Posts

Your friends shape your microbiome — and so do their friends

-
Image
Analysis of nearly 2,000 people living in remote villages in Honduras reveals who’s spreading gut microorganisms to whom. Friends share more than just food when they dine together.Credit: Getty A shared meal, a kiss on the cheek: these social acts bring people together — and bring their microbiomes together, too. The more people interact, the more similar the make-up of their gut microorganisms is, even if individuals don’t live in the same household, a study1 shows. The study also found that a person’s microbiome is shaped not only by their social contacts but also by the social contacts’ connections. The work is one of several studies2 that raise the possibility that health conditions can be shaped by the transmission of the microbiome between individuals, not just by diet and other environmental factors that affect gut flora. In the quest to understand what shapes a person’s microbiome, social interactions are “definitely a piece of the puzzle that I think has been missing until rec...
1 comment
Read more

Diabetes risk soars for adults who had a sweet tooth as kids

-
Image
Study of 1950s sugar rationing in the United Kingdom also suggests risk to babies whose mums ate a high-sugar diet during pregnancy. Candy-floss effect: a childhood diet rich in sugar has been linked to higher risk of high-blood pressure and other conditions in adulthood. Credit: Getty It’s tough news to hear on Halloween: a sugary diet in the first two years of life is linked to a  higher risk of diabetes  and high blood pressure decades later, according to an analysis of UK sugar rationing in the 1950s. The amount of sugar a child consumed after turning six months old seemed to have the biggest effect on the risk of developing a chronic disease later in life. But people exposed to more sugar in the womb also had a higher risk of  diabetes  and high blood pressure compared to those who were conceived when access to sugar was limited. Economist Tadeja Gračner was pregnant with her first child and on doctor-ordered bed rest when she and her colleagues first arrived at...
Post a Comment
Read more

Why elephants never forget but fleas have, well, the attention span of a flea

-
Image
Researchers at the Complexity Science Hub and Santa Fe Institute have developed a model to calculate how quickly or slowly an organism should ideally learn in its surroundings. An organism's ideal learning rate depends on the pace of environmental change and its life cycle, they say. Every day, we wake to a world that is different, and we adjust to it. Businesses face new challenges and competitors and adapt or go bust. In biology, this is a question of survival: every organism, from bacteria to blue whales, faces the challenge of adapting to environments that are constantly in flux. Animals must learn where to seek nourishing food, even as those food sources change with the seasons. However, learning takes time and energy -- an organism that learns too slowly will lag behind environmental changes, while one that learns too quickly will waste effort trying to track meaningless fluctuations. The new mathematical model provides a quantitative answer to the question: What is the optim...
Post a Comment
Read more

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

-
Image
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...
Post a Comment
Read more

A new drug shows promise for hot flashes due to menopause

-
Image
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 ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Life from a drop of rain: New research suggests rainwater helped form the first protocell walls

-
Image
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...
Post a Comment
Read more