Your brain’s “stop eating” signal may come from an unexpected source. Researchers found that astrocytes—once thought to just support neurons—actually play a key role in controlling appetite. After a meal, glucose triggers tanycytes, which send signals to astrocytes that then activate fullness neurons. This newly discovered pathway could lead to innovative treatments for obesity and eating disorders.
Plant-infecting bacteria have a surprisingly direct way of taking over crops. Instead of slowly breaking down defenses, many of them inject proteins straight into plant cells, effectively hijacking the system from the inside.
For decades, scientists have tried to understand one particularly important group of these proteins, known as AvrE/DspE. These molecules are used by pathogens that attack a wide range of crops, including rice, tomatoes, apples, and pears. They are responsible for diseases such as bacterial speck, brown spot, and the devastating fire blight that can wipe out entire orchards.
Extending life is only part of the goal in aging research. Scientists also want more people to reach old age in good health, with fewer differences in when individuals die. This ideal outcome is often described as “squaring the survival curve,” where most deaths are pushed into a narrow window late in life rather than spread out across many years.
To test how close current science comes to that goal, University of Sydney researchers revisited a large meta-analysis of studies in vertebrates. They focused on three widely studied interventions: dietary restriction, rapamycin, and metformin. While all are linked to longevity, they work in different ways.
Dietary restriction involves reducing calorie intake without causing malnutrition. It has been known for more than a century to extend lifespan in animals and is thought to act in part by dialing down a key cellular growth pathway called mTORC1, which helps regulate metabolism and aging. Because strict diets are difficult to maintain, scientists have searched for drugs that mimic these effects. Rapamycin directly blocks mTORC1 activity, while metformin, a common diabetes medication, influences the same pathway indirectly by altering how cells sense energy levels.
With a new electrochemical synthesis via an electrochemical nitrogen reduction reaction (NRR), achieving carbon-free ammonia production is closer to reality through work from Drs. Abdoulaye Djire and Perla Balbuena, chemical engineering professors at Texas A&M University, and graduate students David Kumar and Hao En Lai. A topic outlined in their recent paper published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society introduces NRR, which produces ammonia in a cleaner and simpler way by using renewable electricity.
The research branches off of the team’s previous work, where they looked further into enabling two-dimensional materials in renewable energy.
“The current process of making ammonia is energy intensive and emits a lot of carbon dioxide, so if you can make ammonia electrochemically, then you can avoid these two negative effects,” Djire said. “During the electrochemical NRR process, water provides the hydrogen atoms, which combine with nitrogen from the air to form ammonia, all powered by electricity.”
In recent years, membranes have found extensive applications, primarily in wastewater purification and food packaging. However, petroleum-based membranes can be detrimental to the environment. For this reason, extensive studies are being conducted to identify environmentally friendly substitutes for the materials used in membrane composition. Among these materials, polylactic acid (PLA) and poly(3-hydroxybutyrate) (PHB) are two bio-sourced and biodegradable polymers that can be derived from lignocellulosic waste. These polymers also possess suitable characteristics, such as thermal resistance and mechanical strength, which make them potential candidates for replacing conventional plastics.
Is your houseplant thirsty? Are crops getting enough water? Is a forest at high risk of wildfire? Leaf health can answer all these questions, and researchers at The University of Texas at Austin have developed new technology to measure hydration levels with greater accuracy and without hurting the plant. The researchers developed an electronic tattoo for leaves that uses the hyperflexible and sustainable material graphene to track hydration levels. It sticks on the leaves without harming them, a major improvement over current methods that work only with dead or dried-out leaves or provide indirect measurements.
“Being able to directly measure and monitor the live leaf over time, at the point of photosynthesis, gives us more information to understand the health of our plant ecosystems, whether that’s an individual plant or an entire forest,” said Jean Anne Incorvia, associate professor in the Cockrell School of Engineering’s Chandra Family Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and one of the leaders on the new research published recently in Nano Letters.
Researchers at the University of Seville’s Food Color and Quality Laboratory have studied the effects of different cooking methods used for tomatoes and carrots (in the oven, microwave or air fryer, among others) on the amount of carotenoids that are potentially available for absorption by the body following the digestion of these foods. According to the study, the bioavailability index varies significantly depending on how these foods are cooked. Carotenoids are compounds of great importance due to their positive health effects.
In the case of carrots, the bioavailability of total carotenoids increased ninefold when cooked in the oven. For tomatoes, the highest bioavailability values were obtained by cooking them in either an air fryer (190 °C for 10 minutes) or a conventional oven (180 °C for 20 minutes). There were no significant differences between the two methods. Although the increase in bioavailability was more modest (a 1.5-fold increase), it was also significant compared to raw tomatoes.
The researchers also highlight that the increases in the bioavailability of the vitamin A precursor carotenoids in tomatoes (α-carotene and β-carotene) ranged from 26 to 38 times and 46 to 71 times, respectively, compared with those in raw carrots. Cooking is, therefore, a sometimes-overlooked strategy for combating vitamin A deficiency, one of the world’s most serious nutritional problems.
Amebiasis is a parasitic disease caused by the microscopic protozoan Entamoeba histolytica. Infection occurs through the ingestion of cysts from contaminated water or food. Worldwide, approximately 50 million symptomatic cases are estimated annually, mainly in tropical and subtropical regions.
Fumagillin, a fungal natural product, has been studied for decades as a potential antiparasitic drug, but its more potent relative, ovalicin, was never developed. Now, a study published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society reveals why: although ovalicin is highly active against amebiasis, liver enzymes rapidly break it down in the body. Researchers used a chem-bio hybrid approach to turn that insight into metabolically stable drug candidates that worked in animal models of amebiasis, including liver infection with abscess formation.
The research team, led by scientists from the Graduate School of Bioagricultural Sciences at Nagoya University, identified the liver cytochrome P450 enzymes responsible for ovalicin breakdown, with CYP 2B1 and CYP 2C6 emerging as the main drivers. Blocking these enzymes with a chemical inhibitor significantly prolonged ovalicin survival, providing strong evidence that rapid liver metabolism limits its effectiveness.