Something is clearly wrong with our modern eating habits.

Something is clearly wrong with our eating habits. Today, diet-related diseases plague the Western world. More people suffer from type 2 diabetes, obesity and food allergies, not to mention many forms of cancer, than ever before.

But what exactly is wrong with how we’re eating — and what should we be doing instead? The diets of our ancestors provide a few answers.

They were generally much healthier than modern-day humans, so it’s no wonder that the last decade has witnessed a major uptick in caveman or paleo diets.

But to get a full picture we have to go back even further in time — starting with our earliest, tree-dwelling ancestors 100 million years ago and exploring how these forebears adapted to changing environments and diets. …

And caloric intake doesn’t explain your weight

Did you know that Japanese people eat an average of 300 fewer calories per capita than Americans? That sounds healthy, but is it worth following their example?

Actually, there are upsides and downsides to limiting your caloric intake. For instance, the Japanese live longer than Americans, but that’s not proof that their way is better.

Eating too few calories can deprive your brain of fuel and might cause you to lose focus. Not just that, but consuming too little protein for a period will cause muscle weakness.

So it’s a question of trade-offs. For instance, lots of animals, when going through a period of food scarcity, will reduce inessential bodily functions, like reproduction. And the same goes for humans: women who eat fewer calories will live longer, but they’ll be less fertile and more irritable. …

Climate change could turn some dog ticks into suckers for humans instead of canines.

At temperatures around 38° Celsius (100° Fahrenheit), some brown dog ticks were more attracted to people than to dogs, experiments show. The ticks can carry the pathogen that causes deadly Rocky Mountain spotted fever. The finding suggests that a warmer climate could lead to greater spread of the disease from ticks to humans, researchers reported November 16 at the annual meeting of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.

“We can expect more frequent and larger disease outbreaks of Rocky Mountain spotted fever when hot weather occurs, and when we get hot weather more often,” says Laura Backus, a researcher at the University of California, Davis School of Veterinary Medicine. Patients with Rocky Mountain spotted fever can die if they don’t receive antibiotic treatment within five days. …

The story of workplace AI should be one of collaboration, not replacement.

These are my lessons from by ‘Leadership by Algorithm: Who Leads and Who Follows in the AI Era?’ by David De Cremer

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the next big thing in the world of business. It’s already making inroads into the fields of data entry and recruitment, and its impact is set to grow exponentially in the coming years.

But with every advance in the field, leaders and employees alike raise fresh concerns. Will AI replace workers and render most employees redundant? Can algorithms really be trusted? …

So AI is gonna take over the work huh?

There are some limits to what AI can do in the workplace. Even though it’s adept at managing, it can’t lead.

But there’s more to organizations than just leaders and managers; there are whole ranges of work we haven’t even touched on yet.

Take the financial sector. Bit by bit, banks are replacing their employees with AI, especially those whose tasks are mostly mechanical and calculative. Does that suggest that the advent of AI will make everyone below the level of leadership obsolete? Besides leading, is there anything else left for humans to do?

The human touch that’s necessary for real leadership is valuable at every level of an organization

In fact, the more business operations are automated, the more soft skills will come to be valued in employees. After all, if AI is making inroads into almost every other domain, what’s left for us to capitalize on except what’s uniquely human? …

In 2018, the tech giant Huawei arranged a surprising performance of Franz
Schubert’s Symphony no. 8.

Why was it surprising? Well, Schubert began the symphony almost 200 years ago, but he died after he completed its first two movements. Yet somehow, this orchestra managed to play four. That’s where Huawei came in; the company used AI technology to analyze Schubert’s style and predict what his missing movements might have sounded like!

Engineers fed the AI program 90 of the composer’s finished compositions, and let it analyze the two existing movements of Symphony no. 8. …

You have heard the bad, here’s the good

Most viruses have a pathogenic relationship with their hosts. They invade the host cell, take over its cellular machinery and release new viral particles that will spread out and infect more cells and cause illness.

But they’re not all bad. Some viruses can actually kill bacteria, while others can fight against more dangerous viruses. So like protective bacteria (probiotics), we have several protective viruses in our body.

Bacteriophages

These types of viruses are found in the mucus membrane lining in the digestive, respiratory and reproductive tracts. …

We are more likely to develop advanced carcinoma’s than our closest evolutionary cousins — the chimps. In the words of Science Direct Advanced carcinomas are “the type of tumors that include prostate, breast, lung and colorectal cancers even in the absence of known risk factors, such as genetic predisposition or tobacco use.”

According to a recent study [2] published in FASEB BioAdvances by researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine and Moores Cancer Center, an evolutionary genetic mutation unique to humans may be at least partly to blame.

“At some point during human evolution, the SIGLEC12 gene — and more specifically, the Siglec-12 protein it produces as part of the immune system — suffered a mutation that eliminated its ability to distinguish between ‘self’ and invading microbes, so the body needed to get rid of it,” said senior author Ajit Varki…