Month: January 2019

Enlarge / "Yep, there's definitely poop in there." (credit: Thesupermat)

Scientists often seem to be on a quest for sacred chalices or sterling ammo. But a group of microbiologists has now set out on a more odorous odyssey—one to find fantastical feces.

With data on poop’s therapeutic potential piling up, scientists have gotten wind of the possibility that some among us may be extraordinary excreters, dropping deuces with divine healing powers. In a review article published Monday, January 21 in Frontiers in Cellular and Infection Microbiology, researchers at the University of Auckland dig out all the evidence for these deific defecators from the mound of studies on fecal microbiota transplantations, or FMTs.

An FMT is exactly what it sounds like—fecal matter containing gobs of gut microbes is dumped, squirted, gulped, or otherwise delivered into the bowels of patients. The idea is that the relocated microbial communities will restore or replace the patient’s own gut dwellers to improve health. Intestinal microbes can play a role in nutrition, metabolism, immune system function, and infection protection, after all. Thus, patients with gut communities that are imbalanced and dysfunctional—aka dysbiotic—or are overrun with pathogens stand to see health benefits from such an intestinal repoopulation.

Enlarge / "Yep, there's definitely poop in there." (credit: Thesupermat)

Scientists often seem to be on a quest for sacred chalices or sterling ammo. But a group of microbiologists has now set out on a more odorous odyssey—one to find fantastical feces.

With data on poop’s therapeutic potential piling up, scientists have gotten wind of the possibility that some among us may be extraordinary excreters, dropping deuces with divine healing powers. In a review article published Monday, January 21 in Frontiers in Cellular and Infection Microbiology, researchers at the University of Auckland dig out all the evidence for these deific defecators from the mound of studies on fecal microbiota transplantations, or FMTs.

An FMT is exactly what it sounds like—fecal matter containing gobs of gut microbes is dumped, squirted, gulped, or otherwise delivered into the bowels of patients. The idea is that the relocated microbial communities will restore or replace the patient’s own gut dwellers to improve health. Intestinal microbes can play a role in nutrition, metabolism, immune system function, and infection protection, after all. Thus, patients with gut communities that are imbalanced and dysfunctional—aka dysbiotic—or are overrun with pathogens stand to see health benefits from such an intestinal repoopulation.

Enlarge / Tesla's new Model 3 car on display is seen on Friday, January 26, 2018 at the Tesla store in Washington, DC. (credit: Getty Images)

Tesla has cleared the final regulatory hurdle to selling the Model 3 in Europe, allowing the electric carmaker to begin shipping the vehicles to Europe. Reuters reports that RDW, the automotive regulatory authority in the Netherlands, has signed off on the Model 3. Under EU rules, regulatory approval in one country allows Tesla to sell its cars across the EU territory.

EU law requires an automaker to get "type approval" for each vehicle it wants to sell in the European Union. Tesla shipped several production Model 3s to RDW, which put them through a battery of tests. They checked that the vehicles met all the requirements of EU law: brake performance, lights, crashworthiness, emissions, and so forth.

The approval comes just in time. A Belgian news site reports that Tesla is expected to ship as many as 3,000 cars a week to the Belgian port of Zeebrugge for subsequent distribution across the continent.

Enlarge / Regional differences in the aromatic compounds found in hop varieties can significantly affect the taste of craft beers. (credit: DEA/G. Wright/Getty Images)

If you're a fan of craft beer with a strong, hoppy flavor, heed the science that says to store your beer in a cool place and drink it within three months or so, lest it lose that rich aroma. That's one of the key takeaways from a new study by German scientists published in the journal Brewing Science.

All beer contains hops, a key flavoring agent that also imparts useful antimicrobial properties with its rich aroma. (Without them, beer spoils quickly.) To make beer, brewers mash and steep grain in hot water, which converts all that starch into sugars. This is traditionally the stage where hops are added to the liquid extract (wort) and boiled to give the beer that hint of bitterness. That turns some of the resins (alpha acids) in the hops into iso-alpha acids, producing a bitter taste. Yeast is then added to trigger fermentation, turning the sugars into alcohol.

Add too many hops, however, and the beer will be so bitter as to be undrinkable. So in recent years, many craft brewers have started using dry-hopping as a way to put more hops in beer without getting excessive bitterness. It's added during or after the fermentation stage, after the wort has cooled. There is no isomerization of the alpha acids, so you get all that aromatic hoppy flavor without too much bitterness. Brewers can use as much as 20 times the usual amount of hops if they're dry-hopping. (Just beware of "hop creep," which can cause such bottled beers to explode.)

Enlarge (credit: Capcom)

Two years ago, Capcom struck surprising gold with its umpteenth Resident Evil video game. 2017's Resident Evil 7 was the spark the aging series needed, particularly after RE5 and RE6 threw out the series' best ideas, and it proved that Capcom still knew how to deliver familiar chills without making things boring.

The game's success put Capcom in an odd conundrum. How the heck does it follow such a quality surprise? The answer is an apparent stopgap: Resident Evil 2, a deliberate remake of the 1998 classic Playstation hit.

The result is honestly everything you might want from a triple-A game launching in the slow month of January. RE2 is a modern Resident Evil game: behind-the-shoulder action, smooth controls, gorgeous visuals, masterfully staged atmosphere, ridiculous entrails, and true surprises. RE2 is also a classic Resident Evil game: cheesy dialogue, tight corridors, police-station environs, lumbering zombies, and simple puzzles that rely on item fetching and backtracking.