Tag: Science Adviser | AAAS

The keto diet gets its name from ketone bodies: an alternative energy source made from fats when the body doesn’t receive enough carb-based fuel. They’re why eating keto can help with weight loss over the short term, but it’s remained unclear whether the diet has effects when maintained for years or decades. To find out, researchers turned to mice, as it’s easier to keep them on a strict regimen. After 8 months on a keto diet, mice weighed less than those that ate a regular diet (though they were heavier than ones given a low-fat diet instead). But that wasn’t all—the keto mice had lots of fat in their blood, which is a sign of cardiovascular disease. Male mice on the regimen also had fatty, malfunctioning livers. But perhaps most concerningly, the keto animals showed signs of glucose intolerance. More specifically, they struggled to produce insulin, the hormone that directs the removal of the sugar glucose from the blood. That is similar to what happens in some people with type 2 diabetes—calling into question the diet’s use to treat the condition, the authors noted. On the upside, when the mice stopped eating keto, their glucose tolerance returned to normal.

Mind you, 8 months in a mouse’s life is like decades for a person, so we’re talking serious adherence to the diet for years and years—which many people don’t do, because it is so restrictive. And there’s the usual caveat that mice aren’t people, so researchers would need to confirm that similar outcomes occur in humans who eat keto long-term. Still, “it’s a cautionary tale,” physiologist Amandine Chaix told Science News; “this is not a magical dietary approach.”

Studying the Martian atmosphere can tell scientists about the planet’s past and present, as well as help them determine its habitability. So, a team compiled imaging data from the spacecraft, which travels 400 kilometers above the Martian surface, to analyze the area above Mars’s limb—the fuzzy boundary where the planet seems to merge with space. By looking at the way the atmosphere scattered light, they teased out the concentrations of aerosols in different atmospheric sections. They found that the atmosphere was highly layered, with some swaths less than one km in depth, and that layers’ relative colors (the ratio of their redness to blueness) differed significantly.

One of the biggest open questions about Mars is how its dusty and icy aerosols change with the years and seasons. Visualizing its atmosphere’s pastry-layer like composition should improve models of the Red Planet’s climate, write the authors. Next, they hope to build a database of their findings and further probe this alien sky.

One participant was physicist Daniel Speckhard, who teamed up to test how well LLMs could predict how the crystal structure of a material relaxes to its lowest-energy configuration—a critical step for predicting its properties. Although the group only had time to train their AI model on a small dataset, the initial results were promising, Speckhard says.

Speckhard says he was more impressed by how easy it was to tailor the LLM. By coaxing other LLMs to help write code to import and parse data, the team accomplished in two days what would have taken Speckhard more than a month. He now sees LLMs as a promising partner in his research. Before the event, “I thought they take all the joy out of doing science,” he says. “But after this experience, I’m 100% convinced.”

Cheesin’ about evolution
People and naughty pets aren’t the only pizza lovers; African rainbow lizards also have quite the Italian appetite, found the winners of this year’s nutrition prize. When conducting field work in Togo, tropical ecologist Luca Luiselli learned that lizards had been stealing pizza from tourists at a seaside resort. He and his colleagues decided to investigate the behavior by laying multiple kinds of pizza on the ground and seeing what enticed the rainbow lizards down from the trees. The lizards’ favorite? Four-cheese pizza.

In fact, the slices weren’t just a dinnertime preference, but an evolutionary boon: female lizards that ate four-cheese pizza produced more eggs than those that ate a typical diet of insects. The researchers hypothesize that the stinkiness of the cheese makes the food source easy to find, while its high fat content helps the females invest in reproduction. In his day-to-day research, “It is obviously not the pizza stuff that is important,” says Luiselli. “But through the pizza stuff, you can understand how fast the immediate adaptation of species to the changing environment [is].”

Mmmm, plastic
Health advocates and environmentalists alike have turned away from nonstick cookware in recent years. Rotem Naftalovich, an anesthesiologist and winner of the chemistry prize, went in the opposite direction: What if we ate nonstick coatings on purpose?

The idea, for which he has since gotten a U.S. patent , began when Naftalovich was concerned with obesity as a medical resident. Part of the struggle for obese patients is not feeling satiated when dieting. If people padded their diets with food that can’t be digested, he realized, they could fill up their stomachs without the extra calories. The natural example is fiber. The unnatural example he studied was polytetrafluoroethylene, an inert polymer best known as Teflon. Naftalovich suggests, for example, a chocolate bar whose composition is 25% Teflon: the dieter wouldn’t taste any difference but would poop out the undigestible polymers and get a lower-calorie treat. “People look at it and raise an eyebrow,” he says of his and typical Igs research. “But this is the nature of actual innovation … you’re thinking about things from a different perspective.”

With contributions from Zack Savitsky and Hannah Richter

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