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Category: food – Page 3

Swarm intelligence directs longhorn crazy ants to clear the road ahead for sisters carrying bulky food

Among the tens of thousands of ant species, incredible “intelligent” behaviors like crop culture, animal husbandry, surgery, “piracy,” social distancing, and complex architecture have evolved.

Yet at first sight, the brain of an ant seems hardly capable of such feats: it is about the size of a poppy seed, with only 0.25m to 1m neurons, compared to 86bn for humans.

Now, researchers from Israel and Switzerland have shown how “swarm intelligence” resembling advance planning can nevertheless emerge from the concerted operation of many of these tiny brains. The results are published in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience.

Biased agonism of GLP-1R and GIPR enhances glucose lowering and weight loss, with dual GLP-1R/GIPR biased agonism yielding greater efficacy

Biased agonism to treat diabetes and obesity.

Agonists of glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor (GLP-1R) and glucose-dependent insulinotropic polypeptide receptor (GIPR) have been used for diabetes and obesity treatment. Mechanism of action and signaling of these receptors are of paramount importance.

The researchers investigate the impact of biased cyclic AMP (cAMP) signaling with a dual GLP-1R/ GIPR agonist.

Biased GLP-1R and GIPR agonism with GLP-1R/GIPR agonist, CT-859 leads to better and prolonged glucose lowering, greater food intake reduction, and weight loss than unbiased agonism.

Biased GIPR agonism synergizes with GLP-1R on food intake suppression and weight loss. https://www.cell.com/cell-reports-medicine/fulltext/S2666&#4…0229-0 https://sciencemission.com/Biased-agonism-of-GLP-1R-and-GIPR

Rodriguez et al. investigate the impact of biased signaling with a dual GLP-1R/GIPR agonist. Biased GLP-1R and GIPR agonism leads to better and prolonged glucose lowering, greater food intake reduction, and weight loss than unbiased agonism. Biased GIPR agonism synergizes with GLP-1R on food intake suppression and weight loss.

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New technologies help wood-burning stoves burn more efficiently, produce less smoke

Oregon State University researchers are gaining a more detailed understanding of emissions from wood-burning stoves and developing technologies that allow stoves to operate much more cleanly and safely, potentially limiting particulate matter pollution by 95%.

The work has key implications for human health as wood-burning stoves are a leading source of PM2.5 emissions in the United States. PM2.5 refers to with a diameter of 2.5 micrometers or smaller that can be inhaled deeply into the lungs and even enter the bloodstream. Exposure to PM2.5 is a known cause of cardiovascular disease and is linked to the onset and worsening of respiratory illness.

Even though a relatively small number of households use wood stoves, they are the U.S.’s third-largest source of particulate matter pollution, after wildfire smoke and agricultural dust, said Nordica MacCarty of the OSU College of Engineering.

AI model deciphers plant DNA in major agricultural breakthrough

Plant DNA has become a frontier for artificial intelligence, with large language models turning genetic sequences into interpretable content for researchers. These tools treat bases like words, revealing hidden patterns that once eluded traditional methods.

A study published by Dr. Meiling Zou from Hainan University describes how language-based models interpret extensive plant genomes with remarkable precision.

Study resolves diatom tree of life, revealing rapid speciation 170 million years ago

Trees get most of the love, but diatoms, a group of photosynthetic microalgae, produce 20% of Earth’s oxygen and are the foundation of aquatic food webs. The prevalence and diversity of diatoms have made them highly successful, suggesting the evolutionary history of diatoms is worth understanding as an important piece of the larger puzzle of life on Earth.

A new study led by researchers from the U of A found that diatoms evolved slowly for the first 100 million years of their existence. Then, 170 million years ago, they reached an inflection point characterized by a burst of rapid speciation orders of magnitude faster than anything that had preceded it. This included changes to their shape, size and mode of reproduction, as well as repeated movements from oceans into freshwater systems, a typically difficult barrier for to cross.

With an estimated 100,000 species, diatoms are now one of the most diverse groups of microalgae. They are small enough that dozens could fit on the head of a pin and are found almost anywhere there is water and sunlight.

Early human evolution leapt forward when they began eating meat

The researchers are especially interested in how our bodies maintain balance. Metabolic homeostasis, the fancy term for it, may have shaped more traits than we realize.

And as diets continue to change today, our ancient genetic choices could still be nudging us in new directions.

The study is published in the journal Cell Genomics.

Gut bacteria and acetate team up to cut fat in mice without muscle loss

Researchers led by Hiroshi Ohno at the RIKEN Center for Integrative Medical Sciences (IMS) in Japan have discovered a new way to reduce obesity. Their study shows that supplying the gut with extra acetate reduces fat and liver mass in both normal and obese mice, as long as bacteria of the Bacteroides species are also present in the gut.

When both these conditions are met, gut bacteria can eliminate more sugars from the gut and promote the burning of fats for energy in the host. The findings were published in Cell Metabolism.

Affecting hundreds of millions of people around the world, obesity constitutes a global epidemic. It is linked to eating too much sugar and starchy foods and is known to increase the risk of heart disease, type-2 diabetes, and cancer. At the same time, studies show that eating fiber reduces the risk of these very same diseases—even though it cannot be digested directly by mammals.

This diet can protect your brain even if started later in life, study suggests

People who follow a MIND diet, even if started later in life, were significantly less likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease or related forms of dementia, according to new research.

The MIND diet stands for “Mediterranean-DASH Intervention for Neurodegenerative Delay” and combines many elements of the Mediterranean diet and DASH (“Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension”). It emphasizes brain-healthy foods like leafy greens, berries, nuts and olive oil.

The study, being presented Monday at the American Society for Nutrition’s annual meeting, analyzed data from nearly 93,000 U.S. adults aged 45 to 75 starting in the 1990s.