Commercial airplanes have been getting longer to fit more passengers. However, there’s a limit to how long an airplane can be and still be safe to fly. To find out when length becomes a problem, Youtuber Peter Sripol did an experiment: he took a remote-controlled jet plane model and made its fuselage ridiculously long.
Fiber is your body’s natural guide to weight management – rather than cutting carbs out of your diet, eat them in their original fiber packaging instead
Christopher Damman, University of Washington
Fiber might just be the key to healthy weight management – and nature packages it in perfectly balanced ratios with carbs when you eat them as whole foods. Think unprocessed fruits, vegetables, whole grains, beans, nuts and seeds. Research suggests that carbohydrates are meant to come packaged in nature-balanced ratios of total carbohydrates to fiber. In fact, certain types of fiber affect how completely your body absorbs carbohydrates and tells your cells how to process them once they are absorbed.
Fiber slows the absorption of sugar in your gut. It also orchestrates the fundamental biology that recent blockbuster weight loss drugs like Wegovy and Ozempic tap into, but in a natural way. Your microbiome transforms fiber into signals that stimulate the gut hormones that are the natural forms of these drugs. These in turn regulate how rapidly your stomach empties, how tightly your blood sugar levels are controlled and even how hungry you feel.
It’s as if unprocessed carbohydrates naturally come wrapped and packaged with their own instruction manual for your body on how to digest them.
I am a physician scientist and gastroenterologist who has spent over 20 years studying how food affects the gut microbiome and metabolism. The research is clear – fiber is important not just for happy bowel movements, but also for your blood sugar, weight and overall health.
Carbohydrates without their wrappers
Unfortunately, most Americans get the majority of their carbohydrates stripped of their natural fibers. Modern processed grains like white rice and white flour as well as many ultraprocessed foods like some sugary breakfast cereals, packaged snacks and juices have removed these fibers. They essentially come unwrapped and without instructions for the body on how much it should absorb and how it should process them. In fact, only 5% of Americans eat the recommended amount of carbohydrates with enough of their natural packaging intact. Guidelines recommend at least 25 to 30 grams of fiber a day from food.
It may not be surprising that lack of fiber contributes to diabetes and obesity. What is surprising is that the fiber gap also likely contributes to heart disease, certain types of cancer and maybe even Alzheimer’s disease.
One popular approach to mitigating some of the ill health effects of low fiber and high refined carbohydrates has been to limit carbohydrate intake. Such approaches include the low-carb, keto, paleo and Atkins diets. Each diet is a variation on a similar theme of limiting carbohydrates to varying amounts in different ways.
There is scientific backing to the benefits of some of these diets. Research shows that limiting carbohydrates induces ketosis, a biological process that frees energy from fat reserves during starvation and prolonged exercise. Low-carbohydrate diets can also help people lose weight and lead to improvements in blood pressure and inflammation.
That said, some keto diets may have negative effects on gut health. It is also unknown how they may affect heart health, some forms of cancer and other conditions in the long term.
Even more confusing, research shows that people with diets high in plant-sourced carbohydrates, like the Mediterranean diet, tend to lead the longest and healthiest lives. How can this be reconciled with studies that suggest that low-carbohydrate diets can benefit metabolic health?
Is a carb a carb?
The answer may have to do with the types of carbohydrates that studies are evaluating. Limiting simple sugars and refined carbohydrates may improve certain aspects of metabolic health, as these are some of the most easily digested and absorbed calories. But a more sustainable and comprehensive way of improving health may be increasing the percentage of unprocessed, more complex and slowly absorbed carbohydrates that come with their natural packages and instructions intact – those that have fiber.
These natural carbohydrates can be found in whole grains, beans, nuts, seeds, fruits and vegetables. They come in ratios of total carbohydrate to fiber that rarely exceed 10-to-1 and are often 5-to-1 or lower. Eating mostly whole foods is a simple way to ensure you’re consuming quality carbohydrates with the right ratios.
But who doesn’t like to have a big bowl of pasta or cake with ice cream on occasion? Focusing on packaged processed foods that maintain carb-to-fiber ratios of at least as low as 10-to-1 or ideally 5-to-1 can help you make the best choices when picking more processed foods at the store. Take a look at the nutrition facts label and simply divide total carbohydrates by dietary fiber.
On occasions when you’re eating out or celebrating someone’s birthday, consider taking a fiber supplement with your meal. One pilot study found that a supplement containing a blend of fibers decreased the blood sugar spike – an increase in glucose levels in the blood that if too high can damage the body over time – after a meal in healthy individuals by roughly 30%.
Listen to your body
While almost all fiber is generally good for health in most people, not all fiber affects the body in the same way. Consuming a range of different types of fiber generally helps ensure a diverse microbiome, which is linked to gut and overall health.
But certain medical conditions might preclude consuming certain types of fiber. For example, some people can be particularly sensitive to one class of fiber called FODMAPS – fermentable oligosaccharides, disaccharides, monosaccharides and polyols – that are more readily fermented in the upper part of the gut and can contribute to symptoms of irritable bowel syndrome like bloating and diarrhea. High-FODMAP foods include many processed foods that contain inulin, garlic powder and onion powder, as well as whole foods including those in the onion family, dairy products, some fruits and vegetables.
Listen to how your body responds to different high-fiber foods. Start low and go slow as you reintroduce foods like beans, seeds, nuts, fruits and vegetables to your diet. If you have trouble increasing your fiber intake, talk with your health care provider.
Tools like this online calculator I’ve created can also help you find the highest-quality foods with healthy fiber and other nutrient ratios. It can also show you what proportions of fiber to add back to sugary foods to help achieve healthy ratios.
I wouldn’t endorse eating sweets all the time, but as my three daughters like to remind me, it’s important to enjoy yourself every once in a while. And when you do, consider putting the carbs back in their fiber wrappers. It’s hard to improve upon nature’s design.
Christopher Damman, Associate Professor of Gastroenterology, School of Medicine, University of Washington
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Princess’s Cousin [Comic]
[Source: @asliceofalan]
Comparing the Sizes of Fictional Weapons from Pop Culture
The world of pop culture introduced us to many iconic weapon throughout the years, many varying greatly in size! In this video from MetaBallStudios, the youtuber showcases some of the most notable ones, from the minuscule Noisy Cricket from Men in Black, right up to the Super Tengen Toppa Giga Drill from Gurren Lagann.
Start Over [Comic]
[Source: @war.and.peas]
How Did You Find Out About Warhammer 40K? [Comic]
[Source: @idiotoftheeast]
The Oldest Known Civilizations
Humans have been around for around 350,000 years, but it has only been a short time since they began to group together in what we call civilizations. In all of our history on this planet, humans have only civilized themselves for approximately 10,000 years thanks to the development of agriculture, animal husbandry, and eventually writing. Of the thousands of civilizations that have existed, most have disappeared. Few have remained in the same place they originated such as the Chinese or Egyptians, while most have died out. Many ancient civilizations existed throughout human history, but some lasted longer than you might believe.
A subtle symphony of ripples in spacetime – astronomers use dead stars to measure gravitational waves produced by ancient black holes
Chris Impey, University of Arizona
An international team of astronomers has detected a faint signal of gravitational waves reverberating through the universe. By using dead stars as a giant network of gravitational wave detectors, the collaboration – called NANOGrav – was able to measure a low-frequency hum from a chorus of ripples of spacetime.
I’m an astronomer who studies and has written about cosmology, black holes and exoplanets. I’ve researched the evolution of supermassive black holes using the Hubble Space telescope.
Though members of the team behind this new discovery aren’t yet certain, they strongly suspect that the background hum of gravitational waves they measured was caused by countless ancient merging events of supermassive black holes.
Using dead stars for cosmology
Gravitational waves are ripples in spacetime caused by massive accelerating objects. Albert Einstein predicted their existence in his general theory of relativity, in which he hypothesized that when a gravitational wave passes through space, it makes the space shrink then expand periodically.
Researchers first detected direct evidence of gravitational waves in 2015, when the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, known as LIGO, picked up a signal from a pair of merging black holes that had traveled 1.3 billion light-years to reach Earth.
The NANOGrav collaboration is also trying to detect spacetime ripples, but on an interstellar scale. The team used pulsars, rapidly spinning dead stars that emit a beam of radio emissions. Pulsars are functionally similar to a lighthouse – as they spin, their beams can sweep across the Earth at regular intervals.
The NANOGrav team used pulsars that rotate incredibly fast – up to 1,000 times per second – and these pulses can be timed like the ticking of an extremely accurate cosmic clock. As gravitational waves sweep past a pulsar at the speed of light, the waves will very slightly expand and contract the distance between the pulsar and the Earth, ever so slightly changing the time between the ticks.
Pulsars are such accurate clocks that it is possible to measure their ticking with an accuracy to within 100 nanoseconds. That lets astronomers calculate the distance between a pulsar and Earth to within 100 feet (30 meters). Gravitational waves change the distance between these pulsars and Earth by tens of miles, making pulsars easily sensitive enough to detect this effect.
Finding a hum within cacophony
The first thing the NANOGrav team had to do was control for the noise in its cosmic gravitational wave detector. This included noise in the radio receivers it used and subtle astrophysics that affect the behavior of pulsars. Even accounting for these effects, the team’s approach was not sensitive enough to detect gravitational waves from individual supermassive black hole binaries. However, it had enough sensitivity to detect the sum of all the massive black hole mergers that have occurred anywhere in the universe since the Big Bang – as many as a million overlapping signals.
In a musical analogy, it is like standing in a busy downtown and hearing the faint sound of a symphony somewhere in the distance. You can’t pick out a single instrument because of the noise of the cars and the people around you, but you can hear the hum of a hundred instruments. The team had to tease out the signature of this gravitational wave “background” from other competing signals.
The team was able to detect this symphony by measuring a network of 67 different pulsars for 15 years. If some disruption in the ticking of one pulsar was due to gravitational waves from the distant universe, all the pulsars the team was watching would be affected in a similar way. On June 28, 2023, the team published four papers describing its project and the evidence it found of the gravitational wave background.
The hum the NANOGrav collaboration found is produced from the merging of black holes that are billions of times more massive than the Sun. These black holes spin around one another very slowly and produce gravitational waves with frequencies of one-billionth of a hertz. That means the spacetime ripples have an oscillation every few decades. This slow oscillation of the wave is the reason the team needed to rely on the incredibly accurate timekeeping of pulsars.
These gravitational waves are different from the waves LIGO can detect. LIGO’s signals are produced when two black holes 10 to 100 times the mass of the Sun merge into one rapidly spinning object, creating gravitational waves that oscillate hundreds of times per second.
If you think of black holes as a tuning fork, the smaller the event, the faster the tuning fork vibrates and the higher the pitch. LIGO detects gravitational waves that “ring” in the audible range. The black hole mergers the NANOGrav team has found “ring” with a frequency billions of times too low to hear.
Giant black holes in the early universe
Astronomers have long been interested in studying how stars and galaxies first emerged in the aftermath of the Big Bang. This new finding from the NANOGrav team is like adding another color – gravitational waves – to the picture of the early universe that is just starting to emerge, in large part thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope.
A major scientific goal of the James Webb Space Telescope is to help researchers study how the first stars and galaxies formed after the Big Bang. To do this, James Webb was designed to detect the faint light from incredibly distant stars and galaxies. The farther away an object is, the longer it takes the light to get to Earth, so James Webb is effectively a time machine that can peer back over 13.5 billion years to see light from the first stars and galaxies in the universe.
It has been very successful in the quest, having found hundreds of galaxies that flooded the universe with light in the first 700 million years after the big bang. The telescope has also detected the oldest black hole in the universe, located at the center of a galaxy that formed just 500 million years after the Big Bang.
These findings are challenging existing theories of the evolution of the universe.
It takes a long time to grow a massive galaxy. Astronomers know that supermassive black holes lie at the center of every galaxy and have mass proportional to their host galaxies. So these ancient galaxies almost certainly have the correspondingly massive black hole in their centers.
The problem is that the objects James Webb has been finding are far bigger than current theory says they should be.
These new results from the NANOGrav team emerged from astronomers’ first opportunity to listen to the gravitational waves of the ancient universe. The findings, while tantalizing, aren’t quite strong enough to claim a definitive discovery. That will likely change, as the team has expanded its pulsar network to include 115 pulsars and should get results from this next survey around 2025. As James Webb and other research challenges existing theories of how galaxies evolved, the ability to study the era after the Big Bang using gravitational waves could be an invaluable tool.
Chris Impey, University Distinguished Professor of Astronomy, University of Arizona
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Phone Anxiety [Comic]
[Source: @Inkyrickshaw]
Unveiling the Most Dangerous Weapon: It’s NOT Nuclear!
Biotechnology is advancing at an astonishing pace nowadays, granting us the means to potentially wield mastery over biology itself. However, this progress presents a duality that demands our attention: while we might soon be able to cure some of the most lethal diseases, we also face the emergence of viruses could potentially be even more destructive than nuclear weaponry.
What is currently going on in the world of biotech? Let’s find out in this episode of “In a Nutshell!”