| Some personal and shared stuff | Sunday, 8 November 2026 - 15:17 |
Fungus is, almost universally, not a good thing to have in your walls or personal belongings. And normally, selling certain strains could lead to federal charges. But a company called Ecovative is violating both of those rules, creating packaging and building materials from fungus—and they’re being lauded as visionaries for it.
Really? The Claim: Fresh Produce Has More Nutrients Than Canned – NYTimes.com By ANAHAD O’CONNOR
One way to make healthful meals more economical is to incorporate canned fruits and vegetables, which are often cheaper and more convenient than fresh produce. But does that mean sacrificing nutrients?
Thankfully, it does not. Studies show that like frozen produce, canned produce – provided it is free of added salt and sugars – has a nutrient value that is often as good as, if not better than, that of fresh produce.
Freshly picked fruits and vegetables typically do start with more vitamins and nutrients. But degradation occurs during shipping, and produce sold in many markets often sits on shelves or in storage for days before it reaches a shopper’s basket.
Canned produce can lose some of its nutritional value as well, particularly water-soluble nutrients like vitamins B and C. But over all, the nutrients in canned fruits and vegetables tend to be relatively stable because they are protected from the deteriorating effects of oxygen, a fact emphasized in an extensive report on the subject published in The Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture by researchers at the University of California, Davis.
“Fresh fruits and vegetables usually lose nutrients more rapidly than canned or frozen products,” the researchers wrote. “Losses of nutrients during fresh storage may be more substantial than consumers realize” and may not be reflected on nutrition labels.
At the end of the day, of course, either option is a healthy one.
THE BOTTOM LINE
Despite their reputation, canned fruits and vegetables retain many of their nutrients, in some cases better than fresh produce does.
The colloquial medical advice “rub some dirt in it” appears to have some merit. Researchers at Arizona State University’s Biodesign Institute have been experimenting with different clays, and it appears in research presented in the journal PLoS ONE that they’ve come across a family of antibacterial clays capable of killing pathogens ranging from E. coli to methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, otherwise known as hard-to-kill MRSA.
Anne Trafton, MIT News Office
MIT engineers have transformed bacterial cells into living calculators that can compute logarithms, divide, and take square roots, using three or fewer genetic parts.
Inspired by how analog electronic circuits function, the researchers created synthetic computation circuits by combining existing genetic “parts,” or engineered genes, in novel ways.
The circuits perform those calculations in an analog fashion by exploiting natural biochemical functions that are already present in the cell rather than by reinventing them with digital logic, thus making them more efficient than the digital circuits pursued by most synthetic biologists, according to Rahul Sarpeshkar and Timothy Lu, the two senior authors on the paper, describing the circuits in the May 15 online edition of Nature.
“In analog you compute on a continuous set of numbers, which means it’s not just black and white, it’s gray as well,” says Sarpeshkar, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science and the head of the Analog Circuits and Biological Systems group at MIT
