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Category: food – Page 30

How tiny droplets can deform ice: Findings show potential for cryopreservation and food engineering

When water freezes slowly, the location where water turns into ice—known as the freezing front—forms a straight line. Researchers from the University of Twente showed how droplets that interact with such a freezing front cause surprising deformations of this front. These new insights were published in Physical Review Letters and show potential for applications in cryopreservation and food engineering techniques.

When water freezes, it is often thought of as a predictable, solid block forming layer by layer. But what happens if the progressing freezing front encounters or ? Researchers from the University of Twente have explored this question, discovering that droplets can cause surprising deformations in the way ice forms.

New gene drive reverses insecticide resistance in pests… then disappears

Insecticides have been used for centuries to counteract widespread pest damage to valuable food crops. Eventually, over time, beetles, moths, flies and other insects develop genetic mutations that render the insecticide chemicals ineffective.

Escalating resistance by these mutants forces farmers and vector control specialists to ramp up use of poisonous compounds at increasing frequencies and concentrations, posing risks to human health and damage to the environment since most insecticides kill both ecologically important insects as well as pests.

To help counter these problems, researchers recently developed powerful technologies that genetically remove insecticide-resistant variant genes and replace them with genes that are susceptible to pesticides. These gene-drive technologies, based on CRISPR gene editing, have the potential to protect valuable crops and vastly reduce the amount of chemical pesticides required to eliminate pests.

Fasting-Style Diet Seems to Result in Dynamic Changes in Human Brain

Scientists looking to tackle our ongoing obesity crisis have made an important discovery: Intermittent calorie restriction leads to significant changes both in the gut and the brain, which may open up new options for maintaining a healthy weight.

Researchers from China studied 25 volunteers classed as obese over a period of 62 days, during which they took part in an intermittent energy restriction (IER) program – a regime that involves careful control of calorie intake and relative fasting on some days.

Not only did the participants in the study lose weight – 7.6 kilograms (16.8 pounds) or 7.8 percent of their body weight on average – there was also evidence of shifts in the activity of obesity-related regions of the brain, and in the make-up of gut bacteria.

When Memories Clash: How the Brain Chooses Between Love and Hunger

A study found that male worms’ brains can activate conflicting memories, but behavior is driven by the more beneficial one. This research sheds light on how brains prioritize information, offering insights into conditions like PTSD.

A new study by UCL researchers reveals that two conflicting memories can simultaneously be activated in a worm’s brain, even though only one memory directly influences the animal’s behavior.

In the paper published in Current Biology, the researchers showed how an animal’s sex drive can at times outweigh the need to eat when determining behavior, as they investigated what happens when a worm smells an odor that has been linked to both good experiences (mating) and bad experiences (starvation).

How bioelectricity could regrow limbs and organs, with Michael Levin (Ep. 112)

Basically bio electricity once controlled could offer eternal life for humans because we could simply use the electricity to have longer if not indefinite lifespans that don’t require as much food for energy.

In the near future, birth defects, traumatic injuries, limb loss and perhaps even cancer could be cured through bioelectricity—electrical signals that communicate to our cells how to rebuild themselves. This innovative idea has been tested on flatworms and frogs by biologist Michael Levin, whose research investigates how bioelectricity provides the blueprint for how our bodies are built—and how it could be the future of regenerative medicine.

Levin is a professor of biology at Tufts University and director of the Tufts Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology.

Human evolution in an AI world: Predicting changes in brain size, attention and social behaviors

As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes more common and sophisticated, its effects on human lives and societies raises new questions. A new paper published in The Quarterly Review of Biology posits how these new technologies might affect human evolution.

In “How Might Artificial Intelligence Influence Human Evolution?” author Rob Brooks considers the inevitable but incremental evolutionary consequences of AI’s everyday use and human-AI interactions—without “dramatic but perhaps unlikely events, including possibilities of human annihilation, assimilation, or enslavement.”

In the paper, Brooks considers (“often with considerable speculation”) some possible forms of human-AI interaction and the evolutionary implications of such interactions via natural selection, including forms of selection that resemble the inadvertent and deliberate selection that occurred when humans domesticated crops, livestock, and .

Cognitive neuroscientists discover new blueprint for making and breaking habits

Cognitive neuroscientists at Trinity College Dublin have published new research describing a brand new approach to making habit change achievable and lasting.

This innovative framework has the potential to significantly improve approaches to personal development, as well as the clinical treatment of compulsive disorders (for example , addiction, and eating disorders).

The research was led by Dr. Eike Buabang, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the lab of Professor Claire Gillan in the School of Psychology, has been published as a paper titled “Leveraging for making and breaking real-world habits” in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

As Elon Musk pushes driverless cars, one company is already testing autonomous helicopters to spray crops and fight fires

The heart-stopping flights led to his research of unmanned aircraft systems while getting his doctorate degree in aerospace engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Then, he formed Rotor Technologies in 2021 to develop unmanned helicopters.

Rotor has built two autonomous Sprayhawks and aims to have as many as 20 ready for market next year. The company also is developing helicopters that would carry cargo in disaster zones and to offshore oil rigs. The helicopter could also be used https://apnews.com/article/wildfire-season-2024-firefighters…2e4c66fd7” rel=“noopener”>to fight wildfires.

For now, Rotor is focused on the agriculture sector, which has embraced automation with drones but sees unmanned helicopters as a better way to spray larger areas with pesticides and fertilizers.

Q&A: Holobiont biology, a new concept for exploring how microbiome shapes evolution of visible life

Microorganisms—bacteria, viruses and other tiny life forms—may drive biological variation in visible life as much, if not more, than genetic mutations, creating new lineages and even new species of animals and plants, according to Seth Bordenstein, director of Penn State’s One Health Microbiome Center, professor of biology and entomology, and the Dorothy Foehr Huck and J. Lloyd Huck Endowed Chair in Microbiome Sciences.

Bordenstein and 21 other scientists from around the world published a paper in Science, summarizing research that they said drives a deeper understanding of biological variation by uniting life’s seen and unseen realms.

The authors explained that this newly described concept—holobiont —underpins a multidisciplinary and holistic understanding of how life’s forms and functions, from human disease to , depend upon the relationships between microorganisms and their hosts. Penn State News spoke with Bordenstein about the paper and the emerging field of holobiont biology.