1          Every day, we are bombarded with scientific and medical claims that are not based on good evidence: in advertising material, product websites, advice columns, campaign statements, celebrity health fads and policy announcements. Even where there is some regulation, in advertising or trading standards, such claims keep reappearing.  “Sense About Science”, along with over 5,000 scientists, scientific bodies, research publishers and policy makers, don’t want people to continue getting away with making claims without supporting evidence. They want things to change, so that anyone making a claim expects to be challenged, and is made to stand by their words. The only way to do this is to get more people asking for evidence.

2          We hear about bacteria for lots of different reasons, and it’s unusual for many of them to be ‘good’. Indeed, the last time most people probably remember seeing bacteria make headlines was the contamination of salad vegetables with a deadly Escherichia coli strain relatively recently. However, as any microbiologist will tell you, bacteria are an extremely diverse group of organisms, with equally diverse properties which make some of them indispensable for many aspects of our lives; including food production, digestion and water treatment. For example, Geobacter sulfurreducens is just one of many bacterial superheroes. In this case, its superpower is ‘bioremediation’; the use of its metabolism to remove pollutants from the environment.

3          While some birds only migrate locally in response to extreme weather conditions, others undertake seasonal long-distance migration between land masses and sometimes hemispheres.  The most impressive avian migrator is, by far, the Arctic tern (Sterna paradisaea). Weighing an average of 100g, with a average wingspan of 75 – 85 cm, the birds sometimes nest just once every three years, as so much of their 30 year life span is spent in flight. The bird has the longest seasonal movement than any other animal, and the birds move so consistently with the seasons that they only ever see long days; they experience more sunlight per year than any other creature.

4          There’s actually 47 known species of ‘leafcutter ants’, endemic to South and Central America, which live in colonies of up to ten million individuals organised into a complex social structure. The leaf cutting ants don’t actually eat the leaves they harvest – this is part of an elaborate process of cultivating a mutualistic fungus, which in turn provides the ants with the nutrients on which they feed. Efficiency of fungal cultivation is dependent on roles played by distinct ‘castes’ of ants, based mostly on size. Large workers forage for leaves and defend the colony, while smaller workers farm the fungus and tend to the nest. There’s even a designated waste removal team.

5          Obesity is a growing problem worldwide, but proper protein consumption can help keep it at bay. Researchers have found that, when subjects were fed a 10% protein diet, they consumed 12% more energy over four days than they did on a 15% protein diet. Moreover, 70% of the increased energy intake on the lower protein diet was attributed to snacking. When the protein content was further increased to 25%, however, the researchers observed no change in behaviour relative to the 15% protein diet. It had previously been suggested that protein content plays an important role in determining overall energy intake, and thus affects obesity, but until this study, experimental verification had been lacking.

6          The anti-obesity properties of resveratrol have been demonstrated for the first time in a primate. Researchers recently studied the compound, generated naturally by plants to ward off pathogens, which has received much interest as a dietary supplement for its supposed life-extending effects. A team of researchers from Paris have decided to investigate the effect of dietary supplementation with resveratrol on the weight, metabolism and energy intake of six mouse lemurs. The physiological benefits of resveratrol are currently under intensive investigation, with recent work suggesting that it could be a good candidate for the development of obesity therapies. The team found that lemurs eating a diet supplemented with the compound decreased their energy intake by 13% and increased their resting metabolic rate by 29%.