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Category: food

Low-cost sensor tracks soil pH continuously for months across varied soils

At first glance, a farm field doesn’t seem all that complicated. It’s just dirt and crops.

But among the landscape lies one of Earth’s most complex ecosystems—a bustling network of microbes, nutrients, roots and chemical reactions that quietly govern the health of every harvest.

For years, understanding what’s happening beneath that surface has been one of agriculture’s biggest challenges. Important soil and plant indicators, like pH, microbial activity and plant physiology, are always changing yet notoriously difficult to track in real time.

Irrigating US Crops Slashes Global Footprint

The study finds that expanding irrigation on cropland could substantially reduce agriculture’s global environmental footprint by increasing yields and reducing the amount of land needed to produce food. [ https://www.labroots.com/trending/earth-and-environmental-sc…ootprint-2](https://www.labroots.com/trending/earth-and-environmental-sc…ootprint-2)

How can land irrigation help curb greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs)? This is what a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences hopes to address as a team of scientists compared the impacts of land irrigation to land conversion and how this impacts GHGs. This study has the potential to help farmers, scientists, and the public better understand the role of land irrigation and land conversion on the environment and the steps that can be taken to improve the impact.

For the study, the researchers analyzed data regarding crop irrigation with the goal of ascertaining how its GHG emissions compare to land conversion methods. The primary motivation behind the study was to fill a longstanding knowledge gap regarding the pros and cons of irrigation compared to its GHG emissions. Land irrigation is the controlled watering of crops while land conversion is the intense process of modifying unfarmable land into farmable land.

In the end, the researchers found that not only does land irrigation improve crop production, but the estimated benefits of GHG emissions reduction from land irrigation compared to GHG emissions production from land irrigation are about 361 times greater. The researchers note the majority of GHG emissions produced from land irrigation come from the energy needed to pump the water, which they note can be even further reduced from using electric pumps instead of fossil fuel pumps.

A finely tuned mess—how disorder can make networks more stable

Perfection is overrated—at least when it comes to complex systems like the power grid, food webs and advanced materials. For decades, scientists generally assumed that networks function most reliably when their individual components are as similar as possible. But real-world networks are rarely uniform.

Generators in a power grid, neurons in a brain, animals in a food web and components in a material all differ in ways that scientists traditionally treated as imperfections.

Now, Northwestern University physicists are overturning that long-held assumption.

Researchers Offer New Perspective on How Protein Restriction May Promote Healthy Aging and Longevity

A new perspective from LSU’s Pennington Biomedical Research Center proposes a new way of understanding how dietary protein restriction may promote healthy aging and extend lifespan: through a coordinated physiological response that connects cellular nutrient sensing with hormones, the brain and changes throughout the body.

“Protein restriction and the hallmarks of aging: A coordinated physiological adaptive response?” – authored by Dr. Chris Morrison, Dr. Sora Kim and Dr. Sangho Yu of Pennington Biomedical – was recently published in the journal Cell Metabolism. The authors argue that the diverse effects of protein restriction, including changes in metabolism, glucose regulation, energy expenditure, growth and food preferences, should be viewed as interconnected components of a broader response to protein scarcity rather than as isolated biological pathways.

The perspective provides a framework for investigating how the body’s response to protein scarcity may influence healthy aging and longevity and whether that response can be measured or ultimately targeted to improve health across the lifespan.

Metabolic vulnerability identified that may affect heart development

The heart undergoes major changes during the first weeks of life. Researchers at Karolinska Institutet have now shown that a previously unknown metabolic vulnerability in mitochondria can disrupt heart development. The study, published in Science Advances, could improve our understanding of rare mitochondrial diseases that affect the heart.

During fetal development, the body receives oxygen and nutrients through the placenta. After birth, conditions change rapidly as oxygen availability increases and nutrition comes from milk and later solid food. At the same time, the heart continues to grow and mature.

In the new study, the researchers investigated the role of the molecule S-adenosylmethionine (SAM) in this transition. SAM is best known for its role in chemical modifications of DNA, RNA and proteins. Within mitochondria, however, it is also required for the production of lipoic acid, a molecule that is essential for the function of several important metabolic enzymes.

Popular sweetener byproduct damages DNA in human cells

The distinction between a laboratory effect and a health risk matters. Exposing cells directly to a chemical can reveal a potential hazard, but it does not, by itself, show whether eating a food exposes human tissues to enough of that chemical to cause the same damage. The 2023 experiments did not demonstrate such harm from everyday consumption.

Sucralose and the Gut Barrier

The researchers also investigated the intestinal lining, which helps regulate what passes from the digestive tract into the body. Using a laboratory system containing human intestinal tissue, they tested both sucralose and sucralose-6-acetate. Both impaired the barrier’s integrity under the experimental conditions.

Calorie restriction reveals a potential way to slow age-related DNA mutations

Mutations are changes in the molecular “letters” that make up DNA, the genetic blueprint for cells. Mutations build up with age in every cell when DNA is damaged or when cells make mistakes in fixing or copying it. Most mutations are harmless, but when they disrupt genes, they can cause cancer and other diseases.

Past studies in animals have shown that a large reduction in the number of calories they consume, called caloric restriction, extends their lifespans and slows aspects of aging. But whether caloric restriction also slows the rate at which mutations occur with age had not been investigated across the genome, the complete set of genetic material present in every cell.

In 1990, NASA recovered tomato seeds after nearly 6 years on LDEF; classroom tests found space seeds germinated at 73.8% versus 70.3% for Earth controls

If you were in a classroom in the early 1990s, there is a real chance you planted a piece of space history without even realizing it. NASA sent Rutgers tomato seeds into space for nearly six years and then gave them to 3.3 million students across the country, according to NASA’s Technical Reports Server. Years before people started talking about growing food on Mars, this quiet classroom project was already testing whether seeds could survive years of space radiation and still grow.

Why NASA left seeds in orbit for six years

The seeds were never meant to stay in space that long. The project, called the Space Exposed Experiment Developed for Students, or SEEDS, was a collaboration between NASA Headquarters, NASA’s Langley Research Center, and the George W. Park Seed Company. Rutgers tomato seeds were loaded onto the Long Duration Exposure Facility, a satellite designed to see how materials and biological samples perform over periods in orbit. The Challenger disaster in January 1986 changed the timeline, grounding the shuttle program for about 32 months until it returned to flight in September 1988. The satellite stayed in space far longer than expected. When it finally returned to Earth in January 1990, the tomato seeds had been in orbit for nearly six years. They had been exposed to radiation and solar wind the entire time.

Can AI Help Detect Disease Before Your Pet Gets Sick? | Dr. Ragen McGowan — Nestlé Purina

Can AI tell how your pet feels? Dr. Ragen McGowan, Ph.D. — Director of Global Digital & AI Product Development, Nestlé Purina North America.

What if your dog or cat could tell you how they’re feeling?

Today, artificial intelligence may be giving us a new way to listen.

By continuously monitoring things like activity, eating, sleep, elimination and other behaviors, AI can begin to establish what’s normal for an individual animal — and potentially detect subtle changes that humans would never notice.

Dr. Ragen McGowan, Ph.D. is Director of Global Digital & AI Product Development at Nestlé Purina (https://www.purina.com/pet-experts/rm…

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