Small bits

Confusing calories
How much food does that exercise earn you? You might be surprised

In a small new study, volunteers who were shown chocolate and sports drinks after an exercise workout could not correctly guess how much would be an equal ‘reward’ for the calories they had just burned. Surprisingly, they chose amounts that were much too small – either underestimating how many calories they had burned or overestimating how many were in the foods.

Effect of poverty
The effect of poverty on children’s brains may explain why poor youngsters tend to score lower on standardised tests compared with wealthier students, a new study suggests. “What was already discovered is there is an achievement gap between poor children and middle-class children,” the study’s senior author Seth Pollak said. “Even when they move to better neighbourhoods, children growing up in poor families tend to do less well in school than their less poor counterparts.”

Coffee’s benefits
Coffee drinkers in a long-term study were about half as likely to develop type 2 diabetes as those who didn’t drink coffee, and researchers think an inflammation-lowering effect of the beverage might be the key. “Extensive research has revealed that coffee drinking exhibits both beneficial and aggravating health effects,” said Demosthenes B Panagiotakos of the department of Nutrition and Dietetics at Harokopio University in Athens, Greece.

Cloning success
Researchers have used a controversial cloning technique to make new, healthy, perfectly-matched stem cells from the skin of patients with mitochondrial diseases in a first step towards treatment for these incurable, life-threatening conditions. A study on the technique, published in the journal Nature, showcases the latest advance in the use of somatic-cell nuclear transfer to make patient-specific stem cells that could be used to treat genetic diseases.