How long will the world’s forests impound carbon below ground?
by Jonathan Shaw
MARYVILLE, Tennessee, lies near the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains, a range home to more tree species than exist in all of Europe. Benton Taylor grew up amidst this abundance, but as a boy, he barely noticed the plants. In the nearby national park, a family friend was raising—together with a menagerie of other mammals—a pair of bears orphaned as cubs. Taylor dreamed of studying these apex denizens of the forest, who forage at the top of the food chain. But as his education and understanding grew, his curiosity shifted to seed-dispersing animals, plants, and the soil and nutrients that sustain them: a trip down the trophic pyramid, driven by an appreciation of forests as ecological systems in which plants are primary producers. “Now I’ve half moved into the basement,” jokes the assistant professor of organismic and evolutionary biology, whose research encompasses the strategies plants use to obtain essential nutrients such as nitrogen, and how that, in turn, affects their ability to store another vital element with a global climate impact: carbon.
DIVERSIFYING one’s assets is useful not only in finance but also in diet, according to an October study from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (HSPH). Though not many people have heard of the “portfolio diet”—consisting of plant-based foods proven to lower unhealthy cholesterol, such as nuts, oats, berries, and avocados—it is one of the easiest ways to improve long-term cardiovascular health. “The idea was that each of these foods lowers cholesterol quite minimally, but if you make a whole diet based on these different foods, you will see large reductions in [unhealthy] cholesterol,” said Andrea Glenn, an HSPH postdoctoral research fellow in nutrition and the lead author of the study. The more of these foods one eats, the higher the protection—but one need not include them all to reap the diet’s benefits, she said. “Like a business portfolio, you can choose the ones you want.”
IN THE LATE 2000s, Rachel Carmody was spending a lot of time counting calories. An anthropology graduate student at Harvard, she was studying whether cooking changed the number of calories the gut can extract from food. When humans invented cooking thousands of years ago, she and her advisor Richard Wrangham wondered, had they opened the door to a new source of energy?
DURING THE past two decades, the number of annual cancer deaths in the United States has fallen by 27 percent, a remarkable improvement driven by new precision diagnoses and treatments tailored to individual patients. Today, oncologists can detect cancer in its earliest stages and deliver drugs that enlist the patient’s own immune system to improve their odds of survival. Yet cancer remains the second deadliest disease in the United States, claiming more than 600,000 lives every year. Its persistence underscores the urgent need for a deeper understanding of how cancer interacts with the body. Assistant professor of neurology Humsa Venkatesh believes she may have found a promising new pathway for highly effective cancer treatments in the most unexpected of places: the human brain.
Boomers Daily 