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Lucid abductions and Candy Crush addiction
I dream of alien abductions
There he goes! It’s lunchtime and your colleague Tom is going on and on again about that time he was abducted by aliens. It sounds ridiculous, but he does make some convincing arguments. Tom thinks it was real, but could it have all just been in his head?
Lucid dreaming may help explain alleged alien abductions. During a lucid dream, people know that they’re dreaming, and can also have some control over how the dreams play out. During some dream states, a person can feel intense sensations, such as terror and paralysis, so it’s no wonder these dreams feel so real.
In a recent study, scientists encouraged 152 participants who had self-identified as lucid dreamers to dream about aliens. Many (75%) of the participants were able to dream about alien encounters, and 15% “achieved relatively realistic experiences,” the investigators reported.
So cut Tom some slack. He’s not crazy, he might just have lucid dreaming privileges. Tell him he should dream about something more fun, like a vacation in the Bahamas.
Follow your heart: Drink more coffee
It seems like the world is divided into coffee drinkers and non–coffee drinkers. Then there’s decaf and regular drinkers. Whichever camp you fall into, know this: The widespread belief that caffeine consumption has an effect on your heart is all beans.
In what is the largest investigation of its kind, researchers from the University of California, San Francisco, looked into whether drinking caffeinated coffee was linked to a risk for heart arrhythmia. They also researched whether patients with genetic variants that affect their metabolism could change that association. Almost 400,000 people with a mean age of 56 years participated in the study. More than half of the participants were women.
The investigators analyzed the participants’ self-reported coffee consumption using a technique called Mendelian randomization to leverage genetic data with the participants’ relationship with caffeine, making it an even field and not relying on the participant consumption self-reporting for outcomes as in previous studies.
What they found, after the 4-year follow up, was nothing short of myth busting.
“We found no evidence that caffeine consumption leads to a greater risk of arrhythmias,” said senior and corresponding author Gregory Marcus, MD. “Our population-based study provides reassurance that common prohibitions against caffeine to reduce arrhythmia risk are likely unwarranted.”
There was no evidence of a heightened risk of arrhythmias in participants who were genetically predisposed to metabolize caffeine differently from those who were not. And, there was a 3% reduction of arrhythmias in patients who consumed higher amounts of coffee.
We are not lobbying for Big Caffeine, but this study adds to the reported health benefits linked to coffee, which already include reduced risk for cancer, diabetes, and Parkinson’s disease, with an added bonus of anti-inflammatory benefits. So, the next time you’re hesitant to pour that second cup of Joe, just go for it. Your heart can take it.
Bored? Feeling down? Don’t play Candy Crush
Now hang on, aren’t those the perfect times to play video games? If there’s nothing else to do, why not open Candy Crush and mindlessly power through the levels?
Because, according to a study by a group of Canadian researchers, it’s actually the worst thing you can do. Well, maybe not literally, but it’s not helpful. Researchers recruited 60 Candy Crush players who were at various levels in the game. They had the participants play early levels that were far too easy or levels balanced with their gameplay abilities.
Players in the easy-level group got bored and quit far earlier than did those in the advanced-level group. The group playing to their abilities were able to access a “flow” state and focus all their attention on the game. While this is all well and good for their gaming performance, according to the researchers, it confirms the theory that playing to escape boredom or negative emotions is more likely to lead to addiction. As with all addictions, the temporary high can give way to a self-repeating loop, causing patients to ignore real life and deepen depression.
The researchers hope their findings will encourage game developers to “consider implementing responsible video gaming tools directly within their games.” Comedy gold. Perhaps Canadians’ idea of capitalism is a little different from that of those south of the border.
Hiccups and vaccine refusal
Tonight, LOTME News dives into the fetid cesspool that is international politics and comes out with … hiccups?
But first, a word from our sponsor, Fearless Boxing Club of South Etobicoke, Ontario.
Are you looking to flout public health restrictions? Do you want to spend time in an enclosed space with other people who haven’t gotten the COVID-19 vaccine? Do you “feel safer waiting until more research is done on the side effects being discovered right now”? (We are not making this up.)
Then join the Fearless Boxing Club, because we “will not be accepting any vaccinated members.” Our founders, Mohammed Abedeen and Krystal Glazier-Roscoe, are working hard to exclude “those who received the experimental COVID vaccine.” (Still not making it up.)
And now, back to the news.
Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro was hospitalized recently for a severe case of hiccups that may have been related to a stab wound he received in 2018. [Nope, didn’t make that up, either.]
Mr. Bolsonaro had been hiccuping for 10 days, and was experiencing abdominal pain and difficulty speaking, when he entered the hospital on July 14. Since being stabbed while on the campaign trail, he has undergone several operations, which may have led to the partial intestinal obstruction that caused his latest symptoms.
His medical team advised Mr. Bolsonaro to go on a diet to aid his recovery, but when he was released on July 18 he said, “I hope in 10 days I’ll be eating barbecued ribs.” (Maybe this is all just a lucid dream. Probably shouldn’t have had ribs right before bed.)
I dream of alien abductions
There he goes! It’s lunchtime and your colleague Tom is going on and on again about that time he was abducted by aliens. It sounds ridiculous, but he does make some convincing arguments. Tom thinks it was real, but could it have all just been in his head?
Lucid dreaming may help explain alleged alien abductions. During a lucid dream, people know that they’re dreaming, and can also have some control over how the dreams play out. During some dream states, a person can feel intense sensations, such as terror and paralysis, so it’s no wonder these dreams feel so real.
In a recent study, scientists encouraged 152 participants who had self-identified as lucid dreamers to dream about aliens. Many (75%) of the participants were able to dream about alien encounters, and 15% “achieved relatively realistic experiences,” the investigators reported.
So cut Tom some slack. He’s not crazy, he might just have lucid dreaming privileges. Tell him he should dream about something more fun, like a vacation in the Bahamas.
Follow your heart: Drink more coffee
It seems like the world is divided into coffee drinkers and non–coffee drinkers. Then there’s decaf and regular drinkers. Whichever camp you fall into, know this: The widespread belief that caffeine consumption has an effect on your heart is all beans.
In what is the largest investigation of its kind, researchers from the University of California, San Francisco, looked into whether drinking caffeinated coffee was linked to a risk for heart arrhythmia. They also researched whether patients with genetic variants that affect their metabolism could change that association. Almost 400,000 people with a mean age of 56 years participated in the study. More than half of the participants were women.
The investigators analyzed the participants’ self-reported coffee consumption using a technique called Mendelian randomization to leverage genetic data with the participants’ relationship with caffeine, making it an even field and not relying on the participant consumption self-reporting for outcomes as in previous studies.
What they found, after the 4-year follow up, was nothing short of myth busting.
“We found no evidence that caffeine consumption leads to a greater risk of arrhythmias,” said senior and corresponding author Gregory Marcus, MD. “Our population-based study provides reassurance that common prohibitions against caffeine to reduce arrhythmia risk are likely unwarranted.”
There was no evidence of a heightened risk of arrhythmias in participants who were genetically predisposed to metabolize caffeine differently from those who were not. And, there was a 3% reduction of arrhythmias in patients who consumed higher amounts of coffee.
We are not lobbying for Big Caffeine, but this study adds to the reported health benefits linked to coffee, which already include reduced risk for cancer, diabetes, and Parkinson’s disease, with an added bonus of anti-inflammatory benefits. So, the next time you’re hesitant to pour that second cup of Joe, just go for it. Your heart can take it.
Bored? Feeling down? Don’t play Candy Crush
Now hang on, aren’t those the perfect times to play video games? If there’s nothing else to do, why not open Candy Crush and mindlessly power through the levels?
Because, according to a study by a group of Canadian researchers, it’s actually the worst thing you can do. Well, maybe not literally, but it’s not helpful. Researchers recruited 60 Candy Crush players who were at various levels in the game. They had the participants play early levels that were far too easy or levels balanced with their gameplay abilities.
Players in the easy-level group got bored and quit far earlier than did those in the advanced-level group. The group playing to their abilities were able to access a “flow” state and focus all their attention on the game. While this is all well and good for their gaming performance, according to the researchers, it confirms the theory that playing to escape boredom or negative emotions is more likely to lead to addiction. As with all addictions, the temporary high can give way to a self-repeating loop, causing patients to ignore real life and deepen depression.
The researchers hope their findings will encourage game developers to “consider implementing responsible video gaming tools directly within their games.” Comedy gold. Perhaps Canadians’ idea of capitalism is a little different from that of those south of the border.
Hiccups and vaccine refusal
Tonight, LOTME News dives into the fetid cesspool that is international politics and comes out with … hiccups?
But first, a word from our sponsor, Fearless Boxing Club of South Etobicoke, Ontario.
Are you looking to flout public health restrictions? Do you want to spend time in an enclosed space with other people who haven’t gotten the COVID-19 vaccine? Do you “feel safer waiting until more research is done on the side effects being discovered right now”? (We are not making this up.)
Then join the Fearless Boxing Club, because we “will not be accepting any vaccinated members.” Our founders, Mohammed Abedeen and Krystal Glazier-Roscoe, are working hard to exclude “those who received the experimental COVID vaccine.” (Still not making it up.)
And now, back to the news.
Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro was hospitalized recently for a severe case of hiccups that may have been related to a stab wound he received in 2018. [Nope, didn’t make that up, either.]
Mr. Bolsonaro had been hiccuping for 10 days, and was experiencing abdominal pain and difficulty speaking, when he entered the hospital on July 14. Since being stabbed while on the campaign trail, he has undergone several operations, which may have led to the partial intestinal obstruction that caused his latest symptoms.
His medical team advised Mr. Bolsonaro to go on a diet to aid his recovery, but when he was released on July 18 he said, “I hope in 10 days I’ll be eating barbecued ribs.” (Maybe this is all just a lucid dream. Probably shouldn’t have had ribs right before bed.)
I dream of alien abductions
There he goes! It’s lunchtime and your colleague Tom is going on and on again about that time he was abducted by aliens. It sounds ridiculous, but he does make some convincing arguments. Tom thinks it was real, but could it have all just been in his head?
Lucid dreaming may help explain alleged alien abductions. During a lucid dream, people know that they’re dreaming, and can also have some control over how the dreams play out. During some dream states, a person can feel intense sensations, such as terror and paralysis, so it’s no wonder these dreams feel so real.
In a recent study, scientists encouraged 152 participants who had self-identified as lucid dreamers to dream about aliens. Many (75%) of the participants were able to dream about alien encounters, and 15% “achieved relatively realistic experiences,” the investigators reported.
So cut Tom some slack. He’s not crazy, he might just have lucid dreaming privileges. Tell him he should dream about something more fun, like a vacation in the Bahamas.
Follow your heart: Drink more coffee
It seems like the world is divided into coffee drinkers and non–coffee drinkers. Then there’s decaf and regular drinkers. Whichever camp you fall into, know this: The widespread belief that caffeine consumption has an effect on your heart is all beans.
In what is the largest investigation of its kind, researchers from the University of California, San Francisco, looked into whether drinking caffeinated coffee was linked to a risk for heart arrhythmia. They also researched whether patients with genetic variants that affect their metabolism could change that association. Almost 400,000 people with a mean age of 56 years participated in the study. More than half of the participants were women.
The investigators analyzed the participants’ self-reported coffee consumption using a technique called Mendelian randomization to leverage genetic data with the participants’ relationship with caffeine, making it an even field and not relying on the participant consumption self-reporting for outcomes as in previous studies.
What they found, after the 4-year follow up, was nothing short of myth busting.
“We found no evidence that caffeine consumption leads to a greater risk of arrhythmias,” said senior and corresponding author Gregory Marcus, MD. “Our population-based study provides reassurance that common prohibitions against caffeine to reduce arrhythmia risk are likely unwarranted.”
There was no evidence of a heightened risk of arrhythmias in participants who were genetically predisposed to metabolize caffeine differently from those who were not. And, there was a 3% reduction of arrhythmias in patients who consumed higher amounts of coffee.
We are not lobbying for Big Caffeine, but this study adds to the reported health benefits linked to coffee, which already include reduced risk for cancer, diabetes, and Parkinson’s disease, with an added bonus of anti-inflammatory benefits. So, the next time you’re hesitant to pour that second cup of Joe, just go for it. Your heart can take it.
Bored? Feeling down? Don’t play Candy Crush
Now hang on, aren’t those the perfect times to play video games? If there’s nothing else to do, why not open Candy Crush and mindlessly power through the levels?
Because, according to a study by a group of Canadian researchers, it’s actually the worst thing you can do. Well, maybe not literally, but it’s not helpful. Researchers recruited 60 Candy Crush players who were at various levels in the game. They had the participants play early levels that were far too easy or levels balanced with their gameplay abilities.
Players in the easy-level group got bored and quit far earlier than did those in the advanced-level group. The group playing to their abilities were able to access a “flow” state and focus all their attention on the game. While this is all well and good for their gaming performance, according to the researchers, it confirms the theory that playing to escape boredom or negative emotions is more likely to lead to addiction. As with all addictions, the temporary high can give way to a self-repeating loop, causing patients to ignore real life and deepen depression.
The researchers hope their findings will encourage game developers to “consider implementing responsible video gaming tools directly within their games.” Comedy gold. Perhaps Canadians’ idea of capitalism is a little different from that of those south of the border.
Hiccups and vaccine refusal
Tonight, LOTME News dives into the fetid cesspool that is international politics and comes out with … hiccups?
But first, a word from our sponsor, Fearless Boxing Club of South Etobicoke, Ontario.
Are you looking to flout public health restrictions? Do you want to spend time in an enclosed space with other people who haven’t gotten the COVID-19 vaccine? Do you “feel safer waiting until more research is done on the side effects being discovered right now”? (We are not making this up.)
Then join the Fearless Boxing Club, because we “will not be accepting any vaccinated members.” Our founders, Mohammed Abedeen and Krystal Glazier-Roscoe, are working hard to exclude “those who received the experimental COVID vaccine.” (Still not making it up.)
And now, back to the news.
Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro was hospitalized recently for a severe case of hiccups that may have been related to a stab wound he received in 2018. [Nope, didn’t make that up, either.]
Mr. Bolsonaro had been hiccuping for 10 days, and was experiencing abdominal pain and difficulty speaking, when he entered the hospital on July 14. Since being stabbed while on the campaign trail, he has undergone several operations, which may have led to the partial intestinal obstruction that caused his latest symptoms.
His medical team advised Mr. Bolsonaro to go on a diet to aid his recovery, but when he was released on July 18 he said, “I hope in 10 days I’ll be eating barbecued ribs.” (Maybe this is all just a lucid dream. Probably shouldn’t have had ribs right before bed.)
Garlic cloves in the nose and beer dreams and pareidolia faces
Insert clove A into nostril B
Just when you start wondering what crazy and potentially dangerous thing people can do to themselves next, comes a crazy and potentially dangerous new trend. The good folks at TikTok have provided patients a new treatment for stuffed up sinuses.
Dangerous? Well, that’s what doctors say, anyway.
“We typically do not recommend putting anything into the nostril for the obvious fact that it could get dislodged or lodged up into the nasal cavity,” Anthony Del Signore, MD, of Mount Sinai Union Square, New York, told TODAY.
“Not only does it have the potential to rot or cause a nasal obstruction, it can induce an episode of sinusitis,” Omid Mehdizadeh, MD, of Providence Saint John’s Health Center, Santa Monica, Calif., explained to Shape.
But who doesn't want to breathe easier and keep blood-sucking vampires at bay?
TikTokers are posting videos of themselves sticking garlic cloves in their nostrils for several minutes. They, “then, pull the garlic out, followed, typically, by long strands of mucus,” according to The Hill.
That can’t be real, you’re probably saying. Or maybe you think that no one is actually watching this stuff. Well, wake up! This isn’t network television we’re talking about. It’s freakin’ TikTok! One video has been favorited over half a million times. Another is up to 2.2 million.
It’s all true. Really. We couldn’t make this stuff up if we tried.
Seeing faces in random places?
Ever look up at the clouds, at a fast-moving train, or into your morning bowl of cereal and see two eyes, a nose, and a mouth looking back at you? You may shake it off and think you’re imagining something, but it's actually your brain doing what it’s built to do and researchers know why.
The phenomenon is called face pareidolia, and it’s technically an error function of the human brain. Evolution has molded our brains to rapidly identify faces, according to David Alais, PhD, of the University of Sydney, Australia, lead author of the study.
“But the system plays ‘fast and loose’ by applying a crude template of two eyes over a nose and mouth. Lots of things can satisfy that template and thus trigger a face detection response,” he said in a separate statement. But not only are we seeing faces, our brains go one step further and seemingly give those faces feelings.
In the study, Dr. Alais and his team looked for two things about each pareidolia face: Was it analyzed for facial expression or just rejected as a face altogether? The participants were shown a series of faces and then asked to rate the expression on a scale from angry to happy. What the researchers found was that once a face was detected, the brain analyzed the pareidolia face in the same way as a human face. Have you ever seen an angry trash can? Or a smile on an over-easy egg?
The other question faced: Was there a bias on emotion? Yup, and excuse the dad joke.
The researchers showed a mixed series of human faces and pareidolia faces to participants and found that responses were influenced by the previous face seen, no matter if the face was human or not.
So if someone smiled at you on the way to the grocery store and you see a grinning tomato in the produce section, your mind is playing tricks on you, and it’s totally normal.
Corporate dream manipulation
Advertisements are quite literally everywhere. On billboards, in commercials, in videos, in movies; the list goes on and on. Still, at least you can shut your eyes and be mercifully free of corporate interference inside your own head, right? Right?
Early in 2021, Coors launched an ad campaign that seemed to be a b bit of a gimmick, if not a joke. Coors claimed that if people watched an ad before bed, and played an 8-hour soundscape while sleeping, their dreams would be filled with crisp mountains and cold, thirst-quenching beverages. While, the Coors campaign didn’t go viral, someone was paying attention. A group of 35 leading researchers published an open letter on the subject of corporate dream manipulation, in the journal Dream Engineering.
"Multiple marketing studies are openly testing new ways to alter and motivate purchasing behavior through dream and sleep hacking. The commercial, for-profit use of dream incubation is rapidly becoming a reality," wrote the investigators. "As sleep and dream researchers, we are deeply concerned about marketing plans aimed at generating profits at the cost of interfering with our natural nocturnal memory processing."
People have tried to manipulate their dreams for countless years, but only in recent years have scientists attempted to target or manipulate behavior through dreams. In a 2014 study, smokers exposed to tobacco smoke and rotten egg smell while sleeping reduced their cigarette consumption by 30%.
Most research into dream manipulation has been aimed at positive results, but the experts warn that there’s no reason corporations couldn’t use it for their own purposes, especially given the widespread usage of devices such as Alexa. A company could play a certain sound during a commercial, they suggested, and then replay that sound through a device while people are sleeping to trigger a dream about that product.
And just when our COVID-19–driven anxiety dreams were starting to subside.
The experts said that the Federal Trade Commission could intervene to prevent companies from attempting dream manipulation, and have done so in the past to stop subliminal advertising, but as of right now, there’s nothing stopping big business from messing with your dreams. But hey, at least they’re not directly beaming commercials into our heads with gamma radiation. Yet.
Got breast milk?
As we know, breast milk has endless benefits for newbords and babies, but many things can stand in the way of a mother’s ability to breastfeed. Baby formula has served as a good enough substitute. But now, there might be something that’s even better.
A start-up company called BIOMILQ created a product that could be groundbreaking. Using “breakthrough mammary biotechnology,” BIOMILQ created cell-cultured breast milk.
Leila Strickland, a biologist who is the company’s cofounder and chief science officer, said she’s had her own personal experience with breastfeeding and believes the product could benefit many if just given a chance. "Some of the cells we’ve looked at can produce milk for months and months," according to a company statement
Baby formula has done its job feeding and nourishing babies since 1865, but could BIOMILQ do better?
Time – and babies – will tell.
Insert clove A into nostril B
Just when you start wondering what crazy and potentially dangerous thing people can do to themselves next, comes a crazy and potentially dangerous new trend. The good folks at TikTok have provided patients a new treatment for stuffed up sinuses.
Dangerous? Well, that’s what doctors say, anyway.
“We typically do not recommend putting anything into the nostril for the obvious fact that it could get dislodged or lodged up into the nasal cavity,” Anthony Del Signore, MD, of Mount Sinai Union Square, New York, told TODAY.
“Not only does it have the potential to rot or cause a nasal obstruction, it can induce an episode of sinusitis,” Omid Mehdizadeh, MD, of Providence Saint John’s Health Center, Santa Monica, Calif., explained to Shape.
But who doesn't want to breathe easier and keep blood-sucking vampires at bay?
TikTokers are posting videos of themselves sticking garlic cloves in their nostrils for several minutes. They, “then, pull the garlic out, followed, typically, by long strands of mucus,” according to The Hill.
That can’t be real, you’re probably saying. Or maybe you think that no one is actually watching this stuff. Well, wake up! This isn’t network television we’re talking about. It’s freakin’ TikTok! One video has been favorited over half a million times. Another is up to 2.2 million.
It’s all true. Really. We couldn’t make this stuff up if we tried.
Seeing faces in random places?
Ever look up at the clouds, at a fast-moving train, or into your morning bowl of cereal and see two eyes, a nose, and a mouth looking back at you? You may shake it off and think you’re imagining something, but it's actually your brain doing what it’s built to do and researchers know why.
The phenomenon is called face pareidolia, and it’s technically an error function of the human brain. Evolution has molded our brains to rapidly identify faces, according to David Alais, PhD, of the University of Sydney, Australia, lead author of the study.
“But the system plays ‘fast and loose’ by applying a crude template of two eyes over a nose and mouth. Lots of things can satisfy that template and thus trigger a face detection response,” he said in a separate statement. But not only are we seeing faces, our brains go one step further and seemingly give those faces feelings.
In the study, Dr. Alais and his team looked for two things about each pareidolia face: Was it analyzed for facial expression or just rejected as a face altogether? The participants were shown a series of faces and then asked to rate the expression on a scale from angry to happy. What the researchers found was that once a face was detected, the brain analyzed the pareidolia face in the same way as a human face. Have you ever seen an angry trash can? Or a smile on an over-easy egg?
The other question faced: Was there a bias on emotion? Yup, and excuse the dad joke.
The researchers showed a mixed series of human faces and pareidolia faces to participants and found that responses were influenced by the previous face seen, no matter if the face was human or not.
So if someone smiled at you on the way to the grocery store and you see a grinning tomato in the produce section, your mind is playing tricks on you, and it’s totally normal.
Corporate dream manipulation
Advertisements are quite literally everywhere. On billboards, in commercials, in videos, in movies; the list goes on and on. Still, at least you can shut your eyes and be mercifully free of corporate interference inside your own head, right? Right?
Early in 2021, Coors launched an ad campaign that seemed to be a b bit of a gimmick, if not a joke. Coors claimed that if people watched an ad before bed, and played an 8-hour soundscape while sleeping, their dreams would be filled with crisp mountains and cold, thirst-quenching beverages. While, the Coors campaign didn’t go viral, someone was paying attention. A group of 35 leading researchers published an open letter on the subject of corporate dream manipulation, in the journal Dream Engineering.
"Multiple marketing studies are openly testing new ways to alter and motivate purchasing behavior through dream and sleep hacking. The commercial, for-profit use of dream incubation is rapidly becoming a reality," wrote the investigators. "As sleep and dream researchers, we are deeply concerned about marketing plans aimed at generating profits at the cost of interfering with our natural nocturnal memory processing."
People have tried to manipulate their dreams for countless years, but only in recent years have scientists attempted to target or manipulate behavior through dreams. In a 2014 study, smokers exposed to tobacco smoke and rotten egg smell while sleeping reduced their cigarette consumption by 30%.
Most research into dream manipulation has been aimed at positive results, but the experts warn that there’s no reason corporations couldn’t use it for their own purposes, especially given the widespread usage of devices such as Alexa. A company could play a certain sound during a commercial, they suggested, and then replay that sound through a device while people are sleeping to trigger a dream about that product.
And just when our COVID-19–driven anxiety dreams were starting to subside.
The experts said that the Federal Trade Commission could intervene to prevent companies from attempting dream manipulation, and have done so in the past to stop subliminal advertising, but as of right now, there’s nothing stopping big business from messing with your dreams. But hey, at least they’re not directly beaming commercials into our heads with gamma radiation. Yet.
Got breast milk?
As we know, breast milk has endless benefits for newbords and babies, but many things can stand in the way of a mother’s ability to breastfeed. Baby formula has served as a good enough substitute. But now, there might be something that’s even better.
A start-up company called BIOMILQ created a product that could be groundbreaking. Using “breakthrough mammary biotechnology,” BIOMILQ created cell-cultured breast milk.
Leila Strickland, a biologist who is the company’s cofounder and chief science officer, said she’s had her own personal experience with breastfeeding and believes the product could benefit many if just given a chance. "Some of the cells we’ve looked at can produce milk for months and months," according to a company statement
Baby formula has done its job feeding and nourishing babies since 1865, but could BIOMILQ do better?
Time – and babies – will tell.
Insert clove A into nostril B
Just when you start wondering what crazy and potentially dangerous thing people can do to themselves next, comes a crazy and potentially dangerous new trend. The good folks at TikTok have provided patients a new treatment for stuffed up sinuses.
Dangerous? Well, that’s what doctors say, anyway.
“We typically do not recommend putting anything into the nostril for the obvious fact that it could get dislodged or lodged up into the nasal cavity,” Anthony Del Signore, MD, of Mount Sinai Union Square, New York, told TODAY.
“Not only does it have the potential to rot or cause a nasal obstruction, it can induce an episode of sinusitis,” Omid Mehdizadeh, MD, of Providence Saint John’s Health Center, Santa Monica, Calif., explained to Shape.
But who doesn't want to breathe easier and keep blood-sucking vampires at bay?
TikTokers are posting videos of themselves sticking garlic cloves in their nostrils for several minutes. They, “then, pull the garlic out, followed, typically, by long strands of mucus,” according to The Hill.
That can’t be real, you’re probably saying. Or maybe you think that no one is actually watching this stuff. Well, wake up! This isn’t network television we’re talking about. It’s freakin’ TikTok! One video has been favorited over half a million times. Another is up to 2.2 million.
It’s all true. Really. We couldn’t make this stuff up if we tried.
Seeing faces in random places?
Ever look up at the clouds, at a fast-moving train, or into your morning bowl of cereal and see two eyes, a nose, and a mouth looking back at you? You may shake it off and think you’re imagining something, but it's actually your brain doing what it’s built to do and researchers know why.
The phenomenon is called face pareidolia, and it’s technically an error function of the human brain. Evolution has molded our brains to rapidly identify faces, according to David Alais, PhD, of the University of Sydney, Australia, lead author of the study.
“But the system plays ‘fast and loose’ by applying a crude template of two eyes over a nose and mouth. Lots of things can satisfy that template and thus trigger a face detection response,” he said in a separate statement. But not only are we seeing faces, our brains go one step further and seemingly give those faces feelings.
In the study, Dr. Alais and his team looked for two things about each pareidolia face: Was it analyzed for facial expression or just rejected as a face altogether? The participants were shown a series of faces and then asked to rate the expression on a scale from angry to happy. What the researchers found was that once a face was detected, the brain analyzed the pareidolia face in the same way as a human face. Have you ever seen an angry trash can? Or a smile on an over-easy egg?
The other question faced: Was there a bias on emotion? Yup, and excuse the dad joke.
The researchers showed a mixed series of human faces and pareidolia faces to participants and found that responses were influenced by the previous face seen, no matter if the face was human or not.
So if someone smiled at you on the way to the grocery store and you see a grinning tomato in the produce section, your mind is playing tricks on you, and it’s totally normal.
Corporate dream manipulation
Advertisements are quite literally everywhere. On billboards, in commercials, in videos, in movies; the list goes on and on. Still, at least you can shut your eyes and be mercifully free of corporate interference inside your own head, right? Right?
Early in 2021, Coors launched an ad campaign that seemed to be a b bit of a gimmick, if not a joke. Coors claimed that if people watched an ad before bed, and played an 8-hour soundscape while sleeping, their dreams would be filled with crisp mountains and cold, thirst-quenching beverages. While, the Coors campaign didn’t go viral, someone was paying attention. A group of 35 leading researchers published an open letter on the subject of corporate dream manipulation, in the journal Dream Engineering.
"Multiple marketing studies are openly testing new ways to alter and motivate purchasing behavior through dream and sleep hacking. The commercial, for-profit use of dream incubation is rapidly becoming a reality," wrote the investigators. "As sleep and dream researchers, we are deeply concerned about marketing plans aimed at generating profits at the cost of interfering with our natural nocturnal memory processing."
People have tried to manipulate their dreams for countless years, but only in recent years have scientists attempted to target or manipulate behavior through dreams. In a 2014 study, smokers exposed to tobacco smoke and rotten egg smell while sleeping reduced their cigarette consumption by 30%.
Most research into dream manipulation has been aimed at positive results, but the experts warn that there’s no reason corporations couldn’t use it for their own purposes, especially given the widespread usage of devices such as Alexa. A company could play a certain sound during a commercial, they suggested, and then replay that sound through a device while people are sleeping to trigger a dream about that product.
And just when our COVID-19–driven anxiety dreams were starting to subside.
The experts said that the Federal Trade Commission could intervene to prevent companies from attempting dream manipulation, and have done so in the past to stop subliminal advertising, but as of right now, there’s nothing stopping big business from messing with your dreams. But hey, at least they’re not directly beaming commercials into our heads with gamma radiation. Yet.
Got breast milk?
As we know, breast milk has endless benefits for newbords and babies, but many things can stand in the way of a mother’s ability to breastfeed. Baby formula has served as a good enough substitute. But now, there might be something that’s even better.
A start-up company called BIOMILQ created a product that could be groundbreaking. Using “breakthrough mammary biotechnology,” BIOMILQ created cell-cultured breast milk.
Leila Strickland, a biologist who is the company’s cofounder and chief science officer, said she’s had her own personal experience with breastfeeding and believes the product could benefit many if just given a chance. "Some of the cells we’ve looked at can produce milk for months and months," according to a company statement
Baby formula has done its job feeding and nourishing babies since 1865, but could BIOMILQ do better?
Time – and babies – will tell.
A pacemaker that 'just disappears' and a magnetic diet device
Ignore this pacemaker and it will go away
At some point – and now seems to be that point – we have to say enough is enough. The throwaway culture that produces phones, TVs, and computers that get tossed in the trash because they can’t be repaired has gone too far. That’s right, we’re looking at you, medical science!
This time, it’s a pacemaker that just disappears when it’s no longer needed. Some lazy heart surgeon decided that it was way too much trouble to do another surgery to remove the leads when a temporary pacemaker was no longer needed. You know the type: “It sure would be nice if the pacemaker components were biocompatible and were naturally absorbed by the body over the course of a few weeks and wouldn’t need to be surgically extracted.” Slacker.
Well, get a load of this. Researchers at Northwestern and George Washington universities say that they have come up with a transient pacemaker that “harvests energy from an external, remote antenna using near-field communication protocols – the same technology used in smartphones for electronic payments and in RFID tags.”
That means no batteries and no wires that have to be removed and can cause infections. Because the infectious disease docs also are too lazy to do their jobs, apparently.
The lack of onboard infrastructure means that the device can be very small – it weighs less than half a gram and is only 250 microns thick. And yes, it is bioresorbable and completely harmless. It fully degrades and disappears in 5-7 weeks through the body’s natural biologic processes, “thereby avoiding the need for physical removal of the pacemaker electrodes. This is potentially a major victory for postoperative patients,” said Dr. Rishi Arora, one of the investigators.
A victory for patients, he says. Not a word about the time and effort saved by the surgeons. Typical.
It’s a mask! No, it’s a COVID-19 test!
Mask wearing has gotten more lax as people get vaccinated for COVID-19, but as wearing masks for virus prevention is becoming more normalized in western society, some saw an opportunity to make them work for diagnosis.
Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University have found a way to do just that with their wearable freeze-dried cell-free (wFDCF) technology. A single push of a button releases water from a reservoir in the mask that sequentially activates three different freeze-dried biological reactions, which detect the SARS-CoV-2 virus in the wearer’s breath.
Initially meant as a tool for the Zika outbreak in 2015, the team made a quick pivot in May 2020. But this isn’t just some run-of-the-mill, at-home test. The data prove that the wFDCF mask is comparable to polymerase chain reactions tests, the standard in COVID-19 detection. Plus there aren’t any extra factors to deal with, like room or instrument temperature to ensure accuracy. In just 90 minutes, the mask gives results on a readout in a way similar to that of a pregnancy test. Voilà! To have COVID-19 or not to have COVID-19 is an easily answered question.
At LOTME, we think this is a big improvement from having dogs, or even three-foot rats, sniffing out coronavirus.
But wait, there’s more. “In addition to face masks, our programmable biosensors can be integrated into other garments to provide on-the-go detection of dangerous substances including viruses, bacteria, toxins, and chemical agents,” said Peter Nguyen, PhD, study coauthor and research scientist at the Wyss Institute. The technology can be used on lab coats, scrubs, military uniforms, and uniforms of first responders who may come in contact with hazardous pathogens and toxins. Think of all the lives saved and possible avoidances.
If only it could diagnose bad breath.
Finally, an excuse for the all-beer diet
Weight loss is hard work. Extremely hard work, and, as evidenced by the constant inundation and advertisement of quick fixes, crash diets, and expensive gym memberships, there’s not really a solid, 100% solution to the issue. Until now, thanks to a team of doctors from New Zealand, who’ve decided that the best way to combat obesity is to leave you in constant agony.
The DentalSlim Diet Control device is certainly a radical yet comically logical attempt to combat obesity. The creators say that the biggest problem with dieting is compliance, and, well, it’s difficult to eat too much if you can’t actually open your mouth. The metal contraption is mounted onto your teeth and uses magnetic locks to prevent the user from opening their mouths more than 2 mm. That’s less than a tenth of an inch. Which is not a lot. So not a lot that essentially all you can consume is liquid.
Oh, and they’ve got results to back up their madness. In a small study, seven otherwise healthy obese women lost an average of 5.1% of their body weight after using the DentalSlim for 2 weeks, though they did complain that the device was difficult to use, caused discomfort and difficulty speaking, made them more tense, and in general made life “less satisfying.” And one participant was able to cheat the system and consume nonhealthy food like chocolate by melting it.
So, there you are, if you want a weight-loss solution that tortures you and has far bigger holes than the one it leaves for your mouth, try the DentalSlim. Or, you know, don’t eat that eighth slice of pizza and maybe go for a walk later. Your choice.
Ignore this pacemaker and it will go away
At some point – and now seems to be that point – we have to say enough is enough. The throwaway culture that produces phones, TVs, and computers that get tossed in the trash because they can’t be repaired has gone too far. That’s right, we’re looking at you, medical science!
This time, it’s a pacemaker that just disappears when it’s no longer needed. Some lazy heart surgeon decided that it was way too much trouble to do another surgery to remove the leads when a temporary pacemaker was no longer needed. You know the type: “It sure would be nice if the pacemaker components were biocompatible and were naturally absorbed by the body over the course of a few weeks and wouldn’t need to be surgically extracted.” Slacker.
Well, get a load of this. Researchers at Northwestern and George Washington universities say that they have come up with a transient pacemaker that “harvests energy from an external, remote antenna using near-field communication protocols – the same technology used in smartphones for electronic payments and in RFID tags.”
That means no batteries and no wires that have to be removed and can cause infections. Because the infectious disease docs also are too lazy to do their jobs, apparently.
The lack of onboard infrastructure means that the device can be very small – it weighs less than half a gram and is only 250 microns thick. And yes, it is bioresorbable and completely harmless. It fully degrades and disappears in 5-7 weeks through the body’s natural biologic processes, “thereby avoiding the need for physical removal of the pacemaker electrodes. This is potentially a major victory for postoperative patients,” said Dr. Rishi Arora, one of the investigators.
A victory for patients, he says. Not a word about the time and effort saved by the surgeons. Typical.
It’s a mask! No, it’s a COVID-19 test!
Mask wearing has gotten more lax as people get vaccinated for COVID-19, but as wearing masks for virus prevention is becoming more normalized in western society, some saw an opportunity to make them work for diagnosis.
Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University have found a way to do just that with their wearable freeze-dried cell-free (wFDCF) technology. A single push of a button releases water from a reservoir in the mask that sequentially activates three different freeze-dried biological reactions, which detect the SARS-CoV-2 virus in the wearer’s breath.
Initially meant as a tool for the Zika outbreak in 2015, the team made a quick pivot in May 2020. But this isn’t just some run-of-the-mill, at-home test. The data prove that the wFDCF mask is comparable to polymerase chain reactions tests, the standard in COVID-19 detection. Plus there aren’t any extra factors to deal with, like room or instrument temperature to ensure accuracy. In just 90 minutes, the mask gives results on a readout in a way similar to that of a pregnancy test. Voilà! To have COVID-19 or not to have COVID-19 is an easily answered question.
At LOTME, we think this is a big improvement from having dogs, or even three-foot rats, sniffing out coronavirus.
But wait, there’s more. “In addition to face masks, our programmable biosensors can be integrated into other garments to provide on-the-go detection of dangerous substances including viruses, bacteria, toxins, and chemical agents,” said Peter Nguyen, PhD, study coauthor and research scientist at the Wyss Institute. The technology can be used on lab coats, scrubs, military uniforms, and uniforms of first responders who may come in contact with hazardous pathogens and toxins. Think of all the lives saved and possible avoidances.
If only it could diagnose bad breath.
Finally, an excuse for the all-beer diet
Weight loss is hard work. Extremely hard work, and, as evidenced by the constant inundation and advertisement of quick fixes, crash diets, and expensive gym memberships, there’s not really a solid, 100% solution to the issue. Until now, thanks to a team of doctors from New Zealand, who’ve decided that the best way to combat obesity is to leave you in constant agony.
The DentalSlim Diet Control device is certainly a radical yet comically logical attempt to combat obesity. The creators say that the biggest problem with dieting is compliance, and, well, it’s difficult to eat too much if you can’t actually open your mouth. The metal contraption is mounted onto your teeth and uses magnetic locks to prevent the user from opening their mouths more than 2 mm. That’s less than a tenth of an inch. Which is not a lot. So not a lot that essentially all you can consume is liquid.
Oh, and they’ve got results to back up their madness. In a small study, seven otherwise healthy obese women lost an average of 5.1% of their body weight after using the DentalSlim for 2 weeks, though they did complain that the device was difficult to use, caused discomfort and difficulty speaking, made them more tense, and in general made life “less satisfying.” And one participant was able to cheat the system and consume nonhealthy food like chocolate by melting it.
So, there you are, if you want a weight-loss solution that tortures you and has far bigger holes than the one it leaves for your mouth, try the DentalSlim. Or, you know, don’t eat that eighth slice of pizza and maybe go for a walk later. Your choice.
Ignore this pacemaker and it will go away
At some point – and now seems to be that point – we have to say enough is enough. The throwaway culture that produces phones, TVs, and computers that get tossed in the trash because they can’t be repaired has gone too far. That’s right, we’re looking at you, medical science!
This time, it’s a pacemaker that just disappears when it’s no longer needed. Some lazy heart surgeon decided that it was way too much trouble to do another surgery to remove the leads when a temporary pacemaker was no longer needed. You know the type: “It sure would be nice if the pacemaker components were biocompatible and were naturally absorbed by the body over the course of a few weeks and wouldn’t need to be surgically extracted.” Slacker.
Well, get a load of this. Researchers at Northwestern and George Washington universities say that they have come up with a transient pacemaker that “harvests energy from an external, remote antenna using near-field communication protocols – the same technology used in smartphones for electronic payments and in RFID tags.”
That means no batteries and no wires that have to be removed and can cause infections. Because the infectious disease docs also are too lazy to do their jobs, apparently.
The lack of onboard infrastructure means that the device can be very small – it weighs less than half a gram and is only 250 microns thick. And yes, it is bioresorbable and completely harmless. It fully degrades and disappears in 5-7 weeks through the body’s natural biologic processes, “thereby avoiding the need for physical removal of the pacemaker electrodes. This is potentially a major victory for postoperative patients,” said Dr. Rishi Arora, one of the investigators.
A victory for patients, he says. Not a word about the time and effort saved by the surgeons. Typical.
It’s a mask! No, it’s a COVID-19 test!
Mask wearing has gotten more lax as people get vaccinated for COVID-19, but as wearing masks for virus prevention is becoming more normalized in western society, some saw an opportunity to make them work for diagnosis.
Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University have found a way to do just that with their wearable freeze-dried cell-free (wFDCF) technology. A single push of a button releases water from a reservoir in the mask that sequentially activates three different freeze-dried biological reactions, which detect the SARS-CoV-2 virus in the wearer’s breath.
Initially meant as a tool for the Zika outbreak in 2015, the team made a quick pivot in May 2020. But this isn’t just some run-of-the-mill, at-home test. The data prove that the wFDCF mask is comparable to polymerase chain reactions tests, the standard in COVID-19 detection. Plus there aren’t any extra factors to deal with, like room or instrument temperature to ensure accuracy. In just 90 minutes, the mask gives results on a readout in a way similar to that of a pregnancy test. Voilà! To have COVID-19 or not to have COVID-19 is an easily answered question.
At LOTME, we think this is a big improvement from having dogs, or even three-foot rats, sniffing out coronavirus.
But wait, there’s more. “In addition to face masks, our programmable biosensors can be integrated into other garments to provide on-the-go detection of dangerous substances including viruses, bacteria, toxins, and chemical agents,” said Peter Nguyen, PhD, study coauthor and research scientist at the Wyss Institute. The technology can be used on lab coats, scrubs, military uniforms, and uniforms of first responders who may come in contact with hazardous pathogens and toxins. Think of all the lives saved and possible avoidances.
If only it could diagnose bad breath.
Finally, an excuse for the all-beer diet
Weight loss is hard work. Extremely hard work, and, as evidenced by the constant inundation and advertisement of quick fixes, crash diets, and expensive gym memberships, there’s not really a solid, 100% solution to the issue. Until now, thanks to a team of doctors from New Zealand, who’ve decided that the best way to combat obesity is to leave you in constant agony.
The DentalSlim Diet Control device is certainly a radical yet comically logical attempt to combat obesity. The creators say that the biggest problem with dieting is compliance, and, well, it’s difficult to eat too much if you can’t actually open your mouth. The metal contraption is mounted onto your teeth and uses magnetic locks to prevent the user from opening their mouths more than 2 mm. That’s less than a tenth of an inch. Which is not a lot. So not a lot that essentially all you can consume is liquid.
Oh, and they’ve got results to back up their madness. In a small study, seven otherwise healthy obese women lost an average of 5.1% of their body weight after using the DentalSlim for 2 weeks, though they did complain that the device was difficult to use, caused discomfort and difficulty speaking, made them more tense, and in general made life “less satisfying.” And one participant was able to cheat the system and consume nonhealthy food like chocolate by melting it.
So, there you are, if you want a weight-loss solution that tortures you and has far bigger holes than the one it leaves for your mouth, try the DentalSlim. Or, you know, don’t eat that eighth slice of pizza and maybe go for a walk later. Your choice.
Gray hair goes away and squids go to space
Goodbye stress, goodbye gray hair
Last year was a doozy, so it wouldn’t be too surprising if we all had a few new gray strands in our hair. But what if we told you that you don’t need to start dying them or plucking them out? What if they could magically go back to the way they were? Well, it may be possible, sans magic and sans stress.
Investigators recently discovered that the age-old belief that stress will permanently turn your hair gray may not be true after all. There’s a strong possibility that it could turn back to its original color once the stressful agent is eliminated.
“Understanding the mechanisms that allow ‘old’ gray hairs to return to their ‘young’ pigmented states could yield new clues about the malleability of human aging in general and how it is influenced by stress,” said senior author Martin Picard, PhD, of Columbia University, New York.
For the study, 14 volunteers were asked to keep a stress diary and review their levels of stress throughout the week. The researchers used a new method of viewing and capturing the images of tiny parts of the hairs to see how much graying took place in each part of the strand. And what they found – some strands naturally turning back to the original color – had never been documented before.
How did it happen? Our good friend the mitochondria. We haven’t really heard that word since eighth-grade biology, but it’s actually the key link between stress hormones and hair pigmentation. Think of them as little radars picking up all different kinds of signals in your body, like mental/emotional stress. They get a big enough alert and they’re going to react, thus gray hair.
So that’s all it takes? Cut the stress and a full head of gray can go back to brown? Not exactly. The researchers said there may be a “threshold because of biological age and other factors.” They believe middle age is near that threshold and it could easily be pushed over due to stress and could potentially go back. But if you’ve been rocking the salt and pepper or silver fox for a number of years and are looking for change, you might want to just eliminate the stress and pick up a bottle of dye.
One small step for squid
Space does a number on the human body. Forget the obvious like going for a walk outside without a spacesuit, or even the well-known risks like the degradation of bone in microgravity; there are numerous smaller but still important changes to the body during spaceflight, like the disruption of the symbiotic relationship between gut bacteria and the human body. This causes the immune system to lose the ability to recognize threats, and illnesses spread more easily.
Naturally, if astronauts are going to undertake years-long journeys to Mars and beyond, a thorough understanding of this disturbance is necessary, and that’s why NASA has sent a bunch of squid to the International Space Station.
When it comes to animal studies, squid aren’t the usual culprits, but there’s a reason NASA chose calamari over the alternatives: The Hawaiian bobtail squid has a symbiotic relationship with bacteria that regulate their bioluminescence in much the same way that we have a symbiotic relationship with our gut bacteria, but the squid is a much simpler animal. If the bioluminescence-regulating bacteria are disturbed during their time in space, it will be much easier to figure out what’s going wrong.
The experiment is ongoing, but we should salute the brave squid who have taken a giant leap for squidkind. Though if NASA didn’t send them up in a giant bubble, we’re going to be very disappointed.
Less plastic, more vanilla
Have you been racked by guilt over the number of plastic water bottles you use? What about the amount of ice cream you eat? Well, this one’s for you.
Plastic isn’t the first thing you think about when you open up a pint of vanilla ice cream and catch the sweet, spicy vanilla scent, or when you smell those fresh vanilla scones coming out of the oven at the coffee shop, but a new study shows that the flavor of vanilla can come from water bottles.
Here’s the deal. A compound called vanillin is responsible for the scent of vanilla, and it can come naturally from the bean or it can be made synthetically. Believe it or not, 85% of vanillin is made synthetically from fossil fuels!
We’ve definitely grown accustomed to our favorite vanilla scents, foods, and cosmetics. In 2018, the global demand for vanillin was about 40,800 tons and is expected to grow to 65,000 tons by 2025, which far exceeds the supply of natural vanilla.
So what can we do? Well, we can use genetically engineered bacteria to turn plastic water bottles into vanillin, according to a study published in the journal Green Chemistry.
The plastic can be broken down into terephthalic acid, which is very similar, chemically speaking, to vanillin. Similar enough that a bit of bioengineering produced Escherichia coli that could convert the acid into the tasty treat, according to researchers at the University of Edinburgh.
A perfect solution? Decreasing plastic waste while producing a valued food product? The thought of consuming plastic isn’t appetizing, so just eat your ice cream and try to forget about it.
No withdrawals from this bank
Into each life, some milestones must fall: High school graduation, birth of a child, first house, 50th wedding anniversary, COVID-19. One LOTME staffer got really excited – way too excited, actually – when his Nissan Sentra reached 300,000 miles.
Well, there are milestones, and then there are milestones. “1,000 Reasons for Hope” is a report celebrating the first 1,000 brains donated to the VA-BU-CLF Brain Bank. For those of you keeping score at home, that would be the Department of Veterans Affairs, Boston University, and the Concussion Legacy Foundation.
The Brain Bank, created in 2008 to study concussions and chronic traumatic encephalopathy, is the brainchild – yes, we went there – of Chris Nowinski, PhD, a former professional wrestler, and Ann McKee, MD, an expert on neurogenerative disease. “Our discoveries have already inspired changes to sports that will prevent many future cases of CTE in the next generation of athletes,” Dr. Nowinski, the CEO of CLF, said in a written statement.
Data from the first thousand brains show that 706 men, including 305 former NFL players, had football as their primary exposure to head impacts. Women were underrepresented, making up only 2.8% of brain donations, so recruiting females is a priority. Anyone interested in pledging can go to PledgeMyBrain.org or call 617-992-0615 for the 24-hour emergency donation pager.
LOTME wanted to help, so we called the Brain Bank to find out about donating. They asked a few questions and we told them what we do for a living. “Oh, you’re with LOTME? Yeah, we’ve … um, seen that before. It’s, um … funny. Can we put you on hold?” We’re starting to get a little sick of the on-hold music by now.
Goodbye stress, goodbye gray hair
Last year was a doozy, so it wouldn’t be too surprising if we all had a few new gray strands in our hair. But what if we told you that you don’t need to start dying them or plucking them out? What if they could magically go back to the way they were? Well, it may be possible, sans magic and sans stress.
Investigators recently discovered that the age-old belief that stress will permanently turn your hair gray may not be true after all. There’s a strong possibility that it could turn back to its original color once the stressful agent is eliminated.
“Understanding the mechanisms that allow ‘old’ gray hairs to return to their ‘young’ pigmented states could yield new clues about the malleability of human aging in general and how it is influenced by stress,” said senior author Martin Picard, PhD, of Columbia University, New York.
For the study, 14 volunteers were asked to keep a stress diary and review their levels of stress throughout the week. The researchers used a new method of viewing and capturing the images of tiny parts of the hairs to see how much graying took place in each part of the strand. And what they found – some strands naturally turning back to the original color – had never been documented before.
How did it happen? Our good friend the mitochondria. We haven’t really heard that word since eighth-grade biology, but it’s actually the key link between stress hormones and hair pigmentation. Think of them as little radars picking up all different kinds of signals in your body, like mental/emotional stress. They get a big enough alert and they’re going to react, thus gray hair.
So that’s all it takes? Cut the stress and a full head of gray can go back to brown? Not exactly. The researchers said there may be a “threshold because of biological age and other factors.” They believe middle age is near that threshold and it could easily be pushed over due to stress and could potentially go back. But if you’ve been rocking the salt and pepper or silver fox for a number of years and are looking for change, you might want to just eliminate the stress and pick up a bottle of dye.
One small step for squid
Space does a number on the human body. Forget the obvious like going for a walk outside without a spacesuit, or even the well-known risks like the degradation of bone in microgravity; there are numerous smaller but still important changes to the body during spaceflight, like the disruption of the symbiotic relationship between gut bacteria and the human body. This causes the immune system to lose the ability to recognize threats, and illnesses spread more easily.
Naturally, if astronauts are going to undertake years-long journeys to Mars and beyond, a thorough understanding of this disturbance is necessary, and that’s why NASA has sent a bunch of squid to the International Space Station.
When it comes to animal studies, squid aren’t the usual culprits, but there’s a reason NASA chose calamari over the alternatives: The Hawaiian bobtail squid has a symbiotic relationship with bacteria that regulate their bioluminescence in much the same way that we have a symbiotic relationship with our gut bacteria, but the squid is a much simpler animal. If the bioluminescence-regulating bacteria are disturbed during their time in space, it will be much easier to figure out what’s going wrong.
The experiment is ongoing, but we should salute the brave squid who have taken a giant leap for squidkind. Though if NASA didn’t send them up in a giant bubble, we’re going to be very disappointed.
Less plastic, more vanilla
Have you been racked by guilt over the number of plastic water bottles you use? What about the amount of ice cream you eat? Well, this one’s for you.
Plastic isn’t the first thing you think about when you open up a pint of vanilla ice cream and catch the sweet, spicy vanilla scent, or when you smell those fresh vanilla scones coming out of the oven at the coffee shop, but a new study shows that the flavor of vanilla can come from water bottles.
Here’s the deal. A compound called vanillin is responsible for the scent of vanilla, and it can come naturally from the bean or it can be made synthetically. Believe it or not, 85% of vanillin is made synthetically from fossil fuels!
We’ve definitely grown accustomed to our favorite vanilla scents, foods, and cosmetics. In 2018, the global demand for vanillin was about 40,800 tons and is expected to grow to 65,000 tons by 2025, which far exceeds the supply of natural vanilla.
So what can we do? Well, we can use genetically engineered bacteria to turn plastic water bottles into vanillin, according to a study published in the journal Green Chemistry.
The plastic can be broken down into terephthalic acid, which is very similar, chemically speaking, to vanillin. Similar enough that a bit of bioengineering produced Escherichia coli that could convert the acid into the tasty treat, according to researchers at the University of Edinburgh.
A perfect solution? Decreasing plastic waste while producing a valued food product? The thought of consuming plastic isn’t appetizing, so just eat your ice cream and try to forget about it.
No withdrawals from this bank
Into each life, some milestones must fall: High school graduation, birth of a child, first house, 50th wedding anniversary, COVID-19. One LOTME staffer got really excited – way too excited, actually – when his Nissan Sentra reached 300,000 miles.
Well, there are milestones, and then there are milestones. “1,000 Reasons for Hope” is a report celebrating the first 1,000 brains donated to the VA-BU-CLF Brain Bank. For those of you keeping score at home, that would be the Department of Veterans Affairs, Boston University, and the Concussion Legacy Foundation.
The Brain Bank, created in 2008 to study concussions and chronic traumatic encephalopathy, is the brainchild – yes, we went there – of Chris Nowinski, PhD, a former professional wrestler, and Ann McKee, MD, an expert on neurogenerative disease. “Our discoveries have already inspired changes to sports that will prevent many future cases of CTE in the next generation of athletes,” Dr. Nowinski, the CEO of CLF, said in a written statement.
Data from the first thousand brains show that 706 men, including 305 former NFL players, had football as their primary exposure to head impacts. Women were underrepresented, making up only 2.8% of brain donations, so recruiting females is a priority. Anyone interested in pledging can go to PledgeMyBrain.org or call 617-992-0615 for the 24-hour emergency donation pager.
LOTME wanted to help, so we called the Brain Bank to find out about donating. They asked a few questions and we told them what we do for a living. “Oh, you’re with LOTME? Yeah, we’ve … um, seen that before. It’s, um … funny. Can we put you on hold?” We’re starting to get a little sick of the on-hold music by now.
Goodbye stress, goodbye gray hair
Last year was a doozy, so it wouldn’t be too surprising if we all had a few new gray strands in our hair. But what if we told you that you don’t need to start dying them or plucking them out? What if they could magically go back to the way they were? Well, it may be possible, sans magic and sans stress.
Investigators recently discovered that the age-old belief that stress will permanently turn your hair gray may not be true after all. There’s a strong possibility that it could turn back to its original color once the stressful agent is eliminated.
“Understanding the mechanisms that allow ‘old’ gray hairs to return to their ‘young’ pigmented states could yield new clues about the malleability of human aging in general and how it is influenced by stress,” said senior author Martin Picard, PhD, of Columbia University, New York.
For the study, 14 volunteers were asked to keep a stress diary and review their levels of stress throughout the week. The researchers used a new method of viewing and capturing the images of tiny parts of the hairs to see how much graying took place in each part of the strand. And what they found – some strands naturally turning back to the original color – had never been documented before.
How did it happen? Our good friend the mitochondria. We haven’t really heard that word since eighth-grade biology, but it’s actually the key link between stress hormones and hair pigmentation. Think of them as little radars picking up all different kinds of signals in your body, like mental/emotional stress. They get a big enough alert and they’re going to react, thus gray hair.
So that’s all it takes? Cut the stress and a full head of gray can go back to brown? Not exactly. The researchers said there may be a “threshold because of biological age and other factors.” They believe middle age is near that threshold and it could easily be pushed over due to stress and could potentially go back. But if you’ve been rocking the salt and pepper or silver fox for a number of years and are looking for change, you might want to just eliminate the stress and pick up a bottle of dye.
One small step for squid
Space does a number on the human body. Forget the obvious like going for a walk outside without a spacesuit, or even the well-known risks like the degradation of bone in microgravity; there are numerous smaller but still important changes to the body during spaceflight, like the disruption of the symbiotic relationship between gut bacteria and the human body. This causes the immune system to lose the ability to recognize threats, and illnesses spread more easily.
Naturally, if astronauts are going to undertake years-long journeys to Mars and beyond, a thorough understanding of this disturbance is necessary, and that’s why NASA has sent a bunch of squid to the International Space Station.
When it comes to animal studies, squid aren’t the usual culprits, but there’s a reason NASA chose calamari over the alternatives: The Hawaiian bobtail squid has a symbiotic relationship with bacteria that regulate their bioluminescence in much the same way that we have a symbiotic relationship with our gut bacteria, but the squid is a much simpler animal. If the bioluminescence-regulating bacteria are disturbed during their time in space, it will be much easier to figure out what’s going wrong.
The experiment is ongoing, but we should salute the brave squid who have taken a giant leap for squidkind. Though if NASA didn’t send them up in a giant bubble, we’re going to be very disappointed.
Less plastic, more vanilla
Have you been racked by guilt over the number of plastic water bottles you use? What about the amount of ice cream you eat? Well, this one’s for you.
Plastic isn’t the first thing you think about when you open up a pint of vanilla ice cream and catch the sweet, spicy vanilla scent, or when you smell those fresh vanilla scones coming out of the oven at the coffee shop, but a new study shows that the flavor of vanilla can come from water bottles.
Here’s the deal. A compound called vanillin is responsible for the scent of vanilla, and it can come naturally from the bean or it can be made synthetically. Believe it or not, 85% of vanillin is made synthetically from fossil fuels!
We’ve definitely grown accustomed to our favorite vanilla scents, foods, and cosmetics. In 2018, the global demand for vanillin was about 40,800 tons and is expected to grow to 65,000 tons by 2025, which far exceeds the supply of natural vanilla.
So what can we do? Well, we can use genetically engineered bacteria to turn plastic water bottles into vanillin, according to a study published in the journal Green Chemistry.
The plastic can be broken down into terephthalic acid, which is very similar, chemically speaking, to vanillin. Similar enough that a bit of bioengineering produced Escherichia coli that could convert the acid into the tasty treat, according to researchers at the University of Edinburgh.
A perfect solution? Decreasing plastic waste while producing a valued food product? The thought of consuming plastic isn’t appetizing, so just eat your ice cream and try to forget about it.
No withdrawals from this bank
Into each life, some milestones must fall: High school graduation, birth of a child, first house, 50th wedding anniversary, COVID-19. One LOTME staffer got really excited – way too excited, actually – when his Nissan Sentra reached 300,000 miles.
Well, there are milestones, and then there are milestones. “1,000 Reasons for Hope” is a report celebrating the first 1,000 brains donated to the VA-BU-CLF Brain Bank. For those of you keeping score at home, that would be the Department of Veterans Affairs, Boston University, and the Concussion Legacy Foundation.
The Brain Bank, created in 2008 to study concussions and chronic traumatic encephalopathy, is the brainchild – yes, we went there – of Chris Nowinski, PhD, a former professional wrestler, and Ann McKee, MD, an expert on neurogenerative disease. “Our discoveries have already inspired changes to sports that will prevent many future cases of CTE in the next generation of athletes,” Dr. Nowinski, the CEO of CLF, said in a written statement.
Data from the first thousand brains show that 706 men, including 305 former NFL players, had football as their primary exposure to head impacts. Women were underrepresented, making up only 2.8% of brain donations, so recruiting females is a priority. Anyone interested in pledging can go to PledgeMyBrain.org or call 617-992-0615 for the 24-hour emergency donation pager.
LOTME wanted to help, so we called the Brain Bank to find out about donating. They asked a few questions and we told them what we do for a living. “Oh, you’re with LOTME? Yeah, we’ve … um, seen that before. It’s, um … funny. Can we put you on hold?” We’re starting to get a little sick of the on-hold music by now.
The most important meal of the day, with extra zinc
Busting the myth of skipping breakfast
Your mother told you that breakfast was the most important meal of the day. Cereal marketing teams banked on that, selling breakfast to millions of people based on a common turn of phrase like “an apple a day keeps the doctor away.” Well, what if the notion of breakfast’s importance isn’t just marketing BS?
A new study suggests that adults who don’t eat breakfast are setting themselves up for a nutritional gap. Common breakfast foods pack a ton of calcium, fiber, and vitamin C from milk, cereals, and fruit. Christopher Taylor, PhD, senior author of the study and professor of dietetics at the Ohio State University, Columbus, said that if you’re not getting those nutrients from foods at breakfast, there’s a tendency to skip them throughout the rest of your day.
Data from a sample of the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey – 30,889 adults aged 19 and older who participated between 2005 and 2016 – showed that 15.2% of participants reported skipping breakfast.
The research team then estimated nutrient consumption using federal dietary studies and guidelines and compared it to Food and Nutrition Board of National Academies nutrient recommendations. The breakfast skippers, they determined, were missing out on pronounced levels of fiber, magnesium, iron, calcium, and vitamins A, B1, B2, B3, C, and D and were more likely to fall prey to lower-quality snacking. Cue those Oreos at 3 pm.
You may get more total calories within the day by eating breakfast, but your lunch, dinner, and snacks are much larger when you skip it. So the case of breakfast being the most important meal of the day checks out. Who knew that Tony the Tiger – and Mom – were actually on to something?
The bitter taste of a healthy liver
Alcohol and liver disease. They go together like, well, alcohol and liver disease. But alcohol isn’t the only reason people get liver disease, and now there’s a potential new treatment for people with hepatic steatosis on the way to becoming nonalcoholic fatty liver disease: beer.
Okay, not literally beer, but a pair of compounds derived from hops, the plant that gives beer its color and bitter flavor. In a study published in eLife, researchers from Oregon State University fed mice either a low-fat diet or a high-fat diet to induce hepatic steatosis, with some on the high-fat diet receiving either xanthohumol, a prenylated flavonoid from the hop plant, or tetrahydroxanthohumol, a hydrogenated derivative of xanthohumol.
Mice that received tetrahydroxanthohumol not only gained weight at a far slower rate than that of mice on the normal high-fat diet, their blood sugar remained stable; xanthohumol was similarly effective if the dosage was higher. The researchers noted that the two chemicals were effective because they acted as antagonists for the PPAR-gamma protein, which controls glucose metabolism and fatty cell activation. The chemicals bind to the protein but don’t activate it, meaning fat is unable to build up in the cells. No fat means no hepatic steatosis, which means no liver disease.
The researchers caution that more research is needed to determine the chemicals’ effectiveness in humans, but the classic line from a great animated philosopher still holds true: Alcohol may really be the source of, and solution to, all of life’s problems.
Life’s great mysteries, from A to zinc
Thanks to science, we now have answers to what were once unanswerable questions: Is Jello a solid or a liquid? If someone leads but no one follows, are they just out for a walk? Does zinc inhibit or promote the growth of kidney stones? How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop? (Turns out science really did answer this one.)
If you’re anything like us, then you’ve been following the big debate on the two competing theories involving the role of zinc in kidney stone formation for years. One theory says that zinc stops the growth of calcium oxalate crystals that make up stones. The other says that zinc alters the surfaces of crystals, which encourages growth.
We can’t stand the suspense any longer, so here goes: The answer to “does zinc inhibit or promote the growth of kidney stones?” is … yes.
“What we see with zinc is something we haven’t seen before. It does slow down calcium oxalate crystal growth and at the same time it changes the surface of the crystals, causing defects in the form of intergrowths. These abnormalities create centers for new crystals to nucleate and grow,” said senior author Jeffrey Rimer, PhD, of the University of Houston.
In vitro experimentation, computational modeling, and atomic force microscopy don’t lie: Zinc ions have a unique ability “to alter the termination of crystal surfaces.” They tried alternative ions found in urine, including magnesium, and there was no effect on crystal formation.
With this one great mystery now solved, we contacted Dr. Rimer to ask him about the whole “sound of one hand clapping” business. He hasn’t cracked that one yet, but he did want to speak to our supervisor. So many of life’s unanswered questions, so little time. Oh well.
Babies’ ‘gut instinct’ to cry
At some point or another, you’ve probably been told not to “be such a baby” when you were scared of something. If you’ve been called a crybaby, it may be an indicator that you had a different gut microbiome as an infant.
Investigators from Michigan State University and the University of North Carolina say that babies who react more strongly to scary situations have different gut microbiomes compared with babies who don’t have such a strong reaction. The way babies react to scary situations can say a lot about their future, and there is even some evidence that gut microbiomes may have something to do with mental health.
Physicians who support neurologic development may one day be able to use this research on gut microbiomes to help monitor people’s neurological health. “This early developmental period is a time of tremendous opportunity for promoting healthy brain development. The microbiome is an exciting new target that can be potentially used for that,” said Rebecca Knickmeyer of MSU, leader of the study, which was published in Nature Communications. And loyal LOTME followers already know about the OpenBiome Microbiome Library, aka the “Amazon of bacteria.”
So the next time someone tells you not to be such a baby when you’re scared of something, tell them it’s not your fault. Blame it on your gut microbiome!
Busting the myth of skipping breakfast
Your mother told you that breakfast was the most important meal of the day. Cereal marketing teams banked on that, selling breakfast to millions of people based on a common turn of phrase like “an apple a day keeps the doctor away.” Well, what if the notion of breakfast’s importance isn’t just marketing BS?
A new study suggests that adults who don’t eat breakfast are setting themselves up for a nutritional gap. Common breakfast foods pack a ton of calcium, fiber, and vitamin C from milk, cereals, and fruit. Christopher Taylor, PhD, senior author of the study and professor of dietetics at the Ohio State University, Columbus, said that if you’re not getting those nutrients from foods at breakfast, there’s a tendency to skip them throughout the rest of your day.
Data from a sample of the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey – 30,889 adults aged 19 and older who participated between 2005 and 2016 – showed that 15.2% of participants reported skipping breakfast.
The research team then estimated nutrient consumption using federal dietary studies and guidelines and compared it to Food and Nutrition Board of National Academies nutrient recommendations. The breakfast skippers, they determined, were missing out on pronounced levels of fiber, magnesium, iron, calcium, and vitamins A, B1, B2, B3, C, and D and were more likely to fall prey to lower-quality snacking. Cue those Oreos at 3 pm.
You may get more total calories within the day by eating breakfast, but your lunch, dinner, and snacks are much larger when you skip it. So the case of breakfast being the most important meal of the day checks out. Who knew that Tony the Tiger – and Mom – were actually on to something?
The bitter taste of a healthy liver
Alcohol and liver disease. They go together like, well, alcohol and liver disease. But alcohol isn’t the only reason people get liver disease, and now there’s a potential new treatment for people with hepatic steatosis on the way to becoming nonalcoholic fatty liver disease: beer.
Okay, not literally beer, but a pair of compounds derived from hops, the plant that gives beer its color and bitter flavor. In a study published in eLife, researchers from Oregon State University fed mice either a low-fat diet or a high-fat diet to induce hepatic steatosis, with some on the high-fat diet receiving either xanthohumol, a prenylated flavonoid from the hop plant, or tetrahydroxanthohumol, a hydrogenated derivative of xanthohumol.
Mice that received tetrahydroxanthohumol not only gained weight at a far slower rate than that of mice on the normal high-fat diet, their blood sugar remained stable; xanthohumol was similarly effective if the dosage was higher. The researchers noted that the two chemicals were effective because they acted as antagonists for the PPAR-gamma protein, which controls glucose metabolism and fatty cell activation. The chemicals bind to the protein but don’t activate it, meaning fat is unable to build up in the cells. No fat means no hepatic steatosis, which means no liver disease.
The researchers caution that more research is needed to determine the chemicals’ effectiveness in humans, but the classic line from a great animated philosopher still holds true: Alcohol may really be the source of, and solution to, all of life’s problems.
Life’s great mysteries, from A to zinc
Thanks to science, we now have answers to what were once unanswerable questions: Is Jello a solid or a liquid? If someone leads but no one follows, are they just out for a walk? Does zinc inhibit or promote the growth of kidney stones? How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop? (Turns out science really did answer this one.)
If you’re anything like us, then you’ve been following the big debate on the two competing theories involving the role of zinc in kidney stone formation for years. One theory says that zinc stops the growth of calcium oxalate crystals that make up stones. The other says that zinc alters the surfaces of crystals, which encourages growth.
We can’t stand the suspense any longer, so here goes: The answer to “does zinc inhibit or promote the growth of kidney stones?” is … yes.
“What we see with zinc is something we haven’t seen before. It does slow down calcium oxalate crystal growth and at the same time it changes the surface of the crystals, causing defects in the form of intergrowths. These abnormalities create centers for new crystals to nucleate and grow,” said senior author Jeffrey Rimer, PhD, of the University of Houston.
In vitro experimentation, computational modeling, and atomic force microscopy don’t lie: Zinc ions have a unique ability “to alter the termination of crystal surfaces.” They tried alternative ions found in urine, including magnesium, and there was no effect on crystal formation.
With this one great mystery now solved, we contacted Dr. Rimer to ask him about the whole “sound of one hand clapping” business. He hasn’t cracked that one yet, but he did want to speak to our supervisor. So many of life’s unanswered questions, so little time. Oh well.
Babies’ ‘gut instinct’ to cry
At some point or another, you’ve probably been told not to “be such a baby” when you were scared of something. If you’ve been called a crybaby, it may be an indicator that you had a different gut microbiome as an infant.
Investigators from Michigan State University and the University of North Carolina say that babies who react more strongly to scary situations have different gut microbiomes compared with babies who don’t have such a strong reaction. The way babies react to scary situations can say a lot about their future, and there is even some evidence that gut microbiomes may have something to do with mental health.
Physicians who support neurologic development may one day be able to use this research on gut microbiomes to help monitor people’s neurological health. “This early developmental period is a time of tremendous opportunity for promoting healthy brain development. The microbiome is an exciting new target that can be potentially used for that,” said Rebecca Knickmeyer of MSU, leader of the study, which was published in Nature Communications. And loyal LOTME followers already know about the OpenBiome Microbiome Library, aka the “Amazon of bacteria.”
So the next time someone tells you not to be such a baby when you’re scared of something, tell them it’s not your fault. Blame it on your gut microbiome!
Busting the myth of skipping breakfast
Your mother told you that breakfast was the most important meal of the day. Cereal marketing teams banked on that, selling breakfast to millions of people based on a common turn of phrase like “an apple a day keeps the doctor away.” Well, what if the notion of breakfast’s importance isn’t just marketing BS?
A new study suggests that adults who don’t eat breakfast are setting themselves up for a nutritional gap. Common breakfast foods pack a ton of calcium, fiber, and vitamin C from milk, cereals, and fruit. Christopher Taylor, PhD, senior author of the study and professor of dietetics at the Ohio State University, Columbus, said that if you’re not getting those nutrients from foods at breakfast, there’s a tendency to skip them throughout the rest of your day.
Data from a sample of the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey – 30,889 adults aged 19 and older who participated between 2005 and 2016 – showed that 15.2% of participants reported skipping breakfast.
The research team then estimated nutrient consumption using federal dietary studies and guidelines and compared it to Food and Nutrition Board of National Academies nutrient recommendations. The breakfast skippers, they determined, were missing out on pronounced levels of fiber, magnesium, iron, calcium, and vitamins A, B1, B2, B3, C, and D and were more likely to fall prey to lower-quality snacking. Cue those Oreos at 3 pm.
You may get more total calories within the day by eating breakfast, but your lunch, dinner, and snacks are much larger when you skip it. So the case of breakfast being the most important meal of the day checks out. Who knew that Tony the Tiger – and Mom – were actually on to something?
The bitter taste of a healthy liver
Alcohol and liver disease. They go together like, well, alcohol and liver disease. But alcohol isn’t the only reason people get liver disease, and now there’s a potential new treatment for people with hepatic steatosis on the way to becoming nonalcoholic fatty liver disease: beer.
Okay, not literally beer, but a pair of compounds derived from hops, the plant that gives beer its color and bitter flavor. In a study published in eLife, researchers from Oregon State University fed mice either a low-fat diet or a high-fat diet to induce hepatic steatosis, with some on the high-fat diet receiving either xanthohumol, a prenylated flavonoid from the hop plant, or tetrahydroxanthohumol, a hydrogenated derivative of xanthohumol.
Mice that received tetrahydroxanthohumol not only gained weight at a far slower rate than that of mice on the normal high-fat diet, their blood sugar remained stable; xanthohumol was similarly effective if the dosage was higher. The researchers noted that the two chemicals were effective because they acted as antagonists for the PPAR-gamma protein, which controls glucose metabolism and fatty cell activation. The chemicals bind to the protein but don’t activate it, meaning fat is unable to build up in the cells. No fat means no hepatic steatosis, which means no liver disease.
The researchers caution that more research is needed to determine the chemicals’ effectiveness in humans, but the classic line from a great animated philosopher still holds true: Alcohol may really be the source of, and solution to, all of life’s problems.
Life’s great mysteries, from A to zinc
Thanks to science, we now have answers to what were once unanswerable questions: Is Jello a solid or a liquid? If someone leads but no one follows, are they just out for a walk? Does zinc inhibit or promote the growth of kidney stones? How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop? (Turns out science really did answer this one.)
If you’re anything like us, then you’ve been following the big debate on the two competing theories involving the role of zinc in kidney stone formation for years. One theory says that zinc stops the growth of calcium oxalate crystals that make up stones. The other says that zinc alters the surfaces of crystals, which encourages growth.
We can’t stand the suspense any longer, so here goes: The answer to “does zinc inhibit or promote the growth of kidney stones?” is … yes.
“What we see with zinc is something we haven’t seen before. It does slow down calcium oxalate crystal growth and at the same time it changes the surface of the crystals, causing defects in the form of intergrowths. These abnormalities create centers for new crystals to nucleate and grow,” said senior author Jeffrey Rimer, PhD, of the University of Houston.
In vitro experimentation, computational modeling, and atomic force microscopy don’t lie: Zinc ions have a unique ability “to alter the termination of crystal surfaces.” They tried alternative ions found in urine, including magnesium, and there was no effect on crystal formation.
With this one great mystery now solved, we contacted Dr. Rimer to ask him about the whole “sound of one hand clapping” business. He hasn’t cracked that one yet, but he did want to speak to our supervisor. So many of life’s unanswered questions, so little time. Oh well.
Babies’ ‘gut instinct’ to cry
At some point or another, you’ve probably been told not to “be such a baby” when you were scared of something. If you’ve been called a crybaby, it may be an indicator that you had a different gut microbiome as an infant.
Investigators from Michigan State University and the University of North Carolina say that babies who react more strongly to scary situations have different gut microbiomes compared with babies who don’t have such a strong reaction. The way babies react to scary situations can say a lot about their future, and there is even some evidence that gut microbiomes may have something to do with mental health.
Physicians who support neurologic development may one day be able to use this research on gut microbiomes to help monitor people’s neurological health. “This early developmental period is a time of tremendous opportunity for promoting healthy brain development. The microbiome is an exciting new target that can be potentially used for that,” said Rebecca Knickmeyer of MSU, leader of the study, which was published in Nature Communications. And loyal LOTME followers already know about the OpenBiome Microbiome Library, aka the “Amazon of bacteria.”
So the next time someone tells you not to be such a baby when you’re scared of something, tell them it’s not your fault. Blame it on your gut microbiome!
The pandemic changed smokers, but farming didn’t change humans
Pandemic smoking: More or less?
The COVID-19 pandemic has changed a lot of habits in people, for better or worse. Some people may have turned to food and alcohol for comfort, while others started on health kicks to emerge from the ordeal as new people. Well, the same can be said about smokers.
New evidence comes from a survey conducted from May to July 2020 of 694 current and former smokers with an average age of 53 years. All had been hospitalized prior to the pandemic and had previously participated in clinical trials to for smoking cessation in Boston, Nashville, and Pittsburgh hospitals.
Researchers found that 32% of participants smoked more, 37% smoked less, and 31% made no change in their smoking habits. By the time of the survey, 28% of former smokers had relapsed. Although 68% of the participants believed smoking increased the risk of getting COVID-19, that still didn’t stop some people from smoking more. Why?
Respondents “might have increased their smoking due to stress and boredom. On the other hand, the fear of catching COVID might have led them to cut down or quit smoking,” said lead author Nancy A. Rigotti, MD. “Even before the pandemic, tobacco smoking was the leading preventable cause of death in the United States. COVID-19 has given smokers yet another good reason to stop smoking.”
This creates an opportunity for physicians to preach the gospel to smokers about their vulnerability to respiratory disease in hopes of getting them to quit for good. We just wish the same could be said for all of our excessive pandemic online shopping.
3,000 years and just one pair of genomes to wear
Men and women are different. We’ll give you a moment to pick your jaw off the ground.
It makes sense though, the sexes being different, especially when you look at the broader animal kingdom. The males and females of many species are slightly different when it comes to size and shape, but there’s a big question that literally only anthropologists have asked: Were human males and females more different in the past than they are today?
To be more specific, some scientists believe that males and females grew more similar when humans shifted from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to a farming-based lifestyle, as agriculture encouraged a more equitable division of labor. Others believe that the differences come down to random chance.
Researchers from Penn State University analyzed genomic data from over 350,000 males and females stored in the UK Biobank and looked at the recent (within the last ~3,000 years; post-agriculture adoption in Britain) evolutionary histories of these loci. Height, body mass, hip circumference, body fat percentage, and waist circumference were analyzed, and while there were thousands of differences in the genomes, only one trait occurred more frequently during that time period: Females gained a significantly higher body fat content than males.
It’s a sad day then for the millions of people who were big fans of the “farming caused men and women to become more similar” theory. Count the LOTME crew among them. Be honest: Wouldn’t life be so much simpler if men and women were exactly the same? Just think about it, no more arguments about leaving the toilet seat up. It’d be worth it just for that.
Proteins don’t lie
Research published in Open Biology shows that the human brain contains 14,315 different proteins. The team conducting that study wanted to find out which organ was the most similar to the old brain box, so they did protein counts for the 32 other major tissue types, including heart, salivary gland, lung, spleen, and endometrium.
The tissue with the most proteins in common with the center of human intelligence? You’re thinking it has to be colon at this point, right? We were sure it was going to be colon, but it’s not.
The winner, with 13,442 shared proteins, is the testes. The testes have 15,687 proteins, of which 85.7% are shared with the brain. The researchers, sadly, did not provide protein counts for the other tissue types, but we bet colon was a close second.
Dreaming about COVID?
We thought we were the only ones who have been having crazy dreams lately. Each one seems crazier and more vivid than the one before. Have you been having weird dreams lately?
This is likely your brain’s coping mechanism to handle your pandemic stress, according to Dr. Erik Hoel of Tufts University. Dreams that are crazy and scary might make real life seem lighter and simpler. He calls it the “overfitted brain hypothesis.”
“It is their very strangeness that gives them their biological function,” Dr. Hoel said. It literally makes you feel like COVID-19 and lockdowns aren’t as scary as they seem.
We always knew our minds were powerful things. Apparently, your brain gets tired of everyday familiarity just like you do, and it creates crazy dreams to keep things interesting.
Just remember: That recurring dream that you’re back in college and missing 10 assignments is there to help you, not scare you! Even though it is pretty scary.
Pandemic smoking: More or less?
The COVID-19 pandemic has changed a lot of habits in people, for better or worse. Some people may have turned to food and alcohol for comfort, while others started on health kicks to emerge from the ordeal as new people. Well, the same can be said about smokers.
New evidence comes from a survey conducted from May to July 2020 of 694 current and former smokers with an average age of 53 years. All had been hospitalized prior to the pandemic and had previously participated in clinical trials to for smoking cessation in Boston, Nashville, and Pittsburgh hospitals.
Researchers found that 32% of participants smoked more, 37% smoked less, and 31% made no change in their smoking habits. By the time of the survey, 28% of former smokers had relapsed. Although 68% of the participants believed smoking increased the risk of getting COVID-19, that still didn’t stop some people from smoking more. Why?
Respondents “might have increased their smoking due to stress and boredom. On the other hand, the fear of catching COVID might have led them to cut down or quit smoking,” said lead author Nancy A. Rigotti, MD. “Even before the pandemic, tobacco smoking was the leading preventable cause of death in the United States. COVID-19 has given smokers yet another good reason to stop smoking.”
This creates an opportunity for physicians to preach the gospel to smokers about their vulnerability to respiratory disease in hopes of getting them to quit for good. We just wish the same could be said for all of our excessive pandemic online shopping.
3,000 years and just one pair of genomes to wear
Men and women are different. We’ll give you a moment to pick your jaw off the ground.
It makes sense though, the sexes being different, especially when you look at the broader animal kingdom. The males and females of many species are slightly different when it comes to size and shape, but there’s a big question that literally only anthropologists have asked: Were human males and females more different in the past than they are today?
To be more specific, some scientists believe that males and females grew more similar when humans shifted from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to a farming-based lifestyle, as agriculture encouraged a more equitable division of labor. Others believe that the differences come down to random chance.
Researchers from Penn State University analyzed genomic data from over 350,000 males and females stored in the UK Biobank and looked at the recent (within the last ~3,000 years; post-agriculture adoption in Britain) evolutionary histories of these loci. Height, body mass, hip circumference, body fat percentage, and waist circumference were analyzed, and while there were thousands of differences in the genomes, only one trait occurred more frequently during that time period: Females gained a significantly higher body fat content than males.
It’s a sad day then for the millions of people who were big fans of the “farming caused men and women to become more similar” theory. Count the LOTME crew among them. Be honest: Wouldn’t life be so much simpler if men and women were exactly the same? Just think about it, no more arguments about leaving the toilet seat up. It’d be worth it just for that.
Proteins don’t lie
Research published in Open Biology shows that the human brain contains 14,315 different proteins. The team conducting that study wanted to find out which organ was the most similar to the old brain box, so they did protein counts for the 32 other major tissue types, including heart, salivary gland, lung, spleen, and endometrium.
The tissue with the most proteins in common with the center of human intelligence? You’re thinking it has to be colon at this point, right? We were sure it was going to be colon, but it’s not.
The winner, with 13,442 shared proteins, is the testes. The testes have 15,687 proteins, of which 85.7% are shared with the brain. The researchers, sadly, did not provide protein counts for the other tissue types, but we bet colon was a close second.
Dreaming about COVID?
We thought we were the only ones who have been having crazy dreams lately. Each one seems crazier and more vivid than the one before. Have you been having weird dreams lately?
This is likely your brain’s coping mechanism to handle your pandemic stress, according to Dr. Erik Hoel of Tufts University. Dreams that are crazy and scary might make real life seem lighter and simpler. He calls it the “overfitted brain hypothesis.”
“It is their very strangeness that gives them their biological function,” Dr. Hoel said. It literally makes you feel like COVID-19 and lockdowns aren’t as scary as they seem.
We always knew our minds were powerful things. Apparently, your brain gets tired of everyday familiarity just like you do, and it creates crazy dreams to keep things interesting.
Just remember: That recurring dream that you’re back in college and missing 10 assignments is there to help you, not scare you! Even though it is pretty scary.
Pandemic smoking: More or less?
The COVID-19 pandemic has changed a lot of habits in people, for better or worse. Some people may have turned to food and alcohol for comfort, while others started on health kicks to emerge from the ordeal as new people. Well, the same can be said about smokers.
New evidence comes from a survey conducted from May to July 2020 of 694 current and former smokers with an average age of 53 years. All had been hospitalized prior to the pandemic and had previously participated in clinical trials to for smoking cessation in Boston, Nashville, and Pittsburgh hospitals.
Researchers found that 32% of participants smoked more, 37% smoked less, and 31% made no change in their smoking habits. By the time of the survey, 28% of former smokers had relapsed. Although 68% of the participants believed smoking increased the risk of getting COVID-19, that still didn’t stop some people from smoking more. Why?
Respondents “might have increased their smoking due to stress and boredom. On the other hand, the fear of catching COVID might have led them to cut down or quit smoking,” said lead author Nancy A. Rigotti, MD. “Even before the pandemic, tobacco smoking was the leading preventable cause of death in the United States. COVID-19 has given smokers yet another good reason to stop smoking.”
This creates an opportunity for physicians to preach the gospel to smokers about their vulnerability to respiratory disease in hopes of getting them to quit for good. We just wish the same could be said for all of our excessive pandemic online shopping.
3,000 years and just one pair of genomes to wear
Men and women are different. We’ll give you a moment to pick your jaw off the ground.
It makes sense though, the sexes being different, especially when you look at the broader animal kingdom. The males and females of many species are slightly different when it comes to size and shape, but there’s a big question that literally only anthropologists have asked: Were human males and females more different in the past than they are today?
To be more specific, some scientists believe that males and females grew more similar when humans shifted from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to a farming-based lifestyle, as agriculture encouraged a more equitable division of labor. Others believe that the differences come down to random chance.
Researchers from Penn State University analyzed genomic data from over 350,000 males and females stored in the UK Biobank and looked at the recent (within the last ~3,000 years; post-agriculture adoption in Britain) evolutionary histories of these loci. Height, body mass, hip circumference, body fat percentage, and waist circumference were analyzed, and while there were thousands of differences in the genomes, only one trait occurred more frequently during that time period: Females gained a significantly higher body fat content than males.
It’s a sad day then for the millions of people who were big fans of the “farming caused men and women to become more similar” theory. Count the LOTME crew among them. Be honest: Wouldn’t life be so much simpler if men and women were exactly the same? Just think about it, no more arguments about leaving the toilet seat up. It’d be worth it just for that.
Proteins don’t lie
Research published in Open Biology shows that the human brain contains 14,315 different proteins. The team conducting that study wanted to find out which organ was the most similar to the old brain box, so they did protein counts for the 32 other major tissue types, including heart, salivary gland, lung, spleen, and endometrium.
The tissue with the most proteins in common with the center of human intelligence? You’re thinking it has to be colon at this point, right? We were sure it was going to be colon, but it’s not.
The winner, with 13,442 shared proteins, is the testes. The testes have 15,687 proteins, of which 85.7% are shared with the brain. The researchers, sadly, did not provide protein counts for the other tissue types, but we bet colon was a close second.
Dreaming about COVID?
We thought we were the only ones who have been having crazy dreams lately. Each one seems crazier and more vivid than the one before. Have you been having weird dreams lately?
This is likely your brain’s coping mechanism to handle your pandemic stress, according to Dr. Erik Hoel of Tufts University. Dreams that are crazy and scary might make real life seem lighter and simpler. He calls it the “overfitted brain hypothesis.”
“It is their very strangeness that gives them their biological function,” Dr. Hoel said. It literally makes you feel like COVID-19 and lockdowns aren’t as scary as they seem.
We always knew our minds were powerful things. Apparently, your brain gets tired of everyday familiarity just like you do, and it creates crazy dreams to keep things interesting.
Just remember: That recurring dream that you’re back in college and missing 10 assignments is there to help you, not scare you! Even though it is pretty scary.
Noses can be electronic, and toilets can be smart
Cancer loses … by a nose
Since the human nose is unpredictable at best, we’ve learned to rely on animals for our detailed nozzle needs. But researchers have found the next best thing to man’s best friend to accurately identify cancers.
A team at the University of Pennsylvania has developed an electronic olfaction, or “e-nose,” that has a 95% accuracy rate in distinguishing benign and malignant pancreatic and ovarian cancer cells from a single blood sample. How?
The e-nose system is equipped with nanosensors that are able to detect the volatile organic compounds (VOCs) emitted by cells in a blood sample. Not only does this create an opportunity for an easier, noninvasive screening practice, but it’s fast. The e-nose can distinguish VOCs from healthy to cancerous blood cells in 20 minutes or less and is just as effective in picking up on early- and late-stage cancers.
The investigators hope that this innovative technology can pave the way for similar devices with other uses. Thanks to the e-nose, a handheld device is in development that may be able to sniff out the signature odor of people with COVID-19.
That’s one smart schnoz.
Do you think this is a (food) game?
Dieting and eating healthy is tough, even during the best of times, and it has not been the best of times. With all respect to Charles Dickens, it’s been the worst of times, full stop. Millions of people have spent the past year sitting around their homes doing nothing, and it’s only natural that many would let their discipline slide.
Naturally, the solution to unhealthy eating habits is to sit down and play with your phone. No, that’s not the joke, the Food Trainer app, available on all cellular devices near you, is designed to encourage healthy eating by turning it into a game of sorts. When users open the app, they’re presented with images of food, and they’re trained to tap on images of healthy food and pass on images of unhealthy ones. The process takes less than 5 minutes.
It sounds really simple, but in a study of more than 1,000 people, consumption of junk food fell by 1 point on an 8-point scale (ranging from four times per day to zero to one time per month), participants lost about half a kilogram (a little over one pound), and more healthy food was eaten. Those who used the app more regularly, along the lines of 10 times per month or more, saw greater benefits.
The authors did acknowledge that those who used the app more may have been more motivated to lose weight anyway, which perhaps limits the overall benefit, but reviews on Google Play were overall quite positive, and if there’s one great truth in this world, it’s that Internet reviewers are almost impossible to please. So perhaps this app is worth looking into if you’re like the LOTME staff and you’re up at the top end of that 8-point scale. What, pizza is delicious, who wouldn’t eat it four times a day? And you can also get it from your phone!
It’s time for a little mass kickin’
The universe, scientists tell us, is a big place. Really big. Chromosomes, scientists tell us, are small. Really small. But despite this very fundamental difference, the universe and chromosomes share a deep, dark secret: unexplained mass.
This being a medical publication, we’ll start with chromosomes. A group of researchers measured their mass with x-rays for the first time and found that “the 46 chromosomes in each of our cells weigh 242 picograms (trillionths of a gram). This is heavier than we would expect, and, if replicated, points to unexplained excess mass in chromosomes,” Ian K. Robinson, PhD, said in a written statement.
We’re not just talking about a bit of a beer belly here. “The chromosomes were about 20 times heavier than the DNA they contained,” according to the investigators.
Now to the universe. Here’s what CERN, the European Council for Nuclear Research, has to say about the mass of the universe: “Galaxies in our universe … are rotating with such speed that the gravity generated by their observable matter could not possibly hold them together. … which leads scientists to believe that something we cannot see is at work. They think something we have yet to detect directly is giving these galaxies extra mass.”
But wait, there’s more! “The matter we know and that makes up all stars and galaxies only accounts for 5% of the content of the universe!”
So chromosomes are about 20 times heavier than the DNA they contain, and the universe is about 20 times heavier than the matter that can be seen. Interesting.
We are, of course, happy to share this news with our readers, but there is one catch: Don’t tell Neil deGrasse Tyson. He’ll want to reclassify our genetic solar system into 45 chromosomes and one dwarf chromosome.
A photo finish for the Smart Toilet
We know that poop can tell us a lot about our health, but new research by scientists at Duke University is really on a roll. Their Smart Toilet has been created to help people keep an eye on their bowel health. The device takes pictures of poop after it is flushed and can tell whether the consistency is loose, bloody, or normal.
The Smart Toilet can really help people with issues such as irritable bowel syndrome and inflammatory bowel disease by helping them, and their doctors, keep tabs on their poop. “Typically, gastroenterologists have to rely on patient self-reported information about their stool to help determine the cause of their gastrointestinal health issues, which can be very unreliable,” study lead author Deborah Fisher said.
Not many people look too closely at their poop before it’s flushed, so the fecal photos can make a big difference. The Smart Toilet is installed into the pipes of a toilet and does its thing when the toilet is flushed, so there doesn’t seem to be much work on the patient’s end. Other than the, um, you know, usual work from the patient’s end.
Cancer loses … by a nose
Since the human nose is unpredictable at best, we’ve learned to rely on animals for our detailed nozzle needs. But researchers have found the next best thing to man’s best friend to accurately identify cancers.
A team at the University of Pennsylvania has developed an electronic olfaction, or “e-nose,” that has a 95% accuracy rate in distinguishing benign and malignant pancreatic and ovarian cancer cells from a single blood sample. How?
The e-nose system is equipped with nanosensors that are able to detect the volatile organic compounds (VOCs) emitted by cells in a blood sample. Not only does this create an opportunity for an easier, noninvasive screening practice, but it’s fast. The e-nose can distinguish VOCs from healthy to cancerous blood cells in 20 minutes or less and is just as effective in picking up on early- and late-stage cancers.
The investigators hope that this innovative technology can pave the way for similar devices with other uses. Thanks to the e-nose, a handheld device is in development that may be able to sniff out the signature odor of people with COVID-19.
That’s one smart schnoz.
Do you think this is a (food) game?
Dieting and eating healthy is tough, even during the best of times, and it has not been the best of times. With all respect to Charles Dickens, it’s been the worst of times, full stop. Millions of people have spent the past year sitting around their homes doing nothing, and it’s only natural that many would let their discipline slide.
Naturally, the solution to unhealthy eating habits is to sit down and play with your phone. No, that’s not the joke, the Food Trainer app, available on all cellular devices near you, is designed to encourage healthy eating by turning it into a game of sorts. When users open the app, they’re presented with images of food, and they’re trained to tap on images of healthy food and pass on images of unhealthy ones. The process takes less than 5 minutes.
It sounds really simple, but in a study of more than 1,000 people, consumption of junk food fell by 1 point on an 8-point scale (ranging from four times per day to zero to one time per month), participants lost about half a kilogram (a little over one pound), and more healthy food was eaten. Those who used the app more regularly, along the lines of 10 times per month or more, saw greater benefits.
The authors did acknowledge that those who used the app more may have been more motivated to lose weight anyway, which perhaps limits the overall benefit, but reviews on Google Play were overall quite positive, and if there’s one great truth in this world, it’s that Internet reviewers are almost impossible to please. So perhaps this app is worth looking into if you’re like the LOTME staff and you’re up at the top end of that 8-point scale. What, pizza is delicious, who wouldn’t eat it four times a day? And you can also get it from your phone!
It’s time for a little mass kickin’
The universe, scientists tell us, is a big place. Really big. Chromosomes, scientists tell us, are small. Really small. But despite this very fundamental difference, the universe and chromosomes share a deep, dark secret: unexplained mass.
This being a medical publication, we’ll start with chromosomes. A group of researchers measured their mass with x-rays for the first time and found that “the 46 chromosomes in each of our cells weigh 242 picograms (trillionths of a gram). This is heavier than we would expect, and, if replicated, points to unexplained excess mass in chromosomes,” Ian K. Robinson, PhD, said in a written statement.
We’re not just talking about a bit of a beer belly here. “The chromosomes were about 20 times heavier than the DNA they contained,” according to the investigators.
Now to the universe. Here’s what CERN, the European Council for Nuclear Research, has to say about the mass of the universe: “Galaxies in our universe … are rotating with such speed that the gravity generated by their observable matter could not possibly hold them together. … which leads scientists to believe that something we cannot see is at work. They think something we have yet to detect directly is giving these galaxies extra mass.”
But wait, there’s more! “The matter we know and that makes up all stars and galaxies only accounts for 5% of the content of the universe!”
So chromosomes are about 20 times heavier than the DNA they contain, and the universe is about 20 times heavier than the matter that can be seen. Interesting.
We are, of course, happy to share this news with our readers, but there is one catch: Don’t tell Neil deGrasse Tyson. He’ll want to reclassify our genetic solar system into 45 chromosomes and one dwarf chromosome.
A photo finish for the Smart Toilet
We know that poop can tell us a lot about our health, but new research by scientists at Duke University is really on a roll. Their Smart Toilet has been created to help people keep an eye on their bowel health. The device takes pictures of poop after it is flushed and can tell whether the consistency is loose, bloody, or normal.
The Smart Toilet can really help people with issues such as irritable bowel syndrome and inflammatory bowel disease by helping them, and their doctors, keep tabs on their poop. “Typically, gastroenterologists have to rely on patient self-reported information about their stool to help determine the cause of their gastrointestinal health issues, which can be very unreliable,” study lead author Deborah Fisher said.
Not many people look too closely at their poop before it’s flushed, so the fecal photos can make a big difference. The Smart Toilet is installed into the pipes of a toilet and does its thing when the toilet is flushed, so there doesn’t seem to be much work on the patient’s end. Other than the, um, you know, usual work from the patient’s end.
Cancer loses … by a nose
Since the human nose is unpredictable at best, we’ve learned to rely on animals for our detailed nozzle needs. But researchers have found the next best thing to man’s best friend to accurately identify cancers.
A team at the University of Pennsylvania has developed an electronic olfaction, or “e-nose,” that has a 95% accuracy rate in distinguishing benign and malignant pancreatic and ovarian cancer cells from a single blood sample. How?
The e-nose system is equipped with nanosensors that are able to detect the volatile organic compounds (VOCs) emitted by cells in a blood sample. Not only does this create an opportunity for an easier, noninvasive screening practice, but it’s fast. The e-nose can distinguish VOCs from healthy to cancerous blood cells in 20 minutes or less and is just as effective in picking up on early- and late-stage cancers.
The investigators hope that this innovative technology can pave the way for similar devices with other uses. Thanks to the e-nose, a handheld device is in development that may be able to sniff out the signature odor of people with COVID-19.
That’s one smart schnoz.
Do you think this is a (food) game?
Dieting and eating healthy is tough, even during the best of times, and it has not been the best of times. With all respect to Charles Dickens, it’s been the worst of times, full stop. Millions of people have spent the past year sitting around their homes doing nothing, and it’s only natural that many would let their discipline slide.
Naturally, the solution to unhealthy eating habits is to sit down and play with your phone. No, that’s not the joke, the Food Trainer app, available on all cellular devices near you, is designed to encourage healthy eating by turning it into a game of sorts. When users open the app, they’re presented with images of food, and they’re trained to tap on images of healthy food and pass on images of unhealthy ones. The process takes less than 5 minutes.
It sounds really simple, but in a study of more than 1,000 people, consumption of junk food fell by 1 point on an 8-point scale (ranging from four times per day to zero to one time per month), participants lost about half a kilogram (a little over one pound), and more healthy food was eaten. Those who used the app more regularly, along the lines of 10 times per month or more, saw greater benefits.
The authors did acknowledge that those who used the app more may have been more motivated to lose weight anyway, which perhaps limits the overall benefit, but reviews on Google Play were overall quite positive, and if there’s one great truth in this world, it’s that Internet reviewers are almost impossible to please. So perhaps this app is worth looking into if you’re like the LOTME staff and you’re up at the top end of that 8-point scale. What, pizza is delicious, who wouldn’t eat it four times a day? And you can also get it from your phone!
It’s time for a little mass kickin’
The universe, scientists tell us, is a big place. Really big. Chromosomes, scientists tell us, are small. Really small. But despite this very fundamental difference, the universe and chromosomes share a deep, dark secret: unexplained mass.
This being a medical publication, we’ll start with chromosomes. A group of researchers measured their mass with x-rays for the first time and found that “the 46 chromosomes in each of our cells weigh 242 picograms (trillionths of a gram). This is heavier than we would expect, and, if replicated, points to unexplained excess mass in chromosomes,” Ian K. Robinson, PhD, said in a written statement.
We’re not just talking about a bit of a beer belly here. “The chromosomes were about 20 times heavier than the DNA they contained,” according to the investigators.
Now to the universe. Here’s what CERN, the European Council for Nuclear Research, has to say about the mass of the universe: “Galaxies in our universe … are rotating with such speed that the gravity generated by their observable matter could not possibly hold them together. … which leads scientists to believe that something we cannot see is at work. They think something we have yet to detect directly is giving these galaxies extra mass.”
But wait, there’s more! “The matter we know and that makes up all stars and galaxies only accounts for 5% of the content of the universe!”
So chromosomes are about 20 times heavier than the DNA they contain, and the universe is about 20 times heavier than the matter that can be seen. Interesting.
We are, of course, happy to share this news with our readers, but there is one catch: Don’t tell Neil deGrasse Tyson. He’ll want to reclassify our genetic solar system into 45 chromosomes and one dwarf chromosome.
A photo finish for the Smart Toilet
We know that poop can tell us a lot about our health, but new research by scientists at Duke University is really on a roll. Their Smart Toilet has been created to help people keep an eye on their bowel health. The device takes pictures of poop after it is flushed and can tell whether the consistency is loose, bloody, or normal.
The Smart Toilet can really help people with issues such as irritable bowel syndrome and inflammatory bowel disease by helping them, and their doctors, keep tabs on their poop. “Typically, gastroenterologists have to rely on patient self-reported information about their stool to help determine the cause of their gastrointestinal health issues, which can be very unreliable,” study lead author Deborah Fisher said.
Not many people look too closely at their poop before it’s flushed, so the fecal photos can make a big difference. The Smart Toilet is installed into the pipes of a toilet and does its thing when the toilet is flushed, so there doesn’t seem to be much work on the patient’s end. Other than the, um, you know, usual work from the patient’s end.
Gene therapy is bad business, and hugging chickens is just … bad
Look ma, I’m writing with no hands
Imagine being able to type every thought you had without using your hands, the words just magically appearing on the screen as fast as you can think of writing them down. Well, with the help of a new brain-computer interface (BCI), you can.
In a recent paper published in Nature, a team of researchers described how they developed a whole new way of communicating that blows previous BCIs, which used a method of pointing and clicking on letters, out of the water as far as accuracy and speed are concerned.
Developed for individuals with medical conditions or other disabilities that prevent them from communicating verbally or manually, the technology involves placing tiny sensors on the brain in the areas that control hand and arm movements. All the individual has to do is think of the process of writing and the system does the rest.
Even better, with continual use, the program’s algorithm comes to recognize the patterns of each letter, speeding up the number of words written. The previous record held for a BCI was about 40 characters per minute, but this new program enables users to type 90 characters per minute.
Think of how many emails you could reply to with just a thought. Or the LOTMEs we could write … or think? … Or think about writing?
Chicken noodle salmonella
Chickens and ducks sure are cute, especially babies, but humans should be extra careful around these animals for risk of salmonella. This isn’t a new thing to loyal readers of Livin’ on the MDedge.
As more people keep such creatures at home – Emily Shoop of Penn State University told the N.Y. Times that raising poultry was “the fastest-growing animal-related hobby in the United States” – the ducks and chickens are being treated more like house pets, which is sweet but not safe.
In the latest outbreak, more than 160 people, mostly children under 5 years old, have fallen ill from salmonella poisoning and more than 30 have been hospitalized across 43 states, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suspects the numbers could be higher because many did not get tested and recovered on their own.
People should refrain from kissing these animals and should wash their hands for at least 20 seconds after handling them, their products, or their manure. If they do happen to kiss and cuddle these animals, they should wash their face and brush their teeth.
It’s not that ducks and chickens are dirty creatures, but they naturally carry bacteria. Some can get salmonella from contaminated food, or even contract it from their mothers before birth.
We can’t speak for everyone, but we would find it hard to connect with an animal that’s going to end up on our dinner plate.
This kidney research rocks!
When kids pick teams on the playground, someone is going to get their feelings hurt by being chosen last. There’s no way around it. Someone has to be last.
It’s the same way with research teams. When scientists are trying to cure diseases or pioneer new surgical techniques, they get a team together. And who always gets picked last? That’s right, the geologist, because who needs a geologist when you’re studying brain-computer interfaces?
Turns out, though, that there was a research team that needed a geologist: The one studying kidney stones.
Illinois geology professor Bruce Fouke explains: “The process of kidney stone formation is part of the natural process of the stone formation seen throughout nature. We are bringing together geology, biology, and medicine to map the entire process of kidney stone formation, step by step.”
In its latest work, the team found that kidney stones develop as tiny bits of mineral called microspherules, which can then come together to form larger crystals if they are not flushed out of the kidney tissue. Some eventually become large enough to cause excruciating pain.
Their transdisciplinary approach, known as GeoBioMed, has produced a device the team calls the GeoBioCell, which is “a microfluidic cartridge designed to mimic the intricate internal structures of the kidney,” they said.
Great stuff, no doubt, but we’re thinking the geologists haven’t quite gotten over the whole last-picked-for-the-team business, or maybe they’re just really into Batman. They’ve named the GeoBioCell after themselves, and he had the Batmobile and the Bat-tweezers. Also the Bat-funnel. And the Bat-scilloscope.
Gene therapy: What is it good for? Absolutely nothing!
Gene therapy has the potential to permanently cure all sorts of terrible diseases, and one would assume that this would be something we all could agree on. Yes, no more cancer or diabetes or anything like that, no sane person could possibly be against this, right?
Oh, you poor naive fool.
To be fair, the report written by Goldman Sachs does lay out many potential applications for gene therapy, and all the markets it can expand into. But then the writers ask the question that they’re not supposed to say out loud: Is curing patients a sustainable business model?
They go on to say that, while it would obviously be of enormous benefit to patients and society to give a one-shot cure rather than forcing a long, drawn-out series of treatments, current therapies for chronic disease represent a major source of money that would be cut off if a permanent treatment were found. They specifically mentioned hepatitis C, which has achieved a cure rate of over 90% in the past few years. In 2015, Gilead – the maker of these treatments – brought in sales of over $12 billion from its hepatitis C cure, but the report estimated that in 2021 they would bring in only $4 billion.
The authors of the report suggested that developers focus on “large markets,” such as hemophilia; diseases with high incidence like spinal muscular atrophy; and on diseases such as the various inherited retinal disorders, where there’s plenty of room to constantly bring out new and exciting treatments without sabotaging the all-important money flow.
While we can accept that Goldman Sachs may be technically correct in their assertion that curing disease is bad for business, that’s about as far as our sympathy goes, unless the big biotech companies of the world would like a sad song played on the world’s smallest violin.
Look ma, I’m writing with no hands
Imagine being able to type every thought you had without using your hands, the words just magically appearing on the screen as fast as you can think of writing them down. Well, with the help of a new brain-computer interface (BCI), you can.
In a recent paper published in Nature, a team of researchers described how they developed a whole new way of communicating that blows previous BCIs, which used a method of pointing and clicking on letters, out of the water as far as accuracy and speed are concerned.
Developed for individuals with medical conditions or other disabilities that prevent them from communicating verbally or manually, the technology involves placing tiny sensors on the brain in the areas that control hand and arm movements. All the individual has to do is think of the process of writing and the system does the rest.
Even better, with continual use, the program’s algorithm comes to recognize the patterns of each letter, speeding up the number of words written. The previous record held for a BCI was about 40 characters per minute, but this new program enables users to type 90 characters per minute.
Think of how many emails you could reply to with just a thought. Or the LOTMEs we could write … or think? … Or think about writing?
Chicken noodle salmonella
Chickens and ducks sure are cute, especially babies, but humans should be extra careful around these animals for risk of salmonella. This isn’t a new thing to loyal readers of Livin’ on the MDedge.
As more people keep such creatures at home – Emily Shoop of Penn State University told the N.Y. Times that raising poultry was “the fastest-growing animal-related hobby in the United States” – the ducks and chickens are being treated more like house pets, which is sweet but not safe.
In the latest outbreak, more than 160 people, mostly children under 5 years old, have fallen ill from salmonella poisoning and more than 30 have been hospitalized across 43 states, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suspects the numbers could be higher because many did not get tested and recovered on their own.
People should refrain from kissing these animals and should wash their hands for at least 20 seconds after handling them, their products, or their manure. If they do happen to kiss and cuddle these animals, they should wash their face and brush their teeth.
It’s not that ducks and chickens are dirty creatures, but they naturally carry bacteria. Some can get salmonella from contaminated food, or even contract it from their mothers before birth.
We can’t speak for everyone, but we would find it hard to connect with an animal that’s going to end up on our dinner plate.
This kidney research rocks!
When kids pick teams on the playground, someone is going to get their feelings hurt by being chosen last. There’s no way around it. Someone has to be last.
It’s the same way with research teams. When scientists are trying to cure diseases or pioneer new surgical techniques, they get a team together. And who always gets picked last? That’s right, the geologist, because who needs a geologist when you’re studying brain-computer interfaces?
Turns out, though, that there was a research team that needed a geologist: The one studying kidney stones.
Illinois geology professor Bruce Fouke explains: “The process of kidney stone formation is part of the natural process of the stone formation seen throughout nature. We are bringing together geology, biology, and medicine to map the entire process of kidney stone formation, step by step.”
In its latest work, the team found that kidney stones develop as tiny bits of mineral called microspherules, which can then come together to form larger crystals if they are not flushed out of the kidney tissue. Some eventually become large enough to cause excruciating pain.
Their transdisciplinary approach, known as GeoBioMed, has produced a device the team calls the GeoBioCell, which is “a microfluidic cartridge designed to mimic the intricate internal structures of the kidney,” they said.
Great stuff, no doubt, but we’re thinking the geologists haven’t quite gotten over the whole last-picked-for-the-team business, or maybe they’re just really into Batman. They’ve named the GeoBioCell after themselves, and he had the Batmobile and the Bat-tweezers. Also the Bat-funnel. And the Bat-scilloscope.
Gene therapy: What is it good for? Absolutely nothing!
Gene therapy has the potential to permanently cure all sorts of terrible diseases, and one would assume that this would be something we all could agree on. Yes, no more cancer or diabetes or anything like that, no sane person could possibly be against this, right?
Oh, you poor naive fool.
To be fair, the report written by Goldman Sachs does lay out many potential applications for gene therapy, and all the markets it can expand into. But then the writers ask the question that they’re not supposed to say out loud: Is curing patients a sustainable business model?
They go on to say that, while it would obviously be of enormous benefit to patients and society to give a one-shot cure rather than forcing a long, drawn-out series of treatments, current therapies for chronic disease represent a major source of money that would be cut off if a permanent treatment were found. They specifically mentioned hepatitis C, which has achieved a cure rate of over 90% in the past few years. In 2015, Gilead – the maker of these treatments – brought in sales of over $12 billion from its hepatitis C cure, but the report estimated that in 2021 they would bring in only $4 billion.
The authors of the report suggested that developers focus on “large markets,” such as hemophilia; diseases with high incidence like spinal muscular atrophy; and on diseases such as the various inherited retinal disorders, where there’s plenty of room to constantly bring out new and exciting treatments without sabotaging the all-important money flow.
While we can accept that Goldman Sachs may be technically correct in their assertion that curing disease is bad for business, that’s about as far as our sympathy goes, unless the big biotech companies of the world would like a sad song played on the world’s smallest violin.
Look ma, I’m writing with no hands
Imagine being able to type every thought you had without using your hands, the words just magically appearing on the screen as fast as you can think of writing them down. Well, with the help of a new brain-computer interface (BCI), you can.
In a recent paper published in Nature, a team of researchers described how they developed a whole new way of communicating that blows previous BCIs, which used a method of pointing and clicking on letters, out of the water as far as accuracy and speed are concerned.
Developed for individuals with medical conditions or other disabilities that prevent them from communicating verbally or manually, the technology involves placing tiny sensors on the brain in the areas that control hand and arm movements. All the individual has to do is think of the process of writing and the system does the rest.
Even better, with continual use, the program’s algorithm comes to recognize the patterns of each letter, speeding up the number of words written. The previous record held for a BCI was about 40 characters per minute, but this new program enables users to type 90 characters per minute.
Think of how many emails you could reply to with just a thought. Or the LOTMEs we could write … or think? … Or think about writing?
Chicken noodle salmonella
Chickens and ducks sure are cute, especially babies, but humans should be extra careful around these animals for risk of salmonella. This isn’t a new thing to loyal readers of Livin’ on the MDedge.
As more people keep such creatures at home – Emily Shoop of Penn State University told the N.Y. Times that raising poultry was “the fastest-growing animal-related hobby in the United States” – the ducks and chickens are being treated more like house pets, which is sweet but not safe.
In the latest outbreak, more than 160 people, mostly children under 5 years old, have fallen ill from salmonella poisoning and more than 30 have been hospitalized across 43 states, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suspects the numbers could be higher because many did not get tested and recovered on their own.
People should refrain from kissing these animals and should wash their hands for at least 20 seconds after handling them, their products, or their manure. If they do happen to kiss and cuddle these animals, they should wash their face and brush their teeth.
It’s not that ducks and chickens are dirty creatures, but they naturally carry bacteria. Some can get salmonella from contaminated food, or even contract it from their mothers before birth.
We can’t speak for everyone, but we would find it hard to connect with an animal that’s going to end up on our dinner plate.
This kidney research rocks!
When kids pick teams on the playground, someone is going to get their feelings hurt by being chosen last. There’s no way around it. Someone has to be last.
It’s the same way with research teams. When scientists are trying to cure diseases or pioneer new surgical techniques, they get a team together. And who always gets picked last? That’s right, the geologist, because who needs a geologist when you’re studying brain-computer interfaces?
Turns out, though, that there was a research team that needed a geologist: The one studying kidney stones.
Illinois geology professor Bruce Fouke explains: “The process of kidney stone formation is part of the natural process of the stone formation seen throughout nature. We are bringing together geology, biology, and medicine to map the entire process of kidney stone formation, step by step.”
In its latest work, the team found that kidney stones develop as tiny bits of mineral called microspherules, which can then come together to form larger crystals if they are not flushed out of the kidney tissue. Some eventually become large enough to cause excruciating pain.
Their transdisciplinary approach, known as GeoBioMed, has produced a device the team calls the GeoBioCell, which is “a microfluidic cartridge designed to mimic the intricate internal structures of the kidney,” they said.
Great stuff, no doubt, but we’re thinking the geologists haven’t quite gotten over the whole last-picked-for-the-team business, or maybe they’re just really into Batman. They’ve named the GeoBioCell after themselves, and he had the Batmobile and the Bat-tweezers. Also the Bat-funnel. And the Bat-scilloscope.
Gene therapy: What is it good for? Absolutely nothing!
Gene therapy has the potential to permanently cure all sorts of terrible diseases, and one would assume that this would be something we all could agree on. Yes, no more cancer or diabetes or anything like that, no sane person could possibly be against this, right?
Oh, you poor naive fool.
To be fair, the report written by Goldman Sachs does lay out many potential applications for gene therapy, and all the markets it can expand into. But then the writers ask the question that they’re not supposed to say out loud: Is curing patients a sustainable business model?
They go on to say that, while it would obviously be of enormous benefit to patients and society to give a one-shot cure rather than forcing a long, drawn-out series of treatments, current therapies for chronic disease represent a major source of money that would be cut off if a permanent treatment were found. They specifically mentioned hepatitis C, which has achieved a cure rate of over 90% in the past few years. In 2015, Gilead – the maker of these treatments – brought in sales of over $12 billion from its hepatitis C cure, but the report estimated that in 2021 they would bring in only $4 billion.
The authors of the report suggested that developers focus on “large markets,” such as hemophilia; diseases with high incidence like spinal muscular atrophy; and on diseases such as the various inherited retinal disorders, where there’s plenty of room to constantly bring out new and exciting treatments without sabotaging the all-important money flow.
While we can accept that Goldman Sachs may be technically correct in their assertion that curing disease is bad for business, that’s about as far as our sympathy goes, unless the big biotech companies of the world would like a sad song played on the world’s smallest violin.
A new take on breathing and a performance-enhancing placebo
No ifs, ands, or butt ventilators
Breathing, on most days, is a pretty simple task. You inhale, the oxygen goes in, fills your lungs, becomes carbon dioxide, and is exhaled. But as certain recent events have made very clear, some diseases make this task difficult, which is where ventilators come in. The issue is, some patients can’t really use ventilators.
Enter a new study from Japan, which tested the ability of mice and pigs to absorb oxygen through the rectum. Yes, breathing through the butt. It’s not actually such a far-fetched idea; several aquatic animals such as sea cucumbers and catfish absorb oxygen through their intestines, and as any drunken frat boy can tell you after a good butt chug, other chemicals can absolutely be absorbed by human intestines.
After an initial successful experiment where a group of mice had their intestines scrubbed, had pure oxygen inserted enterally, and were exposed to a hypoxic environment, the researchers decided to step up their game and avoid the exhaustive act of digestive scrubbing by enlisting the aid of something out of science fiction: perfluorocarbon. If you haven’t seen “The Abyss,” this liquid can absorb massive amounts of oxygen, so you can actually breathe it in the same way you do with air.
In part two of the experiment, a group of hypoxic mice and pigs had perfluorocarbon inserted into their anuses, while another group got saline solution. The saline group did not fare well, but the animals that got perfluorocarbon had their hypoxic symptoms relieved within minutes.
The effectiveness of this procedure in humans clearly has yet to be tested, and while it may not be useful in all, or even most, situations, it is always beneficial to have more ways to combat a problem. Just don’t tell the frat boys: They’ll be hooking oxygen tanks up to their butts and chanting: “Breathe! Breathe! Breathe!”
Better, stronger, faster … pinker
Many people, most of whom aren’t even athletes, commit huge amounts of time, effort, and expense to improve their athletic performance. But what if there’s an easier way?
Research conducted at the University of Westminster (England) showed that participants could, with one fairly simple intervention, get on a treadmill and run 212 meters further in 30 minutes, increasing their speed by an average of 4.4%. Not only that, but “feelings of pleasure were also enhanced, meaning participants found running more enjoyable,” according to a statement from the university.
Is this amazing intervention a new wonder drug? No. Is it a super special nutritional supplement? Negatory. An energy drink that “gives you wiiings”? Nope. The latest designer steroid? Nyet.
Like we said, it’s simple, and it’s pink. Literally, the color pink. We will explain.
Each of the 10 study subjects completed two 30-minute trials on the treadmill. For one, they were given a clear, artificially sweetened drink while they were running. For the other, they received the exact same drink colored pink with food dye. Pink did better. So to recap the last month in our column, faster looks pink, and skinny smells like lemons.
Once again, science demonstrates that you can’t go wrong by fooling a brain. Next week, LOTME tries to find out if purple makes you funnier.
Hey … I’m singing here!
Noise pollution has been linked to plenty of negative outcomes, but the latest target is the poor baby zebra finch.
Researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Ornithology in Germany say traffic noise disrupts the timing of vocal development and impairs learning in the flying finches. The noise was also shown to suppress their immune systems, because of lingering stress.
The good news is that the birds with noise-induced stress sang as much as their peers in a control group, so the delay in development “was not due to a lack of vocal practice,” according to researchers. However, one long-term effect could be that zebra finch birdsongs could change over time due to noise-induced copying errors. Imagine a really long game of birdsong telephone – the song at the beginning is unlikely to be the song years from now.
While not mentioned in the study, one could also imagine that due to all that exposure to traffic, young zebra finches could be developing a salty dialect and impatience with fellow finches taking up too much space on the same tree branch. Hopefully, they don’t give others “the bird.”
Slimy soap
Remember at the beginning of the pandemic when it was almost impossible to find sufficient hand-washing supplies? Just when you thought you’d tried everything, there is soap made from snail slime.
Snail slime, surprisingly, has many beneficial properties for humans. The slime has antiaging and skin healing properties and is actually used in some Korean beauty supplies. The snails even use the slime to help fix their shells if they become damaged.
Happily, no snails are harmed in the slime extraction and making of the soap. Snail farmer Damien Desrochers says, “I only touch it with my finger, you see it’s not violent, it’s simple.”
As you can probably imagine, a lot of slime is needed to have a steady supply of this soap, so Mr. Desrochers has systems in place to get enough slime. Approximately 40 snails are needed to make 15 bars of soap, and he hopes to produce about 3,000 bars in the first year.
Nothing really surprises us anymore in the beauty world: People put eggs in their hair and bee venom on their skin, so what’s wrong with a little snail slime?
No ifs, ands, or butt ventilators
Breathing, on most days, is a pretty simple task. You inhale, the oxygen goes in, fills your lungs, becomes carbon dioxide, and is exhaled. But as certain recent events have made very clear, some diseases make this task difficult, which is where ventilators come in. The issue is, some patients can’t really use ventilators.
Enter a new study from Japan, which tested the ability of mice and pigs to absorb oxygen through the rectum. Yes, breathing through the butt. It’s not actually such a far-fetched idea; several aquatic animals such as sea cucumbers and catfish absorb oxygen through their intestines, and as any drunken frat boy can tell you after a good butt chug, other chemicals can absolutely be absorbed by human intestines.
After an initial successful experiment where a group of mice had their intestines scrubbed, had pure oxygen inserted enterally, and were exposed to a hypoxic environment, the researchers decided to step up their game and avoid the exhaustive act of digestive scrubbing by enlisting the aid of something out of science fiction: perfluorocarbon. If you haven’t seen “The Abyss,” this liquid can absorb massive amounts of oxygen, so you can actually breathe it in the same way you do with air.
In part two of the experiment, a group of hypoxic mice and pigs had perfluorocarbon inserted into their anuses, while another group got saline solution. The saline group did not fare well, but the animals that got perfluorocarbon had their hypoxic symptoms relieved within minutes.
The effectiveness of this procedure in humans clearly has yet to be tested, and while it may not be useful in all, or even most, situations, it is always beneficial to have more ways to combat a problem. Just don’t tell the frat boys: They’ll be hooking oxygen tanks up to their butts and chanting: “Breathe! Breathe! Breathe!”
Better, stronger, faster … pinker
Many people, most of whom aren’t even athletes, commit huge amounts of time, effort, and expense to improve their athletic performance. But what if there’s an easier way?
Research conducted at the University of Westminster (England) showed that participants could, with one fairly simple intervention, get on a treadmill and run 212 meters further in 30 minutes, increasing their speed by an average of 4.4%. Not only that, but “feelings of pleasure were also enhanced, meaning participants found running more enjoyable,” according to a statement from the university.
Is this amazing intervention a new wonder drug? No. Is it a super special nutritional supplement? Negatory. An energy drink that “gives you wiiings”? Nope. The latest designer steroid? Nyet.
Like we said, it’s simple, and it’s pink. Literally, the color pink. We will explain.
Each of the 10 study subjects completed two 30-minute trials on the treadmill. For one, they were given a clear, artificially sweetened drink while they were running. For the other, they received the exact same drink colored pink with food dye. Pink did better. So to recap the last month in our column, faster looks pink, and skinny smells like lemons.
Once again, science demonstrates that you can’t go wrong by fooling a brain. Next week, LOTME tries to find out if purple makes you funnier.
Hey … I’m singing here!
Noise pollution has been linked to plenty of negative outcomes, but the latest target is the poor baby zebra finch.
Researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Ornithology in Germany say traffic noise disrupts the timing of vocal development and impairs learning in the flying finches. The noise was also shown to suppress their immune systems, because of lingering stress.
The good news is that the birds with noise-induced stress sang as much as their peers in a control group, so the delay in development “was not due to a lack of vocal practice,” according to researchers. However, one long-term effect could be that zebra finch birdsongs could change over time due to noise-induced copying errors. Imagine a really long game of birdsong telephone – the song at the beginning is unlikely to be the song years from now.
While not mentioned in the study, one could also imagine that due to all that exposure to traffic, young zebra finches could be developing a salty dialect and impatience with fellow finches taking up too much space on the same tree branch. Hopefully, they don’t give others “the bird.”
Slimy soap
Remember at the beginning of the pandemic when it was almost impossible to find sufficient hand-washing supplies? Just when you thought you’d tried everything, there is soap made from snail slime.
Snail slime, surprisingly, has many beneficial properties for humans. The slime has antiaging and skin healing properties and is actually used in some Korean beauty supplies. The snails even use the slime to help fix their shells if they become damaged.
Happily, no snails are harmed in the slime extraction and making of the soap. Snail farmer Damien Desrochers says, “I only touch it with my finger, you see it’s not violent, it’s simple.”
As you can probably imagine, a lot of slime is needed to have a steady supply of this soap, so Mr. Desrochers has systems in place to get enough slime. Approximately 40 snails are needed to make 15 bars of soap, and he hopes to produce about 3,000 bars in the first year.
Nothing really surprises us anymore in the beauty world: People put eggs in their hair and bee venom on their skin, so what’s wrong with a little snail slime?
No ifs, ands, or butt ventilators
Breathing, on most days, is a pretty simple task. You inhale, the oxygen goes in, fills your lungs, becomes carbon dioxide, and is exhaled. But as certain recent events have made very clear, some diseases make this task difficult, which is where ventilators come in. The issue is, some patients can’t really use ventilators.
Enter a new study from Japan, which tested the ability of mice and pigs to absorb oxygen through the rectum. Yes, breathing through the butt. It’s not actually such a far-fetched idea; several aquatic animals such as sea cucumbers and catfish absorb oxygen through their intestines, and as any drunken frat boy can tell you after a good butt chug, other chemicals can absolutely be absorbed by human intestines.
After an initial successful experiment where a group of mice had their intestines scrubbed, had pure oxygen inserted enterally, and were exposed to a hypoxic environment, the researchers decided to step up their game and avoid the exhaustive act of digestive scrubbing by enlisting the aid of something out of science fiction: perfluorocarbon. If you haven’t seen “The Abyss,” this liquid can absorb massive amounts of oxygen, so you can actually breathe it in the same way you do with air.
In part two of the experiment, a group of hypoxic mice and pigs had perfluorocarbon inserted into their anuses, while another group got saline solution. The saline group did not fare well, but the animals that got perfluorocarbon had their hypoxic symptoms relieved within minutes.
The effectiveness of this procedure in humans clearly has yet to be tested, and while it may not be useful in all, or even most, situations, it is always beneficial to have more ways to combat a problem. Just don’t tell the frat boys: They’ll be hooking oxygen tanks up to their butts and chanting: “Breathe! Breathe! Breathe!”
Better, stronger, faster … pinker
Many people, most of whom aren’t even athletes, commit huge amounts of time, effort, and expense to improve their athletic performance. But what if there’s an easier way?
Research conducted at the University of Westminster (England) showed that participants could, with one fairly simple intervention, get on a treadmill and run 212 meters further in 30 minutes, increasing their speed by an average of 4.4%. Not only that, but “feelings of pleasure were also enhanced, meaning participants found running more enjoyable,” according to a statement from the university.
Is this amazing intervention a new wonder drug? No. Is it a super special nutritional supplement? Negatory. An energy drink that “gives you wiiings”? Nope. The latest designer steroid? Nyet.
Like we said, it’s simple, and it’s pink. Literally, the color pink. We will explain.
Each of the 10 study subjects completed two 30-minute trials on the treadmill. For one, they were given a clear, artificially sweetened drink while they were running. For the other, they received the exact same drink colored pink with food dye. Pink did better. So to recap the last month in our column, faster looks pink, and skinny smells like lemons.
Once again, science demonstrates that you can’t go wrong by fooling a brain. Next week, LOTME tries to find out if purple makes you funnier.
Hey … I’m singing here!
Noise pollution has been linked to plenty of negative outcomes, but the latest target is the poor baby zebra finch.
Researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Ornithology in Germany say traffic noise disrupts the timing of vocal development and impairs learning in the flying finches. The noise was also shown to suppress their immune systems, because of lingering stress.
The good news is that the birds with noise-induced stress sang as much as their peers in a control group, so the delay in development “was not due to a lack of vocal practice,” according to researchers. However, one long-term effect could be that zebra finch birdsongs could change over time due to noise-induced copying errors. Imagine a really long game of birdsong telephone – the song at the beginning is unlikely to be the song years from now.
While not mentioned in the study, one could also imagine that due to all that exposure to traffic, young zebra finches could be developing a salty dialect and impatience with fellow finches taking up too much space on the same tree branch. Hopefully, they don’t give others “the bird.”
Slimy soap
Remember at the beginning of the pandemic when it was almost impossible to find sufficient hand-washing supplies? Just when you thought you’d tried everything, there is soap made from snail slime.
Snail slime, surprisingly, has many beneficial properties for humans. The slime has antiaging and skin healing properties and is actually used in some Korean beauty supplies. The snails even use the slime to help fix their shells if they become damaged.
Happily, no snails are harmed in the slime extraction and making of the soap. Snail farmer Damien Desrochers says, “I only touch it with my finger, you see it’s not violent, it’s simple.”
As you can probably imagine, a lot of slime is needed to have a steady supply of this soap, so Mr. Desrochers has systems in place to get enough slime. Approximately 40 snails are needed to make 15 bars of soap, and he hopes to produce about 3,000 bars in the first year.
Nothing really surprises us anymore in the beauty world: People put eggs in their hair and bee venom on their skin, so what’s wrong with a little snail slime?
Canned diabetes prevention and a haunted COVID castle
Lower blood sugar with sardines
If you’ve ever turned your nose up at someone eating sardines straight from the can, you could be the one missing out on a good way to boost your own health.
New research from Open University of Catalonia (Spain) has found that eating two cans of whole sardines a week can help prevent people from developing type 2 diabetes (T2D). Now you might be thinking: That’s a lot of fish, can’t I just take a supplement pill? Actually, no.
“Nutrients can play an essential role in the prevention and treatment of many different pathologies, but their effect is usually caused by the synergy that exists between them and the food that they are contained in,” study coauthor Diana Rizzolo, PhD, said in a written statement. See, we told you.
In a study of 152 patients with prediabetes, each participant was put on a specific diet to reduce their chances of developing T2D. Among the patients who were not given sardines each week, the proportion considered to be at the highest risk fell from 27% to 22% after 1 year, but for those who did get the sardines, the size of the high-risk group shrank from 37% to just 8%.
Suggesting sardines during checkups could make eating them more widely accepted, Dr. Rizzolo and associates said. Sardines are cheap, easy to find, and also have the benefits of other oily fish, like boosting insulin resistance and increasing good cholesterol.
So why not have a can with a couple of saltine crackers for lunch? Your blood sugar will thank you. Just please avoid indulging on a plane or in your office, where workers are slowly returning – no need to give them another excuse to avoid their cubicle.
Come for the torture, stay for the vaccine
Bran Castle. Home of Dracula and Vlad the Impaler (at least in pop culture’s eyes). A moody Gothic structure atop a hill. You can practically hear the ancient screams of thousands of tortured souls as you wander the grounds and its cursed halls. Naturally, it’s a major tourist destination.
Unfortunately for Romania, the pandemic has rather put a damper on tourism. The restrictions have done their damage, but here’s a quick LOTME theory: Perhaps people don’t want to be reminded of medieval tortures when we’ve got plenty of modern-day ones right now.
The management of Bran Castle has developed a new gimmick to drum up attendance – come to Bran Castle and get your COVID vaccine. Anyone can come and get jabbed with the Pfizer vaccine on all weekends in May, and when they do, they gain free admittance to the castle and the exhibit within, home to 52 medieval torture instruments. “The idea … was to show how people got jabbed 500-600 years ago in Europe,” the castle’s marketing director said.
While it may not be kind of the jabbing ole Vladdy got his name for – fully impaling people on hundreds of wooden stakes while you eat a nice dinner isn’t exactly smiled upon in today’s world – we’re sure he’d approve of this more limited but ultimately beneficial version. Jabbing people while helping them really is the dream.
Fuzzy little COVID detectors
Before we get started, we need a moment to get our deep, movie trailer announcer-type voice ready. Okay, here goes.
“In a world where an organism too tiny to see brings entire economies to a standstill and pits scientists against doofuses, who can humanity turn to for help?”
How about bees? That’s right, we said bees. But not just any bees. Specially trained bees. Specially trained Dutch bees. Bees trained to sniff out our greatest nemesis. No, we’re not talking about Ted Cruz anymore. Let it go, that was just a joke. We’re talking COVID.
We’ll let Wim van der Poel, professor of virology at Wageningen (the Netherlands) University, explain the process: “We collect normal honeybees from a beekeeper, and we put the bees in harnesses.” And you thought their tulips were pretty great – the Dutch are putting harnesses on bees! (Which is much better than our previous story of bees involving a Taiwanese patient.)
The researchers presented the bees with two types of samples: COVID infected and non–COVID infected. The infected samples came with a sugary water reward and the noninfected samples did not, so the bees quickly learned to tell the difference.
The bees, then, could cut the waiting time for test results down to seconds, and at a fraction of the cost, making them an option in countries without a lot of testing infrastructure, the research team suggested.
The plan is not without its flaws, of course, but we’re convinced. More than that, we are true bee-lievers.
A little slice of … well, not heaven
If you’ve been around for the last 2 decades, you’ve seen your share of Internet trends: Remember the ice bucket challenge? Tide pod eating? We know what you’re thinking: Sigh, what could they be doing now?
Well, people are eating old meat, and before you think about the expired ground beef you got on special from the grocery store yesterday, that’s not quite what we mean. We all know expiration dates are “suggestions,” like yield signs and yellow lights. People are eating rotten, decomposing, borderline moldy meat.
They claim that the meat tastes better. We’re not so sure, but don’t worry, because it gets weirder. Some folks, apparently, are getting high from eating this meat, experiencing a feeling of euphoria. Personally, we think that rotten fumes probably knocked these people out and made them hallucinate.
Singaporean dietitian Naras Lapsys says that eating rotten meat can possibly cause a person to go into another state of consciousness, but it’s not a good thing. We don’t think you have to be a dietitian to know that.
It has not been definitively proven that eating rotting meat makes you high, but it’s definitely proven that this is disgusting … and very dangerous.
Lower blood sugar with sardines
If you’ve ever turned your nose up at someone eating sardines straight from the can, you could be the one missing out on a good way to boost your own health.
New research from Open University of Catalonia (Spain) has found that eating two cans of whole sardines a week can help prevent people from developing type 2 diabetes (T2D). Now you might be thinking: That’s a lot of fish, can’t I just take a supplement pill? Actually, no.
“Nutrients can play an essential role in the prevention and treatment of many different pathologies, but their effect is usually caused by the synergy that exists between them and the food that they are contained in,” study coauthor Diana Rizzolo, PhD, said in a written statement. See, we told you.
In a study of 152 patients with prediabetes, each participant was put on a specific diet to reduce their chances of developing T2D. Among the patients who were not given sardines each week, the proportion considered to be at the highest risk fell from 27% to 22% after 1 year, but for those who did get the sardines, the size of the high-risk group shrank from 37% to just 8%.
Suggesting sardines during checkups could make eating them more widely accepted, Dr. Rizzolo and associates said. Sardines are cheap, easy to find, and also have the benefits of other oily fish, like boosting insulin resistance and increasing good cholesterol.
So why not have a can with a couple of saltine crackers for lunch? Your blood sugar will thank you. Just please avoid indulging on a plane or in your office, where workers are slowly returning – no need to give them another excuse to avoid their cubicle.
Come for the torture, stay for the vaccine
Bran Castle. Home of Dracula and Vlad the Impaler (at least in pop culture’s eyes). A moody Gothic structure atop a hill. You can practically hear the ancient screams of thousands of tortured souls as you wander the grounds and its cursed halls. Naturally, it’s a major tourist destination.
Unfortunately for Romania, the pandemic has rather put a damper on tourism. The restrictions have done their damage, but here’s a quick LOTME theory: Perhaps people don’t want to be reminded of medieval tortures when we’ve got plenty of modern-day ones right now.
The management of Bran Castle has developed a new gimmick to drum up attendance – come to Bran Castle and get your COVID vaccine. Anyone can come and get jabbed with the Pfizer vaccine on all weekends in May, and when they do, they gain free admittance to the castle and the exhibit within, home to 52 medieval torture instruments. “The idea … was to show how people got jabbed 500-600 years ago in Europe,” the castle’s marketing director said.
While it may not be kind of the jabbing ole Vladdy got his name for – fully impaling people on hundreds of wooden stakes while you eat a nice dinner isn’t exactly smiled upon in today’s world – we’re sure he’d approve of this more limited but ultimately beneficial version. Jabbing people while helping them really is the dream.
Fuzzy little COVID detectors
Before we get started, we need a moment to get our deep, movie trailer announcer-type voice ready. Okay, here goes.
“In a world where an organism too tiny to see brings entire economies to a standstill and pits scientists against doofuses, who can humanity turn to for help?”
How about bees? That’s right, we said bees. But not just any bees. Specially trained bees. Specially trained Dutch bees. Bees trained to sniff out our greatest nemesis. No, we’re not talking about Ted Cruz anymore. Let it go, that was just a joke. We’re talking COVID.
We’ll let Wim van der Poel, professor of virology at Wageningen (the Netherlands) University, explain the process: “We collect normal honeybees from a beekeeper, and we put the bees in harnesses.” And you thought their tulips were pretty great – the Dutch are putting harnesses on bees! (Which is much better than our previous story of bees involving a Taiwanese patient.)
The researchers presented the bees with two types of samples: COVID infected and non–COVID infected. The infected samples came with a sugary water reward and the noninfected samples did not, so the bees quickly learned to tell the difference.
The bees, then, could cut the waiting time for test results down to seconds, and at a fraction of the cost, making them an option in countries without a lot of testing infrastructure, the research team suggested.
The plan is not without its flaws, of course, but we’re convinced. More than that, we are true bee-lievers.
A little slice of … well, not heaven
If you’ve been around for the last 2 decades, you’ve seen your share of Internet trends: Remember the ice bucket challenge? Tide pod eating? We know what you’re thinking: Sigh, what could they be doing now?
Well, people are eating old meat, and before you think about the expired ground beef you got on special from the grocery store yesterday, that’s not quite what we mean. We all know expiration dates are “suggestions,” like yield signs and yellow lights. People are eating rotten, decomposing, borderline moldy meat.
They claim that the meat tastes better. We’re not so sure, but don’t worry, because it gets weirder. Some folks, apparently, are getting high from eating this meat, experiencing a feeling of euphoria. Personally, we think that rotten fumes probably knocked these people out and made them hallucinate.
Singaporean dietitian Naras Lapsys says that eating rotten meat can possibly cause a person to go into another state of consciousness, but it’s not a good thing. We don’t think you have to be a dietitian to know that.
It has not been definitively proven that eating rotting meat makes you high, but it’s definitely proven that this is disgusting … and very dangerous.
Lower blood sugar with sardines
If you’ve ever turned your nose up at someone eating sardines straight from the can, you could be the one missing out on a good way to boost your own health.
New research from Open University of Catalonia (Spain) has found that eating two cans of whole sardines a week can help prevent people from developing type 2 diabetes (T2D). Now you might be thinking: That’s a lot of fish, can’t I just take a supplement pill? Actually, no.
“Nutrients can play an essential role in the prevention and treatment of many different pathologies, but their effect is usually caused by the synergy that exists between them and the food that they are contained in,” study coauthor Diana Rizzolo, PhD, said in a written statement. See, we told you.
In a study of 152 patients with prediabetes, each participant was put on a specific diet to reduce their chances of developing T2D. Among the patients who were not given sardines each week, the proportion considered to be at the highest risk fell from 27% to 22% after 1 year, but for those who did get the sardines, the size of the high-risk group shrank from 37% to just 8%.
Suggesting sardines during checkups could make eating them more widely accepted, Dr. Rizzolo and associates said. Sardines are cheap, easy to find, and also have the benefits of other oily fish, like boosting insulin resistance and increasing good cholesterol.
So why not have a can with a couple of saltine crackers for lunch? Your blood sugar will thank you. Just please avoid indulging on a plane or in your office, where workers are slowly returning – no need to give them another excuse to avoid their cubicle.
Come for the torture, stay for the vaccine
Bran Castle. Home of Dracula and Vlad the Impaler (at least in pop culture’s eyes). A moody Gothic structure atop a hill. You can practically hear the ancient screams of thousands of tortured souls as you wander the grounds and its cursed halls. Naturally, it’s a major tourist destination.
Unfortunately for Romania, the pandemic has rather put a damper on tourism. The restrictions have done their damage, but here’s a quick LOTME theory: Perhaps people don’t want to be reminded of medieval tortures when we’ve got plenty of modern-day ones right now.
The management of Bran Castle has developed a new gimmick to drum up attendance – come to Bran Castle and get your COVID vaccine. Anyone can come and get jabbed with the Pfizer vaccine on all weekends in May, and when they do, they gain free admittance to the castle and the exhibit within, home to 52 medieval torture instruments. “The idea … was to show how people got jabbed 500-600 years ago in Europe,” the castle’s marketing director said.
While it may not be kind of the jabbing ole Vladdy got his name for – fully impaling people on hundreds of wooden stakes while you eat a nice dinner isn’t exactly smiled upon in today’s world – we’re sure he’d approve of this more limited but ultimately beneficial version. Jabbing people while helping them really is the dream.
Fuzzy little COVID detectors
Before we get started, we need a moment to get our deep, movie trailer announcer-type voice ready. Okay, here goes.
“In a world where an organism too tiny to see brings entire economies to a standstill and pits scientists against doofuses, who can humanity turn to for help?”
How about bees? That’s right, we said bees. But not just any bees. Specially trained bees. Specially trained Dutch bees. Bees trained to sniff out our greatest nemesis. No, we’re not talking about Ted Cruz anymore. Let it go, that was just a joke. We’re talking COVID.
We’ll let Wim van der Poel, professor of virology at Wageningen (the Netherlands) University, explain the process: “We collect normal honeybees from a beekeeper, and we put the bees in harnesses.” And you thought their tulips were pretty great – the Dutch are putting harnesses on bees! (Which is much better than our previous story of bees involving a Taiwanese patient.)
The researchers presented the bees with two types of samples: COVID infected and non–COVID infected. The infected samples came with a sugary water reward and the noninfected samples did not, so the bees quickly learned to tell the difference.
The bees, then, could cut the waiting time for test results down to seconds, and at a fraction of the cost, making them an option in countries without a lot of testing infrastructure, the research team suggested.
The plan is not without its flaws, of course, but we’re convinced. More than that, we are true bee-lievers.
A little slice of … well, not heaven
If you’ve been around for the last 2 decades, you’ve seen your share of Internet trends: Remember the ice bucket challenge? Tide pod eating? We know what you’re thinking: Sigh, what could they be doing now?
Well, people are eating old meat, and before you think about the expired ground beef you got on special from the grocery store yesterday, that’s not quite what we mean. We all know expiration dates are “suggestions,” like yield signs and yellow lights. People are eating rotten, decomposing, borderline moldy meat.
They claim that the meat tastes better. We’re not so sure, but don’t worry, because it gets weirder. Some folks, apparently, are getting high from eating this meat, experiencing a feeling of euphoria. Personally, we think that rotten fumes probably knocked these people out and made them hallucinate.
Singaporean dietitian Naras Lapsys says that eating rotten meat can possibly cause a person to go into another state of consciousness, but it’s not a good thing. We don’t think you have to be a dietitian to know that.
It has not been definitively proven that eating rotting meat makes you high, but it’s definitely proven that this is disgusting … and very dangerous.