We Need More Science

Pears could be part of a healthy diet to manage diabetes

While the phrase "an apple a day" is a popular saying, a new study suggests that pears as part of a healthy diet could play a role in helping to manage type 2 diabetes and diabetes-induced hypertension.

The results of research published in Food Research International show potential health benefits of Bartlett and Starkrimson pears. Building on their previous studies, the research team from North Dakota State University, Fargo, and the University of Massachusetts studied whether the peel, pulp and juice of pears could impact the prevention and management of type 2 diabetes, hypertension and the bacteria Helicobacter pylori, which plays a role in intestinal ulcers.

The research team includes: Kalidas Shetty and Dipayan Sarkar, now at North Dakota State University, Fargo, previously at the University of Massachusetts with co-authors Chandrakant Ankolekar and Marcia Pinto. Shetty, professor of Plant Sciences at NDSU, serves as the director of the Global Institute of Food Security and International Agriculture (GIFSIA), as well as associate vice president for International Partnerships and Collaborations.

The in vitro (test tube) lab experiments by researchers in the study provided metabolic insights into how two varieties of pears could play a role to better manage early stage diabetes and associated hypertension, commonly called high blood pressure. More research would be needed to determine if the results of the in vitro studies can be replicated in humans.

Naturally occurring phenolic compounds found in fruits may provide a variety of health benefits, as this study shows. More varied and higher phenolic content is found in the skin of the pear than in its flesh or pulp. The study showed that Starkrimson peel had the highest total phenolic content, and that peel extracts had significantly higher total phenolic content than pulp. The pulp extracts of the Bartlett cultivar had higher total phenolics when compared with Starkrimson.

"Our results from in vitro assays suggest that if we consume Bartlett and Starkrimson pears as a whole fruit (peel and pulp) it may potentially provide better control of early stage diabetes as part of an overall healthier diet," said Shetty.

"Such dietary strategy involving fruits, including pears, not only potentially could help better control blood glucose levels, but also reduce over dependence on drugs for prediabetes stages, or complement a reduced pharmacological dose of drugs with side effects to combat very early stages of type 2 diabetes," said the study authors in their article.

World Health Organization statistics show that diabetes affects approximately 387 million adults worldwide, with the number expected to jump to 592 million by 2035. Some references consider type 2 diabetes a rapidly emerging epidemic in children due to unhealthy diets.

Effects on blood pressure

Researchers also examined whether the pears studied might provide benefits to controlling high blood pressure. ACE (angiotensin-I-converting enzyme) inhibitors are medications that are sometimes used to help treat elevated blood pressure. The study showed that the watery extract of Bartlett pulp had low to moderate ACE inhibitory activity. The pear peel and pulp did not show any ACE inhibitory activity in this study.

"Our results suggested that Bartlett pulp could be utilized as a potential mild ACE inhibitor following further evaluation with different concentrations and extraction processes," said the study authors.

Pears and gut bacteria

Researchers also studied whether fermented whole pear juice of Bartlett and Starkrimson pear extracts could inhibit the bacteria H. pylori. This bacteria found in the gut often is associated with gastritis and stomach ulcers. No pH adjusted samples after fermentation inhibited H. pylori. Starkrimson pear without pH adjustment inhibited H. pylori after 24, 48 and 72 hours of fermentation. Fermented samples of Bartlett pear inhibited H. pylori only after 48 and 72 hours, when pH was adjusted before fermentation.

Results suggest that fermented pear extract can inhibit H. pylori without affecting the growth or function of probiotic bacteria and has the potential to sustain probiotic function of beneficial bacteria.

More studies are needed, said Shetty, to further investigate the bioactive compounds in the peel and pulp of these pear varieties. Study of other properties such as fiber content, amino acids, and vitamin C could provide additional insight on the role of pears in a healthy food system.

Results show opportunity for agriculture

Shetty said results of this study and others point to the use of foods that can help combat disease, which in turn, can impact agriculture around the world. "This research helps make the case to build better 'food crops for health,'" he said. He sees additional opportunity for agriculture, particularly in North Dakota. "We now can develop a wide diversity of crops in North Dakota that not only meet global food security and nutritional security, but also are wholesome to counter chronic diseases from poor diets," he said.

Funding for early work on the study was provided by USA Pears, with support for studies on probiotic and antimicrobial benefits supported by the University of Massachusetts, Massachusetts Agricultural Experiment Station and by student Marcia Pinto on a Brazilian government scholarship. Research on health benefits is continuing at North Dakota State University since 2013, with support from the North Dakota Agricultural Experiment Station.

Old-School Cool: Charming Toy Cars Made of Nothin’ But Wood

Back at last year’s Toy Fair, Candylab’s collection of MO-TO “Awesome Wood Cars” were retro wooden standouts at a show loaded with high-tech playthings. Now, the team that makes these cool toy cars is coming out with its 2015 models, and you’re going to want them for your ~~desk~~ kids.

Candylab and its cars were born in Brooklyn, but it’s now a four-person team spread out across Brooklyn, L.A., and London. Each of the team members has a day job, so making these rides is just a fun hobby. Co-founder Vlad Dragusin is an architect during business hours, and co-founder Florin Galliano is a product developer in L.A.

Like the first batch of cars, the new toy rides are all about minimalism. Their bodies are abstract but still recognizable representations of classic cars. The number of pieces in each car is kept to a minimum, too. There’s solid beechwood for the body, a few metal pins, plastic rims, rubber tires, and some paint. That’s it.

And they all have a look that today’s cars can’t touch.

“Something is getting lost in the current design language,” says co-founder Dragusin, who is based in Brooklyn. “Up until the early ’70s, when various federal safety regulations started to be implemented, car design was pure and raw. Proportions and visual balance were important, and lots of things were done for the love of the art. Cars had personality.”

These shrunken-down wooden classics reflect that. The first wave of Candylab cars included spins on American muscle cars—mashups of 1960s Camaros, GTOs, and Mustangs, and a Plymouth Fury-like police cruiser thrown in for good measure.

The next wave of models, which just cruised past its Kickstarter goal with ease, still remains rooted in yesteryear. To Gadget Lab’s eyeballs, the gem of the lineup is the Woodie. While it has a late-1960s Ford LTD Country Squire vibe, Dragusin says it’s actually a medley of elements from different rides. This kind of design dim-sum is the case with other MO-TO cars, too.

“The front and rear ends have different cues, and then we mix and match,” says Dragusin. “The police grille is loosely taken from a ’67 Galaxie, with its stacked headlights. The Woodie’s front end is a riff on a ’69 Polara Wagon and yes, its taillights could be a ’68 Ford Country Wagon. Our racers (GT10, C77, Plum50) are an homage to the split front grille of the ’67 SS Chevelle. We really love all those cars.”

The Woodie comes with two magnetic connectors that are put to clever use. There’s one magnet on its roof so that you can attach its included surfboard—a must for a Woodie—and there’s another magnet under its trunk so that you can hitch on the new two-tone Camper.

The Woodie looks fetching by itself, but it’s hard to imagine buying it without splurging on the Camper, as well. Luckily, the two are offered together in a “Caravan” package, which requires a $59 pledge. You also get a second surfboard thrown into the mix with that deal.

You can drag around other cars with Candylab’s new offerings, too. The Towie is an old-school towtruck that can haul another ride behind it with a rubber band. All the new cars in the series—including the new powder-blue Blu-77 with a slick orange stripe—will come with a tow hitch under the front end. The Blu-74 and Towie will be packaged together in a “Blown Gasket” pack, which requires a $60 pledge and comes with four spare tires.

The last new model is the Candycab, which is based on an Uber-like vehicle called a “taxi” that was prominent at some point in history. It’s the cheapest new model in the lineup, and you get it with a $24 pledge. You can get every car in the new series with a $139 “Roadside” package, and you can even buy a set of three surfboard magnets with a $9 pledge. Most of the packages are slated to ship by September, but the Woodie and the Camper need a bit more time. They’ll roll out in October.

But what comes after that? Different eras and makes of cars are definitely on the docket, but Dragusin says Candylab may need to become more than a hobby before that happens.

“We have plans for European cars, and without giving out too much, we are looking at other iconic American eras,” says Dragusin. “We do need a functioning profitable company to finance all this development. Had it not been for the Kickstarter community, these would have remained just some prototypes on our shelves.”

Amazon’s X-Ray Shows Movie Info Whenever You Hit Pause

X-Ray for Fire TV shows you who's on screen at any moment. Amazon

If you’ve ever been lost inside the Game of Thrones books, or had trouble keeping straight the Boromirs, Faramirs, and Beregonds of Tolkien’s Lord of The Rings, you’ll understand the value of Amazon’s X-Ray feature. On Kindle, you just long-press on a name or place to quickly figure out their place in the story—who they are, who they’re related to, who they’re sleeping with on the side. On Kindle Fire tablets, that’s also been extended to movies and TV shows. There, X-Ray is the quickest way ever to the answer to that most important of life’s questions: Where do I know that guy from?

Now, Amazon’s bringing the feature to your television, or at least to your Fire TV or Fire TV Stick. After you install the free over-the-air update to your streaming box, as long as you’re watching an Amazon movie, all you have to do is press pause or click up on the remote and you’ll get quick information about whatever you’re watching. Who’s on screen right now? What’s the actor’s name? What’s the song playing in the background? What movie am I watching, again? All of X-Ray’s data comes from IMDB (which Amazon owns), and is amazingly rich. There’s even a “Trivia” tab, which is loaded with weird and arcane information about your favorite cult hit.

Amazon puts a lot of time and energy into X-Ray across all platforms. Its computers can do some of the identification and time-coding, but every movie or TV show has some human touch as well—that’s why there are only about 100 titles a week added to X-Ray. It’s a lot of work for an ostensibly small feature, but Amazon sees it as a differentiator. As streaming services proliferate, their libraries can begin to look similar. There are a half-dozen places to watch the newly digitized Star Wars movies, from Netflix to iTunes, and they’re the same epics no matter where you buy—the power of X-Ray is Amazon’s most compelling bid to be the place you spend your $20.

It might not be good enough to make you spend $99 on a Fire TV, but when you’re looking for a place to watch Pitch Perfect again, it’s a tiebreaker in Amazon’s favor. On one hand, it’s great for quickly looking something or someone up. (Yes, it is McLovin.) And thanks to all the time-coding of characters, music, and scenes, Amazon has essentially improved upon the scene selector your DVDs used to have—you can flip to any moment you want, or even jump straight to “Let It Go” the ten-thousandth time your kid wants to watch Frozen. There’s serious rabbit-hole potential, too: it’s way too easy to go from “who’s that?” to “What else is she in?” to “Wait she’s in THAT?” Suddenly you’re watching a movie completely unlike what you’d planned.

Using X-Ray on a TV is different from a tablet, though. It interrupts (and pauses) whatever you’re watching, fully taking over the screen when you look for anything more than the actors on the screen. It’s not a constant study aid, so much as a periodic catch-up. It’s a great way to kill a couple of minutes while someone’s in the bathroom or went to grab food, though. And look: If Amazon can making pausing a video a fun experience, well, it may have just solved television.

SpaceX Falcon Rocket vs. Robot Boat: Round Two!

Docking of the SpaceX Dragon aboard the International Space Station, March 2013. NASA

Three months ago, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket exploded spectacularly as it attempted to land on a robot boat. CEO Elon Musk described the failure, jokingly, as a “rapid unscheduled disassembly.” Today, the private space launch company is going to try again—firing an uncrewed Dragon spacecraft into low Earth orbit for a rendezvous with the International Space Station. And then it’s going to try to land on that robot boat again.

The mission is a cargo-resupply, the sixth of 12 for which SpaceX has contracted with NASA. It’ll carry almost 4,400 lbs of food, supplies, and scientific equipment. That’s important to the astronauts up there, of course, but the company really wants to stick this landing. It’d be a proof-of-concept in using reusable rockets for spaceflight. Using the now-retired space shuttles for this kind of thing cost $1.5 billion per launch; Musk has said he believes reusable rockets could bring that down by a factor of 100. “The goal for NASA is to buy a service, not build it, freeing up resources for other space launches and space exploration,” says Katherine Hembelton, a spokesperson at NASA HQ.

But as the January mission showed, landing a rocket isn’t easy. SpaceX’s Falcon 9 booster successfully sent its Dragon capsule to the ISS and re-entered the atmosphere, and it even hit its target on the drone barge. Then it blew up. Musk told reporters the rocket’s stabilizing “hypersonic grid fins” simply ran out of hydraulic fluid. Musk and the company vowed to fix the issue for the next launch.

Liftoff is scheduled for 4:33 p.m. Eastern time Monday from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. Dragon is expected to stay docked to the ISS for five weeks, taking away 3,000 pounds of used supplies and trash and then splashing down 400 miles off the California coast. (No barge landing for it.).

Dragon is currently the only spacecraft capable of returning supplies to Earth, a vital capability for much of the science being conducted on the ISS—which range from investigating new ways of counteracting microgravity-induced cell damage in bones and muscles, new materials that could be used in building synthetic tissue for astronauts, continued vision studies for astronauts on prolonged spaceflight, and more. Many studies require safe transport of live animals, plants, organic materials, and other physical data to and from the ISS. (((could you more specifically here call out which studies require sample return? Microgravity doesn’t, vision doesn’t….

Both NASA and SpaceX are webcasting the launch. Don’t watch it hoping for a crash; that’d be morbid.

The Wild Government Projects You’re Funding With Your Taxes

The us government's budget is a bottomless pit. Every year, you suck it up and pay income taxes into a $1.5 trillion pot. Most of it goes to Congress-approved discretionary funding—a pile of money that pays for stuff you'd never OK if you were in charge, including a lot of intangible salaries and upkeep. But that's not all. A hefty chunk funds awesome R&D and sci-fi toys that'll make you proud to be an American. So this April, as you spend late nights scrounging through shoeboxes of old receipts, take comfort in the knowledge that your cash is helping Uncle Sam launch space telescopes, make new maps—and build POTUS a fleet of tricked-out new helicopters.

Why People Care More About Pets Than Other Humans

We love our pets. Two thirds of Americans live with an animal, and according to a 2011 Harris poll, 90 percent of pet owners think of their dogs and cats as members of the family. These relationships have benefits. For example, in a survey by the American Animal Hospital Association, 40 percent of married female dog owners reported they received more emotional support from their pet than from their husband or their kids. The pet products industry calls this “the humanization of pets.” One of my colleagues recently spent $12,000 on cancer treatments for her best friend Asha, a Labrador retriever.

Hal Herzog

About

Hal Herzog is Professor of Psychology of at Western Carolina University and author of Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It’s So Hard To Think Straight About Animals. He writes the blog “Animals and Us” for Psychology Today magazine.

Newspaper editors tell me stories about animal abuse often generate more responses from upset readers than articles about violence directed toward humans. But do Americans really care more about pets that people?

Take, for example, police shootings. The FBI claims that about 400 people a year are killed by police in “justifiable homicides.” The number of incidents in which cops shoot dogs is very hard to pin down. You sometimes hear the claim that a dog is shot by a police officer “every 98 minutes.” That’s would be about 5,000 dogs a year. But Merritt Clifton, editor of Animals 24-7 thinks, based on his analyses of media reports, that the number of dogs killed each year in “confrontational incidents” with cops is probably between 300 and 500 – about the same as human cop shootings.

Because of high profile incidents like the death last week of Walter Scott in Charleston, South Carolina, and, of course, the case of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, death-by-cop is in the news. But, as is illustrated by two shootings that took place within 24 hours last year in Idaho, it is not always the case that we value people over pets.

On July 8, 2014, Jeanetta Riley, pregnant and a mother of two, was killed by police officers outside a hospital in Sandpoint, Idaho. Riley reportedly had a history of drug addiction and alcoholism, and she was drunk, incoherent, and waving a filet knife at the three police officers who showed up at the hospital. A dashboard video camera mounted on one of the police cars shows that Riley was at least 10 feet from the cops when they opened fire. Why the police opted to shoot Riley rather than zap a 100-pound woman with one of the Tasers they were carrying is unclear. The officers were subsequently exonerated, no apology was given to Riley’s family, and the story never made national news until it was recently dredged up by a reporter from The Guardian .

Fast forward 14 hours and travel 50 miles south to a café in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho where Craig Jones was eating lunch, having locked his dog Arfee in the cab of his van. Jones had rolled the windows part-way down so the dog would stay cool. Unfortunately, when the two-year old black Lab mix started barking, someone called the cops. Officer Dave Kelly caught the call. Kelly later claimed that when he approached the van, Arfee (who was initially described as a vicious pit bull) lunged at him, though the van’s window was mostly rolled up. Kelly put a bullet in Arfee’s chest.

This time the media did respond. A headline in the New York Daily News proclaimed “Idaho Cop Shoots, Kills Adorable Black Lab Named Arfee After Mistaking Him For Aggressive Pit Bull.” A “Justice For Arfee” Facebook Page was soon created, and a shadowy organization called “Anonymous” posted several ominous videos on YouTube vaguely threatening Coeur d’Alene police officers with retribution. Two months later, when a police review board ruled that the shooting of the dog was unjustified, the citizens of Coeur d’Alene staged a “Justice for Alfee” rally, demanding that Officer Kelly be fired. The police department issued an official apology to Jones who was awarded $80,000 in damages for the loss of his pet.

Testing the Pets Over People Hypothesis

As The Guardian article indicates, the mismatch between the public outrage over the shootings of a dog and a pregnant mom a mere 14 hours and 50 miles apart is striking. But was this an aberration? In the wake of Ferguson and now South Carolina, police shootings of human beings have been big news. Do the tragic cases of Jeanetta Riley and Arfee support the view that our love of animals trumps our concern for people?

Two sociologists at Northeastern University have tested the claim that people are more upset by news stories of animal abuse than they are about attacks directed toward humans. The researchers, Arnold Arluke, an authority on human-animal relationships, and Jack Levin, an expert on serial killers and mass murders, had college students read fake news accounts on a crime wave in Boston. For instance, one of the articles included the statement, “According to witnesses present, one particularly vicious assault involved a one-year-old puppy that was beaten with a baseball bat by an unknown assailant. Arriving on the scene a few minutes after the attack, a police officer found the victim with one broken leg, multiple lacerations, and unconscious. No arrests have been made in the case.”

The subjects in the experiment did not know the articles were bogus. Nor did they know that there were actually four slightly different versions of the newspaper articles, each portraying a different victim: a puppy, an adult dog, a human infant, or a human adult. After they read one of the four news stories, each subject completed a scale which measured how much empathy and emotional distress they felt for the victim of the beating.

Arluke and Levin reported the results of their study at the 2013 meeting of the American Sociological Association. As you might guess, the story in which the victim was a human adult elicited, by far, the lowest levels of emotional distress in the readers. The “winner” when it came to evoking empathy was not the puppy but the human infant. The puppy, however, came in a close second with the adult dog not far behind. Arluke and Levin concluded that species is important when it comes to generating sympathy with the downtrodden. But they argued that the critical difference in responses to the stories was based on our special concern for creatures that are innocent and defenseless.

Save Your Dog or a Stranger?

In another experiment, psychologists at Georgia Regents University also explored circumstances in which people value animals over human lives. In the study, 573 individuals were asked who they would save in a series of hypothetical scenarios in which a dog and a person were in the path of an out-of-control bus. The researchers found that decisions to save the person or the dog were affected by three factors. The first: who the person in danger was. The subjects were much more likely to save the dog over a foreign tourist than, say, their best friend or a sibling. The second factor was the dog. Forty percent of participants said they would save their personal pet at the expense of a foreign tourist. But only 14 percent claimed they would sacrifice the tourist when the animal in the scenario was described generically as “a dog.” Finally, as other studies have found, women care more about animals than men do. In the run-away-bus scenario, female subjects were nearly twice as likely as males to say they would save a dog over a person.

Living With Moral Inconsistency

The bottom line is that, at least in some circumstances, we do value animals over people. But the differences in public outrage over the deaths of Jeanetta Riley and Arfee illustrate a more general point. It is that our attitudes to other species are fraught with inconsistency. We share the earth with roughly 40,000 other kinds of vertebrate animals, but most of us only get bent out of shape over the treatment of a handful of species. You know the ones: the big-eye baby seals, circus elephants, chimpanzees, killer whales at Sea World, etc. And while we deeply love our pets, there is little hue and cry over the 24 horses that die on race tracks in the United States each week, let alone the horrific treatment of the nine billion broiler chickens American consume annually.

Most people, it seems, live easily with what the environmental philosopher Chris Diehm calls “the paradox of the cats in our houses and cows on our plates.” Go figure.

Internet of Anything: It’s Time for Everyone to be Able to Hack Robots

Ron Evans thinks it’s about time that everyone should be able to make robots. Or at least tell them what to do.

The world of robotics right now is still dominated by grad students, he says. “But the next exciting wave will come from average people who will imagine things that us so-called professionals would never think of.”

To help usher in this future, he and his colleagues at a company called The Hybrid Group created a set of free frameworks—basically skeletons of code—that free up non-specialists to write up the fun stuff for a wide variety of hardware, from Arduino circuit boards to Parrot ARDrones to Sphero robots.

Geek is cool again. Wait, geek was never cool before. Geek is cool for the first time in history. Ron Evans

Evans hopes these frameworks will make it much easier to program these machines by reducing the amount of code you need to write in order to do something cool. For now you’ll need to learn at least a little code if you want to use the tools, but Evans says the company wants to at least make it easier for people to dabble in hardware programming. For example, the latest of the frameworks, dubbed Cylon, lets people program hardware using the JavaScript language, which most web developers and many designers already know.

Ultimately, Evans says, the company may release tools that will help people create their own robotics or Internet of Things software without having to write a single line of code at all.

Democratizing App Creation

In the 1980s Evans worked at Apple on a program called Hypercard, which helped people build their own apps without needing to do complex programming. Hypercard was originally included for free with all Macs and was used to create everything from enterprise software to the popular role-playing game Myst. By showing that anyone, not just people with computer science degrees, could create interactive computer programs, Hypercard helped inspire a generation of programmers. And that was very much by design. Evans says the Hypercard team, lead by Bill Atkinson and Dan Winkler, was always interested in democratizing computing.

That spirit has carried over to his more recent projects, such as Kids Ruby, a piece of educational software that helps teach kids to code using the popular Ruby programming language.

It was Evans’ involvement in the Ruby community that led him to start the first of the Hybrid Group’s three frameworks, Artoo, which enables people to write code for robots and other devices using the language.

Drawing on other Ruby frameworks for the web such as Ruby on Rails and Sinatra, Evans set out to create a platform that would work across devices. One of the big advantages of Artoo and the company’s other frameworks is that if you started building a gadget using, say, an Arduino circuit board but then decided to upgrade to a more powerful platform such as Spark or Tessel, you’d still be able to reuse much of the same code.

Originally Evans only planned on creating one framework, but he soon got the idea of building more. “We thought we’d have a big thing in the Ruby world,” Evans says. “But we found that JavaScript people were more interested than the Ruby people were.”

So they set about adapting Artoo to JavaScript, creating a framework called Gobot, based on Google’s Go programming language, along the way.

All of these frameworks are open source and free of charge, which raises the question of how Hybrid Group will make money from them. The company already makes money from consulting, and the team is also building a cloud service for hosting apps built with their frameworks. But he want to keep the underlying technology free so that as many people as possible can take advantage of them.

“We want people to be able to control their own devices the same way they already publish their own webpages and blogs,” Evans says. “We want to see people taking over their environments through technology.”

Geek Is Cool

That may sound farfetched, given how few people write their own apps today. But in the early days of the web, it was rather unusual for people have a personal homepage. Now, thanks to sites like Facebook, we all have a webpage that many of us update multiple times a day.

Of course, there’s still a big difference between writing a status update on Facebook and writing code to program a robot, even it’s getting easier and easier to write that code. To make it even more accessible, Evans and the team are working on a version Cylon that uses Google’s Blockly, a tool designed to help kids learn to program without writing code.

“It’s entirely drag and drop, but it’s still Cylon underneath so you get all the advantages of real code,” he explains.

Meanwhile, more people are learning to program than ever. Future generations will likely be more code literate, and they might not be as content as we are today to just buy a product and use it the way its inventors intended.

“Geek is cool again,” Evans says. “Wait, geek was never cool before. Geek is cool for the first time in history.”