substance known to man and absolutely will shut off the electricity present in planes. All any terrorist has to do is drop large quantities of plutonium from airplanes onto American soil and it will render electricity completely useless. And the chain reaction that will occur from the US shutting down will be global. We Americans have had the capacity to do that to our enemies for years. I had erroneoulsy thought that atheists knew that since they claim to know so much about our universe. But as usual, you haven't thought things through at all and are speaking from ignorance again. [rrriiiggghhhttt… of course we don't know about where the rest of the heat you forgot to mention go to.]

 

I need to find a corner to cry in…

Genesis

Ok, nothing new and exciting today. Just couldn't find anything, so for the first time in.. quite a long time, I shall just talk. What about? Well, the bible.

Greed, lust, envy, wrath,

CONTROVERTIAL DISCUSSION ALERT. THIS IS A THEOLOGICAL DISCUSSION AND NO RESPONSIBILITIES WILL BE TAKEN FOR ANY OFFENSES TAKEN.

STOP IF YOU ARE A FUNDAMENTALIST, ARE CLOSED MINDED, OR REFUSE TO TAKE A SINGLE WORD OF SCIENTISTS AND RENOWNED HISTORIANS SERIOUSLY.

"I will not take any action or take offense at anything written in this article. I understand that this is an article purely meant for discussion and is not intended for evangelizing of any sort, and is of the personal opinion of The Thinker. By reading further, I accept the above mentioned terms and conditions"

For the group of you open-minded enough to wonder at my paranoia, well, people can get screwed for just about anything.

So, now that I've made my stance clear, let's start at the beginning.

"At the beginning, there was nothing." And through a series of events, God called the world as we know it into being. The 7 day creation indicates everything was created in perfection. The 7^th day rest indicates a complete rest. This is the ideology put forth when the book of genesis was written. A world of perfection created by a perfect being, tainted by Man, and becoming less perfect over time. Why do I say it's an ideology put forth? As much as we like to think, the bible is a book of values. It is a book that describes to us the mindsets of the people at the time they were writing these. The first story of creation tells us about how the world was made in perfection, and that we humanity were made in that image: perfection. As beings of intellect, we were given the authority by God to lord over the animals and plants. As beings of God's image, we raise ourselves above the stigma of beast, and start on the road of divinity. Of course how true is that, we only have to open our eyes and we can see how we are no better than beasts. How did they justify that? The original Sin. The second story of creation, which contains details that directly contradict the first, obviously, (I mean the second story says that we were created before all animals and plants, a story to say that the world was made for us, while the first had us made last, with the first 5 days made in preparation.) places the centre of the story in a small area of the world: paradise. Adam was made first, and then, the rest of the plants and animals made as Man's companions. Adam gets a girlfriend, calls her woman, which means, from man. Lets divert from here slightly to take a look at this point. Women is part of man, and is from man, therefore, is below the status of man. I will point out more later that implies such. As we can see, man ego. The attempt by the people to justify sexism: man's source is divinity, women's source is earthly. Moving on, being perfectly pure, we bear no shame, and thus, are not afraid of nudity. Here, we see how the people of that time viewing nudity as a sign of divinity. Why do you think the images of gods in ancient rome and Greece are naked? Then, comes the first crux. Man is given a choice. Immortality versus the judgment of morality. Both bearing signs of divinity, but only one was granted by God. The personification of evil, the desire by man to blame an external source for their sins: Satan, in the form of a serpent. By distancing evil from man, we receive hope that we are, by nature, divine. The next evidence of sexism: Eve is the one who succumbs to evil and chooses moral judgment, with the hope of reaching godliness. She tempts Adam, and so, they both commit the original sin. Please note that there is no place in the bible that mentions "apple" as the fruit. In latin, malus, or apple sounds like malum, or evil. Moving back, the first sin: greed. In doing so, they gain insight in morality and suddenly see each other as naked. They sew leaves together to hide their bodies, losing what's left of divinity and purity. The second sin: lust. Disappointed, God drives humanity out of paradise. As punishment, man lives by the sweat of his brow, woman screams in pain during birth.

The two stories of creation are now widely known to have origins from the Babylonian creation texts, all of which are polytheistic.

hmm I sense I'm losing my audience… I think I'll go for part 2 another day.. in the next run, I'll continue on with Cain and Abel.

Damage greater than expected?

So, we thought we were in a bad shape.. check out the following

Warming world altering thousands of natural systems

Analysis shows effects of climate change on almost 30,000 biological and physical phenomena.

Emma Marris

Climate warming is influencing a huge range of natural systems.Punchstock

A comprehensive analysis of trends in tens of thousands of biological and physical systems has provided more evidence to bolster the near-universal view that man-made climate change is altering the behaviour of plants, animals, rivers and more.

The study, by an international research team featuring many members of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), is a statistical analysis of observations of natural systems over time. The data, which stretch back to 1970, capture the behaviour of 829 physical phenomena, such as the timing of river runoff, and around 28,800 biological species.

Researchers led by Cynthia Rosenzweig of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York created a map of the planet with a colour-coded grid showing how much different regions have warmed or cooled between 1970 and 2004.

They then placed each of the thousands of datasets on the map and determined whether they were "consistent with warming" or "not consistent with warming". Trees, for example, might flower earlier in regions where the climate has warmed significantly.

In around 90% of cases where an overall trend was observed, it was consistent with the predicted effects of climate warming, the researchers report in this week's Nature ¹.

Widespread changes

"Human-caused climate change is having a broad range of impacts on physical and biological systems, not only at a global scale, but at a continental scale," says Cynthia Rosenzweig.

The bulk of the observations come from Europe, from a single meta-analysis of a collaborative database of observations of annual natural events². Several hundred more came from studies elsewhere in the world, although Africa, Australia and Latin America are relatively poorly represented.

Rosenzweig's team does not claim, therefore, to have shown that human-caused global warming is causing changes to these southern continents on an individual basis.

Among the warming-linked changes seen in the study are the timing of plant flowering, bird nesting, ice melting, salmon migration and pollen release; declines in populations of polar bears, krill and penguins; and increased growth of Siberian pines and cool-water ocean plankton.

"This paper outlines an extremely robust case for linking a range of observed physical and biological changes to human-induced climate change, specifically warming," says Roger Jones of the Centre for Australian Weather and Climate Research. "Unfortunately, the coverage of such data is not global and many regions of the world, including Australia, are not very well covered. Many of the regions that lack coverage are also thought to be highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change."

Cagan Sekercioglu of Stanford University in California studies bird ranges and, among other things, their response to climate change. He is convinced that climate change is affecting many natural systems, and is disappointed that many regions still lack adequate data.

"In Africa there are 14 studies altogether, including the Middle East," he says. "The big oil-producing countries like Saudi Arabia and Venezuela don't have any studies, and it is kind of embarrassing that my own country, Turkey, has no studies."

Old news?

Sekercioglu is impressed by the scope of the study, but says that there was already a wealth of evidence that climate change is affecting the world. "We shouldn't even need to publish such papers at this point," he says. "This paper is an argument that climate change is causing the observed changes. This should be a given. Thirty years later we are still trying to convince people of this."

Rosenzweig sees those 30 years differently. It was about 30 years ago that the Goddard Institute for Space Studies began work on climate-change models. "Less than 30 years after the fist model was developed, we are working on the second global treaty [the successor to the Kyoto Treaty, which will expire in 2012]. I think that the global-warming issue is the [biggest] challenge facing our planet, but at the same time it is leading us to sustainability because of the rapidly growing action. It is finally shaking us up and getting us to realize what is going on with the planet."

• References
  
  • Rosenzweig, C. et al. Nature 453, 353-357 (2008). | Article |
    
  • Menzel, A. et al. Glob. Change Biol. 12, 1969-1976 (2006). | Article |
    

Blame: greater on those we hate?

So, perhaps we should start examining ourselves before we start blaming someone we don't like:

Perceived moral blame can change the memory of a crime

Category: Memory • Research • Social
Posted on: May 8, 2008 3:47 PM, by Dave Munger

Anton races home at speeds well in excess of the speed limit. He's rushing to beat his parents home so that he can hide their anniversary present so it will be a surprise. Suddenly, he hits a slick patch and runs his car off the road an into a tree. He's okay, but the car is totaled and his parent's surprise anniversary party is ruined.

How much is Anton to blame for the accident? If you had to rate it on a scale of 1 to 10, maybe you'd give him a 7. After all, he was just trying to do something special for his parents.

But what if instead of hiding an anniversary present, Anton was rushing home to hide his cocaine stash? Would you now say he's more to blame for the accident? You might not when the two alternatives are placed side-by-side, but when Mark Alicke told the two versions of this story to different groups, the cocaine group rated Anton as more blameworthy than the anniversary present group.

Alicke's study provided the foundation for an array of studies on the effects of social evaluations of individuals on apparently unrelated events, and even factual recollections about episodes.

But when a team led by David Pizarro addressed this question, no study had yet shown that unrelated details about a person could literally affect witnesses' accuracy in recalling that person's actions. The researchers presented a simple story to 283 college students. The story described a person named Frank entering a restaurant, paying with cash for a drink, then ordering a three-course meal, receiving a cell phone call, and leaving without paying the $56.43 bill.

Then some of the students learned that Frank was a generally responsible person, it's just that the phone call was the hospital, telling him his daughter had been in an accident. When Frank realized his mistake, he contacted the restaurant and told them he'd return with payment the next day.

Another group of students were told the Frank enjoyed walking out on checks, and had treated the waiter at the restaurant rudely. He was obnoxiously loud on his phone call and deliberately left without paying.

A third group received no explanation for Frank's behavior.

All the students were asked to rate Frank's level of blame for his behavior on a scale of 1 to 9. As you might expect, those who heard the "bad" explanation rated him very highly -- an average of 8.14, while the "good" group gave a significantly lower rating of just 2.96.

The students returned to the lab a week later and were surprised with a quiz about the story. They were asked to recall the price he paid for the meal as well as several menu items. Here are some of the results:

The "bad" group recalled the meal cost as significantly higher than the "good" group -- those overestimating the magnitude of Frank's crime. There was also a trend towards those in the "bad" group being more likely to believe that Frank hadn't paid for his drink (he had).

Pizarro et al. say this is first study showing that social knowledge of an individual can actually distort details about an event. There have been some studies focusing on different descriptions of an event (a car crash seen on video and later described as two cars "smashing into" each other versus "hitting" each other), which resulted in memory distortions for the original event, but never has a study found that changing details about an individual's character can also distort memories of an event.

Pizarro, D.A., Laney, C., Morris, E.K., Loftus, E.F. (2006). Ripple effects in memory: Judgments of moral blame can distort memory for events. Memory & Cognition, 34(3), 550-555.

 

http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/2008/05/perceived_moral_blame_can_chan.php

The Platypus: mameptile?

So, mammal or reptile? Or should we stop doing categories? What right do we have to say that animals evolved to say reptiles from amphibians? Why can't we say amphibians evolved to mammals and the reptiles are the intermediate? Evolution is a slow continuous spectrum-like process. At what point we differentiate a class from another, we will just find one directly in between. So should we try anyway, calling everything new we find that just refuses to fit into anyone an intermediate? (lungfish?)

Top billing for platypus at end of evolution tree

Monotreme's genome shares features with mammals, birds and reptiles.

Susan Brown

CREDITS TOP TO BOTTOM: MEUL/ARCO/NATUREPL; N. A. CALLOW/NHPA; W. SLOSS/NATUREPL; J. ROTMAN/NATUREPL; J. JENSEN/IMAGEQUESTMARINE.COM; J. JENSEN/IMAGEQUESTMARINE.COM; G. ELLIS/FLPA; D. WATTS/NATUREPL; D. AUBREY/SPL; H. AUSLOOS/NHPA; T. J. RICH/NATUREPL; S. DALTON/NHPA; A. SANDS/NATUREPL; B. CASTELEIN/NATUREPL

A draft sequence of the platypus genome reveals reptilian and mammalian elements and provides more evidence for its place in the ancestral line of animal evolution.

The platypus (Ornithorhynchus anatinus ) is endemic to Australia and one of nature's oddest creatures, seemingly assembled from the spare parts of other animals. The semi-aquatic monotreme is a venomous, duck-billed mammal that lays eggs, nurses its young and occupies a lonely twig at the end of a sparse branch of the vertebrate evolutionary tree.

Now, the structure of its genome has revealed new clues to how mammals evolved. "The analysis is beginning to align these strange features with genetic innovation," says Wesley Warren of Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, the lead author of the genome analysis — a huge international project (see page 175). Comparisons with the genomes of other mammals will help to date the emergence of the platypus's distinguishing characteristics and reveal the genetic events that underlie them.

For example, mammals are defined by their possession of mammary glands, which in females can produce milk. Although the platypus doesn't have nipples, it produces true milk — full of fats, sugars and proteins — which the young suck through a glandular patch on its skin. The analysis shows that the platypus has genes for the family of milk proteins called caseins, which map together in a cluster that matches that of humans. This is a sign that one of the genetic innovations that led to the development of milk occurred more than 166 million years ago, and after mammals first split from the lizard-like sauropsids that gave rise to modern reptiles and birds.

"There is nothing quite as enigmatic as a platypus."

The genes relating to the platypus's eggs offer further insight. The embryos develop within the maternal uterus for 21 days before they are expelled in a thumbnail-sized leathery egg. After 11 days of incubation, the young hatchlings emerge with their organs not yet fully differentiated. Like marsupials, they finish developing while nursing. The platypus shares with other mammals four genes associated with the zona pellucida, a gel-like coating that facilitates fertilization of the egg. But it also has two matches for ZPAX genes that had previously been found only in birds, amphibians and fish. And it shares with the chicken a gene for a type of egg-yolk protein called a vitellogenin. That suggests that vitellogenins, which are found in birds and fish, predate the split from the sauropsids, although the platypus retains only one vitellogenin gene, whereas the chicken has three.

Other characteristics that seem purely reptilian turn out to have evolved independently, the analysis suggests. Male platypuses have spurs on their hind legs that are loaded with a venom so potent it can kill a dog. Like the venom of reptiles, the poison is a cocktail of variations on at least three kinds of peptide. But the variations arose from duplications of different genes in platypuses than in modern reptiles. The similarity in venom is an example of convergent evolution between the two tetrapods.

"There is nothing quite as enigmatic as a platypus," says Richard Gibbs, who directs the Human Genome Sequencing Center at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. "You have got these reptilian repeat patterns and these more recently evolved milk genes and independent evolution of the venom. It all points to how idiosyncratic evolution is."

The platypus has genetic characteristics of both reptiles and mammals.D. WATTS/NATUREPL

The sex of the platypus is determined by a set of ten chromosomes, an oddity that sets it apart from all other mammals and from birds. These chromosomes link during meiosis to form a chain that ensures every sperm gets a set of all Xs or all Ys. Despite the similar designations, none of the platypus X chromosomes resembles the human, dog or mouse X. "The sex chromosomes are absolutely, completely different from all other mammals. We had not expected that," says Jennifer Graves of the Australian National University in Canberra, who studies sex differentiation and is an author on the paper. Instead, the platypus Xs better match the avian Z sex chromosome. Another chromosome matches the mouse X, Graves and her colleagues report in Genome Research (F. Veyrunes et al. Genome Res . doi:10.1101/gr.7101908; 2008). This is evidence that placental mammalian sex chromosomes and the sex-determining gene Sry — found on the Y chromosome — evolved after the monotremes diverged from mammals, much later than previously thought. "Our sex chromosomes are a plain old ordinary autosome in the platypus," Graves says.

A team led by Gregory Hannon of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York sequenced microRNAs, which regulate gene expression, that were isolated from six platypus tissues. Again they found a mix of reptile and mammal examples (E. P. Murchison et al. Genome Res. doi:10.1101/gr.73056.107; 2008). "We have microRNAs that are shared with chickens and not mammals as well as ones that are shared with mammals, but not chickens," Hannon says.

"The reptilian characteristics [of miRNA] are not convergent features, and this is a feature of the genome as well," Hannon says. "Morphology didn't have to be reflected at the level of molecular biology, but in this case it was."

Adam Felsenfeld, who directs the Large-Scale Sequencing Program at the US National Human Genome Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, says: "I find it fascinating that genomic features of what are now two separate lineages can coexist in the genome of a single organism."

About half of the platypus genome contains non-coding DNA sequences. Many are 'interspersed repeats', copies of transposable elements that are characteristically abundant in other mammalian genomes. In contrast, repeats of very short sequences called microsatellite DNA are rarer in the platypus genome than in other mammals' and more closely resemble those of reptiles, with the balance of nucleic acids tipped toward A–T base pairs.

The sequence information has already generated useful genetic markers for studying the population structure of the elusive platypus in the wild. Differences in repeated elements, for example, separate the Tasmanian population from that on Australia's mainland, and could be used to improve understanding of the ecology of this enigmatic animal. There are as yet no plans to sequence the genome of its closest relative, the echidna.

http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080507/full/453138a.html?s=news_rss

Sleep

Everyone, I suggest you start sleeping..

Can You Catch Up on Lost Sleep?

You've given up your fair share of sleep—will you ever feel rested again?

By Molly Webster

 
 

iStockPhoto

Let's do some sleep math. You lost two hours of sleep every night last week because of a big project due on Friday. On Saturday and Sunday, you slept in, getting four extra hours. Come Monday morning, you were feeling so bright-eyed, you only had one cup of coffee, instead of your usual two. But don't be duped by your apparent vim and vigor: You're still carrying around a heavy load of sleepiness, or what experts call "sleep debt"—in this case something like six hours, almost a full nights' sleep.

Sleep debt is the difference between the amount of sleep you should be getting and the amount you actually get. It's a deficit that grows every time we skim some extra minutes off our nightly slumber. "People accumulate sleep debt surreptitiously," says psychiatrist William C. Dement, founder of the Stanford University Sleep Clinic. Studies show that such short-term sleep deprivation leads to a foggy brain, worsened vision, impaired driving, and trouble remembering. Long-term effects include obesity, insulin resistance, and heart disease. And most Americans suffer from chronic deprivation.
 
A 2005 survey by the National Sleep Foundation reports that, on average, Americans sleep 6.9 hours per night—6.8 hours during the week and 7.4 hours on the weekends. Generally, experts recommend eight hours of sleep per night, although some people may require only six hours of sleep while others need ten. That means on average, we're losing one hour of sleep each night—more than two full weeks of slumber every year.

The good news is that, like all debt, with some work, sleep debt can be repaid—though it won't happen in one extended snooze marathon. Tacking on an extra hour or two of sleep a night is the way to catch up. For the chronically sleep deprived, take it easy for a few months to get back into a natural sleep pattern, says Lawrence J. Epstein, medical director of the Harvard-affiliated Sleep HealthCenters.

Go to bed when you are tired, and allow your body to wake you in the morning (no alarm clock allowed). You may find yourself catatonic in the beginning of the recovery cycle: Expect to bank upward of ten hours shut-eye per night. As the days pass, however, the amount of time sleeping will gradually decrease.

For recovery sleep, both the hours slept and the intensity of the sleep are important. Some of your most refreshing sleep occurs during deep sleep. Although such sleep's true effects are still being studied, it is generally considered a restorative period for the brain. And when you sleep more hours, you allow your brain to spend more time in this rejuvenating period.

As you erase sleep debt, your body will come to rest at a sleep pattern that is specifically right for you. Sleep researchers believe that genes—although the precise ones have yet to be discovered—determine our individual sleeping patterns. That more than likely means you can't train yourself to be a "short sleeper"—and you're fooling yourself if you think you've done it. A 2003 study in the journal Sleep found that the more tired we get, the less tired we feel.

So earn back that lost sleep—and follow the dictates of your innate sleep needs. You'll feel better. "When you put away sleep debt, you become superhuman," says Stanford's Dement, talking about the improved mental and physical capabilities that come with being well rested. Finally, a scientific reason to sleep in on Saturday.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=fact-or-fiction-can-you-catch-up-on-sleep&sc=rss

Bad news to the girls out there

Turns out that getting rid of that fat there in the body really can be no mean feat. Especially now with new researches coming out that tells you that you might be in for more trouble than expected:

Fat cell numbers stay constant through adult life

Even serious weight loss doesn't reduce your overall number of fat-holding cells.

Michael Hopkin

The number of fat cells in your body remains constant throughout your adult life, a new study has found. The discovery suggests that the process of weight gain may be fundamentally different in adults and in children.

Adults who gain or lose weight may do so through changes in the size of the fat cells, also called adipocytes, that constitute fatty deposits in the body. Children, on the other hand, may put on extra fat by increasing the overall number of these cells in the body.

This may mean that people who got fat during childhood may find it more difficult to shift the weight later in life, compared to those who piled on the pounds as adults, suggests Kirsty Spalding of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, who led the new research.

Although the number of fat cells remains constant in adulthood, Spalding and her team found that it is not the same cells persisting for ever. There is a dynamic process of cell death and replenishment.

Fat by numbers

Spalding and her team took biopsies of belly fat from 687 people, both lean and obese, and recorded the number and size of fat cells, as well as the subjects' age, sex and body mass index. Combined with previous similar data from children, they showed that the average number of fat cells rises until the age of about 20, and then remains relatively constant, and is closely linked with body mass index.

The researchers also measured 20 people who were obese and had 'stomach stapling' surgery to reduce food intake. When Spalding and her team measured these volunteers again two years after the procedure, they found no reduction in fat-cell number: the subjects still had over 80 billion individual fat cells in their bodies, Spalding and her colleagues calculate. This despite losing an average of 18% of their body weight. It was the volume of each individual fat cell that was reduced, rather than the number, they report in Nature ¹.

Nevertheless, fat cells are constantly dying and being replaced, even in adults, Spalding and her team found. They determined this by studying fat extracted during liposuction procedures from 35 people who had lived through the period of Cold War atomic bomb testing, from 1955–63, when the atmosphere was briefly more radioactive than normal. Food grown and eaten during this period had elevated levels of an isotope called carbon-14.

Fewer fat cells showed a heavy dose of carbon-14 than might be expected if these cells were never replenished, the team reports. This shows that the cells have been subject to turnover in the intervening decades.

Cutting down

If cell biologists can work out exactly how this cell replenishment is regulated, it might be possible to design drugs to interfere with this process — potentially helping people to keep weight off once they have lost it.

Spalding says that such a treatment would best be given only after patients have undergone serious weight-loss therapies such as gastric surgery. "You need to be really cautious about applying this," she warns.

"It would be very dangerous to give people these drugs while they're still obese," Spalding adds. Cutting the number of fat cells while people still have a high fat volume would place extra strain on the fat cells that are left over, leading to metabolic complications such as diabetes, she explains.

"I don't think it's going to be as simple as 'take a pill, lose weight, problem solved'," Spalding adds.

Perhaps most important, Spalding says, is the confirmation that fat cells can proliferate in childhood, although not in adulthood. The factors behind this are likely to be both genetic and dietary, she says.

So although obesity tends to run in families, avoiding getting fat at a young age will help to establish a healthy number of fat cells for life. "The best take-home message is for people with kids to ensure they have a healthy lifestyle," Spalding says.

• References
  
  • Spalding, K. L. et al. Nature advanced online publication, doi:10.1038/nature06902 (2008).