I'm a few days late on this, but as I'm transitioning to a new position I haven't been able to get much writing in this week. July was full of exciting news in science and I'll share a few tidbits today from three articles.
In the first article, scientists used smartphone tracking data to visualize daily physical activity from over 700,000 people across 111 countries. The researchers reported that there is wide variability in the amount of physical activity, in this case daily walking, when comparing different countries, within single countries, and particularly in different cities within countries. People living in China and Japan walk the most (~6,000 steps/day), the United States was middle of the pack at ~4,800 steps, and Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Venezuela rounded out the bottom at ~3,5000 steps/day. Unsurprisingly, obesity was highly correlated with those countries that on average had fewer daily steps. The authors also found that cities that are less 'walkable' are more likely to exhibit inequality in daily physical activity.
The second paper I found to be quite provocative. Researchers were interested to see if risk for cardiovascular disease decreased in the United States when comparing risk in the years 1999-2011 with 2011-2014. This report looked at four risk factors for cardiovascular disease: smoking, total cholesterol, systolic blood pressure, and diabetes. The analysis stratified the research subjects by poverty status and found something quite remarkable: if you lived at high income during this time frame, your risk for cardiovascular disease decreased for all four risk factors when comparing 1999-2011 to 2011-2014. However, if you lived in poverty in those same years, there was no change in your risk for cardiovascular disease.
So what does this mean? The authors of the study report that this is indicative that efforts to combat and control cardiovascular disease risk are influenced by income gaps between the rich and the poor. This is a big deal, as it means that preventative efforts may be failing some individuals more than others (this isn't really surprising, but these are hard numbers to back that claim up).
Now, the authors do point out that this does not highlight a definitive causal link between income and cardiovascular disease. For example, being poor does not necessarily cause you to develop cardiovascular problems; nor does being rich prevent them. However, it does suggest that wealth plays a role in disease risk and that additional factors should be studied in this context to understand the influence of this. Is it stress factors associated with poverty? Lack of education or opportunity? Is there a geographical component?
A lot needs to be looked at here as the results pose some very important questions about wealth in our country. Certainly, more work needs to be done to understand this complex interaction.
And finally, something that is just really damn cool. Geneticists in George Church's lab at Harvard used the CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing tool to engineer an information-storage system into the genomes of bacteria. They took a video of a horse running, pixelated the video, converted that into binary code, and used CRISPR to insert genetically-engineered DNA sequences representing that binary code into the DNA of bacteria. Then they grew the bacteria, sequenced the genome, and reversed the process to show that the video and data storage was reliable, robust, and reproducible. The result is quite amazing.
Considering how stable DNA can be, storing information in living organisms could pave the way for developing new technologies for data transfer and long-term archiving. Aspects of this platform will need to be ironed out to ensure no data loss, but it's a great start.
That's it for now. Enjoy summer!
