Scientists find why the liver may not heal even after you stop drinking - Science Daily

Vanilla is one of the most commonly used flavors in the world. A common baking ingredient could help heal wounds—and it’s pretty sweet. Vanillin (which comes from vanilla pods) has anti-inflammatory, antibacterial, and antioxidant properties that could be used in wound-healing treatments. A study recently published in the International Journal of Pharmaceutics details this food-to-function framework.

If puberty is like climbing a physiological cliff, then menopause may be like falling off one. A new study, published in Nature Medicine, argues that the end of menstruation is not a gradual part of aging, as previously assumed, but an abrupt physiological transition. Using more than 300 million lab tests from over one million women, the new study identifies a number of sudden 'jumps' that occur throughout the body when menopause begins. Some of the most obvious changes are to do with sex hormones, which the ovaries help produce, but there are also sudden shifts in bone health, liver function, kidney function, blood chemistry, and blood fats. "Menopause reshapes female physiology, yet current understanding islimited by small longitudinal cohorts that characterize it as a gradualtransition," explain the authors, led by molecular cell biologist Glen Pridham from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. That may be a misconception. Pridham and colleagues have instead used a computational framework to analyze the transition to menopause in two large cohorts of women, one in the United States and another in Israel.

My former a16z partner Chris Dixon wrote a now-famous post talking about how the next big things in technology often start out being dismissed as “toys” – they look silly, immature relative to the current state of the art, are limited in utility, and full of security concerns or other bugs. Chris was writing about why market incumbents often get surprised – and ultimately lapped or completely wiped out – by innovations in technology (often developed by much smaller and earlier-stage technology startups). The cardinal mistake, according to Chris, is to over-train on the limitations of the technology today – it’s too slow, it’s buggy, it lacks enterprise security features or application integration capabilities, it consumes too much energy, compute power, etc. I could go on. For example, when the telephone first arrived in the late 1870s, it could carry a voice call a very short distance (about a mile or two). Western Union, then the dominant communications company in America, passed on the chance to buy it. Its customers were businesses and railroads, and the phone didn’t seem useful to either. By the standards of the day, the telephone was perceived as a toy.