Category Archives: Science in News

A Glass a Day Keeps the Doctor Away!

Posted on February 21, 2018 by | 5 comments

At the end of a draining week, there is nothing more satisfying than having a long awaited glass of red wine. This may seem like a guilty pleasure, but what if your favourite weekend beverage actually has proven health benefits?

Source: Flickr

History has shown that red wine has been in production for over 6,000 years, and has been used primarily for religious purposes since its origin. However, red wine has been proven to be advantageous for one’s health.

The term wine describes an extensive class of alcoholic beverages, which are the result of grape fermentation. Although wine is a fruit product produced from grapes, the process of fermentation allows it to transform from regular grape juice, into the beverage that we all know as wine!

Ethanol is the alcoholic component in wine, and it has been proven that moderate ethanol consumption can lead to a longer lifespan. A study in Eastern France was conducted, and moderate red wine intake, which was defined as 2-5 glasses per day, was shown to have a 24%-31% reduction in mortality. Now, how exactly does red wine make you live longer?

What makes red wine so unique is the presence of secondary metabolites in grapes, which are called polyphenols. Secondary metabolites are organic molecules that are not directly involved in plant development. Rather, they indirectly aid in defense mechanisms, and keep plants safe.

The skin and seeds of grapes are the source of these polyphenols, and are essential components in the red wine making process. During fermentation of red wine, the skin and seeds are left on, thus allowing humans directly consume the polyphenols. In contrast, before being fermented, white wines are pressed off of the seeds and skins, which also explains why red wine has greater benefits when compared to white wine.

Polyphenols have vital antioxidant properties, which help to lower the overall risk of chronic diseases. They protect our body’s cells from damage, thus helping to lower the possibility of heart conditions, diabetes, and even cancer. Specifically, there is strong evidence that mortality caused by certain types of heart disease is decreased when red wine is consumed. For example, red wine can prevent build-up of fats and other substances in the arteries, ultimately reducing the risk of heart disease.

Source: Flickr

Now it is important to remember that this is all in moderation, and doctors recommend 5 ounces, or 1-2 glasses of red wine a day. With that being said, excess consumption of red wine, and similarly other alcoholic beverages, will not have the same effects, and can even lead to higher mortality. So remember, red wine may in fact have health benefits, but it is only a glass a day that will ultimately keep the doctor away.

Bottoms up!

By Alexis Llewellyn

 

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Having a large sweet tooth may lead to Alzheimer’s

Posted on February 5, 2018 by | 3 comments

Source: Pixabay

A high-sugar diet has developed a negative connotation over the past few decades. This can be attributed to the countless studies showing the adverse effects sugar can have on the body physically.

To further fuel the negativity associated with sugar, a recent study has found that high blood sugar levels are linked to negative cognitive effects in their participants.

The study, published in Diabetologia, observed 5,189 participants over a period of about 8 years. Their results concluded that all participants demonstrated a cognitive decline over this time span. Interestingly, however, those patients with observed high sugar levels demonstrated a much faster rate of cognitive decline than those with healthy sugar levels.

The study above exposes a clear relation between high sugar levels and cognitive decline, but this revelation is far from ground-breaking. Some scientists have long been referring to Alzheimer’s as ‘type-3 diabetes’. This name came about due to the fact that individuals with diabetes have a higher chance of developing Alzheimer’s.

For me, this is a scary prospect. As a woman with a genetic disposition to diabetes and a sweet tooth propelled by the overwhelming amount of sugar in the South Asian diet, I am a clear candidate for developing Alzheimer’s.

How exactly does this development occur, though?

Dr. Eric Berg, from his YouTube channel Dr. Eric Berg DC, explains the mechanism behind the phenomenon in the video below.

In the video, Dr. Berg states that those with high sugar levels develop insulin-resistance in the body, which results in low sugar metabolism. This ‘starves’ the brain and creates significant memory failures, leading to Alzheimer’s. In the end, he mentions cutting out sugar from our diets entirely, to help prevent the development of the disease.

Cutting sugar out of our diets is no simple thing, however. The Keto Diet Podcast touches on some societal barriers when it comes to switching over into diets that involve less sugar. In her interview with Amy Berger regarding her book, The Alzheimer’s Antidote, Leanne Vogel mentions that even after a run fundraising for Alzheimer’s the meals offered included many dishes with carbohydrates, with few alternative options. She also mentions the candies being ever-present in her grandfather’s care home, despite him having developed the disease already.

Listen to the full podcast by clicking below.

Excess sugar leading to Alzheimer’s disease is a link that may now be considered a fact due to the overwhelming amount of evidence. In order to ensure a future of all round health, we should take care of avoiding extra sugar in our diet. Personally, I plan to replace the chocolate bar with an apple, skip the mid-day Frappuccino, and have the medicine go down without a spoonful of sugar.

-Pravnit Kooner

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The Extinction of Starving Polar Bears

Posted on January 29, 2018 by | 1 comment

Photographer Paul Nicklen and filmmakers from conservation group Sea Legacy captured a heartbreaking sight on Somerset Island: a starving polar bear on its deathbed. This dying polar bear was foraging for food on an iceless land.

They filmed the bear’s slow, beleaguered death and posted the video online. “When scientists say bears are going extinct, I want people to realize what it looks like. Bears are going to starve to death,” said Nicklen. They want to “use the power of storytelling to create the change we want to see”.

YouTube Preview Image

 

Climate change is threatening to land mammals nowadays. As animals that live only in Arctic regions, they’re often the first to feel the impacts of warming temperatures and rising sea levels. Loss of Arctic sea ice due to climate change is the primary threat to polar bears. Their habitat and hunting ground melts and declines as the temperature gets warmer.If there is no ice, they cannot catch seals, and there is no terrestrial food that will sustain polar bears. Lack of sea ice makes it more difficult for polar bears to find food, leaving them vulnerable to extinction in coming decades.

The image of the polar bear was taken by wildlife photographer Sue Forbes.

A World Wildlife Fund report predicted that climate change could eventually lead to polar bear endangerment or extinction. A warmer future means polar bears will have less and less access to their prey, therefore the rate at which bears die from starvation will increase. If the trend of sea ice decline continues to happen at a rate of about 13 percent a decade, polar bears would suffer from a loss of habitat and consequently food. According to the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), ice coverage is likely to fall below one million square kilometres by 2050. If there’s not enough ice, we won’t have bears. These bears will become leaner and fewer cubs will be born and survive.

Source: Flickr

Some people argued that all the video shown was a starving polar bear. It was not examined for injury, disease or age. The video did not demonstrate polar bears were dying because of global warming. However, based on the article written by a team of researchers led by Steven C. Amstrup, they used satellite data of sea ice conditions and model projections to predict the status of the world’s polar bears in the future decades and concluded that sea ice habitat will severely impact future polar bear populations. Two-thirds of the current world polar bear population will likely disappear by 2050.

It is true that we don’t know what caused this bear to starve, but we are certain that sea ice will continue to disappear and many bears will starve unless we pay more attention to their declining habitat base, try to reduce more carbon emissions and make action plans to limit climate warming.

By Rain Xia

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A Glass a Day Keeps the Doctor Away!

Posted on January 29, 2018 by | 1 comment

At the end of a draining week, there is nothing more satisfying than having that long awaited glass of red wine. This may seem like a guilty pleasure, but what if your favourite weekend beverage actually has proven health benefits?

Source: Flickr

History has shown that red wine has been in production for over 6000 years, and has been used primarily for religious purposes since its origin. However, red wine has been proven to have significant health benefits.

The term wine describes an extensive class of alcoholic beverages, which are the result of grape fermentation. Wine is a fruit product produced from grapes, however the process of fermentation allows it to transform from regular grape juice into the beverage that we all know know as wine!

Ethanol is the alcoholic component in wine, and it has been proven that moderate ethanol consumption can lead to a longer lifespan. A study in eastern France was conducted, and moderate red wine consumption, which was defined as 2-5 glasses per day, was shown to have a 24%-31% reduction in mortality. Now, how exactly does red wine make you live longer?

What makes red wine so special is the content of secondary metabolites in grapes, which are called polyphenols. Secondary metabolites are organic molecules that are not directly involved in plant development. Rather, they indirectly aid in defense mechanisms, and keep plants safe. The skin and stems of grapes (the source of polyphenols) are essential components in the red wine making process. This also explains why red wine has greater benefits when compared to white wine.

These polyphenols have very prominent antioxidant properties, which help to lower the overall risk of chronic diseases. They protect our body’s cells from damage, thus helping to lower the possibility of heart conditions, diabetes, and even cancer. Specifically, there is strong evidence that atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease mortality is decreased through consumption of red wine. This means that red wine prevents build-up of fats and other substances in the arteries, ultimately reducing the risk of heart disease.

Source: Flickr

Now it is important to remember that this is all in moderation, and doctors recommend 5 ounces, or 1-2 glasses of red wine a day. Consequently, excess consumption of red wine, and similarly other alcoholic beverages, will not have the same effects, and can even lead to higher mortality. So remember, red wine may in fact have health benefits, but it is only a glass a day that will ultimately keep the doctor away.

Bottoms up!

By Alexis Llewellyn

 

 

 

1 Comment

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How much can babies really understand?

Posted on January 28, 2018 by | Leave a comment

Whether you love them or hate them, at some point in your life you have likely talked to a baby. Often, we don’t associate them to have a vocabulary that goes anything beyond “goo goo gaga” so we don’t expect them to understand the slightest of what we are saying. It isn’t until they’re nearly two years old that we expect them to start speaking and communicating in comprehensible language. However, studies have shown that infants at 6 months of age may be able to comprehend the meanings of common nouns.

Source: Flickr

In Bergelson & Swingley’s study, they presented images to infants between the ages of 6 and 9 months while parents named the objects in the pictures. When named, the researchers found that the infants would gaze towards the associated image. This study suggested that infants were able to understand their parents before 15 months of age, which was previously thought to be the age where understanding began.

Setup for Bergelson & Swingley’s study on infant understanding. Sourced from their published study,

Now this work inspired further investigation. How much do these infants really understand? Do all infants equally develop understanding of common nouns at the same points in life? Bergelson performed a more recent study that suggested infants are more easily able to tell the difference between words that are semantically unrelated, such as milk and foot, than when they are related (milk and juice). This was the first time infants of this age were observed utilizing their understanding of phonemes to comprehend human language.

YouTube Preview Image

It seems obvious that an infant would not be able to make that distinction as easily; however, this lack of distinction is also observed in adult understanding of language. Previous studies have been conducted like the Bergelson & Swingley study, in which images were placed before adult participants and their eye movements were tracked when words were spoken to them. A delay in eye fixation was observed when related images were shown to the adult participant versus images that were completely unrelated. As it turns out, our understanding of common nouns is not far from that of a 6-month old infant. This is the first time a similarity in language comprehension of this scale has been observed between adults and infants at the age of 6 months.

Source: Flickr

New developments such as this suggest that infants are learning and developing understanding on a much faster rate than previously thought. It’s worth noting that there are short-comings to this research. For one, there were only 51 children studied and most of the infants were from white, middle-class families. However, this opens the door to further studies on infant cognition. Perhaps next time we talk to a baby, we might be more careful with the words we choose, because it seems that they understand more than what we once thought.

By Faraz Kazi

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A cool and refreshing way to lose weigh

Posted on January 22, 2018 by | 1 comment

Many have been struggling with losing weight. Some people choose to control their diet very strictly. Others try to lose weight by going to the gym very frequently. These ways can definitely help people to reach their goals. However, it is painful for some people to only eat healthy food. And going to the gym takes a lot of time and energy. Here comes a simple and cool solution — drinking water. Most people know that water is very essential to our lives. But can you imagine that you can easily lose weight simply by drinking more water? 

[source: https://pixabay.com/en/lose-weight-fat-slim-diet-loss-1911605/]

Surprisingly that is true. Scientists have found that drinking water can increase the resting metabolic rate(RMR) of adults. RMR is the measurement of the rate of body’s metabolism. Higher RMR means human body can consume more calories by spending the same amount of energy. One experiment is conducted on overweighted women who normally drink less than 0.5 L water every day. The result of it shows that the increased intake of water to over 1 L per day can make a significant difference in body weight. After over a  12-month period, most overweight women who participated in the experiment lost more than 2 kg. Because all the participants were required not to change their lifestyle except to drink more water, this study shows the direct relationship between the intaking amount of water and the weight loss. 

 

[source: https://pixabay.com/en/tape-tomato-glas-diet-water-403592/]

Given the fact that drinking more water does help us reduce the body fat, what is the proper way to drink water based on this theory?

First, don’t forget to drink water before the meal. This can help to reduce your appetite. According to a research based on adults subjects, pre-meal water consumption has an effect on the reduction of meal energy intake, especially for older adults. This is due to the sense of fullness provided by water. Because the hunger ratings were lower and fullness ratings were higher after drinking water, people tend to eat less after drinking the required amount of water.  However, for those of you who are not older adults, it is still a good advice. Although this may not have that impressive effect on you at the same level as the middle-aged people, it still helps you to avoid overeating.

Second, try to drink one more cup of water every day and replace other sweetened beverage with water. Sugars in the sweetened beverage are the biggest enemy of losing weight. A study shows that drinking beverage can not only increase the energy intake and body weight but also increase the risk of several medical problems. It has been proved that the daily intake of water can have an influence on people’s behavior and emotions. In general, you should drink water as soon as you feel thirsty and drink enough to quench your thirst. However, it is not good to over drink the water. 1-2 liters of water per day is recommended to help stay healthy and lose weight. 

[source: https://pixabay.com/en/thirsty-man-drink-drinking-water-937395/]

Isn’t it cool to lose weight simply by drinking water? For those of you who are not interested in working out or being upset of controlling the diet, this refreshing way can be your lifesaver! If you still doubt it, just try to drink more water from now on! It does not take much effort but can give you a huge benefit.

By Qingyue Wang

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AI links video gaming and research

Posted on January 22, 2018 by | Leave a comment

Today I want to introduce an Artificial Intelligence (AI) application developed by DeepMind, the company which created the famous AlphaGo. AlphaGo is the Go AI application which has beaten many top level human players over the last few years. This new application is a learning environment based on the video game StarCraft II. StarCraft II is a Real-time-strategy game based on a fictional future when several races struggle for survival and dominance in universe.  In the game you start with a base and a few workers. You need to collect resources, develop economy and technology, observe and disturb your enemy, build a strong army and finally destroy the enemy. Both StarCraft II and the original StarCraft are one of the most popular e-sports competitions which viewed by millions of fans.

Figure 1 Rogue, the 2017 StarCraft II World Champion1

Researchers of DeepMind believe StarCraft is the next challenge for research in AI after Go since this game mimic a compelling solution to the issue of evaluating and comparing different learning and planning approaches on standardised tasks. StarCraft resembles an imperfect-information problem due to a partially uncovered map in contrast with the Go that players know all the information about the game. The game possesses a large action space with the control of hundreds of units, and a professional player might need to keep their mind at three or four battle scenes at the same time. It also has delayed credit assignment as early decisions or strategies may have long-term effect after several minutes. Simply speaking, StarCraft II is much harder than Go. Therefore, SC2LE provides a new challenge for research in reinforcement learning algorithms and architectures.

The goal of developing an AI based on this video game is not to design a robot which can beat human players, but to demonstrate that AI could handle such a big amount of information and give immediate response, in contrast with the goal that the information is much less and players have much more time to think and make decision. DeepMind also want to use these famous games to promote their research in AI to players and normal audience.

Figure 2 A scene of StarCraft II Game2

They used similar technology to AlphaGo, reinforcement learning based on neural network. First, the AI need to know the rule of controlling the units and develop including the construction sequence of buildings as well as the conditions of win, i.e.  eliminating all of enemy’s building or forcing them to surrender by giving enough destruction.

Figure 3 Left is a human’s view, right is its layered structure3

Unlike human who read the information from the screen, the AI will observe “feature layers” generated by StarCraft II Application programming interface (API). Each layer represents something special in the game like unit type and hit points. The AI was designed to mimic human players as closely as possible including compound actions. It will generate a sequence of actions to mimic human like use shift to select multiple units then click on the screen to move.

Figure 4 How AI’s actions differ from human’s3

The learning algorithms can study useful strategies from games and replays not only choose strategies from a given pool. There is an in-game award points system based on the player’s performance. Its performances could also be simply examined by winning a game or not and how long the AI player survives in a game if it loses.

Unlike the Go, StaCraft are much more complicated with thousands of possible actions and combinations of these actions. Although now AI could make some good decisions of perform a certain task with accurate action flows, it still behaves very naïve when considering a full game and even much worse than beginner level human players. There is a still long way for AI researchers to go. The day when AI beat top level human players will be a milestone in AI research, because it means the AI technology have made substantial progress and would be much more useful than it is today.

References:

  1. https://wcs.starcraft2.com/en-us/news/21196407/The-World-Champion-Is-Crowned/
  2. https://www.instant-gaming.com/en/169-buy-key-battlenet-starcraft-2-heart-of-the-swarm/
  3. Oriol Vinyals, Timo Ewalds, Sergey Bartunov, Petko Georgiev, Alexander Sasha Vezhnevets, Michelle Yeo, Alireza Makhzani, Heinrich Kuttler, John Agapiou, Julian Schrittwieser, et al. StarCraft II: A New Challenge for Reinforcement Learning. arXiv:1708.04782, 2017.

By Jun Ling

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