Word: bacteria
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...among adults in Europe and North America, festering in the close quarters of military barracks and shelters accommodating displaced communities. There was no treatment other than rest and fresh air. An American scientist had purified an antibiotic, streptomycin, that raised hopes by showing a remarkable ability to kill tuberculosis bacteria in a lab dish. But nobody knew whether the compound would prove effective--or safe--in human patients...
...this year's Best Inventions package, green innovations dominate the selection in a way that no single category has ever done in the 10 years we've been making this list. There's a smart thermostat, solar shingles, the new Philips lightbulb, the edible race car, electric bacteria, lots of electric vehicles and farm-raised bluefin tuna. The remarkable ingenuity shown in the hunt for new materials and products that don't stress the environment is reflected in our list, once again ably edited by senior writer Lev Grossman. One glowing exception to the trend is our invention...
...main advantage was that Gordon and his team now had the cutting-edge DNA-sequencing capability to scan and analyze all the genes contained in those bacteria. That meant researchers could determine not only which species of bacteria were present and in what proportions, but also which genes these bugs were actively using in different conditions. Before such genomic-analysis technology became available, researchers could study only the gut microbes (animal or human) that could be cultured outside their intestinal home - something that not all of the oxygen-shunning bugs were amenable to - but never the complete microbiota...
That diversity and its impact came into plain view when the researchers started experimenting with the rodents' diet. When one group of mice was fed a typical Western diet, high in fat and sugars, they tended to gain weight and grow more Firmicutes gut bacteria and fewer Bacteroidetes. In mice given a low-fat plant-based chow, the distribution of the two groups of bugs flipped and the animals remained lean. It's not clear whether the balance of gut bugs causes weight gain or is a result of it, but the findings suggest that a "gut profile" could potentially...
Gordon also found in his mouse populations that changing the animals' diet caused a dramatic and rapid shift in the population of bacteria in their gut. Switching a mouse from low-fat plant chow to a high-fat Western diet resulted in an explosion of Firmicutes in less than...