What's four times more nutritious than cow's milk and could be key in feeding our ever-expanding population? Chances are, your guess was not cockroach milk. But that's exactly the food that an international team of scientists is banking on to become the new superfood.
A team from the Institute of Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine in India has sequenced a protein crystal from the gut of Diploptera punctata (Pacific Beetle Cockroach), the only known cockroach to give birth to live young. To feed its offspring, the roach also produces a milk-like substance with protein crystals which have three times the energy of buffalo milk.
Before you start imagining how you can milk a cockroach, the scientists have dismissed such an option and are instead sequencing the genes responsible for the production of milk protein crystals. "The crystals are like a complete food - they have proteins, fats and sugars. If you look into the protein sequences, they have all the essential amino acids," said one scientist from the team, Sanchari Banerjee, to the Times of India.
Len Worthington on Flickr
What's also fascinating, the milk crystals release proteins not all at once but in accordance with the speed of digestion.
The leader of the project, Subramanian Ramaswamy, confirmed that: "It's time-released food if you need food that is calorifically high, that is time released and food that is complete. This is it."
This calorie-rich food will be especially helpful to those who struggle to get the necessary amount of calories per day. The roach milk can be a quick source of necessary nutrition, with Ramaswamy calling it “a fantastic protein supplement".
Cockroaches decorated with Romanian (R) and French flags run at the cockroaches racing course built by Berlin-based Russian painter Nikolai Makarov in his studio in Berlin, on June 10, 2016 ahead of the start of the Euro 2016. (Photo by CHRISTOF STACHE/AFP/Getty Images)
Whether enough people around the world can get around the obvious gross-out factor that comes from any combination of cockroaches and food is largely dependent on how this kind of milk will be made.
As the scientists completed the sequencing, they are moving on to producing the crystal in much larger quantities. In particular, they are looking to focus on how create the food without resorting to milking cockroaches or otherwise pulling the crystals from their guts.
Here's where you can read the full paper, with the exciting title: “Structure of a heterogeneous, glycosylated, lipid-bound, in vivo-grown protein crystal at atomic resolution from the viviparous cockroach Diploptera punctata."
Arches of chaos in space manifolds.
Humanity could be making its way through the Solar System much faster thanks to the discovery of a new superhighway network among space manifolds. Don't get your engines roaring along this "celestial autobahn" just yet, but the researchers believe the new pathways can eventually be used by spacecraft to get to the outer reaches of our Solar System with relative haste.
The celestial highway could get comets and asteroids from Jupiter to Neptune in less than a decade. Compare that to hundreds of thousands or even millions of years it might ordinarily take for space objects to traverse the Solar System. In a century of travel along the new routes, a 100 astronomical units could be covered, project the scientists. For reference, an astronomical unit is the average distance from the Earth to the Sun or about 93 million miles.
The international research team included Nataša Todorović, Di Wu, and Aaron Rosengren from the Belgrade Astronomical Observatory in Serbia, the University of Arizona, and UC San Diego. Their new paper proposes a dynamic route, going along connected series of arches within so-called space manifolds. These structures, coming into existence from gravitational effects between the Sun and the planets, stretch from the asteroid belt to past Uranus.
The most pronounced of these structures are linked to Jupiter by its strong gravitational pull, explained UC San Diego's press release. They influence the comets around the gas giant as well as smaller space objects called "centaurs," with are like asteroids in size but exhibit the composition of comets.
This animation shows space manifolds over a hundred years. Each frame of the animation shows how the arches and substructures appear over three-year increments.
Credit: Nataša Todorović, Di Wu and Aaron Rosengren/Science Advances
"Space manifolds act as the boundaries of dynamical channels enabling fast transportation into the inner- and outermost reaches of the Solar System," write the researchers. "Besides being an important element in spacecraft navigation and mission design, these manifolds can also explain the apparent erratic nature of comets and their eventual demise."
A closer image of the manifolds showing colliding and escaping objects.
Credit: Science Advances
The researchers discovered the structures by analyzing collected numerical data on the millions of orbits in the Solar System. The scientists figured out how these orbits were contained within known space manifolds. To detect the presences and structure of the space manifolds, the team employed the fast Lyapunov indicator (FLI), used to detect chaos. The scientists ran simulations to compute how the trajectories of particles approaching different planets like Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune would be affected by possible collisions and the manifolds.
While the results are encouraging, the next step is to figure out how these arches can be used by spacecraft for much speedier travel. It's also not clear how similar manifolds work near Earth. Also unclear is how they impact our planet's run-ins with asteroids and meteorites or any of the man-made objects floating up in space near us.
Check out the new paper "The arches of chaos in the Solar System" in Science Advances.
