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Category: food

Exploring metabolic noise opens new paths to better biomanufacturing

Much like humans, microbial organisms can be fickle in their productivity. One moment they’re cranking out useful chemicals in vast fermentation tanks, metabolizing feed to make products from pharmaceuticals and supplements to biodegradable plastics or fuels, and the next, they inexplicably go on strike.

Engineers at Washington University in St. Louis have found the source of the fluctuating metabolic activity in microorganisms and developed tools to keep every microbial cell at peak productivity during biomanufacturing.

The work, published in Nature Communications, tracks hundreds of E. coli cells as they produce a yellow food pigment—betaxanthin—while growing, dividing and carrying out normal metabolic activities.

Physics of foam strangely resembles AI training

Foams are everywhere: soap suds, shaving cream, whipped toppings and food emulsions like mayonnaise. For decades, scientists believed that foams behave like glass, their microscopic components trapped in static, disordered configurations.

Now, engineers at the University of Pennsylvania have found that foams actually flow ceaselessly inside while holding their external shape. More strangely, from a mathematical perspective, this internal motion resembles the process of deep learning, the method typically used to train modern AI systems.

The discovery could hint that learning, in a broad mathematical sense, may be a common organizing principle across physical, biological and computational systems, and provide a conceptual foundation for future efforts to design adaptive materials. The insight could also shed new light on biological structures that continuously rearrange themselves, like the scaffolding in living cells.

This Common Blood Pressure Drug Boosts Lifespan And Slows Aging in Animals

The hypertension drug rilmenidine has been found to slow aging in worms – an effect that, if it translates to humans, could one day help us live longer and stay healthier in old age.

Rilmenidine appears to mimic the effects of caloric restriction on a cellular level, and reducing available energy while maintaining nutrition has been shown to extend lifespans in several animal models.

Whether this translates to human biology, or is a potential risk to our health, is a topic of ongoing debate. Finding ways to achieve the same benefits without the costs of extreme calorie cutting could lead to new ways to improve health in old age.

Q&A: What do scientists need to learn next about blocking enzymes to treat disease?

Enzymes are the molecular machines that power life; they build and break down molecules, copy DNA, digest food, and drive virtually every chemical reaction in our cells. For decades, scientists have designed drugs to slow down or block enzymes, stopping infections or the growth of cancer by jamming these tiny machines. But what if tackling some diseases requires the opposite approach?

Speeding enzymes up, it turns out, is much harder than stopping them. Tarun Kapoor is the Pels Family Professor in Rockefeller’s Selma and Lawrence Ruben Laboratory of Chemistry and Cell Biology. Recently, he has shifted the focus of this lab to tackle the tricky question of how to make enzymes work faster.

Already, his lab has developed a chemical compound to speed up an enzyme that works too slowly in people with a rare form of neurodegeneration. The same approach could open new treatment possibilities for many other diseases where other enzymes have lost function, including some cancers and neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s.

First Therapy Chatbot Trial Yields Mental Health Benefits

face_with_colon_three Year 2025

Dartmouth researchers conducted the first-ever clinical trial of a generative AI-powered therapy chatbot and found that the software resulted in significant improvements in participants’ symptoms, according to results published March 27 in NEJM AI.

People in the study also reported they could trust and communicate with the system, known as Therabot, to a degree that is comparable to working with a mental health professional.

The trial consisted of 106 people from across the United States diagnosed with major depressive disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, or an eating disorder. Participants interacted with Therabot through a smartphone app by typing out responses to prompts about how they were feeling or initiating conversations when they needed to talk.

Sunlight-driven nanoparticles enable cleaner ammonia synthesis at room temperature

Ammonia (NH3) is a colorless chemical compound comprised of nitrogen and hydrogen that is widely used in agriculture and in industrial settings. Among other things, it is used to produce fertilizers, as well as cleaning products and explosives.

Currently, ammonia is primarily produced via the so-called Haber-Bosch process, an industrial technique that entails prompting a reaction between nitrogen and hydrogen at very high temperatures and pressure. Despite its widespread use, this process is known to be highly energy-intensive and is estimated to be responsible for approximately 3% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Researchers at Stanford University School of Engineering, Boston College and other institutes have identified new promising catalysts (i.e., materials that speed up chemical reactions) that could enable the sunlight-driven synthesis of ammonia at room temperature and under normal atmospheric pressure.

Antarctica’s only native insect is already eating microplastics

A global research team led by researchers from the University of Kentucky Martin-Gatton College of Agriculture, Food and Environment has found that Antarctica’s only native insect is already ingesting microplastics, even in one of the planet’s most remote regions.

The study, published in the journal Science of the Total Environment, is the first to examine how microplastics affect an Antarctic insect and to document plastic pieces inside wild-caught midges.

Jack Devlin, who led the work back in 2020 as part of his Ph.D. before moving to Scotland to work as a marine ornithologist, said the project started after a documentary on plastic pollution left him stunned.

Year-round edamame: Hydroponic LED plant factories redefine sustainable cultivation

Artificial light-type plant factories are an emerging agricultural innovation that enables crops to be grown year-round in precisely controlled environments. By adjusting factors such as light, temperature, humidity, carbon dioxide concentration, and nutrient delivery, these facilities can produce stable yields independent of climate conditions. They offer a promising way to reduce pesticide use and minimize the impacts of climate change.

However, legumes like edamame have long been considered difficult to cultivate in such settings because of their long growth periods, short storage periods, complex flowering, and pod-setting processes.

Against this backdrop, the research group, led by Professor Toshio Sano from the Faculty of Bioscience and Applied Chemistry, Hosei University, Japan, and Associate Professor Wataru Yamori of the Graduate School of Agricultural and Life Sciences, The University of Tokyo, Japan, had previously gained attention for successfully cultivating tomatoes under LED lighting in a plant factory.

Calculating the spreading of fluids in porous materials to understand saltwater in soil

A solution to a tricky groundwater riddle from Australia: Researchers at TU Wien have developed numerical models to simulate the movement of fluids in porous materials.

Things are complicated along the Murray–Darling River in southern Australia. Agricultural irrigation washes salt out of the upper soil layers, and this salt eventually ends up in the river. To prevent the river’s salt concentration from rising too much, part of the is diverted into special basins.

Some of these basins are designed to let the salty water evaporate, others to slowly release it in a controlled manner in the underground. That keeps salt temporarily out of the river and allows better management of the river’s water—but it increases the salinity in the ground. How can we calculate how this saltwater spreads underground and what its will be?

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