Many people will soon load up Easter baskets with chocolate candy for children and adults to enjoy. On its own, dark chocolate has health benefits, such as antioxidants that neutralize damaging free radicals. And a report in ACS Food Science & Technology suggests that packing the sweet treat with pre- and probiotics could make it more healthful. Flavoring agents, however, can affect many properties, including moisture level and protein content of the chocolate product. Probiotics, found in fermented foods such…
As major changes continue for our planet’s climate, scientists are concerned about how plants will grow and adapt. Researchers in the MSU-DOE Plant Research Laboratory, or PRL, Sharkey lab are studying changes in plant metabolism that occur when plants are grown in high light, high CO2 (HLHC) conditions. They found that under these conditions, plants photosynthesize more, which can lead to larger plants, and potentially larger crop yields. However, there are tradeoffs; scientists also found that plants lose carbon under…
Understanding children’s subjective experiences through color As a child, did it ever occur to you that your perception of color differed from that of others? It’s quite common to have this thought, but it turns out that the human color experience may be more universal than we previously believed. In psychology and neuroscience, the relationship between subjective experience, such as how we perceive color, and physical brain activity has remained an unresolved problem. Furthermore, due to their limited language abilities,…
National Poll: 2 in 5 parents wish the government was doing more to prevent a bird flu outbreak; 1 in 3 have taken action to protect their family against it With soaring egg prices and ongoing bird flu headlines, many parents are uncertain about the risks and facts surrounding the virus, a national poll suggests. Most parents say they don’t know if there have been cases of bird flu in their state, and less than half feel that they are…
Using an approach called DNA origami, scientists at Caltech have developed a technique that could lead to cheaper, reusable biomarker sensors for quickly detecting proteins in bodily fluids, eliminating the need to send samples out to lab centers for testing. “Our work provides a proof-of-concept showing a path to a single-step method that could be used to identify and measure nucleic acids and proteins,” says Paul Rothemund (BS ’94), a visiting associate at Caltech in computing and mathematical sciences, and…
El Camino Health successfully pilots an innovative Women’s Heart Center According to the U.S. Physician Workforce Data Dashboard, only about 17% of cardiologists are women, ranking as one of the lowest specialties among female physicians, yet heart disease remains the number one killer of women, accounting for one in five female deaths. El Camino Health is innovating a solution to address the unique symptoms and risk factors of heart disease in women. A new national survey conducted by El Camino…
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