Potassium and magnesium are essential minerals with distinct roles: potassium aids in heart function and fluid balance, while magnesium supports over 300 biochemical reactions, including nerve function and bone health. Proper intake is crucial for overall well-being, and supplementation can help address deficiencies.
“The Case Against Sugar” delves into sugar’s history, health impacts, and controversies, urging readers to reconsider their dietary choices.
“So low-income people in this country are basically juggling a whole bunch of balls simultaneously. The result of that constant juggling is stress. These communities were “incubators of chronic stress,” he said in a TEDx talk. “Low-income people are physiologically different than high-income people. Not because they were born that way, but because we made them that way.” There’s a well-established link between chronic stress and a variety of health problems, among them cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and inflammation. And that’s why the health care system was so poorly positioned to close the gap. The problem was not the lack of treatment. It was the lack of health.
Excerpt From: Dan Heath. “Upstream.”
“The average human body is made from around forty trillion cells. Trillion! Forty trillion is 40,000,000,000,000. A truly impressive number. If we want your cells to be represented by individual people, then we need more than one hundred times as many people as have lived in the 250,000-year-long history of humanity. Let’s try to visualize this a bit. Right now around 7.8 billion people are alive. If we put them shoulder to shoulder, they surprisingly would only cover an area of around 700 square miles (1,800 square kilometers). Which is a little bit more than the surface area of London. To get forty trillion people we need to multiply this by 120”
Excerpt From: Dettmer, Philipp. “Immune : A Journey into the Mysterious System That Keeps You Alive”
“As a newborn, in the birthing ward, you are given an injection. The needle punctures your skin, the very first line of your defense network. The threat didn’t even come through the line at the party’s velvet rope—not through your mouth or nose. It was sliced in through the roof. The steel invades the tissue. It will likely be clean of bacteria. Regardless, it will cause a localized response, a virtual panic among your cells. Months later, you might get scratched by the family cat. The cat may carry a microbe. So might the mosquito that landed on your crib and punctured your skin. Mobilization again, within an instant, the most sophisticated defense network in the known world explodes into action.”
Excerpt From: Matt Richtel. “An Elegant Defense.” – Amazon Link
“These discussions always seem to evoke high emotions with people feeling judged or categorised, which is a shame, as all that scientists are trying to do is to help us to understand ourselves better. There are of course always exceptions to the rule with both sexes, and research continues to throw more light onto this as we go forward. So, anatomically and physiologically, there are differences between the male and female Computers. There are also different responses to some neurotransmitters (chemicals that send messages) in different parts of the brain.”
Excerpt From: Peters, Dr Steve. “The Chimp Paradox.”
“To maximize the likelihood of detecting a new virus, he and his team had put onto the Virochip the oldest gene sequences of each known virus—those strings of genes that had been preserved even after the virus had evolved.”
If the unidentified virus is a new virus, why would it stick to anyplace on the Virochip?
People always asked this. All viruses on earth are genetically related, Joe explained, because they’d evolved from common ancestors. If a virus is new, and thus doesn’t match up perfectly with the DNA on the chip, the chip can still lead you to its family. Its grandparents or, at least, its distant cousins. The chip, in other words, could be used not just to diagnose an existing virus but to discover a new one, as it had with SARS. And its power to diagnose grew with the addition of new viruses to the chip.”
Excerpt From: Michael Lewis. “The Premonition: A Pandemic Story.”
“Our newfound ability to make edits to our genes raises some fascinating questions. Should we edit our species to make us less susceptible to deadly viruses? What a wonderful boon that would be! Right? Should we use gene editing to eliminate dreaded disorders, such as Huntington’s, sickle-cell anemia, and cystic fibrosis? That sounds good, too. And what about deafness or blindness? Or being short? Or depressed? Hmmm… How should we think about that? A few decades from now, if it becomes possible and safe, should we allow parents to enhance the IQ and muscles of their kids? Should we let them decide eye color? Skin color? Height?”
Excerpt From: Walter Isaacson. “The Code Breaker.”
