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The cells in your body are like computer software: they’re “programmed” to carry out specific functions at specific times. If we can better understand this process, we could unlock the ability to reprogram cells ourselves, says computational biologist Sara-Jane Dunn. In a talk from the cutting-edge of science, she explains how her team is studying embryonic stem cells to gain a new understanding of the biological programs that power life — and develop “living software” that could transform medicine, agriculture and energy.

This talk was presented at an official TED conference, and was featured by our editors on the home page.

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On the first page of Heinz Koop’s fecal analysis test results, a bar showed where he fell on a gradient from green to red. A label above said, in German: “Overall dysbiosis.” Koop was not in the green or even the yellow regions, but a worrisome orange. It was a bad result — but, he says, “I was kind of happy.”

Doctors hadn’t given him a satisfying answer about his recurring bloody diarrhea and other gut troubles. But Koop had learned on Facebook that he could test his gut microbiome — the community of bacteria and other organisms living in his gastrointestinal tract — to look for problems. Koop ordered a test from a German laboratory called Medivere. The results said his gut microbes were imbalanced, which was something he thought he could treat. Soon he would be attempting to correct this imbalance by chauffering a friend’s fresh stool samples home to implant up his own colon.

Trillions of microbes living on and in our bodies, especially our guts, make up our microbiome. The bugs in our bowel are not just there to slow down our poop, as one researcher speculated in 1970, but are intricately connected to our health. Gut microbes help us digest our food, make critical vitamins, and keep pathogens out. Over the past decade or so, research into the microbiome has exploded as researchers have tried to tease apart the complex connections between our diseases and our resident microbes.

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There’s a structural avalanche waiting inside that box of Rice Krispies on the supermarket shelf. Cornell researchers are now closer to understanding how those structures behave — and in some cases, behave unusually.

The researchers, led by James Sethna, professor of physics in the College of Arts and Sciences, have for the first time rendered a model for crackling noise in two dimensions. Their paper, “Unusual Scaling for Two-Dimensional Avalanches: Curing the Faceting and Scaling in the Lower Critical Dimension,” was published Oct. 30 in Physical Review Research. The paper’s lead author was Lorien X. Hayden, M.S. ‘15, Ph.D. ‘19, and co-author was Archishman Raju, M.S. ‘16, Ph.D. ‘18.

Milk enters Rice Krispies through a process known as “fluid invasion,” which is similar to the oil industry’s method of pumping pressurized water into porous sandstone to push out oil. The resulting noise — the cereal’s famous “snap, crackle and pop” — is a type of tiny “avalanche” that indicates a burst of milk invading pores in the puffed rice. Each avalanche is essentially composed of smaller-scale versions of itself, a proportionality shaped by “power law” distribution. Crackling noise also describes earthquakes, magnets and many other systems.

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Please read 🙂.

Eat well for a long and healthy life – that’s a mantra that we’re all familiar with, but what are the best foods to help us achieve that goal? In this article, we give you an overview of some of the most healthful and nutritious foods.

Official figures indicate that, currently, the top three countries in the world with the highest life expectancy are the Principality of Monaco, Japan, and Singapore. These are places where the inhabitants experience a high quality of life, and an important element of that is eating healthful meals.

Often, we find praise for “superfoods” in the media – foods so high in nutritional value that they are seen as dietary superheroes.

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ROME (Thomson Reuters Foundation) — It may sound like science fiction, but in a few short years the family dinner table may be laden with steak from a printer and other proteins produced from air, methane or volcanic microbes.

With the explosive success of vegan beef and burger substitutes developed by Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods, the alternative protein sector just keeps growing.

According to investment bank Barclays, alternative meat sales could reach $140 billion — or 10% of the global meat industry — within a decade, or a 10-fold increase from current levels.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKlDszBCdNQ&feature=share

God gives long life to those with a good heart??? Because they work??? Because they eat anything??? That is some of the answers one gets when asking these centurians what got them past 100??? Buster is a character he states he smokes and drinks so he does not know why??? I say mindset and treatment are very key in Japanese culture. In the west sadly families begin to shun and demonize the elderly in their family.

As life expectancy continues to soar, more and more of us are living to well over the age of 100. Award-winning filmmaker Daisy Asquith asks some of the oldest people in the world the question everyone wants answered: what is the secret to long life?

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Produced by Century Films.

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Trillions of plastic fragments are afloat at sea, which cause large “garbage patches” to form in rotating ocean currents called subtropical gyres. As a result, impacts on ocean life are increasing and affecting organisms from large mammals to bacteria at the base of the ocean food web. Despite this immense accumulation of plastics at sea, it only accounts for 1 to 2 percent of plastic debris inputs to the ocean. The fate of this missing plastic and its impact on marine life remains largely unknown.

It appears that sunlight-driven photoreactions could be an important sink of buoyant plastics at sea. Sunlight also may have a role in reducing plastics to sizes below those captured by oceanic studies. This theory could partly explain how more than 98 percent of the plastics entering the oceans go missing every year. However, direct, experimental evidence for the photochemical degradation of marine plastics remains rare.

A team of scientists from Florida Atlantic University’s Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute, East China Normal University and Northeastern University conducted a unique study to help elucidate the mystery of missing plastic fragments at sea. Their work provides novel insight regarding the removal mechanisms and potential lifetimes of a select few microplastics.

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From raindrops rolling off the waxy surface of a waterlily leaf, to the efficiency of desalination membranes, interactions between water molecules and water-repellent “hydrophobic” surfaces are all around us. The interplay becomes even more intriguing when a thin water layer becomes sandwiched between two hydrophobic surfaces, KAUST researchers have shown.

In the early 1980s, researchers first noted an unexpected effect when two hydrophobic surfaces were slowly brought together in water. “At some point, the two surfaces would suddenly jump into contact—like two magnets being brought together,” says Himanshu Mishra from KAUST’s Water Desalination and Reuse Center. Mishra’s lab investigates water at all length scales, from reducing water consumption in agriculture, to the properties of individual water molecules.

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When the first smartphones arrived, few people understood how they would change our reality. Today, our internet-connected mobile device maps our travel, manages our finances, delivers our dinner, and connects us to every corner of human knowledge. In less than a generation, it has become almost an extension of our central nervous system — so indispensable that we can’t imagine leaving home without it to guide us.

We are about to embark on another journey even more important to every individual and to human society. We are entering the age of genomics, an amazing future that will dramatically improve the health outcomes of people across the planet. Soon, we won’t be able to imagine a time when we left home without knowledge of our genome to guide us.

But this future isn’t a generation away. As early as 2020, I believe we will be living in a world where software uses knowledge of our personal genome to guide us, like a health GPS, toward choices that are appropriate for us as individuals. From the foods we choose to eat to the medicines we take to prevent or cure disease, from helping us avoid exposure to environmental risks to eradicating thousands of genetic diseases, genomics will reveal such immense possibilities that it will feel as if we can see and hear for the first time.

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