Growing flowers and vegetables reduces the risk of cancer; always feeling depressed and anxious? Do some good deeds | Hot spot review

"Hotspot Review | Major Technology Events of the Week" is a new column with pictures and texts launched by Academic Headlines, which aims to help readers quickly understand the hot technology news of the past week. Due to the limited space (and knowledge), everyone is welcome to add more~

Eat less fast food! Otherwise your liver will be damaged

Studies have shown that fast food consumption is associated with an increased risk of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD).

NAFLD is a potentially life-threatening disease that is divided into nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFL) and nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH). The difference between the two is that the latter is accompanied by inflammation with hepatocellular damage (such as ballooning) with or without fibrosis.

The researchers found that people with obesity or diabetes who consumed 20 percent or more of their daily calories from fast food had significantly increased levels of fat in their livers compared with those who ate little or no fast food.

“A healthy liver contains a small amount of fat, usually less than 5%, and even a modest increase in fat can lead to nonalcoholic fatty liver disease,” said Ani Kardashian, MD, a hepatologist at Keck Medicine. “Severe increases in liver fat are particularly noticeable in people with obesity or diabetes, probably because these conditions cause fat to accumulate in the liver more easily.”

The researchers hope that this study will encourage health care providers to provide more nutrition education to their patients, especially those with obesity or diabetes, who are at higher risk for fatty liver disease from fast food. Currently, the only way to treat liver steatosis is through improving diet.

Paper link:

https://www.cghjournal.org/article/S1542-3565(22)01137-5/fulltext

Why does weight and body fat rebound quickly after dieting?

Dietary restriction (DR) is a common dietary intervention method that restricts diet to control weight and reduce body fat. Regardless of whether you are fat or thin, whether you are a teenager or middle-aged and elderly, a large proportion of people use dieting to control their weight or lose weight. At the same time, the proportion of people with normal weight who are dieting is increasing.

However, many studies have shown that people who diet are less able to maintain the weight they lose and often face the problem of rapid rebound of body weight and body fat. It is crucial to analyze the key mechanisms of weight and body fat rebound after dieting and find corresponding intervention strategies.

Recently, Zhai Qiwei's research group from the Shanghai Institute of Nutrition and Health, Chinese Academy of Sciences, used ten different dieting models and found that termination of dieting all led to rapid accumulation of body fat and obesity.

The study found that termination of various types of dieting led to rapid fat accumulation and obesity, revealing that the increase of intestinal lactobacilli and their metabolites during weight rebound promoted intestinal lipid absorption and fat accumulation, while a high-protein diet or specific antibiotic treatment after dietary restriction could inhibit the growth of lactobacilli and thus inhibit intestinal lipid absorption and fat accumulation.

This study showed that restoring a free diet after dietary restriction led to the occurrence of obesity, providing a new series of animal models for obesity research in addition to high-fat and high-sugar diets.

At the same time, the study suggests that inhibiting intestinal lipid absorption by targeting intestinal lactobacilli through a high-protein diet or antibiotics is an effective strategy for preventing obesity after dieting.

Source: Shanghai Institute of Nutrition and Health, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Paper link:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s42255-022-00687-6

Growing flowers and vegetables can reduce the risk of cancer

Exercise more, eat healthier, make new friends... As people make lists of resolutions to improve their physical and mental health for 2023, a new study by American scientists suggests you might want to add this powerful item to your list: gardening.

The first randomized controlled trial of community gardening, funded by the American Cancer Society, found that those who gardened ate more fiber and got more physical activity — both ways to reduce the risk of cancer and chronic disease. They also had significantly lower levels of stress and anxiety.

"These findings provide concrete evidence that community gardening can play an important role in preventing cancer, chronic disease and mental health disorders," said Jill Litt, a professor in the Department of Environmental Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Litt recruited 291 adults from the Denver area who had never participated in gardening. Their average age was 41. More than a third of them were Hispanic, and more than half came from low-income families. After the spring frost, half of the participants were assigned to the community gardening group, and the other half were assigned to the control group and asked to wait a year before starting gardening.

The researchers found that the gardening group ate an average of 1.4 grams more fiber per day than the control group, an increase of about 7%. The researchers pointed out that fiber has important effects on inflammation and immune response, including how people metabolize food to the health of their intestinal microbiota and even their susceptibility to diabetes and certain cancers. At the same time, the gardening group also increased their physical activity level by about 42 minutes per week.

The study also confirmed that even gardening novices can reap significant health benefits from the pastime in their first season.

Source: China Science Daily

Paper link:

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(22)00303-5/fulltext

How did we lose our body hair?

Why humans have significantly less hair than other mammals has long been a mystery.

Recently, American scientists published a paper in eLife saying that humans seem to have genes for growing hair all over their bodies, but evolution has caused them to lose their function. The results of the study pointed out that a group of genes and regulatory regions of the genome seem to be crucial for the formation of hair.

Equally important, regulatory regions of the genome seem to be. These regions do not code for hair structure, but influence the coding process indirectly. They determine when and where certain genes are switched on, and how much.

To solve the mystery of hair loss in mammals, researchers began looking for genes in hairless animals that evolve faster than in hairy animals.

They developed a computational method that can compare hundreds of regions of the genome simultaneously and surveyed 19,149 genes and 343,598 regulatory regions across dozens of mammals. In the process, they took steps to ignore gene regions responsible for evolving species-unique traits, such as adaptations to aquatic life.

The study answers fundamental questions about the mechanisms that shape this defining human trait, and the researchers believe it could lead to new treatments for baldness and hair loss following chemotherapy.

Source: China Science Daily

Paper link:

https://elifesciences.org/articles/76911

Walking for 5 minutes every half an hour can better offset the harm of sitting for a long time

There is growing evidence that many health problems are associated with prolonged sitting , and that even regular exercise cannot offset the negative effects of prolonged sitting on the human body. These health problems include increased blood pressure and blood sugar, excess waist fat and abnormal cholesterol levels, as well as an increased risk of death from cardiovascular disease and cancer.

Therefore, doctors recommend that all adults sit less and move more. Whenever possible, you can stand up instead of sitting, or find ways to move around more. So how often do we need to get up and move around? And for how long?

A recent study led by Keith Diaz, assistant professor at Columbia University Medical Center, showed that getting up and walking around for 5 minutes every half hour during long periods of sitting can offset some of the most harmful effects.

They found that walking for five minutes after every 30 minutes of sitting significantly lowered blood sugar and blood pressure. It also significantly reduced participants' blood sugar spikes after a large meal by 58 percent , compared with sitting in a chair all day.

To achieve optimal health, people need to incorporate regular movement into their workday, in addition to their daily exercise routine. "While this may sound unrealistic, our research shows that even small amounts of walking during work hours can significantly reduce the risk of heart disease and other chronic diseases."

Paper link:

https://journals.lww.com/acsm-msse/Abstract/9900/Breaking_Up_Prolonged_Sitting_to_Improve.200.aspx

Why is obesity more dangerous for men?

Recently, a study published by British scientists revealed the biological basis of sex differences in obesity-related diseases. The researchers observed significant differences in the cells that build blood vessels in the fat tissue of male and female mice .

Tara Haas, professor at York University's School of Kinesiology and Health Sciences, said men are more likely than women to develop obesity-related conditions such as cardiovascular disease, insulin resistance and diabetes.

The team used software to screen thousands of genes to zero in on genes involved in blood vessel growth. They found that processes related to the proliferation of new blood vessels were more abundant in female mice, while processes related to inflammation were more abundant in male mice. "Other studies have shown that when there is this inflammatory response in the endothelium, males function abnormally and do not respond normally to stimuli," Haas said.

Female endothelial cells replicate faster, while male endothelial cells are more sensitive to inflammatory stimuli. By comparing with previously published datasets, the researchers found that endothelial cells from aged male mice also showed more inflammatory features compared to females.

Although humans and mice have different genes, Haas thinks the findings may be applicable to future research. He is interested in studying these cells in people.

Source: China Science Daily

Paper link:

https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S2589004222020843

Generative AI and multimodal pre-trained large models were selected as "Damo Academy's Top Ten Technology Trends in 2023"

On January 11, DAMO Academy released "DAMO Academy's Top Ten Technology Trends in 2023", and technologies such as generative AI and multimodal pre-trained large models were selected .

DAMO Academy predicts that in the next three years, generative AI will enter the fast lane of technology productization, there will be more exploration in business models, and the industrial ecosystem will gradually improve with the popularization of applications. By then, the content creation ability of generative AI will reach the human level. Large technology companies with data, computing power, and productization experience will become the main participants in the implementation of generative AI. Computing infrastructure and platforms based on generative models will gradually develop, and models will become readily available services. Customers can use them without the professional skills to deploy and run generative models. Generative models will make significant progress in interactive capabilities, security and trustworthiness, and cognitive intelligence to assist humans in completing various creative tasks.

The development of multimodal pre-trained models will reshape the AI ​​business model and have a positive impact on people's production and lifestyle. For individuals, multimodal models like CLIP will enable more non-technical people to express their creativity without the need for tools and programming expertise; for enterprises, multimodal pre-trained models will become the key to improving enterprise production efficiency. In terms of business models, technology companies with big data, computing resources and model development capabilities will become providers of model services, helping companies integrate the capabilities of basic models with production processes to achieve optimal efficiency and cost.

PDF address of the report "Top Ten Technology Trends of DAMO Academy in 2023":

https://files.alicdn.com/tpsservice/9b8b05280c05294f158bdb0dee61f78b.pdf

Scientists make progress in research on biosensors based on transcriptional regulators

Microbial breeding technology is developing in the direction of automation, standardization and systematization. A large number of engineered strains can be designed and constructed in a short period of time. How to quickly and accurately screen the target high-yield strains is the key rate-limiting step in the iteration of industrial strains. Biosensors can convert the concentration signal of the target compound into easily detectable signals such as fluorescence, and are important tools for high-throughput screening of strains. Biosensors based on transcriptional regulatory factors (TFs) are widely used in high-throughput screening of strains and dynamic regulation of metabolic pathways.

However, the sensing performance of natural TF is often difficult to meet the needs of practical applications. Currently, its sensing performance is mainly improved through directed evolution or rational modification of the effector binding domain. However, since the effector binding domain generally exceeds 200 amino acids, library construction and screening are difficult, and mutations can easily change the specificity of its effector response. Therefore, there is an urgent need to develop a simpler, more efficient and universal TF-type biosensor design and modification strategy.

The team led by Zheng Ping, a researcher at the Tianjin Institute of Industrial Biotechnology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, took LysG and BenM of the LTTR family, the largest family of transcriptional regulatory factors in prokaryotes, as their research objects, and analyzed the regulatory function and regulatory mechanism of the hinge region between the effector binding domain and the DNA binding domain through molecular docking, molecular dynamics simulation and directed evolution.

The study further conducted directed evolution on the hinge region, which only contains about 30 amino acids, and quickly obtained mutants with significantly improved response performance, thus developing a general strategy for the design, modification and performance improvement of TF-type biosensors.

This strategy was applied to the modification and improvement of the alkaline amino acid biosensor LysG, and the obtained LysG mutant showed better application effects in the high-throughput screening of key enzymes in lysine synthesis and the dynamic regulation of the synthesis pathway.

Source: Tianjin Institute of Industrial Biotechnology, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Paper link:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0956566322010442

Scientists discover new factor that promotes healthy aging

Chronic low-grade inflammation is one of the main characteristics of aging, and this inflammation is closely related to many aging-related diseases, such as neurodegenerative diseases, metabolic syndrome, cancer, cardiovascular disease, etc. Centenarians can avoid or delay some major geriatric diseases, but it is still unclear whether this survival advantage is related to their inflammatory state .

Therefore, taking healthy and long-lived people as research subjects and exploring their mechanisms of inflammation regulation may provide new targets for extending the healthy lifespan of organisms and achieving healthy aging.

Recently, the team of Kong Qingpeng, a researcher at the Kunming Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the team of He Yonghan, a researcher at the Kunming Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, in collaboration with the team of Li Ji, a professor at the Xiangya Hospital of Central South University, discovered that the expression levels of multiple inflammatory factors in centenarians are downregulated; further analysis found that this low level of inflammation in centenarians may be regulated by the transcriptional regulatory factor ATF7 (activating transcription factor 7) .

The researchers used a variety of cell aging models to perform functional validation and found that overexpression or knockdown of ATF7 can delay or promote cell aging, respectively. The study used Caenorhabditis elegans as a research model and found that overexpression of ATF7 can indeed inhibit the aging phenotype of nematodes and extend the healthy lifespan of nematodes.

The research results show that ATF7 is a new healthy aging regulatory gene present in long-lived people. This gene can promote healthy longevity by delaying cellular aging and reducing inflammation levels in elderly individuals.

Source: Kunming Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Paper link:

http://www.aginganddisease.org/EN/10.14336/AD.2022.1217

Feeling depressed and anxious all the time? Try doing some good deeds

People with depression or anxiety may be able to heal themselves by doing nice things for others , with doing good deeds leading to more improvements than two other treatments used to treat depression or anxiety, a new study shows.

"Social connections are one of the factors in life that are most strongly associated with happiness, and doing good deeds appears to be one of the best ways to foster those connections," said David Cregg, a psychology doctor at Ohio State University.

The findings suggest that many people's intuition about people with depression may be wrong, as doing good deeds can help people forget about their symptoms of depression and anxiety. "We often assume that people with depression have enough to deal with, so we don't want to burden them by asking them to help others. But these results contradict that."

Paper link:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17439760.2022.2154695

Scientists propose to understand complex systems such as the brain by analyzing the implicit geometry of networks

Network geometry is currently a rapidly developing and fascinating research area in physics. How the conductivity of a network is affected by the network geometry is a key question in science and engineering. The research literature in this field points out and proves that the hyperbolic network is the most efficient form to conduct any network. Knowing to what extent a network conforms to a hyperbolic network is very helpful in analyzing the conductivity of the network. However, there is no numerical evaluation method to measure the degree of geometric isomorphism of a network to a hyperbolic network in this field.

Recently, the Center for Complex Network Intelligence (CCNI) of the Brain and Intelligence Laboratory of Tsinghua University has made important progress in understanding complex systems such as the brain by analyzing the implicit geometry of networks. It has proposed a fast algorithm to measure the relationship between variable space, geometry and connectivity within complex interconnected systems, and revealed why finding this intrinsic connection can improve people's understanding of brain differences between different ages and genders.

Currently, brain network structures can be visualized in three-dimensional space, but there are many variables that shape brain structure. Among them, age and gender are known variables, and many variables are unknown but can still be found in brain network morphology. Therefore, researchers try to measure the degree of isomorphism between a network morphology and its implicit geometry. At the same time, this degree of isomorphism can also be used as a landmark indicator to distinguish different states or health conditions of brain networks, which is helpful for the conception of new theories and methods for designing brain disease markers.

Source: Tsinghua University

Paper link:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-34634-6

Loss of smell may be a sign of frailty and unhealthy aging

In a study using data from nearly 1,200 older adults, Johns Hopkins Medicine researchers found that loss of the sense of smell is a predictor of increased risk of frailty as people age.

Common consequences of smell loss include loss of appetite, difficulty monitoring personal hygiene, depression, and the inability to detect toxic gases. In older adults, this can be associated with weight loss, malnutrition, frailty, inadequate personal care, and even possible injuries from gas leaks or fires.

Previous studies have shown that olfactory dysfunction is a common early sign of cognitive decline related to the brain. The new findings suggest that the link to frailty may not only be in the brain, but also in the nose . If further research can confirm the findings, screening older adults for their ability to smell a variety of odors could be as important as testing hearing and vision.

" We use our sense of smell to identify threats like fire or enjoy the scent of flowers in the spring , but like vision and hearing, this sense can diminish with age," says senior author Nicholas Rowan, associate professor of otolaryngology-head and neck surgery at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. "If someone fails a smell test, that patient may need improved nutrition or a more detailed neurological or medical exam."

Paper link:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36502375/