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Your diet can change your immune system — here’s how

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Claims about food and immunity are everywhere. Now scientists are exploring exactly how nutrition acts on the immune system to boost health and treat disease. Reboot your immune system with intermittent fasting. Help your ‘good’ bacteria to thrive with a plant-based diet. Move over morning coffee: mushroom tea could bolster your anticancer defences. Claims such as these, linking health, diet and immunity, bombard supermarket shoppers and pervade the news. Beyond the headlines and product labels, the scientific foundations of many such claims are often based on limited evidence. That’s partly because conducting rigorous studies to track what people eat and the impact of diet is a huge challenge. In addition, the relevance to human health of results from studies of animals and cells isn’t clear and has sometimes been exaggerated for commercial gain, feeding scepticism in nutrition science. In the past five or so years, however, researchers have developed innovative approaches to nutritio
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A new drug shows promise for hot flashes due to menopause

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Up to 80 percent of women experience hot flashes at some point during the menopausal transition. A new nonhormonal drug to treat these symptoms performed well in clinical trials. Dmitrii Marchenko/Moment/Getty Images Plus Share this: A new treatment for hot flashes brought relief and a better night’s rest for women experiencing these disruptive symptoms during menopause. Two phase 3 clinical trials compared the drug elinzanetant with a placebo at two timepoints. The drug subdued hot flashes quickly: By the fourth week, a majority of those taking the drug reported at least a 50 percent reduction in frequency. By week 12,  more than 70 percent taking elinzanetant , compared with more than 40 percent on placebo, experienced that drop in hot flash frequency, researchers reported August 22 in the  Journal of the American Medical Association . Participants on elinzanetant also reported significantly improved sleep compared with those on placebo at the 12-week mark. “Elinzanetant is a promisi
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Life from a drop of rain: New research suggests rainwater helped form the first protocell walls

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A Nobel-winning biologist, two engineering schools, and a vial of Houston rainwater cast new light on the origin of life on Earth Date: August 21, 2024 Source: University of Chicago Summary: New research shows that rainwater could have helped create a meshy wall around protocells 3.8 billion years ago, a critical step in the transition from tiny beads of RNA to every bacterium, plant, animal, and human that ever lived. One of the major unanswered questions about the origin of life is how droplets of RNA floating around the primordial soup turned into the membrane-protected packets of life we call cells. A new paper from the UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering, University of Houston Chemical Engineering Department and Chicago Center for the Origins of Life suggests rainwater could have helped create a meshy wall around protocells 3.8 billion years ago, a critical step in the transition from tiny beads of RNA to every bacterium, plant, animal, and human that ever lived. (Il
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A mixed origin made maize successful

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Source: University of California - Davis Summary: Maize is one of the world's most widely grown crops. It is used for both human and animal foods and holds great cultural significance, especially for indigenous peoples in the Americas. Yet despite its importance, the origins of the grain have been hotly debated for more than a century. Now new research shows that all modern maize descends from a hybrid created just over 5000 years ago in central Mexico, thousands of years after the plant was first domesticated. Maize is one of the world's most widely grown crops. It is used for both human and animal foods and holds great cultural significance, especially for indigenous peoples in the Americas. Yet despite its importance, the origins of the grain have been hotly debated for more than a century. Now new research, published Dec. 1 in  Science , shows that all modern maize descends from a hybrid created just over 5000 years ago in central Mexico, thousands of years after the plant
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How the rising earth in Antarctica will impact future sea level rise

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Effects will depend on how much global warming is controlled, study finds Date: August 2, 2024 Source: Ohio State University Summary: The rising earth beneath the Antarctic Ice Sheet will likely become a major factor in future sea level rise, a new study suggests. The rising earth beneath the Antarctic Ice Sheet will likely become a major factor in future sea level rise, a new study suggests. Despite feeling like a stationary mass, most solid ground is undergoing a process of deformation, sinking and rising in response to many environmental factors. In Antarctica, melting glacial ice means less weight on the bedrock below, allowing it to rise. How the rising earth interacts with the overlying ice sheet to affect sea level rise is not well-studied, said Terry Wilson, co-author of the study and a senior research scientist at the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center at The Ohio State University. In the new study, Wilson's colleagues at McGill University developed a model to predict
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Neural circuit basis of placebo pain relief

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 Source: Nature Placebo effects are striking demonstrations of mind-body interactions 1,2. During pain perception, in the absence of any treatment, an expectation of pain relief can reduce the experience of pain, a phenomenon known as placebo analgesia 3–6. However, despite the strength of placebo effects and their impact on everyday human experience and failure of clinical trials for new therapeutics 7, the neural circuit basis of placebo effects has remained elusive. Here, we show that analgesia from the expectation of pain relief is mediated by rostral anterior cingulate cortex (rACC) neurons that project to the pontine nucleus (rACC→Pn), a pre-cerebellar nucleus with no established function in pain. We created a behavioral assay that generates placebo-like anticipatory pain relief in mice. In vivo calcium imaging of neural activity and electrophysiological recordings in brain slices showed that expectations of pain relief boost the activity of rACC→Pn neurons and potentiate neurotr
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