Weird Science's heart loves booze, hates mornings

Your heart is not a morning organ: Circadian rhythms, the changes your body undergoes based on time of day, influence a huge number of your body's normal processes. It looks like they might influence abnormal processes too. Researchers tracked myocardial infarctions based on time of day, and measured their severity based on standard tests of enzyme levels. It turns out the heart hates the morning, as MI size was largest in the hours from 6am to noon. It would be nice to see a bit of imaging, since a possible alternate explanation for this is that the levels of those enzymes are higher in the heart at that hour, so an identical MI would just release more of them.
Still, it's probably worth following up on this.
And the heart sure likes its booze: The evidence that alcohol consumption protects against heart disease has been building for a while, but there's also growing evidence that alcohol helps the heart even at levels where it's dangerous for the rest of the body. In a study of over 40,000 individuals, those who abstained from alcohol entirely had the highest risk of coronary heart disease. "A hazardous consumption of alcohol is associated with a decreased likelihood of CHD after controlling for sociodemographic, psychiatric, and addictive risk factors," the authors conclude. However, the press release notes that the standards for "hazardous" drinking would probably include a lot of European adults.
But it listens to evidence: In the decade from 1996 to 2007, the Swedish medical system greatly expanded its use of evidence-based treatments for myocardial infarctions. The result? The mortality rate in these patients showed a consistent downward trend. Evidence works—who knew?
Surgery beats healthy living: Bariatric surgery, in which a person's ability to ingest food is surgically limited, may seem like the easy way out of a weight problem—it can't be expected to provide all the same benefits that a healthy diet does, right? Actually, it may be even better. Patients who have bariatric surgery actually end up with better glucose control than their peers who lose weight via a diet, even when the amount of weight loss is controlled for. The authors found that those who underwent surgery had higher levels of amino acids in their blood afterwards, which can be a sign of altered metabolism, although the significance of that isn't entirely clear.
It's the education, stupid (except when it's not): People tend to marry those with similar levels of education, but it's hard to say what causes that. It could be attraction to those with similar education, it could just be that people meet their spouses at school, it could be that education puts them in similar jobs, and so on. Fortunately, a PhD student has identified the ideal population for answering this question: movie stars (the author appears to be an aspiring actor). For those who focus on the intellectualization of acting, there's bad news, as a movie star's success is not in any way correlated with education. However, there's good news for those who like to see marriage as a meeting of intellectual equals, since the stars married spouses with a similar level of education.
Chernobyl hit birds with reddish plumage especially hard: Weird but apparently true. A certain type of plumage coloring, pheomelanin (which is a reddish color) requires the use of a chemical called glutathione. Glutathione also happens to be essential for the neutralization of reactive oxygen molecules—and reactive oxygen species are part of how radiation does its damage. So, by dumping lots of glutathione into pretty looking feathers, birds leave themselves at greater risk of radiation damage.
Marked for munching, by munching: Alternately, the plants are out to get you, provided you are a caterpillar. Some plants have small organs that secrete defensive chemicals that can annoy or damage the organisms that eat them. But Manduca sexta caterpillars eat them with impunity. At least at the time of eating. Predatory ants, however, use the aroma generated by these chemicals to find the caterpillars and eat them.

http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2011/05/weird-sciences-heart-loves-booze-hates-mornings.ars