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Stress, meet weight gain. Weight gain, meet stress
You’re not eating differently and you’re keeping active, but your waistline is expanding. How is that happening? Since eating healthy and exercising shouldn’t make you gain weight, there may be a hidden factor getting in your way. Stress. The one thing that can have a grip on your circadian rhythm stronger than any bodybuilder.
Investigators at Weill Cornell Medicine published two mouse studies that suggest stress and other factors that throw the body’s circadian clocks out of rhythm may contribute to weight gain.
In the first study, the researchers imitated disruptive condition effects like high cortisol exposure and chronic stress by implanting pellets under the skin that released glucocorticoid at a constant rate for 21 days. Mice that received the pellets had twice as much white and brown fat, as well as much higher insulin levels, regardless of their unchanged and still-healthy diet.
In the second study, they used tagged proteins as markers to monitor the daily fluctuations of a protein that regulates fat cell production and circadian gene expression in mouse fat cell precursors. The results showed “that fat cell precursors commit to becoming fat cells only during the circadian cycle phase corresponding to evening in humans,” they said in a written statement.
“Every cell in our body has an intrinsic cell clock, just like the fat cells, and we have a master clock in our brain, which controls hormone secretion,” said senior author Mary Teruel of Cornell University. “A lot of forces are working against a healthy metabolism when we are out of circadian rhythm. The more we understand, the more likely we will be able to do something about it.”
So if you’re stressing out that the scale is or isn’t moving in the direction you want, you could be standing in your own way. Take a chill pill.
Who can smell cancer? The locust nose
If you need to smell some gas, there’s nothing better than a nose. Just ask a scientist: “Noses are still state of the art,” said Debajit Saha, PhD, of Michigan State University. “There’s really nothing like them when it comes to gas sensing.”
And when it comes to noses, dogs are best, right? After all, there’s a reason we don’t have bomb-sniffing wombats and drug-sniffing ostriches. Dogs are better. Better, but not perfect. And if they’re not perfect, then human technology can do better.
Enter the electronic nose. Which is better than dogs … except that it isn’t. “People have been working on ‘electronic noses’ for more than 15 years, but they’re still not close to achieving what biology can do seamlessly,” Dr. Saha explained in a statement from the university.
Which brings us back to dogs. If you want to detect early-stage cancer using smell, you go to the dogs, right? Nope.
Here’s Christopher Contag, PhD, also of Michigan State, who recruited Dr. Saha to the university: “I told him, ‘When you come here, we’ll detect cancer. I’m sure your locusts can do it.’ ”
Yes, locusts. Dr. Contag and his research team were looking at mouth cancers and noticed that different cell lines had different appearances. Then they discovered that those different-looking cell lines produced different metabolites, some of which were volatile.
Enter Dr. Saha’s locusts. They were able to tell the difference between normal cells and cancer cells and could even distinguish between the different cell lines. And how they were able to share this information? Not voluntarily, that’s for sure. The researchers attached electrodes to the insects’ brains and recorded their responses to gas samples from both healthy and cancer cells. Those brain signals were then used to create chemical profiles of the different cells. Piece of cake.
The whole getting-electrodes-attached-to-their-brains thing seemed at least a bit ethically ambiguous, so we contacted the locusts’ PR office, which offered some positive spin: “Humans get their early cancer detection and we get that whole swarms-that-devour-entire-countrysides thing off our backs. Win win.”
Bad news for vampires everywhere
Pop culture has been extraordinarily kind to the vampire. A few hundred years ago, vampires were demon-possessed, often-inhuman monsters. Now? They’re suave, sophisticated, beautiful, and oh-so dramatic and angst-filled about their “curse.” Drink a little human blood, live and look young forever. Such monsters they are.
It does make sense in a morbid sort of way. An old person receiving the blood of the young does seem like a good idea for rejuvenation, right? A team of Ukrainian researchers sought to find out, conducting a study in which older mice were linked with young mice via heterochronic parabiosis. For 3 months, old-young mice pairs were surgically connected and shared blood. After 3 months, the mice were disconnected from each other and the effects of the blood link were studied.
For all the vampire enthusiasts out there, we have bad news and worse news. The bad news first: The older mice received absolutely no benefit from heterochronic parabiosis. No youthfulness, no increased lifespan, nothing. The worse news is that the younger mice were adversely affected by the older blood. They aged more and experienced a shortened lifespan, even after the connection was severed. The old blood, according to the investigators, contains factors capable of inducing aging in younger mice, but the opposite is not true. Further research into aging, they added, should focus on suppressing the aging factors in older blood.
Of note, the paper was written by doctors who are currently refugees, fleeing the war in Ukraine. We don’t want to speculate on the true cause of the war, but we’re onto you, Putin. We know you wanted the vampire research for yourself, but it won’t work. Your dream of becoming Vlad “Dracula” Putin will never come to pass.
Hearing is not always believing
Have you ever heard yourself on a voice mail, or from a recording you did at work? No matter how good you sound, you still might feel like the recording sounds nothing like you. It may even cause low self-esteem for those who don’t like how their voice sounds or don’t recognize it when it’s played back to them.
Since one possible symptom of schizophrenia is not recognizing one’s own speech and having a false sense of control over actions, and those with schizophrenia may hallucinate or hear voices, not being able to recognize their own voices may be alarming.
A recent study on the sense of agency, or sense of control, involved having volunteers speak with different pitches in their voices and then having it played back to them to gauge their reactions.
“Our results demonstrate that hearing one’s own voice is a critical factor to increased self-agency over speech. In other words, we do not strongly feel that ‘I’ am generating the speech if we hear someone else’s voice as an outcome of the speech. Our study provides empirical evidence of the tight link between the sense of agency and self-voice identity,” lead author Ryu Ohata, PhD, of the University of Tokyo, said in a written statement.
As social interaction becomes more digital through platforms such as FaceTime, Zoom, and voicemail, especially since the pandemic has promoted social distancing, it makes sense that people may be more aware and more surprised by how they sound on recordings.
So, if you ever promised someone something that you don’t want to do, and they play it back to you from the recording you made, maybe you can just say you don’t recognize the voice. And if it’s not you, then you don’t have to do it.
Stress, meet weight gain. Weight gain, meet stress
You’re not eating differently and you’re keeping active, but your waistline is expanding. How is that happening? Since eating healthy and exercising shouldn’t make you gain weight, there may be a hidden factor getting in your way. Stress. The one thing that can have a grip on your circadian rhythm stronger than any bodybuilder.
Investigators at Weill Cornell Medicine published two mouse studies that suggest stress and other factors that throw the body’s circadian clocks out of rhythm may contribute to weight gain.
In the first study, the researchers imitated disruptive condition effects like high cortisol exposure and chronic stress by implanting pellets under the skin that released glucocorticoid at a constant rate for 21 days. Mice that received the pellets had twice as much white and brown fat, as well as much higher insulin levels, regardless of their unchanged and still-healthy diet.
In the second study, they used tagged proteins as markers to monitor the daily fluctuations of a protein that regulates fat cell production and circadian gene expression in mouse fat cell precursors. The results showed “that fat cell precursors commit to becoming fat cells only during the circadian cycle phase corresponding to evening in humans,” they said in a written statement.
“Every cell in our body has an intrinsic cell clock, just like the fat cells, and we have a master clock in our brain, which controls hormone secretion,” said senior author Mary Teruel of Cornell University. “A lot of forces are working against a healthy metabolism when we are out of circadian rhythm. The more we understand, the more likely we will be able to do something about it.”
So if you’re stressing out that the scale is or isn’t moving in the direction you want, you could be standing in your own way. Take a chill pill.
Who can smell cancer? The locust nose
If you need to smell some gas, there’s nothing better than a nose. Just ask a scientist: “Noses are still state of the art,” said Debajit Saha, PhD, of Michigan State University. “There’s really nothing like them when it comes to gas sensing.”
And when it comes to noses, dogs are best, right? After all, there’s a reason we don’t have bomb-sniffing wombats and drug-sniffing ostriches. Dogs are better. Better, but not perfect. And if they’re not perfect, then human technology can do better.
Enter the electronic nose. Which is better than dogs … except that it isn’t. “People have been working on ‘electronic noses’ for more than 15 years, but they’re still not close to achieving what biology can do seamlessly,” Dr. Saha explained in a statement from the university.
Which brings us back to dogs. If you want to detect early-stage cancer using smell, you go to the dogs, right? Nope.
Here’s Christopher Contag, PhD, also of Michigan State, who recruited Dr. Saha to the university: “I told him, ‘When you come here, we’ll detect cancer. I’m sure your locusts can do it.’ ”
Yes, locusts. Dr. Contag and his research team were looking at mouth cancers and noticed that different cell lines had different appearances. Then they discovered that those different-looking cell lines produced different metabolites, some of which were volatile.
Enter Dr. Saha’s locusts. They were able to tell the difference between normal cells and cancer cells and could even distinguish between the different cell lines. And how they were able to share this information? Not voluntarily, that’s for sure. The researchers attached electrodes to the insects’ brains and recorded their responses to gas samples from both healthy and cancer cells. Those brain signals were then used to create chemical profiles of the different cells. Piece of cake.
The whole getting-electrodes-attached-to-their-brains thing seemed at least a bit ethically ambiguous, so we contacted the locusts’ PR office, which offered some positive spin: “Humans get their early cancer detection and we get that whole swarms-that-devour-entire-countrysides thing off our backs. Win win.”
Bad news for vampires everywhere
Pop culture has been extraordinarily kind to the vampire. A few hundred years ago, vampires were demon-possessed, often-inhuman monsters. Now? They’re suave, sophisticated, beautiful, and oh-so dramatic and angst-filled about their “curse.” Drink a little human blood, live and look young forever. Such monsters they are.
It does make sense in a morbid sort of way. An old person receiving the blood of the young does seem like a good idea for rejuvenation, right? A team of Ukrainian researchers sought to find out, conducting a study in which older mice were linked with young mice via heterochronic parabiosis. For 3 months, old-young mice pairs were surgically connected and shared blood. After 3 months, the mice were disconnected from each other and the effects of the blood link were studied.
For all the vampire enthusiasts out there, we have bad news and worse news. The bad news first: The older mice received absolutely no benefit from heterochronic parabiosis. No youthfulness, no increased lifespan, nothing. The worse news is that the younger mice were adversely affected by the older blood. They aged more and experienced a shortened lifespan, even after the connection was severed. The old blood, according to the investigators, contains factors capable of inducing aging in younger mice, but the opposite is not true. Further research into aging, they added, should focus on suppressing the aging factors in older blood.
Of note, the paper was written by doctors who are currently refugees, fleeing the war in Ukraine. We don’t want to speculate on the true cause of the war, but we’re onto you, Putin. We know you wanted the vampire research for yourself, but it won’t work. Your dream of becoming Vlad “Dracula” Putin will never come to pass.
Hearing is not always believing
Have you ever heard yourself on a voice mail, or from a recording you did at work? No matter how good you sound, you still might feel like the recording sounds nothing like you. It may even cause low self-esteem for those who don’t like how their voice sounds or don’t recognize it when it’s played back to them.
Since one possible symptom of schizophrenia is not recognizing one’s own speech and having a false sense of control over actions, and those with schizophrenia may hallucinate or hear voices, not being able to recognize their own voices may be alarming.
A recent study on the sense of agency, or sense of control, involved having volunteers speak with different pitches in their voices and then having it played back to them to gauge their reactions.
“Our results demonstrate that hearing one’s own voice is a critical factor to increased self-agency over speech. In other words, we do not strongly feel that ‘I’ am generating the speech if we hear someone else’s voice as an outcome of the speech. Our study provides empirical evidence of the tight link between the sense of agency and self-voice identity,” lead author Ryu Ohata, PhD, of the University of Tokyo, said in a written statement.
As social interaction becomes more digital through platforms such as FaceTime, Zoom, and voicemail, especially since the pandemic has promoted social distancing, it makes sense that people may be more aware and more surprised by how they sound on recordings.
So, if you ever promised someone something that you don’t want to do, and they play it back to you from the recording you made, maybe you can just say you don’t recognize the voice. And if it’s not you, then you don’t have to do it.
Stress, meet weight gain. Weight gain, meet stress
You’re not eating differently and you’re keeping active, but your waistline is expanding. How is that happening? Since eating healthy and exercising shouldn’t make you gain weight, there may be a hidden factor getting in your way. Stress. The one thing that can have a grip on your circadian rhythm stronger than any bodybuilder.
Investigators at Weill Cornell Medicine published two mouse studies that suggest stress and other factors that throw the body’s circadian clocks out of rhythm may contribute to weight gain.
In the first study, the researchers imitated disruptive condition effects like high cortisol exposure and chronic stress by implanting pellets under the skin that released glucocorticoid at a constant rate for 21 days. Mice that received the pellets had twice as much white and brown fat, as well as much higher insulin levels, regardless of their unchanged and still-healthy diet.
In the second study, they used tagged proteins as markers to monitor the daily fluctuations of a protein that regulates fat cell production and circadian gene expression in mouse fat cell precursors. The results showed “that fat cell precursors commit to becoming fat cells only during the circadian cycle phase corresponding to evening in humans,” they said in a written statement.
“Every cell in our body has an intrinsic cell clock, just like the fat cells, and we have a master clock in our brain, which controls hormone secretion,” said senior author Mary Teruel of Cornell University. “A lot of forces are working against a healthy metabolism when we are out of circadian rhythm. The more we understand, the more likely we will be able to do something about it.”
So if you’re stressing out that the scale is or isn’t moving in the direction you want, you could be standing in your own way. Take a chill pill.
Who can smell cancer? The locust nose
If you need to smell some gas, there’s nothing better than a nose. Just ask a scientist: “Noses are still state of the art,” said Debajit Saha, PhD, of Michigan State University. “There’s really nothing like them when it comes to gas sensing.”
And when it comes to noses, dogs are best, right? After all, there’s a reason we don’t have bomb-sniffing wombats and drug-sniffing ostriches. Dogs are better. Better, but not perfect. And if they’re not perfect, then human technology can do better.
Enter the electronic nose. Which is better than dogs … except that it isn’t. “People have been working on ‘electronic noses’ for more than 15 years, but they’re still not close to achieving what biology can do seamlessly,” Dr. Saha explained in a statement from the university.
Which brings us back to dogs. If you want to detect early-stage cancer using smell, you go to the dogs, right? Nope.
Here’s Christopher Contag, PhD, also of Michigan State, who recruited Dr. Saha to the university: “I told him, ‘When you come here, we’ll detect cancer. I’m sure your locusts can do it.’ ”
Yes, locusts. Dr. Contag and his research team were looking at mouth cancers and noticed that different cell lines had different appearances. Then they discovered that those different-looking cell lines produced different metabolites, some of which were volatile.
Enter Dr. Saha’s locusts. They were able to tell the difference between normal cells and cancer cells and could even distinguish between the different cell lines. And how they were able to share this information? Not voluntarily, that’s for sure. The researchers attached electrodes to the insects’ brains and recorded their responses to gas samples from both healthy and cancer cells. Those brain signals were then used to create chemical profiles of the different cells. Piece of cake.
The whole getting-electrodes-attached-to-their-brains thing seemed at least a bit ethically ambiguous, so we contacted the locusts’ PR office, which offered some positive spin: “Humans get their early cancer detection and we get that whole swarms-that-devour-entire-countrysides thing off our backs. Win win.”
Bad news for vampires everywhere
Pop culture has been extraordinarily kind to the vampire. A few hundred years ago, vampires were demon-possessed, often-inhuman monsters. Now? They’re suave, sophisticated, beautiful, and oh-so dramatic and angst-filled about their “curse.” Drink a little human blood, live and look young forever. Such monsters they are.
It does make sense in a morbid sort of way. An old person receiving the blood of the young does seem like a good idea for rejuvenation, right? A team of Ukrainian researchers sought to find out, conducting a study in which older mice were linked with young mice via heterochronic parabiosis. For 3 months, old-young mice pairs were surgically connected and shared blood. After 3 months, the mice were disconnected from each other and the effects of the blood link were studied.
For all the vampire enthusiasts out there, we have bad news and worse news. The bad news first: The older mice received absolutely no benefit from heterochronic parabiosis. No youthfulness, no increased lifespan, nothing. The worse news is that the younger mice were adversely affected by the older blood. They aged more and experienced a shortened lifespan, even after the connection was severed. The old blood, according to the investigators, contains factors capable of inducing aging in younger mice, but the opposite is not true. Further research into aging, they added, should focus on suppressing the aging factors in older blood.
Of note, the paper was written by doctors who are currently refugees, fleeing the war in Ukraine. We don’t want to speculate on the true cause of the war, but we’re onto you, Putin. We know you wanted the vampire research for yourself, but it won’t work. Your dream of becoming Vlad “Dracula” Putin will never come to pass.
Hearing is not always believing
Have you ever heard yourself on a voice mail, or from a recording you did at work? No matter how good you sound, you still might feel like the recording sounds nothing like you. It may even cause low self-esteem for those who don’t like how their voice sounds or don’t recognize it when it’s played back to them.
Since one possible symptom of schizophrenia is not recognizing one’s own speech and having a false sense of control over actions, and those with schizophrenia may hallucinate or hear voices, not being able to recognize their own voices may be alarming.
A recent study on the sense of agency, or sense of control, involved having volunteers speak with different pitches in their voices and then having it played back to them to gauge their reactions.
“Our results demonstrate that hearing one’s own voice is a critical factor to increased self-agency over speech. In other words, we do not strongly feel that ‘I’ am generating the speech if we hear someone else’s voice as an outcome of the speech. Our study provides empirical evidence of the tight link between the sense of agency and self-voice identity,” lead author Ryu Ohata, PhD, of the University of Tokyo, said in a written statement.
As social interaction becomes more digital through platforms such as FaceTime, Zoom, and voicemail, especially since the pandemic has promoted social distancing, it makes sense that people may be more aware and more surprised by how they sound on recordings.
So, if you ever promised someone something that you don’t want to do, and they play it back to you from the recording you made, maybe you can just say you don’t recognize the voice. And if it’s not you, then you don’t have to do it.