Yoghurt that might stop a heart attack
10 Mar. Daily Telegraph
Our guts are home to a microscopic world and
their contents may be a matter of life or death, reports Roger
Highfield. What does it mean to be human? It’s a deceptively simple
question, but the answer is complex. The reason is that most of our
cells are not human at all. We depend on a vast army of microbes to
stay alive: a friendly “microbiome” that protects us against germs,
breaks down food to release energy, and produces vitamins.
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Titanic site mapped for first time
Researchers have pieced together what's believed
to be the first comprehensive map of the entire three-by-five-mile
(five-by-eight-kilometre) Titanic debris field and hope it will
provide new clues about what exactly happened the night 100 years
ago when the superliner hit an iceberg, plunged to the bottom of the
North Atlantic and became a legend.
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Coral and shellfish under threat as seas turn acidic
Shellfish, coral reefs and other marine animals
with exterior skeletons will find it difficult to cope with the
speed at which the oceans are turning acidic due to rising
concentrations of carbon dioxide, a study has found. Scientists have
calculated that the current rate of ocean acidification today is
unprecedented over the past 300 million years, when the seas
experienced at least four major mass extinctions involving rising
ocean acidity. In the past 100 years, the concentration of carbon
dioxide in the atmosphere has increased by about a third. This has
resulted in a corresponding decrease in the natural alkaline state
of the oceans, effectively making them more acidic as CO2 in the air
dissolves in seawater to create carbonic acid, scientists said. The
oceans have been more acidic than they are now on several occasions
in the past. But the current rate of acidification is many times
faster than, for instance, at the time of the "Permian mass
extinction" 252 million years ago, which wiped out 95 per cent of
marine life on Earth, they said. "We know that life during past
ocean-acidification events was not wiped out - new species evolved
to replace those that died off.
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