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Category: food – Page 107

Say you live across from a bakery. Sometimes you are hungry and therefore tempted when odors waft through your window, but other times satiety makes you indifferent. Sometimes popping over for a popover seems trouble-free but sometimes your spiteful ex is there. Your brain balances many influences in determining what you’ll do. A new MIT study details an example of this working in a much simpler animal, highlighting a potentially fundamental principle of how nervous systems integrate multiple factors to guide food-seeking behavior.

All animals share the challenge of weighing diverse sensory cues and internal states when formulating behaviors, but scientists know little about how this actually occurs. To gain deep insight, the research team based at The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory turned to the C. elegans worm, whose well-defined behavioral states and 302-cell nervous system make the complex problem at least tractable. They emerged with a of how in a crucial olfactory neuron called AWA, many sources of state and converge to independently throttle the expression of a key smell receptor. The integration of their influence on that receptor’s abundance then determines how AWA guides roaming around for food.

“In this study, we dissected the mechanisms that control the levels of a single olfactory receptor in a single olfactory neuron, based on the ongoing state and stimuli the animal experiences,” said senior author Steven Flavell, Lister Brothers Associate Professor in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. “Understanding how the integration happens in one cell will point the way for how it may happen in general, in other worm neurons and in other animals.”

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The global dairy industry is changing. Among the disruptions is competition from food alternatives not produced using animals – including potential challenges posed by synthetic milk.

Synthetic milk does not require cows or other animals. It can have the same biochemical make up as animal milk, but is grown using an emerging biotechnology technique know as “precision fermentation” that produces biomass cultured from cells.

More than 80 percent of the world’s population regularly consume dairy products. There have been increasing calls to move beyond animal-based food systems to more sustainable forms of food production.

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Most neurons in the human brain are generated from neural stem cells during embryonic development. After birth, a small reservoir of stem cells remains in the brain that keeps on producing new neurons throughout life. However, the question arises as to whether these new neurons really support brain function? And if so, can we improve brain capacity by increasing the number of neurons? The research group of Prof. Federico Calegari at the Center for Regenerative Therapies Dresden (CRTD) of TU Dresden has answered these questions, now published in the EMBO Journal.

In their latest study, the scientists analysed healthy adult mice in which the small reservoir of stem cells was manipulated in order to increase in number. As a result, the number of neurons, generated from these stem cells, also increased. In mice, these neurons mainly populate the brain area responsible for interpreting odours. In fact, olfaction is one to the most powerful senses in mice, fundamental for finding food and escape from predators. As powerful as the sense of smell naturally is in mice, in the following behavioural experiments the scientists found that mice with more neurons were able to distinguish extremely similar odours that normal mice failed to. Hence, this study is fundamental in proving that stem cells can be used to improve brain function.

“Evolution gave mice an extremely sensitive olfactory system. It is amazing that by adding few neurons we could improve something that seemed already close to perfection,” states Prof. Federico Calegari. “This study sets the basis for our research, which now is focused on finding out whether we could apply our strategy as a therapeutic approach in neurodegenerative models.”

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The technology at the heart of this research takes aim at one of the key metabolic functions of cells in all living things called ATP, or adenosine triphosphate. This molecule is the primary energy carrier in cells, capturing chemical energy from the breakdown of food molecules and distributing it to power other cellular processes.

Among those cellular processes is the proliferation of cancerous cells, and because of this we have seen ATP implicated in previous anti-cancer breakthroughs. The authors of the new study sought to cut off the supply of ATP, which is generated as mitochondria soak up oxygen and convert it into the molecule.

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Humanity has left its mark on the Earth, from cities of steel to mountains of styrofoam. The latter is proving to be a problem, as many of the synthetic materials we produce don’t degrade in anything approaching a human timescale. Scientists have long sought to develop better plastic recycling methods, and the answer might be crawling around in the wild. Researchers from the University of Queensland in Australia say that a beetle larvae (it looks like a worm in larval form) may hold the key to eliminating polystyrene from the environment.

Styrofoam, technically known as polystyrene, is one of the most common types of plastic, accounting for 7–10 percent of all the non-fibrous plastics produced. You probably encounter it frequently in packing materials where the material’s foam conformation is adept at absorbing impacts. The solid version of polystyrene can be used to make transparent containers, disposable utensils, and more. However, polystyrene carries a recycling ID of 6, meaning it’s difficult to process and is not accepted at most curbside pickups.

Scientists have long searched for microbes or insect enzymes that could help break down durable plastics like polystyrene, and a beetle known as Zophobas morio might have it. It’s a species of darkling beetle, and the larval form is more commonly known as a superworm. They look like larger mealworms and are often used as a food source for insectivorous animals. In addition to being a high-protein, low-carb snack, this creature’s gut carries a unique mixture of bacterial enzymes that can digest polystyrene. The researchers reported that darkling beetle larva can subsist entirely on a diet of polystyrene — they can even grow while eating a pile of plastic.

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Our bodies are home to hundreds or thousands of species of microbes — nobody is sure quite how many. That’s just one of many mysteries about the so-called human microbiome.

Our inner ecosystem fends off pathogens, helps digest food and may even influence behavior. But scientists have yet to figure out exactly which microbes do what or how. Many studies suggest that many species have to work together to do each of the microbiome’s jobs.

To better understand how microbes affect our health, scientists have for the first time created a synthetic human microbiome, combining 119 species of bacteria naturally found in the human body. When the researchers gave the concoction to mice that did not have a microbiome of their own, the bacterial strains established themselves and remained stable — even when the scientists introduced other microbes.

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Nuro, a Softbank-backed developer of street-legal autonomous, electric delivery vehicles, has struck a long-term partnership with Uber to use its toaster-shaped micro-vans to haul food orders, groceries and other goods to customers in Silicon Valley and Houston using the Uber Eats service starting this year.

People using the Uber Eats app in Houston and Mountain View, California (where Nuro is based) will be able to order deliveries using the new autonomous service this fall, with plans to expand the program to other parts of the San Francisco Bay Area in the months ahead, the companies said.

The SoftBank-backed developer of street-legal autonomous, electric vehicles, has a long-term partnership with Uber to use its toaster-shaped micro-vans to haul food orders, groceries and other goods in Silicon Valley and Houston.

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