UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa — Penn State appears in the news hundreds of times every day. Monthly, the University’s Office of Strategic Communications features national and international news coverage of the work and expertise of Penn State’s faculty, students and staff.
November's highlights:
— An apple a day may keep the doctor away, but a beer or two is good for your heart. Shue Huang, doctoral candidate, Department of Nutritional Sciences, presented findings to the American Heart Association in November that showed if men drink one or two beers a day and women drink a beer a day, they had a slower decline of HDL, the good cholesterol, and therefore a lower risk of cardiovascular disease. Huang told TIME Magazine, “Almost without exception if you look at fatal and non-fatal heart disease, people who drink in moderation have substantially lower rates than people who abstain.” The research also ran in dozens of publications, from MSN to Maxim.
— If you don’t like the taste of beer, Penn State researchers also found there were health benefits to adding canola oil to your diet. Distinguished Professor of Nutrition Penny Kris-Etherton had research subjects drink two smoothies a day with either canola oil or various other oils, and those who drank the canola oil lost belly fat in just four weeks. “Reducing abdominal fat is a great first step to improving the other risk factors associated with metabolic syndrome, including a decrease in blood pressure, blood sugar and triglycerides, and an increase in HDL cholesterol," said Kris-Etherton. "This evidence suggests that using an everyday oil predominantly made up of monounsaturated fat, like canola oil, could help to have a significant impact on public health." The research was also widely reported in outlets like Redbook, the New York Daily News and Women’s Health.
-- This past month the Wall Street Journal asked the question, “Is it time to deregulate all electric utilities?” The Journal turned to two experts to argue the point, and Professor of Energy and Environmental Economics Andrew Kleit says that deregulation could make energy more affordable: “New technologies, innovation, green power and competitive markets all go together. To create a cleaner, more reliable and less expensive electricity grid, it is time to escape the dictates of government officials and free up competitive forces.”
— Penn State researchers are working together with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute to study coral as a means to understand climate change. The teams looked at fossilized coral that became extinct between one million and two million years ago. They believe a drastic climate change caused the die-off then and studying that event could help them prevent coral loss now. “The implications of these findings go beyond basic science,” said Monica Medina, research associate at STRI and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and associate professor at Penn State. “We can look forward to using similar approaches to predict demographic models to better manage the climate change-threatened Orbicella reefs of today.” Their research was published in the Smithsonian.
— Meanwhile, the BBC and the Washington Post published Penn State Research on a more well-known extinction event: the dinosaurs. Graduate student Michael Donovan published research findings that tracked how fast species recovered after the death of the dinosaurs about 66 million years ago. They were surprised to find that South America rebounded in just four million years compared to North America’s nine-million-year recovery time. “If you look at many modern forests in South America, there’s really highly diverse insect feeding,” Donovan said. “They might be part of the legacy of these insects that survived the extinction or diversified during this early recovery period.” He went on to say that these findings will help them better understand biodiversity today by studying how species recover from extinction.
These are just a few of the highlights. For more of Penn State’s experts’ appearances in the media, visit http://news.psu.edu/media-highlights.