UC Science Today

In the near future, the Nutrition Facts label on the back of packaged foods will have a new look and more information. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has plans to include larger serving sizes and new ‘added sugars’ values in an effort to curb consumers’ risks of chronic disease.

"I am very excited for the new nutrition labels to actually have an added sugar component on the nutrition label, which differentiates between the sugars that are naturally occurring in the food versus the sugars that are added by the food processor."

Nutritional biologist Kimber Stanhope of the University of California, Davis says a perfect example of this would be a fruit yogurt.

"When I look at the amount of sugar on that small little 6-ounce carton of fruit yogurt, it's a very high number, but I don't even know how much is added sugar, and I'm a registered dietician, so obviously the general public doesn't know either."

Human faces are distinctive because we have evolved to look unique. Those were the findings of a new study by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley. Behavioral ecologist Michael Sheehan explains that they found there were more variations in facial traits than in the rest of the body.

"Traits tend to be correlated in size. So bigger animals have bigger traits, right? Tall people have long arms and long legs. But it’s not the case that tall people have large facial traits. Tall people don’t necessarily have big noses. So the face is doing something quite different not just from the rest of our body but sort of different from what other organismal traits do in general. This would be one way to create lots of different variation in the overall phenotype and make individuals more distinctive."

Sheehan says that the variation may have come from evolutionary pressures to make us easily recognizable.

"Recognition is a really important part of our social lives so therefore there may have been selection for individuals to be more recognizable and make recognition a little bit easier."

Superbugs are antibiotic-resistant bacteria and they've been on the rise ever since antibiotics were first introduced eighty years ago. Matthew Coleman, a senior scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, says one reason for this is the overprescribing of antibiotics has allowed pathogens to develop immunities against them.

"It’s a real problem because a lot of bacteria have come up with mechanisms in which they can overcome the antibiotic so they don’t die; they end up living and causing even more problems because in the end, they can actually develop a resistance to that antibiotic."

Coleman is part of a research team at the Livermore Lab that patented a technique that essentially reverses this trend by developing novel antibiotics that effectively kill superbugs.

"This is an enzyme that comes in and just removes and strips away the cell wall, making it impossible for the cells to survive. So, this is a unique mechanism at which to approach antimicrobials."