Chemistry

Though wealthy elites and fad-chasing food activists have promoted the idea that salt is a killer, the science doesn't show that. Instead, links are correlational. Asia has always been held up as a standard for health but as their incidence of hypertension has risen, as many have blamed salt as they have a diet beyond what peasants could afford in the past. In JAMA, Yongning Wu, Ph.D., of the China National Centre for Food Safety Risk Assessment in Beijing and colleagues compared salt and sodium consumption in China in 2000 with 2009-2012 in 12 of China's 31 mainland provinces and found that…

Can a different food process actually create food that is nutritionally different? Scientists are skeptical but a group of nutritionists claim they have done so - by reviewing a bunch of papers which claim to have done so. Can it even be possible? Certainly, different strawberries may have different levels of some compounds, but that is also true if both are grown organically.  So recent findings will be treated with skepticism because they fly in the face of the science consensus and what they don't do is create identical food under different processes, they instead look at studies of…

Scientists have inventoried and categorized all of Earth's rare mineral species described to date, each sampled from five or fewer sites around the globe. Individually, several of the species have a known supply worldwide smaller than a sugar cube. These 2,550 minerals are far more rare than pricey diamonds and gems usually presented as tokens of love. But while their rarity would logically make them the most precious of minerals, many would not work in a Valentine's Day ring setting. Several are prone to melt, evaporate or dehydrate. And a few, vampire-like, gradually decompose on exposure…

Fibres from the Australian native spinifex grass are being used to improve latex that could be used to make condoms as thin as a human hair without any loss in strength. Working in partnership with Aboriginal traditional owners of the Camooweal region in north-west Queensland, the Indjalandji-Dhidhanu People, researchers from The University of Queensland have developed a method of extracting nanocellulose -- which can be used as an additive in latex production -- from the grass. Professor Darren Martin from UQ's Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (AIBN) said the…

It may be time to embrace DDT again. New findings from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) confirm dihydroartemisinin-piperaquine, the first-line treatment for Plasmodium falciparum malaria infection in Cambodia, has failed in certain provinces due to parasite resistance to artemisinin and piperaquine. Dihydroartemisinin-piperaquine is an artemisinin combination therapy (ACT) for malaria that combines potent, fast-acting artemisinin with a long-acting partner drug, piperaquine. Resistance to artemisinin in parts of Southeast Asia is well-documented, but until…

Diabetes is one of the leading causes of death. Patients with type 1 diabetes have their insulin secreting cells destroyed by the immune system and require daily insulin injections. Pancreatic islet transplantation is an effective treatment that can dramatically reduce daily doses or even eliminate dependence on external insulin. Insulin producing cells are injected into a recipient liver and after an adaptation period they start to produce sufficient hormone needed by diabetic patients. However, while the transplantation procedure itself has been greatly improved in recent years, collection…

Groundwater in Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Myanmar, Vietnam and China commonly contains concentrations of arsenic 20 to 100 times greater than the World Health Organization's recommended limit, resulting in more than 100 million people being poisoned by drinking arsenic-laced water. Now scientists have found where the microbes responsible for releasing dangerous arsenic into groundwater in Southeast Asia get their food.  Arsenic is bound to iron oxide compounds in rocks from the Himalayas, and gets washed down the major rivers and deposited in the lowland basins and deltas. Scientists…

Chemical triggers that make plants defend themselves against insects could replace pesticides, according to a new paper in Bioorganic&Medicinal Chemistry Letters which identifies five chemicals that trigger rice plants to fend off a common pest - the white-backed planthopper, Sogatella furcifera Pesticides are used around the world to control insects that destroy crops but their use has been criticized by activists groups, with the claim that some kill indiscriminately. For rice plants, this means pesticides kill the natural enemies of one of their biggest pests, the white-backed…

A team of Belgian researchers has shown that the yeasts used to ferment cocoa during chocolate production can modify the aroma of the resulting chocolate. "This makes it possible to create a whole range of boutique chocolates to match everyone's favorite flavor, similar to wines, tea, and coffee," says Jan Steensels, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Leuven, and the Flanders Institute for Biotechnology, Belgium.   Initially, the researchers sought robust yeast strains that could outcompete the many invading yeast strains that flood the cocoa beans during fermentation. "…

There is some good news for consumers with a sweet tooth. Cornell food scientists have reduced the sweetener stevia's bitter aftertaste by physical - rather than chemical - means. Cornell professor of food process engineering, Syed Rizvi, co-authored the research "Controlling the Taste Receptor Accessible Structure of Rebaudioside A via Binding to Bovine Serum Albumin," with Samriddh Mudgal, the lead author and former graduate student in Rizvi's lab at Cornell; Ivan Keresztes, director of Cornell's NMR facility in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, and Gerald W. Feigenson,…