Getting the best out of your food

Have you given thought of what you eat and the combination of foods you chow down everyday? Well, according to this article, you should.

A balanced diet is the key to a happier, healthier life, so the mantra goes.

Experts advise us to eat more fruit and veg; boost protein and fibre intake; make sure we get the optimum levels of vitamins and minerals.

But what actually happens to these nutrients once they are inside the body?

Food scientists, working in an area called bioavailability, are trying to answer this question in a bid to discover how people can get the very best out of what they eat.

Toni Steer, a nutritionist at the Medical Research Council Human Nutrition Research Centre in Cambridgeshire, said: "The idea that we absorb everything we eat just isn't true.

"While you may have a certain amount of a nutrient within a food, what is actually absorbed may be less.

"Bioavailabity means how much of that nutrient within a food is usefully absorbed."

But, she says, bioavailability is not set in stone, and researchers are working to find ways of manipulating the levels of nutrients that can be absorbed by the body.

"If people are meeting dietary requirements, all of the nutrients they need are probably being absorbed.

"But for people who suffer vitamin or mineral deficiencies, or for those in developing countries where nutrition is poor, research into bioavailability can be very useful."

Read more here.

Peer review gets an online makeover

Publishing your work in a journal is part and parcel of a researcher's life. You and I know how challenging it is to accomplish that especially getting passed through the peer review. Peer review has its advantages and disadvantages. The article below tells how peer review is being evolved to something more relevant now. Peer review – the unsung hero and convenient villain of science – gets an online makeover.

Getting published in the illustrious British scientific journal Nature is, frankly, a bitch. It's not just the years you spend designing the perfect experiment, or the hustling for grant money to collect the data. It's not even the long nights of trying to figure out how to express all that work elegantly in the cold language of scientific communication. No – the real trick is getting the editors at Nature to like it.

But that's still just the beginning: Those editors pick three or so relevant experts – from a list Nature requires you to submit – to anonymously assess your work's technical accuracy and overall merit. Those experts bounce it back to the editors, who add their own comments and send it to you asking for more work. If you decide it's worth the time and effort, you do it. And revise. And send it back to the reviewers. In the end, if everyone's satisfied, the article runs. If not, you submit it to another journal, one tier down, and do it all again. The process takes about four months.

That rigmarole is called peer review. Almost every journal does it, from marquee pubs like Nature to highly specialized periodicals like International Journal of Chemical Reactor Engineering. (No offense to IJCRE – you guys are a helluva read.) When it works, it's genius – quality control that ensures the best papers get into the appropriate pages, lubricating communication and debate. It's the quiet soul of the scientific method: After forming hypotheses, collecting data, and crunching numbers, you report the results to learned colleagues and ask, "What do you folks think?"

But science is done by humans, and humans occasionally screw up. They plagiarize, fake data, take incorrect readings. And when they do? Oy! Somebody always blames peer review. The process is lousy at policing research. Bad papers get published, and work that's merely competent (boring) or wildly speculative (maverick) often gets rejected, enforcing a plodding conservatism. It seems silly to say this about a system that's been in development since the mid-1700s, but the whole thing seems kind of antiquated. "Peer review was brilliant when distribution was a problem and you had to be selective about what you could publish," says Chris Surridge, managing editor of the online interdisciplinary journal PLoS ONE. But the Web has remapped the universe of scientific publishing – and as a result, peer review may finally get fixed.

Read how peer review finally gets fixed here.

Remarkable physiology allows crucian carp to survive months without oxygen

An interesting article written by the American Physiological Society.

Cooling water temperature during the fall prompts the crucian carp to store vast amounts of glycogen in its brain to keep the brain functioning and healthy from February to April, when there is no oxygen left in the ponds, a new study finds.

The study from Finland found that the amount of glycogen in the brain was at its peak in February, when the pond becomes nearly depleted of oxygen (anoxic). Glycogen, an energy supply that the carp brain uses to survive anoxia, was 15 times higher in February, compared to brain glycogen content in July, when oxygen in the pond is at its peak.

At the same time, the carp brain's sodium-potassium pump activity, a measure of energy demand, decreased 10-fold to its low point between February and April, said the study's lead author, Vesa Paajanen. Taken together, these findings indicate the carp extends the amount of time it can survive without oxygen in frigid water by 150-fold. Further, the study found that it was the dropping water temperature that sets these physiological changes into motion.

Read more here.