Monthly Archives: November 2018

Researchers at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences have successfully implanted bio-loggers into farmed rainbow trout to monitor them in real time and natural conditions. Bio-loggers are small, bullet-shaped sensors that are about 13 cm or 1.5 inches long and can measure heart rate and temperature from inside an animal for 18 months. The researchers also measured cortisol, the stress hormone, before and after introducing stressors to verify how accurately heart rate correlates to stress in rainbow trout. This study was the first time scientists implanted farmed fish with bio-loggers. Fish can be very difficult to study due to their underwater habitat and uniform physical appearance, making them difficult to monitor at an individual level. Usually fish are tested by removing them from the water, which stresses the animal out and can only last for a couple minutes at a time. Therefore, these tests only provide a snapshot of the…

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Researchers at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences have successfully implanted bio-loggers into farmed rainbow trout to monitor them in real time and natural conditions. Bio-loggers are small, bullet-shaped sensors that are about 13 cm or 1.5 inches long and can measure heart rate and temperature from inside an animal for 18 months. The researchers also measured cortisol, the stress hormone, before and after introducing stressors to verify how accurately heart rate correlates to stress in rainbow trout. This study was the first time scientists implanted farmed fish with bio-loggers. Fish can be very difficult to study due to their underwater habitat and uniform physical appearance, making them difficult to monitor at an individual level. Usually fish are tested by removing them from the water, which stresses the animal out and can only last for a couple minutes at a time. Therefore, these tests only provide a snapshot of the…

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Nutrition articles may wax philosophical about “bad fats” and “good fats,” but the truth is never simple. Healthy eating is not so much a battle of good versus evil as it is an ongoing learning process. The current dietary guidelines are useful general recommendations for a healthy diet, but they are always being optimized. A recent clinical trial attempted to answer a popular question about fats – is all saturated fat unhealthy or does the source matter? Saturated fats, such as butter, have been linked to poor heart health because of their impact on cholesterol levels in the blood. In the 1980s, margarine was touted as a healthier alternative to butter. In the 1990s, the negative health effects of trans fats, which are just a man-made saturated fat, were discovered. Margarine starts out as vegetable oil and is made solid through a chemical process called hydrogenation. This process occasionally produces…

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Nutrition articles may wax philosophical about “bad fats” and “good fats,” but the truth is never simple. Healthy eating is not so much a battle of good versus evil as it is an ongoing learning process. The current dietary guidelines are useful general recommendations for a healthy diet, but they are always being optimized. A recent clinical trial attempted to answer a popular question about fats – is all saturated fat unhealthy or does the source matter? Saturated fats, such as butter, have been linked to poor heart health because of their impact on cholesterol levels in the blood. In the 1980s, margarine was touted as a healthier alternative to butter. In the 1990s, the negative health effects of trans fats, which are just a man-made saturated fat, were discovered. Margarine starts out as vegetable oil and is made solid through a chemical process called hydrogenation. This process occasionally produces…

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Up to about 200 years ago, the passenger pigeon was one of the most numerous vertebrate animals on Earth. The species had an estimated 3 to 5 billion individuals at the peak of its existence and had such big flock sizes that they were known to block out the sun. However, this changed during the early 1800s when they were commercialized as a cheap food source. Over the course of only 100 years, a combination of hunting and deforestation killed millions of pigeons a year, until finally, the birds were completely extinct. So how did these birds, that existed for tens of thousands of years, die off in little over one lifetime? This is the question Dr. Gemma Murray and her team sought to answer by looking at the genetics of some well-preserved passenger pigeons. To understand what could have led to the rapid demise of the passenger pigeon, the…

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