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Category: food – Page 36

Scientists have long thought of the fluid-filled sac around our lungs merely as a cushion from external damage. Turns out, it also houses potent virus-eating cells that rush into the lungs during flu infections.

Not to be confused with phages, which are viruses that infect bacteria, these cells are macrophages, immune cells produced in the body.

“The name macrophage means ‘big eater.’ They gobble up bacteria, viruses, , and dying cells. Really, anything that looks foreign, they take it up and destroy it,” said UC Riverside virologist Juliet Morrison, who led the discovery team. “We were surprised to find them in the lungs because nobody has seen this before, that these cells go into the lung when there’s an infection.”

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Tesla’s Supercharger network might be good enough to push other automakers to join the standard, but that hasn’t stopped several companies from banding together to build their own Tesla-rivaling charging network. Ionna is a joint venture between seven automakers that promises to bring tens of thousands of chargers to North America — along with food and restrooms.

BMW, GM, Honda, Hyundai, Kia, Mercedes-Benz, and Stellantis are working together on the project with the slogan “We charge North America.” The group announced that it had gained regulatory approval and was officially starting work last Friday.

Ionna aims to build a network of 30,000 fast chargers to facilitate long-distance driving across the continent. The company said it is targeting 2030 to build the network and promised charging locations in urban areas and along highways. The first chargers will open this year, and the focus will be on an “elevated customer experience” that includes 350kW fast chargers, food, retail stores, and other amenities within the charging complex. Electrify America, created using money from VW’s Dieselgate settlement, also recently announced a shift to a more upscale charging experience.

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Today we’ll look at colonizing Ceres and asteroid mining, farming in space, and a potential distant future of a developed asteroid belt.

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Credits: outward bound: colonizing ceres. 141 season 4 episode 26

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Climate change and increasingly extreme weather conditions are predicted to wreak havoc with humanity’s food security. But hopefully, at least tomatoes will stay safe.

Researchers from Tel Aviv University have succeeded in cultivating tomato varieties that consume less water as they grow without compromising on yield, quality or taste, using CRISPR genome editing technology.

Their study, which contributes to growing efforts to ensure food security in a world of diminishing freshwater resources, was recently published in the journal PNAS.

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A Chinese team of life scientists, microbiologists, plant researchers and seed designers has developed a way to grow engineered moss with partially synthetic genes. In their project, reported in the journal Nature Plants, the group engineered a moss that is one of the first living things to have multiple cells carrying a partially artificial chromosome.

Several research projects have been working toward the goal of creating plants with synthetic —such plants could be programmed to produce more food, for example, or more oxygen, or to pull more from the air. Last year, one team of researchers developed a way to program up to half of the genome of yeast cells using synthetic genes.

In this new effort, the team in China upped the ante by replacing natural genes with genes created in a lab—moss is far more genetically complex than yeast. They call their project SynMoss.

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An Australian cultured meat startup has “resurrected” the woolly mammoth — in the hope that people will think about eating it.

The challenge: Our traditional way of producing meat — by raising and slaughtering animals — is both bad for the environment and arguably unethical, yet demand for meat continues to increase.

Cultured meat, which is grown from muscle cells in a lab, can perfectly replicate the flavor of meat that comes from animals, so carnivores may prefer it to plant-based alternatives — once prices come down, at least. But some people may hesitate to even try cultured beef or pork when they could just keep eating the “real” stuff.

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If you listen to a lot of podcasts, there is a chance you might remember funny tidbits and are wondering… “Wait, who talked about eating fries with sriracha again?” or more serious questions. To look for the answers, you have to first find the podcast and then search through their transcripts. Dexa is trying to make podcast search easier by leveraging AI.

The tool lets you ask questions about a single podcast, like Andrew Humberman’s Huberman Lab podcast in the screenshot below, or query all the podcasts in Dexa’s database — there are currently more than 120 with more being added. The search results will give you an AI-generated summary of the answer along with pointers to podcasts where the participant discussed the topic.

For instance, you can ask questions like “What’s the best way to get more sleep?” and find answers to that from Dexa’s podcast library with timestamped links to those conversations. You can also @mention a specific podcast to narrow down your search results.

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Norovirus, a highly infectious virus that is the leading cause of diarrhea and vomiting in the U.S., has no approved therapeutics or vaccines to prevent its miserable effects. This is partly due to a lack of reliable animal models to study norovirus infection and predict how effective interventions would be in people. To solve this, NIAID scientists have developed an animal model to study human norovirus infection that could help facilitate the development of new vaccines and therapeutics to treat norovirus infection. Findings from this research were published Feb. 6 in Nature Microbiology.

Human norovirus causes illness in tens of millions of people in the U.S. each year and, in some cases, can result in hospitalization and even death. It is easily spread when people ingest foods, drinks or particles from surfaces contaminated by virus from the stool or vomit of an infected individual. Noroviruses are genetically diverse, with different genogroups—groups characterized by genetic similarity—of the virus infecting different species of animals. Several genogroups of noroviruses infect people without similarly infecting animals. This has led to difficulties in establishing an animal model for human norovirus infection.

Following up on earlier evidence that rhesus macaque monkeys could develop norovirus infections, a team of researchers led by scientists at NIAID’s Vaccine Research Center set out to determine whether macaques could serve as an effective animal model for the human disease. The macaques were challenged with several genotypes of human noroviruses at once. Throughout the experiment, the animals were kept in biocontainment, and their health and behavior were carefully monitored. Levels of virus in the animals’ stool were measured, and antibodies against norovirus in the animals’ blood serum were analyzed. The researchers found that the macaques were susceptible to viral infection with at least two genotypes of norovirus, with similar antibody responses, shedding of virus in stool, and pathology as in human norovirus infection. Notably, the infections in the animals did not result in clinical symptoms, such as diarrhea and vomiting.

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In a recent breakthrough, DNA sequencing technology has uncovered the culprit behind cassava witches’ broom disease: the fungus genus Ceratobasidium. The cutting-edge nanopore technology used for this discovery was first developed to track the COVID-19 virus in Colombia, but is equally suited to identifying and reducing the spread of plant viruses.

The findings, published in Scientific Reports, will help plant pathologists in Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam and Thailand protect farmers’ valued harvest.

“In Southeast Asia, most rely on cassava. Its starch-rich roots form the basis of an industry that supports millions of producers. In the past decade, however, cassava witches’ broom disease has stunted plants, reducing harvests to levels that barely permit affected farmers to make a living,” said Wilmer Cuellar, Senior Scientist at the Alliance of Bioversity and CIAT.

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