Discover 10 science backed anti inflammatory biohacks that improve health through simple food, sleep, stress, and lifestyle habits.
Category: food
Soft robot powered by edible pneumatic battery and actuator
Using common kitchen ingredients such as citric acid and sodium bicarbonate, scientists have created an edible pneumatic battery and valve system to power soft robots.
Soft, biodegradable robots are used in various fields, such as environmental monitoring and targeted drug delivery, and are designed to completely disappear after performing their tasks. However, the main problem with them is that they rely on conventional batteries (such as lithium), which are toxic and non-biodegradable. And until now, no successful system has been developed that can provide repeated, self-sustained motion using only edible materials.
In a new paper published in the journal Advanced Science, researchers from Dario Floreano’s Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at EPFL in Switzerland describe how they developed a fully edible power source (battery), a valve system (controller), and an actuator (the robot’s muscle).
Species in crisis: Critically endangered penguins are directly competing with fishing boats
A new study led by the University of St Andrews has found that critically endangered African penguins (Spheniscus demersus) are significantly more likely to forage in the same areas as commercial fishing vessels during years of low fish abundance, increasing competition for food and adding pressure to a species already in crisis.
Published in the Journal of Applied Ecology, the research introduces a novel metric called “overlap intensity” which for the first time measures not just the extent of shared space between penguins and fishing vessels, but how many penguins are actually affected by this overlap.
The African penguin population has plummeted by nearly 80% in the past three decades, in part due to competition with the local fishery targeting sardines and anchovies, a key prey for the penguins.
Urolithin A nudges aging immune cells toward a youthful profile in 28 days
An international research team focused on aging reports that urolithin A at 1,000 mg per day shifted human immune profiles toward a more naive-like, less exhausted CD8+ state and increased fatty acid oxidation capacity, with additional functional gains.
Urolithin A is a metabolite produced by gut bacteria after breaking down ellagic acid from certain foods, such as pomegranates and walnuts. While produced naturally through microbial digestion, it is in much smaller quantities than available as a supplement or used in the study.
Aging bodies face reduced production of mature T cells, shrinking naive T cell pools and chronic low-grade inflammation. Mitochondrial dysfunction and waning autophagy sit at the core of these shifts, with mitophagy failure linked to immune dysregulation and disease.
Unusual days signal rising migraine risk
Harvard Medical School researchers report that higher day-to-day “trigger surprisal” scores were associated with migraine attacks over the next 12 and 24 hours. In this cohort, higher surprisal scores aligned with greater odds of a headache attack, even after accounting for recent headache history and fluctuations in daily experience.
Migraine management often revolves around trying to identify and control conditions that might trigger them. From food and drink and environmental exposures to physiological and psychological stressors, it is a crowded landscape of potential trigger suspects. Individuals attempting to match migraine attack timing to these suspected triggers rely on memory and a self-selected list of candidates rather than controlled experimental designs.
In the study, “Information-Theoretic Trigger Surprisal and Future Headache Activity,” published in JAMA Network Open, researchers conducted a cohort study to evaluate the association between surprise and future headache attacks.
Fighting poverty may require cultural wisdom, not just cash
Most poverty-fighting efforts focus on meeting basic material needs, such as food and shelter. But this overlooks the psychological and cultural factors that shape how people take action in their lives.
University of Michigan researchers found that psychosocial programs designed to support women’s agency in Niger, West Africa, were effective in promoting women’s economic empowerment when grounded in local values—such as social harmony, respectfulness and collective progress—but not a Western-style program grounded in individual ambition.
The new study highlights how culturally attuned approaches to empowerment can offer a powerful pathway for reducing global poverty. The research, published in the latest issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, introduces a “culturally wise” approach: psychosocial programs that honor diverse worldviews and community values.
New lightweight polymer film can prevent corrosion
MIT researchers have developed a lightweight polymer film that is nearly impenetrable to gas molecules, raising the possibility that it could be used as a protective coating to prevent solar cells and other infrastructure from corrosion, and to slow the aging of packaged food and medicines.
The polymer, which can be applied as a film mere nanometers thick, completely repels nitrogen and other gases, as far as can be detected by laboratory equipment, the researchers found. That degree of impermeability has never been seen before in any polymer, and rivals the impermeability of molecularly-thin crystalline materials such as graphene.
“Our polymer is quite unusual. It’s obviously produced from a solution-phase polymerization reaction, but the product behaves like graphene, which is gas-impermeable because it’s a perfect crystal. However, when you examine this material, one would never confuse it with a perfect crystal,” says Michael Strano, the Carbon P. Dubbs Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT.
Vagus nerve’s right branch plays a key role in digestive signaling
After years of work, cognition and neuroscience doctoral student Hailey Welch is—for the first time—the lead author of a study published in an academic journal, a paper appearing in Cell Reports, which examined the role of the vagus nerve’s branches in digestive signaling.
The goal of Welch’s research is to learn more about the vagus nerve’s role in the forming of dietary habits. The vagus nerve includes left and right branches. Earlier research in the Motor and Habit Learning Lab of Dr. Catherine Thorn, associate professor of neuroscience in the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences and the corresponding author of the Cell Reports study, indicates that those two sides have different functions.
“We know that the vagus nerve transmits information about the nutritional and reward aspects of food from the gut to the brain,” Welch said. “What we are discovering is that such reward signaling is lateralized—mainly right-sided.”
New ‘IndonesianFoods’ worm floods npm with 100,000 packages
A self-spreading package published on npm spams the registry by spawning new packages every every seven seconds, creating large volumes of junk.
The worm, dubbed ‘IndonesianFoods,’ due to its distinctive package naming scheme that picks random Indonesian names and food terms, has published over 100,000 packages according to Sonatype, and the number is growing exponentially.
Although the packages do not have a malicious component for developers (e.g., stealing data, backdooring hosts), this could change with an update that introduces a dangerous payload.
Shared gut microbe imbalances found across autism, ADHD, and anorexia nervosa
A new study has identified distinct patterns in the gut bacteria of children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorder, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, and anorexia nervosa. Published in the journal Neuroscience, the research also reveals altered levels of hormones that regulate appetite, suggesting a complex interplay between gut microbes, eating behaviors, and brain health in these conditions.
The human digestive tract is home to a bustling community of trillions of microorganisms, collectively known as the gut microbiota. This internal ecosystem communicates with the brain through a complex network of signals, often called the gut-brain axis. Researchers are increasingly recognizing that an imbalance in this microbial community, sometimes referred to as dysbiosis, may be associated with a range of health conditions, including those affecting the brain.
Neurodevelopmental disorders like autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), along with the psychiatric disorder anorexia nervosa (AN), are frequently accompanied by gastrointestinal issues and atypical eating patterns.