TOP 10 REASONS WHY THE WORLD WON'T END IN 2012

By Ray Villard

In the early days of computers, when hard drives weighed as much as a piece of furniture, a popular phrase was "Garbage-in, Garbage-out" (GIGO). It meant that computers would unquestioningly process the most nonsensical of input data and produce nonsensical output. "GIGO" describes the abysmal lack of intelligent thought and critical thinking on the Internet when it comes to all the hysteria about the end of the world coming on December 21, 2012 -- just in time to ruin Christmas. I'm getting e-mail about this weekly and I expect the nonsense to ratchet up. This latest installment in decades of flaky astronomical apocalypse predictions is loosely based on the Mayan calendar that marks the end of a 5,126-year era.

Apparently the Mayans knew something about the heavens we don't, according to numerous hot-selling 2012 doomsday books on the market. Our multi-billion dollar telescopes, space probes, and 6,000 professional astronomers somehow just can't keep up with the mystic knowledge of an ancient superstitious culture. With the much-ballyhooed release of the film "2012" opening on November 13, end of world chatter will be the topic from backyard cookouts, to bars, to wine and cheese parties. I am listing the 10 most popular 2012 end-of-world scenarios and providing a quickie reference guide to use in politely dismissing any friends, relatives, or in-laws whose brains have turned into a pile of GIGO mush after being suckered by the End of Days hype.

The ten top 2012 doomsday scenarios:

10. Changes in the Sun's magnetic field will lead to powerful flares.

So what else is new under the sun? The sun goes though a well-documented 11-year sunspot cycle that is driven by its magnetic field entangling, reforming and flipping polarity. Yes, the peak of the next cycle is in 2012 (or 2013), and some predictions suggest it might be 30 to 50 percent stronger than the last peak.

But experts say it will certainly not be the biggest peak ever recorded.

The bottom line is that no dragon's breath of flame will stretch across 100 million miles of space and blowtorch Earth. The largest solar flare recorded to date, on Nov. 4, 2003, spewed several billions of tons of plasma in Earth's direction. The flare's X-ray radiation that impacted our protective atmosphere had the equivalent radiation of 5,000 suns.

We're still here.

9. The Earth's magnetic field will reverse.

Don't hold you breath. The last field reversal happened nearly 800,000 years ago. Fred Flintstone and our other ancestor cavemen survived. Geological evidence shows that the field has reversed its orientation tens of thousands of times over Earth history. Yet there is no definitive evidence that a magnetic field reversal has ever caused any mass extinction due to increased cosmic ray influx.

8. The Earth's rotation axis will tip.

This isn't nearly as easy as tipping cows. Unlike Mars, which does go though wide excursions in it axial tilt, Earth's tilt is kept steady by the gravitational influence of the moon. An object the size of Mars would have to hit Earth to transfer enough momentum to knock us out of kilter. But Mars-sized protoplanets were kicked into interstellar space over 4 billion years ago. The solar system doesn't make "planets-gone-wild" anymore.

7. A grand alignment of Jupiter and Saturn will gravitationally perturb Earth.

For the past several decades there have been doomsday claims that the combined gravity from grand planetary alignments will cause geologic and meteorological upheavals on Earth.

None are scheduled for 2012.

In 1962 an extremely rare grand conjunction of the classical naked-eye planets drove astrologers crazy. The conjunction happened on Feb. 4-5 and was accompanied by a solar eclipse! The most infamous grand conjunction was in 1982 and popularized in a book called "The Jupiter Effect," which predicted earthquakes and massive tides. Life went on as usual both years. The moon has a vastly greater gravitational influence on Earth than Jupiter. It's called location, location, location! At a whopping distance of 400 million miles from Earth, Jupiter's tug is pretty wimpy.

6. The Sun will align with the galactic equator on the winter solstice.

So what? These are simply coordinates in the sky. It has no physical reality any more than the intersection of Broadway and 7th Avenue at Times Square influences the geology of Manhattan Island. This is greatly confused with the fact that the sun's position actually oscillates up and down as it orbits the galaxy, like a horse on a carousel.

We pass through the galactic plane every 35 to 40 million years. It's possible that an increased number of comets might be hurled towards the Earth because of gravitational interaction with the densest parts of our galaxy during this passage. But we are talking about the consequences spanning many thousands of years, not crashing down on our heads in any one specific year.

5. The black hole in the galactic center will affect us.

The Milky Way's black hole has no influence on the galactic disk. The black hole is three million solar masses. The Milky Way is several trillion solar masses when we add the tug of dark matter. Any gravitational influence of the black hole over the galaxy would be like the tail wagging the dog. The Milky Way's collision with the Andromeda galaxy will dump gas into the black hole and it will blaze as a quasar. But that's several billion years away.

4. An asteroid will smash into Earth.

A threatening near-Earth asteroid that's gotten the most press is the 900-foot wide Apophis. But its chances of collision have been downgraded to 1 in 250,000 at its next close approach in 2029. In theory, an uncharted asteroid or comet could come out of the blue tomorrow. But if we don't know about it today, the Mayans certainly didn't know about it 1,200 years ago. Earth-killer impacts are tens of millions of years apart. So there's no reason to be a doomsday clock-watcher.

3. The rogue planet Nibiru will swing by Earth.

There isn't such a planet any more than the planet Naboo from the Star Wars trilogy is real. Purported Internet pictures of the interloper are photographic lens flares or hoaxes. Don't believe every dot you see photographed in the sky.

2. Supernovae or hypernovae will irradiate Earth.

There are no stars that are so close to Earth that radiation from their supernova demise would seriously affect us. The nearest candidate, the red giant Betelgeuse, is predicted to explode in the next 1,000 years. The monster star Eta Carinae is also on a short fuse. Neither doomed star has a spin axis precisely aimed at Earth, so we don't have to worry about being fried by a narrow beam of gamma rays ejected from the core's implosion. In fact the kinds of stars that shoot out these Death Star beams are uncommon in the Milky Way. Earth has a one percent chance of getting zapped over 10 billion years. Scratch gamma ray bursts off of your homeowner's insurance policy.

1. A cloud of negative energy engulfs the solar system.

Wow! A dark cloud with a bad attitude! This sound suspiciously like a Star Trek episode. Dark energy is all around us already, but it is not packaged into clouds. The same goes for dark matter.

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'Half-Sheep Half-Human' Baby Causes Outrage In Sokoto, Northwest Nigeria

A sheep has allegedly given birth to a ‘half-sheep half-human’ baby in Sokoto, Nigeria. Local newspaper the Daily Sun reported that after vets delivered the odd-looking lamb at Fakon Idi Veterinary Clinic on 22 January, thousands of curious onlookers were drawn to the clinic. The “mutant” sheep caused outrage among the gathered locals, reported the paper, believing the bloated "half-sheep half-human" to be the result of bestiality or witchcraft. Nigerian Security and Civil Defence Corps (NCDSC) had to step in to disperse the crowd, who were demanding the owner of the sheep to identify himself.

However “mutant” looking lambs have been birthed before, notably in Turkey, when a sheep was helped by vets deliver a baby with a head that appeared to have human features. Although the lamb remained alive for some hours, spooked locals eventually slaughtered the animal. In Nigeria, Vets from the Fakon Idi clinic were far more rational in their explanation for the lamb’s appearance Dr Ismail Usman, who helped deliver the lamb, described the rumours going round about the baby as “embarrassing”. “It was a surprise that people’s perspective could be so negative when it comes to scientific reasoning and thoughts," he told the Daily Sun. He said it was more likely the lamb looked so strange because the sheep had been two days overdue and had suffered problems during the pregnancy.

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The Secret to Cheaper, Greener Local Beer

Brewing beer is, in theory, fairly simple. A small farmer can grow all the barley and the hops needed on a little plot of land—it’s easier to grow than corn. And a microbrewery can pump out a few humble barrels of finished beer in anything from a spare room to sprawling warehouse.

But a step in the middle can stand in the way. Malting the barley—soaking, drying and then heating the grains to turn their starches into simple sugar ready to ferment—is more complicated. In fact, it can be something of a bottleneck for brewers like Dustin Brau, CEO of Brau Brothers Brewery in tiny Lucan, Minnesota.

“There aren’t a lot of maltsters, so what you get is a lot of breweries buying from a relatively [small] number of maltsters worldwide,” he says.

That homogenizes the final product, which is not a compliment from a booster of microbrews. Malting also drives up the carbon footprint needed to make the beer—and the limited number of malt suppliers ramps up the price, with Brau estimating that about 75 percent of his costs come in shipping and processing malt.

But Brau hopes that his brewery will rely less on the malting process in the future. His company has completed the first test batch of malt-less beer to prove they don’t need a costly middle-man for a great tasting brew. The small batch of a few hundred cases of Bohemian Soup beer, an Eastern European-style pilsner, went on sale around Minnesota and at brewers’ conventions.

The secret to making the raw barley beer is an enzyme additive called Ondea Pro. Normally, brewers rely on malting to produce natural enzymes that help turn starch in the grain into sugar, which the yeast is then able to chomp on during the all-important fermentation process—when the beer becomes beer. Ondea Pro allows brewers to skip malting (and the expense and energy costs that come with it) to make beer with unmalted grains.

"Even for a very efficient malting process, brewing with unmalted barley reduced the overall carbon footprint of beer production by eight percent," says Adam Monroe, President of Novozymes North America, the company that makes Ondea Pro. "We also documented a seven percent reduction in the amount of barley required to produce the same amount of beer, thereby improving land utilization and earnings."

This isn't going to close the hole in the ozone layer, but incremental efficiency should be recognized. The company estimates that if 10 percent of global beer production is converted to unmalted barley—a pie-in-the-sky dream at this point—the potential savings could equal more than 350,000 tons of CO2, about the same as taking 85,000 cars off the road.

For Brau, it's less C02 savings than local flavor that drew him to drop the malting process.

“One thing that intrigued us about raw barley beer,” Braus says, was “being able to pull barely straight from field and cut out the middle man.”

Typically, farmers to sell barley en masse to a maltster, who refines the product and sells it to brewers. Instead, Brau wants to buy direct from the farmers, saving money, reducing shipping costs, and ideally finding a few new flavors in the process. Absent the homogenizing influence of bulk-bought barley and centralized malting, each region’s unique barley would increase the variety of beers available.

One obstacle standing in the way: The farmers near Brau Brewing don’t grow much barley now, so Brau is growing it himself right next door, enough for a few hundred barrels next growing season. His production capacity for Bohemian Soup is limited largely by the dearth of local grains.

 “We need to convince some local farmers to grow it, then we can expand,” he says.

That’s why he’s showing off his beer at brewing conventions and touting the process in the media. He needs other breweries to follow his lead and create enough demand that farmers have an incentive to switch from corn or other crops to beer grains. There’s a good financial reason for him to expect success.

“It could potentially make beer cheaper,” he says. Grain prices rose as much as thirty percent last year. “You’ve already seen [the price of beer] go up and you will probably see it going up even more.”

Brau makes a good case, pun intended.

Photo courtesy of Brau Brothers Brewing Company.

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Whitney Houston, superstar of records, films, dies

Whitney Houston, who reigned as pop music's queen until her majestic voice and regal image were ravaged by drug use, erratic behavior and a tumultuous marriage to singer Bobby Brown, has died. She was 48.

Whitney Houston with music producer Clive Davis, in 1983, shortly after signing a contract with Arista Records. AP

Whitney Houston, left, and Jermaine Jackson sing during a rehearsal for the CBS television soap opera "As the World Turns" in New York in 1984. AP/Marty Lederhandler

Whitney Houston belts out a song during her segment of a benefit concert at Boston Garden in 1986. AP/Elise Amendola

Whitney Houston accepts her Grammy Award in 1986 in Los Angeles for pop female vocal performance with "Saving All My Love For You." AP

Whitney Houston shows her American Music Award at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles in 1986. AP

Whitney Houston looks over her shoulder as her husband Bobby Brown looks to her at the premiere of "The Wonderful World of Disney" movie "Cinderella" in 1997. AP/Rene Macura

Whitney Houston poses with her Grammy at the annual Grammy Awards presentation in New York in 1988. AP/Mark Lennihan

Mariah Carey, left, and Whitney Houston present the award for Best Male Video during the MTV Video Music Awards in 1998. AP/Kevork Djansezian

Whitney Houston, left, celebrates her win at the American Music Awards with her mother, Cissy, and brother, Gary, at the Shrine Auditorium, in Los Angeles in 1998. AP/Reed Saxon

Muhammad Ali is greeted by singer Whitney Houston as he arrives on stage at New York's Radio City Music Hall to accept a GQ 1998 "Men of the Year" Award. AP/Mitch Jacobson

Whitney Houston performs "Until You Come Back To Me" during the 26th annual American Music Awards at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles in 1999. AP/Kevork Djansezian

Whitney Houston performs before winning for Best Female R&B Vocal Performance at the 42nd annual Grammy Awards in 2000. REUTERS/Gary Hershorn/Files

Whitney Houston strikes a pose during a performance at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles in 2000. AP/Mark J.Terrill

Bobby Brown and Whitney Houston arrive at Vanity Fair's Oscar party at Morton's in Hollywood in 2001. AP/Laura Rauch

Whitney Houston, left, smiles at her husband, singer Bobby Brown, during a 2002 court hearing in Dekalb County State Court in Decatur, Ga. AP/Erik S. Lesser

Singer Whitney Houston performs songs from her new album "Just Whitney" for "Good Morning America" in New York in 2002. AP/Diane Bondareff

Whitney Houston, right, and her husband, Bobby Brown, perform during the "VH1 Divas" duets show in Las Vegas in 2003. AP/Joe Cavaretta

Whitney Houston performs the song "Try It On My Own" during the "VH1 Divas Duets" concert at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas in 2003. REUTERS/Ethan Miller/Files

Whitney Houston smiles as she receives a standing ovation while coming onto the stage in 2005. AP/Danny Moloshok

Whitney Houston arrives at the 17th Carousel of Hope Ball benefiting the Barbara Davis Center for Childhood Diabetes in Beverly Hills, Calif. in 2006. AP/Matt Sayles

Whitney Houston, right, and music producer Clive Davis arrive at the 17th Carousel of Hope Ball benefiting the Barbara Davis Center for Childhood Diabetes in Beverly Hills, Calif. in 2006. AP/Matt Sayles

Whitney Houston and Bobby Brown arrive at the Arista Records pre-Grammy party. AP/Jill Connelly

Whitney Houston arrives at the Clive Davis Pre-Grammy Party in Beverly Hills, Calif. in 2008. AP/Chris Pizzello

Whitney Houston gestures at the Clive Davis pre-Grammy party in Beverly Hills, California, in 2008. REUTERS/Mario Anzuoni/Files

Whitney Houston, right, sings with her daughter Bobbi Kristina Brown during a performance on 'Good Morning America' in Central Park in New York in 2009. AP/Evan Agostini

Whitney Houston at the BET Honors in the Warner Theatre in Washington in 2009. AP/Evan Agostini

Whitney Houston performs on 'Good Morning America' in New York's Central Park in 2009. AP/Evan Agostini

Whitney Houston receives the International Artist Award onstage at the 37th Annual American Music Awards in Los Angeles in 2009. AP/Matt Sayles

Whitney Houston receives the International Artist Award onstage at the 37th Annual American Music Awards in Los Angeles in 2009. AP/Matt Sayles

Whitney Houston performs at the 37th Annual American Music Awards in Los Angeles in 2009. AP/Matt Sayles

Whitney Houston bows after performing "I Didn't Know My Own Strength" at the 2009 American Music Awards in Los Angeles. REUTERS/Mario Anzuoni

Whitney Houston accepts an award at the Warner Theatre during the 2010 BET Hip Hop Honors in Washington in 2010. AP/Nick Wass

Pop Vocal Legend Whitney Houston Found Dead

By Billy Johnson, Jr. | Stop The Presses! 

Too many of us—myself included—are guilty of making insensitive jokes about the demise of Whitney Houston, her frail frame, loss of one of pop's purest voices, and battle with drugs. But none of us are laughing now. On Saturday, Houston's publicist confirmed to the Associated Press that the award-winning "I Will Always Love You" singer died. She was 48. The timing of her death, the eve of the Grammys, the biggest music event of the year, makes the horrible news even more tragic. According to CNN, Houston was pronounced dead at 3:55 p.m. PT at the Beverly Hilton Hotel.

The Beverly Hilton is the venue for the music industry's most prestigious pre-Grammy party hosted by veteran executive Clive Davis, who discovered Houston. In an industry flooded with novelty artists, who disappear after scoring one hit, Houston's longevity was unquestioned when she released her debut single, the ballad "You Give Good Love" in February 1985. The song's soothing opening ad-libs displayed her soulful roots while also celebrating her pop sensibilities.

Houston's sound was distinct, and clearly separated her from the funk-laden stylings of the era's other female R&B singers. Plus, she was a model who appeared in "Glamour" and "Cosmopolitan" magazines. Houston's sound made sense when considering her pedigree. She was the perfect melding of the styles of her mother, gospel singer Cissy Houston; cousin, 1960s pop singer Dionne Warwick; and godmother, queen of soul Aretha Franklin. Houston's self-titled debut album topped the charts and was certified diamond. Her career was impenetrable throughout the release of several follow up albums, 1987's "Whitney," 1990's "I'm Your Baby Tonight," and 1992's "The Bodyguard" soundtrack.

Houston's fans were concerned when she married R&B bad boy Bobby Brown in 1992, but they professed their happiness. By the late 1990s, Houston's drug problems began to become tabloid fodder. In a 2002 interview with ABC's Diane Sawyer, Houston admitted to her struggles, but maintained that she was doing fine. The public received its first real glimpse of Houston behind-the-scenes in 2004 when she appeared on Brown's reality series "Being Bobby Brown." The bad publicity move depicted Houston as profane, combative, and delusional, seemingly supporting the behavior of someone on drugs.

Among the saddest indications of Houston's fall was her 2009 comeback album, "I Look To You." While the album received positive reviews, her live performances signaled that the damage to her voice was beyond repair. Whitney Houston performed the greatest national anthem in sports history Concertgoers stormed out of her 2010 "Nothing But Love World Tour" angry, complaining that Houston was not fit to sing live, and they demanded that their ticket costs be refunded.

On stage, Houston made light of her vocal struggles, and even seemed to be confident when doing so. But the public scrutiny intensified, and was followed by additional stints in rehab. While the cause of death has not yet been revealed, one can only wonder whether it was drug-related. Anyone who remembers Houston's early work and the impact it had on music can only be saddened by her death. I extend condolences to her family and friends, especially her daughter, Bobbi Kristina.

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Windows 8 UI is dropping the ‘Start’ button

Microsoft has removed the “Start” menu button from its upcoming Windows 8 operating system, according to a consumer preview released earlier this week.

The Start button. which made its debut in the Windows 95 version of the OS, sits on the far left side of the “Live Bar” (see screenshot above). The Start button was one of the primary methods used for people to navigate to computer settings, applications, stored files, and more. The leaked screenshot, obtained by PCbeta, reveal that Microsoft has removed the button. This was probably done as part of Microsoft’s Metro-style UI effort to make the user interface more intuitive across multiple devices.

While the Start button may be gone, the button’s core functionality will be retained using a “hot corner”, according to a report from The Verge. The hot corner, which you activate by either touching or mousing over one of the screen’s four corners, will supposedly activate a start-style menu screen when the operating system is both desktop and Metro UI mode.

The Live Bar, which allows you to pin frequently used programs to, will continue being used in Windows 8, according to the report.

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Tom Brady Pirated The Super Bowl Last Year

Several sports streaming sites had their domain names seized by the Department of Justice and Homeland Security’s ICE unit this week.

The operation was planned a few days in advance of the Super Bowl to prevent “rogue” sports fans from watching the game through unofficial channels.

Tom Brady, one of the stars playing in today’s Super Bowl, is a good example of such a ruthless thief.

The NFL star admitted that he streamed the game illegally in 2011.

“Last year I was rehabbing my foot in Costa Rica, watching the game on an illegal Super Bowl website. And now I’m actually playing in the game. So, it’s pretty cool,” Brady said.

So is Brady a content thief? Should he be locked up?

If anything, the above shows that instead of complaining about these ‘rogue’ sites the NLF should focus on making the Super Bowl accesible worldwide.

Fans simply want to watch sports, so if they can’t find a legal option….

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Obama in Super Bowl interview: 'I deserve a second term'

By James Oliphant

President Obama said Sunday that he deserves a second term despite suggesting in a similar interview three years ago that if he didn’t turn around the economy in three years, his presidency was going to be a “one-term proposition.’ “We’ve made progress,” Obama told NBC’s Matt Lauer. “The key right now is to just make sure we don’t start turning in a new direction that could throw that progress off." That “new direction” to which the president obliquely referred likely involves voters choosing someone else such as Mitt Romney to run the country.

Obama has made a Super Bowl pregame interview an annual tradition. Last year, he sat down with Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly. Lauer, the co-host of NBC’s “Today” show also interviewed Obama three years ago, shortly after he was sworn into office. “I've got four years," the new president told Lauer then. "A year from now I think people are going to see that we're starting to make some progress, but there's going to be some pain out there. If I don't have this done in three years, than this is going to be a one-term proposition."

Romney and other Republicans have used Obama’s remarks to argue that the president hasn’t met his own criteria for reelection. Obama doesn’t agree. “I deserve a second term,” he said. "But we’re not done.” The timing of the sit-down was fortuitous, however, for the president. His administration received a surprisingly robust jobs report Friday, allowing Obama to claim significant progress on the economic front before a Super Bowl pregame audience.

Lauer also pressed Obama on Iran, with the president reiterating that he hopes to secure a diplomatic solution to the growing conflict over the country’s nuclear ambitions rather than a military confrontation, but he said, "No option is off the table."

Asked about Israel’s intentions to intervene, the president said he believed the Israeli government had made no decision on whether to launch a strike against Iran. "They, like us, believe Iran has to stand down on its nuclear weapons program," he said, sidestepping a question about whether the U.S. would be given advance word of such a raid.

Obama said his administration was not anticipating Iranian attacks on American soil.

"We don't see any evidence that they have those intentions or capabilities right now," he said.

Obama also demurred when asked to pick a winner between the New York Giants and the New England Patriots, after choosing the Steelers to win last year. Lauer reminded him that when the Patriots won in an election year, 2004, a Republican,George W. Bush, was reelected president. When the Pats lost in 2008, Obama was elected. But the president wouldn’t bite.

“You’re not gonna get me,” he told Lauer.

The rest of Lauer’s interview with Obama will be aired Monday.

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Preference for Fatty Foods May Have Genetic Roots

ScienceDaily (Feb. 3, 2012) — A preference for fatty foods has a genetic basis, according to researchers, who discovered that people with certain forms of the CD36 gene may like high-fat foods more than those who have other forms of this gene.

The results help explain why some people struggle when placed on a low-fat diet and may one day assist people in selecting diets that are easier for them to follow. The results also may help food developers create new low-fat foods that taste better. "Fat is universally palatable to humans," said Kathleen Keller, assistant professor of nutritional sciences, Penn State. "Yet we have demonstrated for the first time that people who have particular forms of the CD36 gene tend to like higher fat foods more and may be at greater risk for obesity compared to those who do not have this form of the gene. In animals, CD36 is a necessary gene for the ability to both detect and develop preferences for fat. Our study is one of the first to show this relationship in humans."

Keller and a team of scientists from Penn State, Columbia University, Cornell University and Rutgers University examined 317 African-American males and females because individuals in this ethnic group are highly vulnerable to obesity and thus are at greatest risk for obesity-related diseases. The team gave the participants Italian salad dressings prepared with varying amounts of canola oil, which is rich in long-chain fatty acids. The participants were then asked to rate their perceptions of the dressings' oiliness, fat content and creaminess on a scale anchored on the ends with "extremely low" and "extremely high."

The team also gave participants questionnaires aimed at understanding their food preferences. Participants rated how much they liked each food on a scale anchored with "dislike extremely" and "like extremely." Foods included on the questionnaire were associated with poor dietary intake and health outcomes, such as half-and-half, sour cream, mayonnaise, bacon, fried chicken, hot dogs, French fries, cheese, chips, cake, cookies and doughnuts. The researchers collected saliva samples from the participants to determine which forms of CD36 they had. From the saliva samples, they extracted DNA fragments and examined differences in the CD36 gene contained within the fragments.

They found that participants who had the "AA" form of the gene -- present in 21 percent of the population -- rated the salad dressings as creamier than individuals who had other forms of the gene. These individuals reported that the salad dressings were creamier regardless of how much fat was actually in them. The researchers also found that "AA" individuals liked salad dressings, half-and-half, olive oil and other cooking oils more than those who had other forms of the gene. The results are published in a recent issue of the journal Obesity. "It is possible that the CD36 gene is associated with fat intake and therefore obesity through a mechanism of oral fat perception and preference," said Keller. "In other words, our results suggest that people with certain forms of the CD36 gene may find fat creamier and more enjoyable than others. This may increase their risk for obesity and other health problems."

According to Keller, having certain forms of a gene that help in the perception and enjoyment of fats in foods might once have been an advantage. "Fats are essential in our diets," she said. "In our evolutionary history, people who were better able to recognize fats in foods were more likely to survive. Such forms of the gene, however, are less useful to us today as most of us no longer have to worry about getting enough fats in our diets."

In fact, she added, having such forms of a gene can be detrimental in today's world of fat-laden convenience foods. "Our results may help explain why some people have more difficulty adhering to a low-fat diet than other people and why these same people often do better when they adopt high-fat, low-carbohydrate diets such as the Atkins diet," said Keller. "We hope these results will one day help people select diets that are easier for them to follow. We also think the results could help food developers create better tasting low-fat foods that appeal to a broader range of the population."

In the future, the team plans to expand the population they examine to include children. "By the time we are adults it is very hard for us to change our eating behaviors," said Keller. "So if we can determine which children have forms of the CD36 gene, as well as other genes that are associated with greater liking of fats, we can help them develop healthier eating behaviors at a young age."

Keller also plans to incorporate novel techniques, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), to better understand why certain forms of the CD36 gene are linked to higher fat preferences.

"We plan to scan children while they are tasting high-fat foods and beverages so that we can see how their brains react to fats," she said. "By doing this, we may be able to develop foods that are perceived by the brain as palatable high-fat treats, even though in reality, they are low-fat and healthy."

Kathleen Keller was an assistant professor and research associate at Columbia University and the New York Nutrition Obesity Research Center when she conducted the research. Other authors on the paper include Columbia University graduate students Lisa Liang, Johannah Sakimura, Daniel May and Christopher van Belle; Cornell University undergraduate students Cameron Breen and Elissa Driggin; and Beverly Tepper, professor, Rutgers University. Also at Columbia were Patricia Lanzano, research coordinator; Liyong Deng, research technician; and Wendy Chung, assistant professor.

The National Institutes of Health funded this research.

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