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Category: Health

The key to a healthy gut microbiome is a healthy diet

The key to a healthy gut microbiome is a healthy diet

Università di Trento: A varied diet rich in vegetables is known to be healthy for one’s well-being. Excessive consumption of meat, especially red meat, can lead to chronic and cardiovascular diseases. That is also because what we eat shapes the gut microbiome. At the same time, excluding certain foods, such as dairy or animal products, is not necessarily a general solution to achieve microbial balance. But can we find out which food products determine differences in the gut microbiome? Starting…

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We all carrying thousands of genetic mistakes accrued over a lifetime

We all carrying thousands of genetic mistakes accrued over a lifetime

Amber Dance writes: You began when egg and sperm met, and the DNA from your biological parents teamed up. Your first cell began copying its newly melded genome and dividing to build a body. And almost immediately, genetic mistakes started to accrue. “That process of accumulating errors across your genome goes on throughout life,” says Phil H. Jones, a cancer biologist at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Hinxton, England. Scientists have long known that DNA-copying systems make the occasional blunder…

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From nuts to kelp: The ‘carbon-negative’ foods that help reverse climate change

From nuts to kelp: The ‘carbon-negative’ foods that help reverse climate change

Joseph Poore writes: We all know that producing most foods creates greenhouse gas emissions, driving climate change. These emissions come from hundreds of different sources, including tractors burning fuel, manufacturing fertiliser and the bacteria in cow’s guts. Overall, food production contributes a quarter of human caused greenhouse gas emissions. However, there are some foods that remove more greenhouse gases than they emit, often referred to as “carbon negative” foods. These foods leave the climate better than they found it. Producing…

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Jimmy Carter’s quiet but monumental work in global health

Jimmy Carter’s quiet but monumental work in global health

The New York Times reports: Jimmy Carter’s five decades of leadership in global health brought a hideous disease to the brink of elimination, helped deliver basic health and sanitation to millions of people and set a new standard for how aid agencies should engage with the countries they assist. It was quiet work and drew relatively little attention because it was focused on afflictions that plague the poorest people in the most marginalized places, but it had enormous impact. “The…

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Australia banned kids from social media. Now it has advice for the U.S.

Australia banned kids from social media. Now it has advice for the U.S.

Politico reports: As countries around the world race to counter the tech industry’s ever-expanding influence, one issue in particular has become a major rallying cry: protecting children online. And Australia just put itself out front. In late November, Australia became the first country in the world to ban minors under age 16 from social media. Oddly enough, it’s an American who will help enforce the unprecedented legislation: Julie Inman Grant, who has served as Australia’s eSafety Commissioner since 2017. The…

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How to buy a piece of a lawsuit and impoverish a country

How to buy a piece of a lawsuit and impoverish a country

Inside Climate News reports: When a foreign mining company sued Greenland in 2022, the government’s lead lawyer thought he was prepared. Paw Fruerlund had handled similar cases before, and he believed the law and facts were on his side. When he arrived at one of the first hearings, however, Fruerlund stared across the table at 12 corporate lawyers from two firms representing his opponent, an Australian company called Greenland Minerals. There were so many, they spilled across two rows of…

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How America lost control of the bird flu, setting the stage for another pandemic

How America lost control of the bird flu, setting the stage for another pandemic

By Amy Maxmen, December 20, 2024 Keith Poulsen’s jaw dropped when farmers showed him images on their cellphones at the World Dairy Expo in Wisconsin in October. A livestock veterinarian at the University of Wisconsin, Poulsen had seen sick cows before, with their noses dripping and udders slack. But the scale of the farmers’ efforts to treat the sick cows stunned him. They showed videos of systems they built to hydrate hundreds of cattle at once. In 14-hour shifts, dairy…

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To escape extreme heat, farmers and fisherfolk worldwide are adopting overnight hours

To escape extreme heat, farmers and fisherfolk worldwide are adopting overnight hours

Modern Farmer reports: Every morning, for years, Josana Pinto da Costa would venture out onto the waterways lining Óbidos, Brazil, in a small fishing boat. She would glide over the murky, churning currents of the Amazon River Basin, her flat nets bringing in writhing hauls as the sun ascended into the cerulean skies above. Scorching temperatures in the Brazilian state of Pará have now made that routine unsafe. The heat has “been really intense” this year, said Pinto da Costa…

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AI chatbots show dementia-like cognitive decline in tests, raising questions about their future in medicine

AI chatbots show dementia-like cognitive decline in tests, raising questions about their future in medicine

The British Medical Journal reports: Almost all leading large language models or “chatbots” show signs of mild cognitive impairment in tests widely used to spot early signs of dementia, finds a study in the Christmas issue of the BMJ. The results also show that “older” versions of chatbots, like older patients, tend to perform worse on the tests. The authors say these findings “challenge the assumption that artificial intelligence will soon replace human doctors.” Huge advances in the field of…

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Giant companies took secret payments to allow free flow of opioids

Giant companies took secret payments to allow free flow of opioids

The New York Times reports: In 2017, the drug industry middleman Express Scripts announced that it was taking decisive steps to curb abuse of the prescription painkillers that had fueled America’s overdose crisis. The company said it was “putting the brakes on the opioid epidemic” by making it harder to get potentially dangerous amounts of the drugs. The announcement, which came after pressure from federal health regulators, was followed by similar declarations from the other two companies that control access…

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Amazon disregarded internal warnings on injuries, Senate investigation claims

Amazon disregarded internal warnings on injuries, Senate investigation claims

The New York Times reports: For years, worker advocates and some government officials have argued that Amazon’s strict production quotas lead to high rates of injury for its warehouse employees. And for years, Amazon has rejected the criticism, arguing that it doesn’t use strict quotas, and that its injury rates are falling close to or below the industry average. On Sunday, the majority staff of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, which is chaired by Senator Bernie…

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McConnell defends polio vaccine, an apparent warning to RFK Jr.

McConnell defends polio vaccine, an apparent warning to RFK Jr.

The New York Times reports: Senator Mitch McConnell, the former Republican leader and a survivor of polio, issued a pointed statement in support of the polio vaccine on Friday, hours after The New York Times reported that the lawyer for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has petitioned federal regulators to withdraw the vaccine from the market. Without naming Mr. Kennedy, Mr. McConnell suggested that the petition could jeopardize his confirmation to be health secretary in the incoming Trump administration. “Efforts to…

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‘Unprecedented risk’ to life on Earth: Scientists call for halt on ‘mirror life’ microbe research

‘Unprecedented risk’ to life on Earth: Scientists call for halt on ‘mirror life’ microbe research

The Guardian reports: World-leading scientists have called for a halt on research to create “mirror life” microbes amid concerns that the synthetic organisms would present an “unprecedented risk” to life on Earth. The international group of Nobel laureates and other experts warn that mirror bacteria, constructed from mirror images of molecules found in nature, could become established in the environment and slip past the immune defences of natural organisms, putting humans, animals and plants at risk of lethal infections. Although…

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A new theory of placebos reframes the mind-body problem

A new theory of placebos reframes the mind-body problem

Dien Ho writes: When healthcare researchers test potential new treatments, they use randomized clinical trials. Since the 1950s, placebos have been crucial parts of these trials. The placebo is made to resemble the treatment being tested, but lacks the experimental ingredients. For the treatment to be deemed efficacious, it must outperform the placebo, which is given to a control group. Otherwise, the treatment’s positive effects may be “mere” placebo effects. Advocates of evidence-based medicine consider double-blind randomized clinical trials with…

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A CEO’s killing echoes the political violence of the Gilded Age

A CEO’s killing echoes the political violence of the Gilded Age

Zeynep Tufekci writes: I’ve been studying social media for a long time, and I can’t think of any other incident when a murder [that of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson] in this country has been so openly celebrated. The conditions that gave rise to this outpouring of anger are in some ways specific to this moment. Today’s business culture enshrines the maximization of executive wealth and shareholder fortunes, and has succeeded in leveraging personal riches into untold political influence. New communication…

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Sick animals suggest COVID pandemic started in Wuhan market

Sick animals suggest COVID pandemic started in Wuhan market

Nature reports: The quest to understand where the COVID-19 pandemic started has revealed fresh clues. Researchers have re-analysed data collected from a market in Wuhan, China, during the early days of the pandemic and found that animals there were infected with a virus – although they could not confirm what exactly caused the infection. “The conclusion is convincing that there was infection in the animals,” says Spyros Lytras, an evolutionary virologist at the University of Tokyo. The results, which have…

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