One small regret about my time in South Korea is that I never made it to Jeju Island, very roughly the "Hawaii" of the country, a beautiful island off the south coast. It's famous for seafood, pork made from special black pigs, and the "Ocean Women" -- middle aged women who free dive for various ocean foods. The U.S. Navy is now studying them for insights into preventing hypothermia:
"His so-called crazy idea is to eventually engineer these microorganisms that maintain a symbiotic relationship with their host humans to generate heat when the environmental temperature drops.
'Basically, what we want to develop is a genetic circuit -- we call it a genetic circuit -- that is basically in the bacteria that allow microbes to increase heat production in response to temperature downshift,' he said.
The microbes, he said, would also be able to reduce heat generation if exposed to a warm environment to maintain homeostasis of the human body."
Why not?
No comments:
Post a Comment