Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

We have selected to characterize the micro-biota of 15 meals that exemplify the typical meals consumed as part of three different dietary patterns in order to determine the average total amount of daily microbes ingested via food and beverages and their composition in the average American adult consuming these typical foods/diets: the Average American dietary pattern focused on…

Dominant crop pollinators are furthermore able to persist under agricultural expansion and many are relatively easily enhanced by simple conservation measures. Focusing conservation on the services delivered by pollinators may therefore lead to management strategies that predominantly benefit the limited set of species currently providing the majority of crop pollination. Consequently, conservation of the biological…

Metabolic enzymes and pathways that confer the structural diversity of pomegranate phytochemicals also warrant further investigation. For example, the production of diverse HT monomers and polymers has been suggested to involve the activity of multiple laccase enzymes. However, the HT-forming laccases have not been cloned and characterized from pomegranate or any other plant species. Elucidation…

However, this consideration does not apply here, because we were careful to ensure that the poor explanations in our study did not contradict known facts. Rather, the poor explanations were designed to lack explanatory goodness. In some cases, there was no general causal connection between the facts and the explanation; in others, the explanation failed to…

The optimal Rmax were as follows: 1.6 , 1.9 , 1.8 , 1.7 , 1.9 , and 3.0 . We used these values to compute the second Betti curve and determine how well it could account for the second integrated Betti value. All reported P values for comparison with experimentally gener- ated Betti curves were…

One of the main advantages of C. elegans is its short lifespan of about 20 to 25 days, allowing the rapid screening of substances that affect longevity. In addition, nematodes can be manipulated easily and single-gene deletion mutants are readily available, which facilitates the identification of signaling pathways involved in lifespan extension. Furthermore, many cellular…

However, functional ingredients may not produce the same effects when delivered outside a whole food matrix. Further, delivery of health benefits based on antioxidant capacity has come under intense scrutiny in recent years.Therefore, we studied the effects of beans on postprandial metabolic, oxidative stress, and inflammatory responses with the focus of understanding the contribution of…

Increased levels of superoxide were observed in SOD deleted wild type worms or in ISP-1 and NOU-6 mutants. The effect of deletion of SOD on C. elegans lifespan is shown in Table 2. The impact of SOD deletion on the lifespan appears to be contradictory, depending upon the C. elegans model used. For example, SOD2 deletion markedly…

These findings are consistent with reports showing that BB dietary supplementation enhances BDNF-mediated plasticity with improved spatial and object recognition memory. Moreover, the significant positive correlation between levels of BDNF and CREB indicates that BDNF and CREB are co-regulated in our paradigm. In addition, evidence indicates an association between BDNF and CREB, and this interaction…

In areas where major land-use changes have gone in the opposite direction, however, bee abundance has tended to increase . These changes may represent detectable effects from the US Department of Agriculture Conservation Reserve Program, which compensates farmers for retiring marginal lands . Given the clear patterns in Fig. 1 A–C, supported by other studies…