Isegoria

Researchers open secret cave under Mexican pyramid — well, it used to be secret, a long time ago:

Archeologists are opening a cave sealed for more than 30 years deep beneath a Mexican pyramid to look for clues about the mysterious collapse of one of ancient civilization’s largest cities.

The soaring Teotihuacan stone pyramids, now a major tourist site about an hour outside Mexico City, were discovered by the ancient Aztecs around 1500 AD, not long before the arrival of Spanish explorers to Mexico.

But little is known about the civilization that built the immense city, with its ceremonial architecture and geometric temples, and then torched and abandoned it around 700 AD.

It sounds to me like they summoned an unspeakable evil and did not know how to kill it, so they buried it deep within the earth. Right? Occam’s Razor, and all that…

The Economist speaks of sommeliers and stomachs, exploring the health benefits of red wine, which is high in polyphenols, and how those polyphenols might help, since they don’t seem to make the trip from the stomach to the bloodstream in large amounts:

[Dr Kanner] and his colleagues fed a group of rats one of two meals — either red meat from a turkey (a foodstuff shown by previous research to raise malondialdehyde levels in humans) or such meat mixed with red-wine concentrate. An hour and a half after the rats had eaten, they were killed. Dr Kanner then removed their stomachs and analysed the contents. As he reports in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, the wine concentrate did indeed reduce the formation of malondialdehyde. It also cut the level of hydroperoxides, another group of oxidising agents that cause cell damage.

Caloric Restriction Comes in a Pill:

In 2006, Sinclair and National Institute on Aging gerontologist Rafael de Cabo, also a co-author of the Cell Metabolism study, used resveratrol to improve the health and extend the lives of obese mice on high-calorie diets. The latest study involved both obese and normal mice, fed standard, low- and high-calorie fare.

Regardless of mouse weight and diet, resveratrol worked wonders. At two years of age, or the mouse equivalent of senescence, the mice were more coordinated than their non-dosed counterparts. Their bones were thicker and stronger, their eyes free of cataracts, their hearts beating strong. At the cellular level, tissues displayed gene-level changes almost identical to those produced by caloric restriction.

The mitochondria of resveratrol-taking mice also proved healthy. Mitochondrial degeneration has been implicated in a variety of diseases, leading some researchers to believe that heart disease, cancer and dementia — all the so-called diseases of aging — have a common root.

“The mice had tremendous health benefits from taking resveratrol,” said de Cabo. “If any of those parameters translate to humans, it will be tremendous.”

More Evidence for a Revolutionary Theory of Water:

In the recent study, Nilsson and colleagues probed the structure of liquid water using X-ray Emission Spectroscopy and X-ray Absorption Spectroscopy. These techniques use powerful X-rays, generated by a synchrotron light source, to excite electrons within a water molecule’s single oxygen atom. Tuning the X-rays to a specific range of energies can reveal with tremendous precision the location and arrangement of the water molecules. In this way Nilsson’s team found that water is indeed made up of tetrahedral groups, but clear evidence also emerged for the dominance of a second, less defined structure in the mix.

The idea that liquid water is made up of two structures is not new. German physicist Willhelm Conrad Röntgen, who discovered X-rays in the late 19th century, published a paper proposing that liquid water comprised two different structures — one tetrahedral “ice-like” structure, and another more loosely arranged structure, which helped explain why water behaves in such unusual ways. Now, more than a century later, the current study is giving new life to Röntgen’s “two structure” model.

“It is amazing that the modern usage of X-rays demonstrates that Röntgen, more than 100 years ago, was on the right path,” said Nilsson. “Water is still not fully understood, although it is the basis of our existence. I expect more surprises to be discovered in the future.”