“The Original EcoSphere® is the world’s first totally enclosed ecosystem – a complete, self-contained and self-sustaining miniature world encased in glass. Be wary of inferior and lower quality imitations. Easy to care for, an EcoSphere is an incredible learning tool that can provide powerful insights about life on our own planet… and provide a glimpse of technology that’s shaping the future of space exploration.”
So cool. Will have to get one some day. [via @curisma]
Read this article…
An Analysis of the Existing Regulatory Framework and Recommendations for Alternative Frameworks
A team of researchers at the University of Maryland Baltimore is studying federal regulation of probiotics under a grant from NIH’s Human Microbiome Project (HMP). A portion of HMP funds were set aside to study the Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications (often referred to as the ELSI issues) of the Project’s scientific goals. The probiotics project is an interdisciplinary collaboration between faculty members from the University of Maryland Schools of Law, Pharmacy and Medicine.
This site is chock-full of info on probiotics policy, regulations, and science. Really good stuff.
Read this article…
 A bit of history:
I experienced a huge brain- and world-expanding time during my Nokia Lifeblog years (2004-05). Early on, we paired up with Six Apart (via Marko Ahtisaari and Joi Ito), and I spent a lot of time under Loïc LeMeur’s wing promoting blogging, Six Apart, and Lifeblog, and meeting some of the key movers in the nascent Web 2.0 (thank you, Loïc).
In those days, I pushed for the fusion of web and mobile, started seeing how everything was coming in as streams, and how people started exuding their own lifestreams. The next logical idea was how to bring that together.
In 2006, the poster child was NetVibes. But I though we could do better. Some started talking about personal aggregators, Digital Lifestyle Aggregators, the widgetization of everything.
Morsels:
For me, the sweetspot was to be the one holding all the morsels (He who hold the morsels, holds the experience. “The structure holding the morsels becomes the experience” – Fabio Sergio), a dynamic dashboard where all my social streams come in, where I could mix and match, and then send all the things of note out back into the streams.
This was my original vision of what should have become Ovi.com. Alas, I could point to so many places where the harpoon was sunk and twisted into me (and into those who stayed on), but I had been given a huge wad of cash to do it, and I f-ed it up by not channeling my inner-Jobs and insisting we stay true to vision.
Lesson learned. Enough self-pitying. I had my chance and blew it.
In the time since, I have seen attempts to create similar services, and even some blatant suggestions from some great thinkers as to what was missing in this age of lifestreams (which I thought would be in 2008). But nothing really took hold (though I think Seesmic desktop shows promise).
Bottlenose:
And, lo, on comes a new service. And from a brilliant semantic web guy with a track record of actually coming out with things that I thought approached what I wanted to see.
“Bottlenose is a new social media dashboard for influencers of all stripes. But it’s not just for posting and reading; it helps you filter and manage your networks with semantics and machine learning. It’s all Web-based, written in HTML 5 and Javascript. It does the data crunching on the browser side (for the non-pro users), so you get native performance behind these major operations reading and parsing your stream.”
Read this article from Read Write Web
I signed up and have been checking it out. Of course, I’m sure this is better than whatever I would have built in 2007, given how the Web and mobile world have changed since then. I think one issue that could come to bite is any deviation from the usual UI folks are accustomed to for scanning info and streams. The weirder, the less likely someone will use it without feeling geeky.
In any case, I’m excited to play with it. If you check it out, let me know what you think of it.
One more thing:
I’ve also evolved my thinking since 2007 and think Bottlenose should be a P2P system. Take back the Cloud!
Image from the Read Write article on Bottlenose.
“Now, a new study by Eric Martens, David Bolam, and colleagues has looked into how a pair of the most common species of gut bacteria metabolize polysaccharides, showing that each bacterium is highly specialized. Using a high-throughput system for feeding the bacteria dozens of kinds of carbohydrates, one at a time, and tracking the bacteria’s gene expression, they were able to see how these microbes have tailored themselves to fill specific niches in the gut.”
This is a really good study. For me, a better understanding of the gut metabolic ecology will allow for the development of better probiotics. One interesting finding in this study is that some bug don’t grow well on simple sugar because their sensors are built for complex sugars. Made me think of folks in developed world and what effect eating more simple sugars (high-fructose corn syrup) has on gut flora and any consequential obesity.
Read this article…
“Global Industry Analysts (GIA) predicts the global probiotics market will be worth $28.8bn by 2015, even though the market is still considered to be in infancy. “
I like this.
Read this article…
“The story of a group of University of Massachusetts students who set out to initiate the construction of the school’s first permaculture garden a year ago is a remarkable one, but it’s only the beginning of a worldwide movement.”
This is really interesting. Small-scale farming was killed by industrial farming to feed huge masses. But could it be that small-scale farming, like it used to be, to feed a local group, say a family or a cafeteria, is making a comeback? That would be cool.
Question: does technology and science help make us better “micro-farmers”?
Read this article…
Image of the garden from the article linked above.
 When I lived in the US in the 90s, it was hard to find live-culture yogurt in supermarkets (you could find them in natural food stores, of course). The only one I could find was Stonyfield yogurt.
When I lived in Finland, not only were there a bunch of live-culture milk products, but there was one in particular “Valio A+” that was specifically recommended for women to balance their flora.
Now back in the US, it’s hard not to find live-culture yogurt, and some are specifically marketed, yes, for women to balance their flora. Furthermore, the use of live bacterial cultures for health purposes, called probiotics, has become mainstream enough that you can find probiotic supplements for children in the supermarket.
What does this mean?
It means that folks are becoming aware of functional foods, of the importance of microorganism in their diet, and that the feeding desire to find a short cut (a pill rather than eating wholesome yogurt) is always a good business.
I’ve been seeking out all these probiotic products to get an idea of what’s out there, what the message is, and, for me, always on the look out for practical use of microbes, I’ve been trying to understand what microorganisms are in fashion.
OK, so the science behind probiotics is still in progress, so I will not go into that right now.
But, going on the premise that yogurt is the gold standard for beneficial live (with microorganisms) food, then my standard for all probiotic products used for digestive health is Stonyfield’s yogurt. Stonyfield’s has 6 bacteria (S thermophilus, L bulgaricus, L acidophilus, Bifidus, L casei, and L rhamnosus). I’d say that most of the products I have seen have one or more of these bugs. There are some proprietary sub-species and I’ve been pleased to see a few products with S salivarius or some other bacteria.
For me, the type, variety, and number of bacteria in a probiotic food or supplement is key. And I think it’s just snake oil if the product only has one bug.
Nonetheless, I think as probiotics go mainstream, buyers will be more astute as to what they are looking for. Also, I hope that new applications show up, beyond gut and vaginal flora health (I can think of a few).
What I do know, is that doctors are starting to suggest probiotics to patients on antibiotics or with digestive issues such as colitis or C diff.*
And that’s great.
Do you eat probiotic foods or take supplements? Send me pics of the ones you see or take! I could/should create a database of products and attach reviews or commentary. Hm…. not another project….
*Ego boost: A gastroenterologist aked me recently what probiotics I recommended. Ha! My first probiotic consulting gig?
 As you know, I’m always looking for practical uses of microbes. One that I stumbled upon a long while back was “transfaunation”, or, seeding one person’s gut with microbes from another’s. Yes, transfering poop microbes from one to another.
Be an adult. Don’t get grossed out. I’ve read some great papers on the process how our guts get colonized after birth. Also, there are some really interesting papers on how our gut microbes (or lack thereof) are involved in various intestinal disorders. And there are some promising papers on how diet affect the bacterial ecology in the gut. [Sorry, I'll link to the papers in a larger gut related set of posts at some point in the future - you can also just search for gut and microbes in my posts.]
Here’s the basic idea. People suffering from the hardy C. diff bacteria are generally prescribed a powerful antibiotic. Problem is, the drugs don’t just kill the invaders; they also wipe out much of the beneficial bacteria in the gut. With these “good” microorganisms out of the way, any C. diff stragglers have a much easier time regrouping for a second bout of illness. If there were some way to respawn the beneficial bacteria in the intestines, such re-infections could be warded off. Some people, like Ruth, turn to expensive probiotic supplements. (At one point she was spending $350 on them every week.) But in certain cases, a patient who has lost nearly all of her good bacteria will find it nearly impossible to get them back. A fecal transplant seems to work as a sort of mega-probiotic, allowing doctors to repopulate a patient’s intestines with the appropriate microorganisms by placing a robust sample directly into her gut.
Slate had a nice article on the subject (quoted above). It’s a serious subject and for many, the only hope to get a better and healthier bacterial gut fauna (hence the term, transfaunation).
My wife’s a vet and she’s not only heard of this procedure, but performed it on animals. It’s not uncommon to jumpstart an animal’s ability to digest grass by grabbing bugs from one animal and putting it in the right place. And, did you know, some animals eat poop on purpose for this very reason – rabbits, capibaras, hamsters, elephants, termites, pandas, koalas, and hippos – to colonize their gut?
And really, folks eat yogurt to populate their gut with good bacteria. Why not poo bacteria as probiotics? I actually think, as we learn more about our gut fauna, this will be come a more accepted course of action for folks with nasty bowel infections, colitis, or inflammatory bowel diseases.
What do you think?
Image of Kristen Paulson’s Anatomy and Guts Embroidery Hoop Art on Etsy (get your own!)
“Health claims for probiotics are evaluated by the Panel on Dietetic Products, Nutrition and Allergies of the European Food Safety Authority. Despite a substantial amount of basic and clinical research on the beneficial effects of probiotics, all of the evaluated claim applications thus far have received a negative opinion. With the restrictions on the use of clinical endpoints, validated biomarkers for gut health and immune health in relation to reduction in disease risk are needed. Clear-cut criteria for design as well as evaluation of future studies are needed. An open dialogue between basic and clinical scientists, regulatory authorities, food and nutrition industry, and consumers could bridge the gap between science and marketing of probiotics.”
Not sure what to make of this other than the comment that ‘clear-cut criteria’ will be needed to actually turn claims into science.
Read this article…
“Widely described as the point of no return, the event horizon of SgrA* would be the largest in our skies, but still just 30 microarcseconds across — the apparent size of a tennis ball on the Moon when viewed from Earth. To capture its image would be a stunning technical achievement in itself, but it would also open the door to further studies of how black holes spin and gather material, as well as probing some fundamental aspects of space-time and general relativity. And the first picture taken of our local supermassive black hole — the most enigmatic and charismatic of all the wonders of the Universe — would surely be one of the defining images of the time. It might even knock everyday trouble and strife from the front pages, and perhaps even, for a while, from people’s minds.”
Cool.
Read this article…
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