“This is not a product to eat!” South Korea’s Ministry of Food and Drug Safety wrote in a post on X. “Their safety as food has not been verified!”

In the videos appearing on social media, individuals can be seen frying toothpicks so that they appear similar to curly fries. But unlike the wooden toothpicks often found in the U.S., most toothpicks in South Korea are made of corn or potato starch mixed with sorbitol, a sweet sugar alcohol found naturally in various fruits. Because of this, they are biodegradable and dissolve in water. The toothpicks also often have green food coloring added to them and are frequently used in restaurants.

“Mukbang” videos, which show content creators eating excessive amounts of strange or unusual foods, have grown extremely popular in South Korea in recent years. The emergence of fried toothpicks on social media is the latest example of “Mukbang” videos.

In 2018, the South Korean government attempted to impose regulations on these videos to prevent them from encouraging binge eating and harming public health.

The post Videos of South Koreans Eating Fried Toothpicks Have Gone Viral. Health Officials Want Them to Stop appeared first on News Agency nabakhabar.

Most living things have internal clocks that govern fluctuations in everything from hunger and hormone levels to when genes are active throughout the day.

In a study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, U.S. National Science Foundation-supported researchers analyzed gene activity in patients who showed up at medical facilities along the Thailand-Cambodia border, showing signs of malaria infection in their blood.

The team found that malaria parasites somehow sync their molecular rhythms with the internal 24-hour clocks of their hosts, their respective genes rising and falling in perfect lockstep with each other over the course of a day, like two pendulum clocks with synchronized swings.

The team of researchers at Duke University, Florida Atlantic University and the Armed Forces Research Institute of Medical Sciences say the findings could pave the way to new anti-malarial drugs that throw malaria’s internal clock out of step with its host, essentially “jet-lagging” the parasites.

“We have a reason to care about this,” said senior author Steve Haase at Duke. “We’re on our last line of drugs, artemisinin-based combination therapies, and we’re already seeing resistance to those in southeast Asia. Exploring some new ideas for fighting malaria makes sense.”

When someone has malaria, a deadly loop repeats itself inside their body. The disease’s recurring fever spikes are caused by microscopic Plasmodium parasites that invade the person’s red blood cells, multiply and then burst out in unison, spewing into the bloodstream by the millions to invade other cells and begin the cycle anew.

This cycle repeats itself every 24, 48 or 72 hours depending on the Plasmodium species. Which got scientists wondering: Could the parasites be coordinating in some way with the 24-hour circadian rhythms of their hosts?

The researchers identified hundreds of genes that follow a clock-like rhythm, ramping up at certain times of day and switching off at others. Using this data, they developed a way to calculate the internal clock time for each patient and for their parasites. Then they calculated how well the rhythms of gene expression were aligned.

Sure enough, for every turn of the parasite clock, the 24-hour body clock of their host went around twice.

As a next step, the researchers are trying to figure out exactly how the parasite and human clocks “communicate” with each other so that their cycles line up.

“There have to be some molecular signals that they’re passing back and forth to each other,” Haase said. “We don’t know what they are, but if we can disrupt them, then we might have a shot at an intervention.

The post Biological clocks of people and malaria parasites tick in tune appeared first on News Agency nabakhabar.