Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: biotech/medical – Page 2,233

Hundreds of millions of people in India depend on farming for their livelihoods, but many of them struggle with losing crops to disease, getting them to market or achieving the right price when they do. Several startups are trying to change that.

Piggybacking on India’s mobile boom, these companies are using smartphones and the internet to help farmers grow, harvest and sell their crops more efficiently. India is self-sufficient in food staples, but faces a constant challenge to feed its population of 1.3 billion and rising. The country accounts for a quarter of the world’s hungry people and is home to over 190 million undernourished people, according to the latest estimates by the United Nations.

“There is a lot of financing and talent which is coming in this space,” says Rikin Gandhi, co-founder and executive director of Digital Green, a social enterprise that began as a research project backed by Microsoft ( MSFT ).

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The calls started pouring in soon after word spread that Dr. Valerie Taylor was testing fecal microbiota transplantation — transferring poop from one body to another — for bipolar disorder.

The mental health condition is different from depression. It comes with mania, the “up” swings that can make people feel superhuman. “But so many people with depression called wanting to take part in the study we felt we had an obligation to try,” said Taylor, chief of psychiatry at the University of Calgary.

Two years after spearheading the bipolar study, the first of its kind in the world, Taylor has now launched a second study testing fecal transplants in people with depression, as well as a third for depression in people who also have irritable bowel syndrome.

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New research from a team of Canadian scientists has for the first time demonstrated how exposure to Narrow Band Ultraviolet B light (UVB) can directly influence gut microbiome diversity in humans. The research hypothesizes that this result is modulated by vitamin D and presents evidence of a novel skin-gut communication pathway.

Autoimmune diseases such as inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and multiple sclerosis are thought to be caused by a number of environmental and genetic factors. Gut bacterial diversity, exposure to sunlight and vitamin D levels, have all been observed as influential factors for inflammatory disease, however a new study is asserting a causal chain may link all three of these elements.

The new research examined 21 female subjects who were all administered three 60-second full-body UVB exposure sessions across one week. Blood and fecal samples were taken from all subjects at the beginning and end of the study to track changes to vitamin D levels and gut bacterial diversity. Half of the subjects were noted as having taken vitamin D supplements across the prior three winter months.

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