Lifeboat Foundation

Most clams are happy to make their burrow in a nice, soft bed of sand or mud. Not this mollusc. A recently uncovered relative of the shipworm puts the hard into hardcore, chewing holes into rocks and excreting the debris as sand.

Lithoredo abatanica joins a short list of freshwater animals capable of literally weathering the landscape and creating real estate for other species to hide in, while potentially affecting the course of their river ecosystem.

Continue reading “These Bizarre Wormlike Creatures Eat Rock, Poop Sand, And May Even Redesign Rivers” »

Sugar poses one of the most pressing health problems in the modern world – not least because it’s just so delicious. Rather than quitting sweets cold turkey, low-calorie alternatives to sucrose could make tasty treats that are at least less bad for us. And now, researchers from Tufts University have developed a more efficient method for producing one such sweetener, using farms of bacteria.

The sugar in question is called tagatose, which the FDA says is “generally regarded as safe.” It’s 92 percent as sweet as sucrose – regular old table sugar – but because the human digestive system doesn’t metabolize as much of it, it only has 38 percent of the calories. That, in turn, means tagatose has a much smaller effect on blood glucose and insulin, making it safe for diabetics. And to cap it off, tests show that it doesn’t contribute to cavities or tooth decay.

But, of course, there’s a catch – tagatose is a little complicated to produce. Normally, it’s done by hydrolyzing lactose to make galactose, which is then isomerized into tagatose, which then needs to be purified and crystallized into a solid, usable form. Yields from this process are low, at less than 30 percent.

New research highlights the importance of a diet rich in fruit, vegetables, and whole grains for preventing cognitive decline later in life.

“This inverse association was robust, consistently seen across current, past, and never smokers, as well as men, women, and individuals with different backgrounds,” she adds.

Shu says the health benefits may be rooted in their prebiotic (nondigestible food that promotes growth of beneficial microorganisms in the intestines) and probiotic properties. The properties may independently or synergistically modulate gut microbiota in a beneficial way.

The research appears in JAMA Oncology. Additional coauthors are from Seoul National University and Vanderbilt.

While Intermittent fasting may sound like another dieting craze, the practice of routinely not eating and drinking for short periods of time has shown again to lead to potentially better health outcomes.

In a new study by researchers at the Intermountain Healthcare Heart Institute in Salt Lake City, researchers have found that cardiac catheterization patients who practiced regular intermittent fasting lived longer than patients who don’t. In addition, the study found that patients who practice intermittent fasting are less likely to be diagnosed with heart failure.

“It’s another example of how we’re finding that regularly fasting can lead to better health outcomes and longer lives,” said Benjamin Horne, Ph.D., principal investigator of the study and director of cardiovascular and genetic epidemiology at the Intermountain Healthcare Heart Institute.

Synthetic protocells can be made to move toward and away from chemical signals, an important step for the development of new drug-delivery systems that could target specific locations in the body. By coating the surface of the protocells with enzymes—proteins that catalyze chemical reactions—a team of researchers at Penn State was able to control the direction of the protocell’s movement in a chemical gradient in a microfluidic device. A paper describing the research appears November 18, 2019 in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

“The futuristic vision is to have drugs delivered by tiny ‘bots’ that can transport the drug to the specific location where it is needed,” said Ayusman Sen, the Verne M. Willaman Professor of Chemistry at Penn State and the leader of the research team. “Currently, if you take an antibiotic for an infection in your leg, it diffuses throughout your entire body. So, you have to take a higher dose in order to get enough of the antibiotic to your leg where it is needed. If we can control the directional movement of a drug-delivery system, we not only reduce the amount of the drug required but also can increase its speed of delivery.”

One way to address controlling direction is for the drug-delivery system to recognize and move towards specific chemical signals emanating from the infection site, a phenomenon called chemotaxis. Many organisms use chemotaxis as a survival strategy, to find food or escape toxins. Previous work had shown that enzymes undergo chemotactic movement because the reactions they catalyze produce energy that can be harnessed. However, most of that work had focused on positive chemotaxis, movement towards a chemical. Until now, little work had been done looking at negative chemotaxis. “Tunable” chemotaxis—the ability to control movement direction, towards and away from different chemical signals—had never been demonstrated.

View full lesson: http://ed.ted.com/lessons/can-we-eat-to-starve-cancer-william-li

William Li presents a new way to think about treating cancer and other diseases: anti-angiogenesis, preventing the growth of blood vessels that feed a tumor. The crucial first (and best) step: Eating cancer-fighting foods that cut off the supply lines and beat cancer at its own game.

Talk by WIlliam Li.

Maybe interesting for this group too.

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Continue reading “The danger of AI is weirder than you think | Janelle Shane” »

On November 2, 12 bottles of Bordeaux wine were launched to the International Space Station (ISS). These bottles are not intended for holiday celebrations by the crew, however (consumption of alcohol is officially prohibited in space.) Instead. the bottles are part of an experiment conducted by the University of Bordeaux’s Institute of Vine and Wine Science (ISVV) and a company called Space Cargo Unlimited to investigate if the aging process of wine is affected by microgravity conditions.

As novel as this experiment sounds, the Bordeaux team is not the first group to examine how alcoholic beverages age in space. That distinction is held by two whisky producers, one in Scotland, the other in Japan. In 2011, Scotch whisky producer Ardbeg partnered with Nanoracks to launch the first whisky aging experiment in orbit. When the samples were returned to Earth in 2014, a clear difference was readily apparent from the control samples that remained on Earth—and not for the better. According to an Ardbeg white paper, the aftertaste was “pungent, intense and long, with hints of wood, antiseptic lozenges and rubbery smoke.” However, Ardbeg was not certain if this was a result of the aging process or other extreme factors that the samples encountered.

In 2015, Japanese whisky producer Suntory also launched whisky samples to be aged on the ISS. One batch of these samples returned to Earth for analysis after a year in orbit, but another batch still remains on the station. Thus far, Suntory has not released any data from these experiments.