It isn’t just the beer that     1     to beer bellies. It could also be the extra calories, fat and unhealthy eating choices that may come with       2     drinking.

A recent study found that men consume an     3     433 calories (equivalent to a McDonald’s double cheeseburger) on days they drink a moderate amount of alcohol. About 61% of the caloric increase comes from the alcohol itself. Men also report eating higher amounts of saturated fats and meat, and less fruit and milk, on those days than on days when they aren’t drinking, the study showed. Women fared a bit better, taking in an extra 300 calories on moderate-drinking days, from the alcohol and eating fattier foods. But women’s increase in calories from additional eating wasn’t statistically significant, the study said. ‘Men and women ate less healthily on days they drank alcohol,’ said Rosalind Breslow, an epidemiologist with the federal National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism and lead author of the study. ‘Poorer food choices on drinking days have public-health     4    , she said. The findings dovetail with controlled lab studies in which     5     generally eat more food after consuming alcohol. Researchers suggest that alcohol may enhance ‘the short-term rewarding effects’ of consuming food, according to a 2010 report in the journal Physiology & Behavior that reviewed previous studies on alcohol, appetite and obesity. But other studies have pointed to a different trend. Moderate drinkers gain less weight over time than either heavy drinkers or people who abstain from alcohol, particularly women, this research has shown. Moderate drinking is     6     having about two drinks a day for men and one for women. ‘People who gain the least weight are moderate drinkers, regardless of [alcoholic] beverage choice,’ said Eric Rimm, an associate professor of epidemiology and nutrition at Harvard Medical School and chairman of the 2010 review of alcohol in the federal dietary     7    . The weight-gain difference is modest, and ‘starting to drink is not a weight-loss diet,’ he said. The various research efforts form part of a long-standing     8     about how alcohol affects people’s appetites, weight and overall health. Researchers say there aren’t simple answers, and suggest that individuals’ metabolism, drinking patterns and gender may play a role. Alcohol is ‘a real wild card when it comes to weight management,’ said Karen Miller-Kovach, chief scientific officer of Weight Watchers International. At seven calories per gram, alcohol is closer to fat than to carbohydrate or protein in caloric content, she said. Alcohol tends to lower restraint, she notes, causing a person to become more     9     with what they’re eating. Research bolstering the role of moderate drinking in helping to control weight gain was published in 2004 in the journal Obesity Research. That study followed nearly 50,000 women over eight years. An earlier study, published in the American Journal of Epidemiology in 1994, followed more than 7,000 people for 10 years and found that moderate drinkers gained less weight than nondrinkers. Studies comparing changes in waist circumference among different groups have yielded similar results. Dr. Rimm said it isn’t clear why moderate drinking may be     10     against typical weight gain, but it could have to do with metabolic adjustments. After people drink alcohol, their heart rate increases so they burn more calories in the following hour.

‘It’s a modest amount,’ he said. ‘But if you take an individual that eats 100 calories instead of a glass of wine, the person drinking the glass of wine will have a slight increase in the amount of calories burned.’

A novel way of making computer memories, using bacteria FOR half a century, the       1     of progress in the computer industry has been to do more with less. Moore’s law famously observes that the number of transistors which can be crammed into a given space     2     every 18 months. The amount of data that can be stored has grown at a similar rate. Yet as     3     get smaller, making them gets harder and more expensive. On May 10th Paul Otellini, the boss of Intel, a big American chipmaker, put the price of a new chip factory at around $10 billion. Happily for those that lack Intel’s resources, there may be a cheaper option—namely to mimic Mother Nature, who has been building tiny     4    , in the form of living cells and their components, for billions of years, and has thus got rather good at it. A paper published in Small, a nanotechnology journal, sets out the latest example of the       5    . In it, a group of researchers led by Sarah Staniland at the University of Leeds, in Britain, describe using naturally occurring proteins to make arrays of tiny magnets, similar to those employed to store information in disk drives. The researchers took their     6     from Magnetospirillum magneticum, a bacterium that is sensitive to the Earth’s magnetic field thanks to the presence within its cells of flecks of magnetite, a form of iron oxide. Previous work has isolated the protein that makes these miniature compasses. Using genetic engineering, the team managed to persuade a different bacterium—Escherichia coli, a ubiquitous critter that is a workhorse of biotechnology—to     7     this protein in bulk. Next, they imprinted a block of gold with a microscopic chessboard pattern of chemicals. Half the squares contained anchoring points for the protein. The other half were left untreated as controls. They then dipped the gold into a solution containing the protein, allowing it to bind to the treated squares, and dunked the whole lot into a heated     8     of iron salts. After that, they examined the results with an electron microscope. Sure enough, groups of magnetite grains had materialised on the treated squares, shepherded into place by the bacterial protein. In principle, each of these magnetic domains could store the one or the zero of a bit of information, according to how it was polarised. Getting from there to a real computer memory would be a long road. For a start, the grains of magnetite are not strong enough magnets to make a useful memory, and the size of each domain is huge by modern computing     9    . But Dr Staniland reckons that, with enough tweaking, both of these objections could be dealt with. The     10     of this approach is that it might not be so capital-intensive as building a fab. Growing things does not need as much kit as making them. If the tweaking could be done, therefore, the result might give the word biotechnology a whole new meaning.