Lifeboat Foundation

Marine microorganisms in the Southern Ocean may find themselves in a deadly vise grip by century’s end as ocean acidification creates a shallower horizon for life, new University of Colorado Boulder research finds.

The modeling study, published today in the journal Nature Climate Change, forecasts that at current carbon dioxide emission rates, the depth at which some shelled organisms can survive will shrink from an average of 1,000 meters today to just 83 meters by the year 2100, a drastic reduction in viable habitat.

The steep drop, which could happen suddenly over a period as short as one year in localized areas, could impact marine food webs significantly and lead to cascading changes across ocean ecosystems, including disruptions of vital global fisheries.

Continue reading “Fatal horizon, driven by acidification, closes in on marine organisms in Southern Ocean” »

NEW YORK (AP) — Somewhere in the Midwest, a restaurant is frying foods with oil made from gene-edited soybeans. That’s according to the company making the oil, which says it’s the first commercial use of a gene-edited food in the U.S.

Calyxt said it can’t reveal its first customer for competitive reasons, but CEO Jim Blome said the oil is “in use and being eaten.”

The Minnesota-based company is hoping the announcement will encourage the food industry’s interest in the oil, which it says has no trans fats and a longer shelf life than other soybean oils. Whether demand builds remains to be seen, but the oil’s transition into the food supply signals gene editing’s potential to alter foods without the controversy of conventional GMOs, or genetically modified organisms.

Syngenta’s new method could transform difficult-to-edit plants.

Opinion

Forget government-issued food pyramids. Let an algorithm tell you how to eat.

Credit Credit Erik Blad

Continue reading “The A.I. Diet” »

Termitomyces titanicus’s cap can measure three feet across.

Late last year, archaeologists in China found some very interesting items in an ancient tomb dating back as far as 202 BC, including a bronze vessel that somehow still held liquid. The liquid, which at the time was thought to be some type of wine, has since undergone closer examination that reveals its true purpose.

China’s Xinhua news agency is now reporting that the beverage was actually an “elixir of immortality” that matches descriptions from ancient documents. The substance has been tested and, if scientists are right about it, there’s probably little chance it would do anything to extend someone’s life, and may even usher death in even quicker.

The biggest source of variability in the microbiome is the person-to-person variability. It’s a problem if you’re looking for causality. That’s a red flag word for us – causality – meaning something about the bacterial community causes some disease. You actually don’t know whether it’s the bacteria or whether the bacteria are a sign of something that happened before. It’s very much individualized, so everybody’s history matters.

We are all teeming with bacteria that help us digest food or fight disease, but two people might play host to a very different array of bacteria due to diet, where they live, hobbies or even medical histories.

As a result, scientists have struggled to understand which bacteria are linked to disease and which protect against it. Studies comparing people’s bacterial companions – known as the microbiome – to explore what that variation means might disagree because they analyzed different groups or didn’t sample enough people.

Continue reading “Linking bacterial populations with health” »

Infections with BMMF („Bovine Milk and Meat Factors ) in humans provide a clue, why the consumption of cow milk and meat correlates with colon and breast cancers.

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Division episomal‐persistent DNA in cancer‐ and chronic diseases, deutsches krebsforschungszentrum, heidelberg, germany.

Continue reading “Specific nutritional infections early in life as risk factors for human colon and breast cancers several decades later” »

When was the last time you thought about your breathing? Take a breath right now and think about it. You breathe because you need oxygen, a gas which makes up 21 percent of the Earth’s atmosphere. All that oxygen has to come from somewhere. You might already know that it comes from photosynthetic organisms like plants. But did you know that most of the oxygen you breathe comes from organisms in the ocean?

That’s right—more than half of the oxygen you breathe comes from marine photosynthesizers, like phytoplankton and seaweed. Both use carbon dioxide, water and energy from the sun to make food for themselves, releasing oxygen in the process. In other words, they photosynthesize. And they do it in the ocean.

Continue reading “With Every Breath You Take, Thank the Ocean” »