Science

Protected: Frontiers Planetary Prize 2024

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https://council.science/current/blog/frontiers-planetary-prize-2024/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=frontiers-planetary-prize-2024

Researchers who recorded direct neural signals from people listening to “Another Brick in the Wall” have reproduced a recognizable version of the song from the neural data.

Bridging the trust gap: science freedom and responsibility in Asia-Pacific

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New science fiction podcast series launches today in partnership with Nature and the ISC’s Centre for Science Futures

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Science as a political and ethical project

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https://council.science/current/blog/science-as-a-political-and-ethical-project/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=science-as-a-political-and-ethical-project

Here's the article they're reporting on: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanhl/article/PIIS2666-7568(23)00187-3/fulltext

r/science

r/EverythingScience

The whole channel should have way more views. Science fraud is a topic that scientists knows and talk about but it is always vague and it's hard to point at precises cases due to lack of documentation (and journalists in general).

It's worth noting that the correlation held for total red meat consumption along with considering just processed red meats and unprocessed red meat separately

There are certainly some limitations of this study but it does align with the growing body of evidence suggesting a potential link between any red meat consumption and type 2 diabetes

"The authors proposed three universal concepts of selection: the basic ability to endure; the enduring nature of active processes that may enable evolution; and the emergence of novel characteristics as an adaptation to an environment."

Rich, high-fat foods such as ice cream are loved not only for their taste, but also for the physical sensations they produce in the mouth — their ‘mouthfeel’. Now scientists have identified a brain area that both responds to the smooth texture of fatty foods and uses that information to rate the morsel’s allure, guiding eating behaviour1.

These findings, published on 16 October in The Journal of Neuroscience, “add a new dimension” of the eating experience to scientists’ understanding of what motivates people to choose certain foods, says Ivan de Araujo, a neuroscientist at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany, who was not involved in the study.

A tongue for texture

To explore how food textures influence eating habits, Fabian Grabenhorst, a neuroscientist at the University of Oxford, UK, and his colleagues set out to quantify the mouthfeel of fatty foods. The authors prepared several milkshakes with varying fat and sugar contents and placed a sample of each between two pig tongues procured from a local butcher. The researchers then slid the tongues across each other and measured the amount of friction between the two surfaces, providing a numerical index of each shakes smoothness.

The researchers then gave 22 participants milkshakes with the same compositions as those tested on the pig tongues. After tasting each milkshake, participants placed bids on how much they would spend to drink a full glass of it after the experiment.

Accompanying brain scans showed that activity patterns in an area called the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), which is involved in reward processing, reflected the shakes’ texture. The scans also identified OFC activity patterns that reflected participants’ bids, suggesting that this brain region links mouthfeel to the value placed on that food.

To find out whether this finding extends to food intake, the researchers invited the participants to return to the laboratory for a free lunch of several curry dishes with varying fat contents. Unbeknown to the participants, the researchers measured how much of each curry the participants ate. They found that those whose OFCs were most sensitive to fatty texture were more likely to eat more of the high-fat curry compared with those who weren’t as sensitive to fatty texture.

These findings could help to shape formulations of low-calorie foods and understand the neural mechanisms of overeating, Grabenhorst says.

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-03243-8

References

Khorisantono, P. A., et al. J. Neurosci. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1473-23.2023 (2023).

Startups are harnessing the fast-growing “roots" of mushrooms for sustainable alternatives to leather, packaging, building materials, and meat. Mycelium's versatility makes it a prime candidate to displace many harmful mainstream materials — especially for a more conscious future. However, scaling production and costs still remain key hurdles to overcome.

A team of scientists is proposing a new explanation for some cases of long Covid, based on their findings that serotonin levels were lower in people with long Covid. They said that the biological pathway that their research outlines could unite many of the major theories of what causes long Covid: lingering remnants of the virus, inflammation, increased blood clotting and dysfunction of the autonomic nervous system.