Menu

Blog

Archive for the ‘food’ category: Page 198

Jun 13, 2019

Research decodes plant defense system, with an eye on improving farming and medicine

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, food, genetics

UMBC’s Hua Lu, professor of biological sciences, and colleagues have found new genetic links between a plant’s circadian rhythm (essentially, an internal clock) and its ability to fend off diseases and pests. The findings were 10 years in the making and published in Nature Communications this week. The results could eventually lead to plants that are more resistant to disease-causing pathogens and better treatment for human diseases.

“It’s quite cool,” Lu says, “because, in both and animals, people are beginning to study the crosstalk between the clock and the immunity system.”

Read more

Jun 11, 2019

The World Is a Mess. We Need Fully Automated Luxury Communism

Posted by in categories: bioengineering, biotech/medical, food, space

Asteroid mining. Gene editing. Synthetic meat. We could provide for the needs of everyone, in style. It just takes some imagination.

Read more

Jun 11, 2019

Beewolves use a gas to preserve food

Posted by in category: food

Scientists from the Universities of Regensburg and Mainz and the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology discovered that the eggs of the European beewolf produce nitric oxide. The gas prevents the larvae’s food from getting moldy in the warm and humid brood cells. The results were published in the journal eLife.

Food stored in warm and humid conditions gets moldy very quickly and thus becomes inedible or even toxic. To prevent this, we use refrigerators and freezers as well as various other methods of preservation. Animals do not have such technical appliances and therefore need to find other ways to preserve food. The European beewolf Philanthus triangulum, a solitary wasp species whose females hunt honey bees, has evolved a successful method of food preservation. A female takes up to five honey bees into its brood cells where they serve as food for a young beewolf. Female beewolves prefer to build their nests in sunlit and sandy places. The nests are deep and therefore the brood cells are warm and humid. Such conditions are favorable for the development of the beewolf larvae; however, they also foster the growth of mold fungi. As a matter of fact, bees stored under such conditions in the lab were overgrown by mold within one to three days.

Read more

Jun 10, 2019

Epigenetic ‘Memories’ That Could Pass On A Father’s Life Experiences Seen In Worm Sperm

Posted by in categories: food, genetics, health

We may like to think that what we do in our daily lives only affects ourselves and perhaps a few people around us, but the increasingly active field of scientific inquiry called epigenetics suggests that life experiences like what we eat and the environments we expose ourselves to can influence the health and development of our kids and the generations beyond them.

Studies of both humans and animals have suggested that a father’s experiences can be transmitted across generations, but the mechanism for this epigentic inheritance hasn’t quite been clear.

New research published Wednesday in Nature Communications details how Susan Strome’s lab at UC Santa Cruz observed the transmission of epigenetic markers in the sperm of the small roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans.

Continue reading “Epigenetic ‘Memories’ That Could Pass On A Father’s Life Experiences Seen In Worm Sperm” »

Jun 10, 2019

Skyscraper Farms Are About to Go Global

Posted by in categories: food, sustainability

Spread is producing pesticide-free vegetables.

Read more

Jun 9, 2019

Photonic Sentry

Posted by in categories: energy, food, government, military

THE PHOTONIC FENCE:


Laser Insect Monitoring and Eradication.

The Photonic Fence is poised to revolutionize response to and monitoring of harmful insect incursions in agriculture, hospitality, government, military and residential pest control markets.

Continue reading “Photonic Sentry” »

Jun 8, 2019

Researchers discover meat-eating plant in Ontario, Canada

Posted by in category: food

Call it the “Little Bog of Horrors.” In what is believed to be a first for North America, biologists at the University of Guelph have discovered that meat-eating pitcher plants in Ontario’s Algonquin Park wetlands consume not just bugs but also young salamanders.

Read more

Jun 7, 2019

What You Think is as Important as What You Eat

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, food, health

Recent research in the field of mind-body medicine shows there’s a lot more to health than what you eat, and most of it has to do with your mind.

Read more

Jun 6, 2019

Humans ingest at least 50,000 plastic particles a year

Posted by in categories: food, particle physics

Food is contaminated with plastic, which means it’s going directly into our bodies.

If you have resisted giving up bottled water for any reason, this should change your mind. A new study estimates that people who drink bottled water ingest 90,000 additional plastic microplastic particles annually, compared to those who drink tap water, which puts only an extra 4,000 particles into their bodies.

This finding is part of a study that has estimated the number of plastic particles that humans ingest every year. Conducted by researchers at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, it pulled together data from 26 previous studies that had measured plastic in salt, beer, sugar, fish, shellfish, water, and urban air. Pairing this data with the U.S. dietary guidelines, the scientists calculated how many particles people were likely to consume annually. Their discovery? 50,000 for adults, 40,000 for children. When inhalation is factored in, the estimate jumps to between 74,000 and 121,000 for adults.

Continue reading “Humans ingest at least 50,000 plastic particles a year” »

Jun 5, 2019

Drugs make headway against lung, breast, prostate cancers

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, food, sustainability

CHICAGO (AP) — Newer drugs are substantially improving the chances of survival for some people with hard-to-treat forms of lung, breast and prostate cancer, doctors reported at the world’s largest cancer conference.

Among those who have benefited is Roszell Mack Jr., who at age 87 is still able to work at a Lexington, Kentucky, horse farm, nine years after being diagnosed with lung cancer that had spread to his bones and lymph nodes.

“I go in every day, I’m the first one there,” said Mack, who helped test Merck’s Keytruda, a therapy that helps the immune system identify and fight cancer. “I’m feeling well and I have a good quality of life.”

Continue reading “Drugs make headway against lung, breast, prostate cancers” »