Isegoria

Rural Bangladesh has a lead-poisoning problem — because turmeric is routinely adulterated with a yellow pigment that contains lead, PbCrO4. Wow.

An international trial with almost 1,000 patients with Lynch syndrome revealed that a regular dose of resistant starch, also known as fermentable fibre, taken for an average of two years, did not affect cancers in the bowel but did reduce cancers in other parts of the body by more than half:

This effect was particularly pronounced for upper gastrointestinal cancers including oesophageal, gastric, biliary tract, pancreatic and duodenum cancers.

The astonishing effect was seen to last for 10 years after stopping taking the supplement.

The study, led by experts at the Universities of Newcastle and Leeds, published today in Cancer Prevention Research, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research, is a planned double blind 10 year follow–up, supplemented with comprehensive national cancer registry data for up to 20 years in 369 of the participants.

Previous research published as part of the same trial, revealed that aspirin reduced cancer of the large bowel by 50%.

“We found that resistant starch reduces a range of cancers by over 60%. The effect was most obvious in the upper part of the gut,” explained Professor John Mathers, professor of Human Nutrition at Newcastle University. “This is important as cancers of the upper GI tract are difficult to diagnose and often are not caught early on.

“Resistant starch can be taken as a powder supplement and is found naturally in peas, beans, oats and other starchy foods. The dose used in the trial is equivalent to eating a daily banana; before they become too ripe and soft, the starch in bananas resists breakdown and reaches the bowel where it can change the type of bacteria that live there.

“Resistant starch is a type of carbohydrate that isn’t digested in your small intestine, instead it ferments in your large intestine, feeding beneficial gut bacteria — it acts in effect, like dietary fibre in your digestive system. This type of starch has several health benefits and fewer calories than regular starch. We think that resistant starch may reduce cancer development by changing the bacterial metabolism of bile acids and to reduce those types of bile acids that can damage our DNA and eventually cause cancer. However, this needs further research.”

In November 2020, the AI group DeepMind announced it had developed a program called AlphaFold that could rapidly predict how chains of amino acids fold up into complex shapes:

Last year, DeepMind published the protein structures for 20 species — including nearly all 20,000 proteins expressed by humans — on an open database. Now it has finished the job, and released predicted structures for more than 200m proteins.

“Essentially, you can think of it as covering the entire protein universe. It includes predictive structures for plants, bacteria, animals, and many other organisms, opening up huge new opportunities for AlphaFold to have an impact on important issues, such as sustainability, food insecurity, and neglected diseases,” said Demis Hassabis, DeepMind’s founder and chief executive.

Scientists are already using some of its earlier predictions to help develop new medicines. In May, researchers led by Prof Matthew Higgins at the University of Oxford announced they had used AlphaFold’s models to help determine the structure of a key malaria parasite protein, and work out where antibodies that could block transmission of the parasite were likely to bind.

“Previously, we’d been using a technique called protein crystallography to work out what this molecule looks like, but because it’s quite dynamic and moves around, we just couldn’t get to grips with it,” Higgins said. “When we took the AlphaFold models and combined them with this experimental evidence, suddenly it all made sense. This insight will now be used to design improved vaccines which induce the most potent transmission-blocking antibodies.”

Social comparison orientation is significantly correlated with psychopathy, Rob Henderson explains:

In other words, people who habitually compare themselves with others are more likely to have psychopathic traits (selfishness, callousness, cynicism).

And psychopathy, in turn, was associated with more comfort with sacrificing a few to save many.

Social comparison is also associated with narcissism. People prone to comparing themselves with others agree more strongly with statements such as “I am great” and “Other people are worth nothing.”

[…]

Later, I learned that psychopaths are overrepresented among college students by a factor of four. Roughly two percent of the general population are psychopaths, compared with 8 percent of college students.

[…]

Other studies find that people who frequently compare themselves with others are more likely to experience malicious envy.

They tend to agree with statements like “If other people have something that I want for myself, I wish to take it away from them” and “Seeing other people’s achievements makes me resent them.”

[…]

Social comparers prefer to make everyone else worse off, if it means they will obtain a relative advantage.

Also unsurprisingly, social comparison was highly correlated with competitiveness (“I judge my performance on whether I do better than others rather than on just getting a good result”).

A new study of DNA from the “pestilence” victims in what is now northern Kyrgyzstan shows that they were indeed infected with the bacterium, Yersinia pestis, that caused the Black Death:

The Syriac engraving on the medieval tombstone was tantalizing: “This is the tomb of the believer Sanmaq. [He] died of pestilence.” Sanmaq, who was buried in 1338 near Lake Issyk Kul in what is now northern Kyrgyzstan, was one of many victims of the unnamed plague. By scrutinizing field notes and more photos from the Russian team that had excavated the graves in the 1880s, historian Philip Slavin found that at least 118 people from Sanmaq’s Central Asian trading community died in the epidemic.

Slavin was on the trail of the origin of the Black Death, which devastated Europe a decade after the Kyrgyzstan burials. But he knew the medieval diagnosis of “pestilence” encompassed many horrific diseases. “I was almost 100% certain it was the beginning of the Black Death,” says Slavin, a medieval historian at the University of Stirling. “But there was no way to prove it without DNA.”

Now, Slavin is senior author of a new study of ancient DNA from the “pestilence” victims showing they were indeed infected with the bacterium, Yersinia pestis, that caused the Black Death. The strain that killed them was ancestral to all the strains that rampaged across Europe a decade later and continued to kill for the next 500 years. The bacterium jumped from rodents to humans just before the Kyrgyzstan burials, perhaps after sudden changes in rainfall or temperature, the researchers propose this week in Nature.

“This is the place where it all started — the Wuhan of the Black Death,” says senior author and paleogeneticist Johannes Krause of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

[…]

The strain was closely related to ones found in rodents near Issyk Kul today. The authors suggest it spilled over to humans, perhaps from a marmot, which are abundant in the Tian Shan mountain region of northern Kyrgyzstan, southern Kazakhstan, and northwestern China. Sudden changes in rainfall or temperature could have led to surges in local rodent populations and the fleas or other insects they harbor. More rodents and their pests meant more opportunities to hop to a new host—humans—and adapt to it, says population biologist Nils Christian-Stenseth of the University of Oslo, who has shown a correlation between outbreaks of plague and warm, wet weather in Central Asia. He adds: “There are many good possibilities for plague reservoirs; you have the great gerbils, marmots, voles.”

The remaining mystery, he says, is how the Black Death traveled 3500 kilometers from Central Asia to the Black Sea, where historical accounts describe the Mongolian army hurling the bodies of plague victims into the besieged city of Caffa in Crimea in 1346 in an early form of biological warfare.

The meticulous archaeological records for each Kyrgyzstan grave offer hints, Slavin says. Many people were buried with pearls, coins, and other goods from the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean, and Iran; some were apparently traders. As they traveled, their camel wagons may have harbored rats and fleas, long considered likely vectors for plague.