Engineered microbe may be key to producing plastic from plants — ScienceDaily

With a few genetic tweaks, a type of soil bacteria with an appetite for hydrocarbons shows promise as a biological factory for converting a renewable — but frustratingly untapped — bounty into a replacement for ubiquitous plastics. Researchers, like those at the University of Wisconsin-Madison-based, Department of Energy-funded Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center, hoping to…

Longer shifts do not create chronic sleep loss in first-year doctors or reduce safety for patients, study finds — ScienceDaily

When medical residents were permitted to work shifts longer than 16 hours, patient mortality was not affected and the doctors themselves did not experience chronic sleep loss, according to a pair of papers published today in the New England Journal of Medicine by a team of researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the…

Clinical trial shows reduction of inflammation in humans; diet appears to reverse Crohn’s and colitis pathology in mice — ScienceDaily

USC researchers provided evidence that a low-calorie “fasting-mimicking” diet has the potential to do just that. Published in the March 5 edition of Cell Reports, the study reports on the health benefits of periodic cycles of the diet for people with inflammation and indicated that the diet reversed inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) pathology in mice.…