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Business is
Mushrooming

Mushrooms like cool, dark, humid growing environments. So it may seem strange that Below Farm is cultivating fungi in hot, sunny Abu Dhabi.

But Liliana Slowinska and her partners at Below Farm are using technology and waste biomass to grow their mushrooms inside specially adapted industrial buildings. Although plenty of other companies are farming indoors, cultivating mushrooms presents specific challenges.

“The key here is this: Mushrooms are not plants,” says Slowinska, the company’s co-founder and business development director. “In fact, they metabolically resemble animals more.

They digest their food, which is the feedstock we create in the form of a growing medium from locally available materials such as date palm leaves.”

These palm leaves come from waste that would otherwise go to landfills.

Home grown

The United Arab Emirates, which traditionally imports most of its food, has ambitious goals, aiming to top the Global Food Security Index by 2051. Part of the strategy is encouraging local, sustainable food production. Read more›››

The first phase aims to encourage domestic production of red meat, eggs, poultry, dairy products, dates, leafy vegetables, tomatoes, peppers and aubergine.

Another campaign called Ne’ma – Arabic for blessing – aims to reduce food waste.

There are about 38,000 farms operating in the UAE. ‹‹‹ Read less

“Then there is the fact that mushrooms breathe out CO2, just like us, and this necessitates appropriate levels of gas exchange,” Slowinska says.

Another issue: Also like animals, the fungi don’t require watering the same way plants do. “They absorb moisture from the environment, and to that end we maintain variety-specific levels of humidity in each fruiting chamber.

Overall, growing mushrooms consistently is more complex than other types of produce,” Slowinska says.

The Below Farm team believes that the operation could be a model for food production in an age of climate change and increased urbanization.

“Businesses like ours are the future of food production,” Slowinska says. “As the world gets hotter, drier and more urbanized, there is a dire need for robust and decentralized food systems.

The UAE is the perfect training ground for our fungi proof-of-concept farm as we know now firsthand how to grow food in arid environments.”

Local businesses have taken notice. Abu Dhabi restaurant Marmellata Bakery uses Below Farm’s mushrooms in some of its top-selling pizzas.

“We choose Below Farm because their mushrooms are amongst the highest-quality ingredients that we source locally, period,” says Marmellata owner Raj Dagastani. “They allow us to participate in our local economy, they help us build a community of like-minded food professionals, their mushrooms arrive fresh and in their prime, there is less waste produced, less environmental impact, less drama. But most importantly, their mushrooms are delicious.”

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Trust your gut?

Many gut conditions are typically diagnosed using invasive, uncomfortable procedures, but new technology aims to offer accurate diagnoses, more simply and without all of the discomfort.

Our guts have many important jobs that contribute to overall health, one of which is allowing only water and nutrients to pass into our bloodstreams. While all guts are semi-permeable to allow for this to happen, some are more permeable than others — and this complicates things for the body.

Picture a long tube with tiny, brick-like structures packed tightly together. The bricks, or cells, have spaces between them that are sealed with “glue” called tight junctions. These allow good stuff in and keep the bad stuff out. When the gut gets inflamed, the “glue” can weaken, allowing things to pass through that should not.

“This work signifies major progress towards the use of non-invasive bioimpedance sensing as a diagnostic tool in ingestible technology and leaky gut identification,”

– Research team at University of Maryland

Checking the strength of the “glue” is often met with endoscopies — invasive tests that are uncomfortable and can’t reach all of the gastrointestinal tract or measure permeability. These tests can be inconclusive.

But not anymore.

A study recently published in Microsystems & Nanoengineering discusses an ingestible device capable of continuously monitoring the epithelial barriers of the gastrointestinal tract.

The research team from the University of Maryland used animal tissue models to validate the findings, measuring how electricity moves (bioimpedance) through the lining of the gut. This allows detection of gaps in the tight junctions.

Identification of these gaps can indicate early signs of diseases like Crohn’s and ulcerative colitis, in which early diagnoses can determine the severity and speed at which the disease progresses.

Crohn’s is a chronic inflammatory disease of the gastrointestinal tract. While a person isn’t likely to die from it, the disease can lead to other life-threatening issues such as severe infections and colorectal cancer.

Prolonged diagnoses can also lead to damage in the intestines like holes or blockages that require surgery to fix.

Dr. Siobhan O’Sullivan talks the gut microbiome

Less threatening symptoms include stomach pain, severe diarrhea, weight loss, malnutrition and fatigue.

With 6-8 million people in the United States alone affected and no cure, early detection and treatment can alleviate a lot of the bodily trauma, pain and life-threatening issues. It can also contribute to periods of remission.

Until the development of this device, detection of dilations in the tight junctions could be achieved only in the esophagus because the electrodes needed to be connected externally. Therefore, “comparable datasets from the small or large intestine are lacking,” the team says.

CAPTION: Upper gastrointestinal endoscopy IMAGE: Shutterstock

But with wireless, bluetooth-enabled technology, this is no longer the case.

And seeing isn’t nearly enough for comprehensive diagnoses. The capsules measure things like temperature and motility, offering real-time and continuous data required for not only diagnoses, but also for treatment-plan adjustments and interventions.

The data needs to be on point, which is complicated with all of the twists and turns in the intestines. Sensor-sensitivity design needs to be targeted.

“This work signifies major progress towards the use of non-invasive bioimpedance sensing as a diagnostic tool in ingestible technology and leaky gut identification,” the researchers say.

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Spotting early signs of Alzheimer’s

A new study from Singapore, published in the journal Alzheimer’s & Dementia, shows that a simple blood test could help detect Alzheimer’s disease earlier and more accurately.

The test, done with an Asian cohort, looks at a substance in the blood called p-tau217, which is linked to the buildup of amyloid in the brain — a key sign of Alzheimer’s. The study involved 215 people, many of whom also had other brain-related health issues that can make diagnosing Alzheimer’s more difficult.

Researchers found that this blood test worked better than regular check-ups and other blood markers in spotting signs of Alzheimer’s. They created a system that grouped people into low, medium or high risk based on their p-tau217 levels.

People in the high-risk group not only had more signs of Alzheimer’s but also experienced faster memory and thinking decline. This means the test might not just help with diagnosis — it could also help predict how quickly someone might get worse.

One big advantage? This method could greatly reduce the need for expensive brain scans. Only one in 10 people tested would still need a scan, compared with four to six out of 10 using current methods.

The researchers say more studies are needed in different populations, but the results are promising for improving how we find and manage Alzheimer’s disease around the world.

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Sweet talk

Glucose is the body’s main source of energy. What we consume is eventually broken down into glucose and is used to fuel us.

We usually think of the type of sugar as just fuel for our bodies, but a new study from Stanford University shows it does much more — especially when it comes to our skin.

A Stanford Medicine study published in Cell Stem Cell reports that glucose helps control how skin cells grow and mature. It does this by “switching on” a special protein called IRF6, which acts like a manager for turning on the right genes during skin development.

Instead of being burned for energy, glucose sticks to this protein and helps it do its job — leading to healthy, mature skin cells. When researchers blocked this sugar-protein connection, skin cells couldn’t develop properly in lab-grown skin models.

This finding changes how we see glucose. It’s not just fuel — it’s also a key messenger that tells certain cells how to grow. And this might not just be true for skin; scientists also believe glucose may play a similar role in how other types of tissues form.

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The hunt for the best insect
repellent is on

Many insect repellants are flawed. Some are strong or unpleasantly scented. There are also health implications of chemicals to consider.

But researchers have developed a surefire method of telling us which repellants will keep us from being bitten and won’t stink up the place.

By applying a machine learning model to analyze chemical structures and predict both insect repellency and human olfactory perception, a team of researchers from the University of California-Riverside was able to identify several novel compounds that both repel insects and emit scents humans like.

The experimental validation showed that 90 percent of the tested compounds were effective at repelling mosquitos, and many were pleasant smelling.

The results represent significant steps toward safer and more pleasant insect repellants for the consumer. Further exploration of this AI-driven approach could influence discoveries of new repellants that rely less on the usual chemicals and offer better safeguarding against insect-borne diseases.

The study was published in eLife.

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