The Ed's Up #75

Food Additives Inflame Mouse Guts By Disturbing Microbes

"These additives may confer stability to food, but they can also bring discord to the gut—at least in mice. Gewirtz has found that two common emulsifiers—caboxymethylcellulose (CMC) and polysorbate-80 (P80)—can change the roll call of bacteria in a mouse’s gut. They also make the gut more porous, allowing microbes to slip through its walls and reach the immune cells and blood vessels on the other side. As a result, the mice developed severe inflammation. They also put on weight, and their blood sugar went up." (Image: GM)
 

Fishing For the Microbes Behind Malnutrition

A team of scientists, led by Jeff Gordon at the Washington University School of Medicine, has shown that children with kwashiorkor harbour 11 species of gut bacteria that, together with their poor diets, conspire to damage their guts. These results suggest that this particular type of malnutrition isn’t just caused by the absence of food, but also by the presence of the wrong microbes. (Image: Tanya Yatsunenko)
 

More good reads

• Two boys from either side of the Iron Curtain, united through a love of birds, turn a no man’s land into an ecological success story. This piece from Phil McKenna is one of the best I’ve read recently. I cried at the end.
• The time everyone "corrected" the world's smartest woman, and she was right. A great piece about the Monty Hall Problem.
• The Science of Why No One Agrees on the Color of This Dress. Adam Rogers explains. 
• An Italian surgeon claims that he can do head transplants. It’s complete nonsense. Virtually every new organisation covers it terribly. Azeen Ghorayshi at Buzzfeed does it right.
• You think you're safe and then--BAM--an octopus leaps out of the water and kills you.
• Mars Missions Are A Scam. Dan Vergano tells it like it is.
• "Science routinely reinforces the public’s mistrust with our everyday foibles." Hope Jahren with some harsh truths about science communication.
• Patients with bionic hands control them using thought alone. Lovely piece by Alok Jha
• On icebergs, by Donovan Hohn, in Moby-Duck. I highly recommend this book.
• Jessica Wapner’s piece on circumcision is a great exercise in thinking one's way through convoluted evidence where there may be no right answer.
• Eyelashes in mammals are always roughly 1/3 as long as the eye's width. Why?
• "It’s one of the world’s most startling ecological calamities - the story of how cotton soaked up an entire sea."
• “The monkeys who didn’t turn into humans: they must be gutted.” Pitch-perfect satire on evolution, from Philomena Cunk.
• A beautiful illustrated essay about the zombie bone-eating worms by Deb Chachra            

More good links will be released in tomorrow's linkfest on Not Exactly Rocket Science.

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And that's it! Thanks for reading.

-Ed