#bbc future

Inizia ora: i comportamenti chiave nei 30-anni per stare bene a 70

In a 2017 study Ravid Straussman, a cancer biologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel and his team showed that some bacteria living inside human pancreatic cancers can protect the tumours by inactivating a common chemotherapy drug. They found that one particular class of bacteria, known as Gammaproteobacteria, could break down gemcitabine: a drug used to treat a number of cancers including those found in the bladder, breast and pancreas. This helped the tumours become resistant to the drug. When the team injected mice with colon cancer with the bacteria, the mice's cancers also became resistant to the drug. But when the researchers gave the mice an antibiotic alongside the chemotherapy drug, the resistance disappeared.

That's because Alex's story is a dramatic example of a much broader phenomenon, affecting people of all abilities: how well you read and write can depend on the language you are using. Consider, for example, how long it takes children to learn to read in different languages, or more specifically, in different orthographies (spelling systems). "There is quite a lot of evidence that learning to read in English just takes longer because it's harder than other orthographies," says Karin Landerl, a professor of developmental psychology at the University of Graz, Austria. Children who speak languages as diverse as Welsh, Spanish, Czech, Finnish and many others, all tend to learn to read more quickly than English-speakers.

In late 18th-Century Europe, a new fashion led to an international scandal. In fact, an entire social class was accused of appearing in public naked. The culprit was Dhaka muslin, a precious fabric imported from the city of the same name in what is now Bangladesh, then in Bengal. It was not like the muslin of today. Made via an elaborate, 16-step process with a rare cotton that only grew along the banks of the holy Meghna river, the cloth was considered one of the great treasures of the age. It had a truly global patronage, stretching back thousands of years – deemed worthy of clothing statues of goddesses in ancient Greece, countless emperors from distant lands, and generations of local Mughal royalty. By the early 20th Century, Dhaka muslin had disappeared from every corner of the globe, with the only surviving examples stashed safely in valuable private collections and museums. The convoluted technique for making it was forgotten, and the only type of cotton that could be used, Gossypium arboreum var. neglecta – locally known as Phuti karpas – abruptly went extinct.