Food prices in the U.S. fell for 19 straight months through July, the longest streak of price declines since the 1950s. Prices for staples like beef and eggs have fallen dramatically over the past year and a half, thanks in part to cheaper fuel costs and China buying less food from the U.S.
A vaccine against heart disease has worked successfully in mice, raising the possibility that scientists will develop a breakthrough technique that could save millions of lives. Researchers in Europe tested the experimental vaccine on mice that were fed an unhealthy, high-fat Western diet, leaving them with high cholesterol and atherosclerosis, fatty buildup in the arteries that increases the risk of heart attack and stroke. The vaccine effectively lowered the total blood cholesterol level of the mice by 53 percent, The Guardian (U.K.) reports. It also reduced arterial damage linked to atherosclerosis by 64 percent and led to a 28 percent drop in markers of blood vessel inflammation. The vaccine works by triggering the production of antibodies that block an enzyme called PCSK9, which prevents the body from clearing LDL, or “bad” cholesterol from the blood. The antibodies produced by the vaccine remained at high levels throughout the entire 18-week study, suggesting the shot has long-term benefits, unlike daily cholesterol-lowering statin drugs, which can cause muscle pain, confusion, digestive issues, and other side effects. The vaccine is currently being tested on 72 people, with results of the Phase I clinical trial expected by the end of the year. “If these findings translate successfully into humans,” says Gunther Staffler, one of the vaccine’s developers, “we could develop a long-lasting therapy that, after the first vaccination, just needs an annual booster.”
Women are more likely to die from breast cancer if they eat a lot of grilled, smoked, and barbecued meats, new research suggests. The study also found women who reported greater intake of these foods have a 23 percent greater risk of death from any cause. “There are many carcinogens found in grilled or smoked meats,” author Humberto Parada tells The Washington Post, including polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons [PAH], which are formed when meat—particularly fatty meat—is subjected to very high heat. Researchers monitored 1,500 women with breast cancer for nearly two decades, and found that those who routinely ate large amounts of grilled, smoked, and barbecued meats were 31 percent more likely to die during the study period. Women who included substantial amounts of poultry and fish in their diet, however, were 45 percent less likely to die over the same period than those who didn’t eat these lean proteins.Taken from the February 10, 2017 edition of The Week Magazine.
Eating red-hot chili peppers may help you live longer, reports CBSNews.com. In a new study, researchers from the University of Vermont examined the health and diet data of more than 16,000 Americans for nearly 19 years on average. They found that those who regularly ate hot peppers were 13 percent less likely to die over that period than those who didn’t eat such peppers. While the researchers didn’t establish a direct cause-and-effect relationship between eating peppers and longevity, they theorized that the fiery fruit improves fat metabolism, which helps ward off obesity, high blood pressure, and type 2 diabetes. Capsaicin, the compound that makes peppers hot, is thought to be responsible for the health benefit; previous studies have found that this bioactive ingredient has antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, and antimicrobial properties. Researchers Mustafa Chopan and Benjamin Littenberg said additional studies are needed to examine how different kinds of chili peppers affect people. “Such evidence may lead to new insights into the relationships between diet and health, updated dietary recommendations, and the development of new therapies.”
People striving to improve their health by eating more fresh produce may want to double down on their efforts. After analyzing 95 studies on diet and well-being, researchers from Imperial College London have concluded that we should be aiming to eat 10 portions of fruit and vegetables a day, rather than the five portions recommended by the World Health Organization. They found that daily consumption of 28 ounces of fresh produce was associated with a 33 percent reduced risk of stroke, a 13 percent drop in cancer risk, and a 31 percent lower risk for premature death. “Fruit and vegetables have been shown to reduce cholesterol levels and blood pressure, and to boost the health of our blood vessels and immune system,” the study’s lead author, Dagfinn Aune, tells TheGuardian.com. These benefits may be linked to valuable nutrients found in fresh produce, such as fiber, glucosinolates, and antioxidants, which can help prevent DNA damage.
Two Brazilian researchers have created a special recipe to fight future food shortages in a more populous world: bread made out of cockroaches. The special bread, developed by two university students, is made from flour made partly from ground-up members of Nauphoeta cinerea, a cockroach specially bred to meet Brazilian government health standards. “We chose the cockroach because it was the insect that had the highest protein content—almost 70 percent,” the researchers said. They admit that most people now refuse to sample their bread, but add, “in the future, people will need to get used to this idea.”
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| Cleopatra Queen 2017 |
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| Ivan Pavlov - photo taken from here. |
In an echo of Pavlov’s famous conditioning experiments, studies show we can train our bodies into thinking we’ve had medicine. Science journalist Jo Marchant investigates whether we can harness the mind to slash drug costs.
Marette Flies was 11 when her immune system turned against her. A cheerful student from Minneapolis, she had curly brown hair and a pale, moon-shaped face, and she loved playing trumpet. But in 1983, she was diagnosed with lupus, a condition in which the immune system destroys the body’s healthy tissues.
It ran rampant, attacking her body on multiple fronts. She was given steroids to suppress her immune system; the drugs made her face swell up, and her hair fell out. But despite the treatment, her condition worsened over the next two years, causing inflamed kidneys, frequent headaches, seizures, and high blood pressure.
By 1985, antibodies were attacking a vital clotting factor in Marette’s blood, causing her to bleed uncontrollably. It got so bad that her doctors considered giving her a hysterectomy, because they were worried that when her periods started she might bleed to death. She took drugs, including barbiturates, antihypertensives, diuretics, and steroids, but her blood pressure kept rising. Then her heart started to fail, and her doctors reluctantly decided to give her Cytoxan, an extremely toxic drug.
Cytoxan is very good at suppressing the immune system. But it causes vomiting, stomachaches, bruising, bleeding, and kidney and liver damage, and increases the risk of infections and cancer, and at the time its use in humans was experimental. Karen Olness, a psychologist and pediatrician now at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio, was helping Marette cope with the stress and pain of her condition, and she was concerned that if lupus didn’t kill the teenager, this new drug might. Then Marette’s mother showed Olness a scientific paper she had seen. The author claimed to have slowed lupus in mice—but with just half the usual dose of Cytoxan.
The results were part of a well-known and seemingly mundane phenomenon that has been driving a quiet revolution in immunology. Proponents hope that the process, by allowing doctors to cut drug doses, will not only minimize harmful side effects but also slash billions from health-care costs, transforming treatment for conditions such as autoimmune disorders and cancer. The secret? Teaching your body how to respond to a particular medicine, so that in the future it can trigger the same change on its own.
Ever eaten a favorite food that made you sick—prawns, say—and discovered that for weeks or months afterward, you couldn’t face eating it? This effect is called learned or conditioned taste aversion, and it makes sense: Avoiding foods that have poisoned us in the past protects us from getting ill again.
In 1975, Robert Ader, a psychologist at the University of Rochester in New York, was studying taste aversion in rats and got an utterly mystifying result. Ader gave his animals saccharin solution to drink. Rats usually love the sweet taste, but Ader paired the drink with injections of Cytoxan, which made them feel sick. When he later gave the animals the sweetened water on its own they refused to drink it, just as he expected. So to find out how long the learned aversion would last, he force-fed this harmless drink to them using an eyedropper. But the rats didn’t forget. Instead, one by one, they died.
After more experiments, Ader concluded that when the animals received saccharin and the drug together, they hadn’t just associated the sweet taste with feeling sick; they’d also learned the immunosuppression. Eventually, they’d responded to the sweetened water just as they had to the drug. Even though the second phase of the experiment involved no drug at all, the water Ader fed them suppressed their immune systems so dramatically that they succumbed to fatal infections. In other words, their bodies were reacting to something that wasn’t really there, just because the circumstances made them expect it.
The phenomenon in which we learn to associate a contextual cue with a physiological response is well known. It’s called conditioning, and was discovered in the 1890s by the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov, who noticed that dogs learned to associate his presence with being fed, so that his arrival caused them to salivate even if he had no food. He showed that different signals, such as a buzzer or electric shock, could all be made to trigger the same response.
Such learned associations are an important part of our daily lives. Cues prepare the body for important biological events such as eating or sex, and they trigger responses that have evolved to help us avoid or flee from danger. Exposure to a stimulus we associate with a previous allergic reaction, such as a grassy field or fluffy cat, can make us cough or sneeze even if no physical allergen is present, while previously scary situations, like a barking dog or an enclosed space, can induce a state of fight-or-flight.
Ader’s result was revolutionary because it showed that learned associations don’t affect just brain-regulated responses like nausea or salivation. His rats proved that these associations influence immune responses too, to the point where a taste or smell can make the difference between life and death. The body’s fight against disease, his experiment suggested, is guided by the brain.
In fact, a similar discovery had already been made. In the 1920s, Russian researchers at the University of St. Petersburg were following up on Pavlov’s work, to see which other physiological responses could be conditioned.
Among them was the immunologist Sergey Metalnikov. Instead of suppressing the immune system, as Ader would, Metalnikov wanted to boost it. In one experiment, he repeatedly warmed guinea pigs’ skin and at the same time gave them injections that triggered an immune response. Then he gave them and another group of unconditioned guinea pigs a normally lethal dose of Vibrio cholerae bacteria, while warming both groups’ skin. The unconditioned animals died within eight hours, whereas the conditioned ones survived an average of 36 hours, and some of them recovered completely. Their response to a learned cue—heat—appeared to have saved their lives.
In a 1982 study, Ader used conditioning to treat mice that had a lupus-like disease. He trained them to associate Cytoxan with saccharin solution, just as in his original experiment. After they learned the association, he kept giving the mice sweetened water along with half the usual drug dose for lupus. Compared with mice that received the same dose but weren’t conditioned, they lived longer, and their disease progressed more slowly. This was the paper that Marette’s mother had seen.
Karen Olness telephoned Ader and asked: Would his conditioning work on Marette? Could they train her immune system to respond to a lower Cytoxan dose than normal, sparing her the worst of the drug’s toxicity? Ader agreed to try.
The first question was what taste to use. “We had to choose something that was unique, that she hadn’t experienced before,” says Olness. She considered vinegars, horehound, eucalyptus chips, and various liqueurs before finally settling on a combination of rose perfume and cod liver oil.
Marette’s treatment started the next morning. She sipped the cod liver oil as Cytoxan flowed through an IV line into a vein in her foot. Meanwhile, Olness uncapped the rose perfume and waved it around the room.
They repeated this bizarre ritual once a month for the next three months. After that, Marette was exposed to cod liver oil and perfume every month, but received Cytoxan only every third month. By the end of the year, she had received just six doses of the drug instead of the usual 12.
Marette responded as well as her doctors would have hoped from the full drug regimen. The clotting factor reappeared, and her blood pressure returned to normal. She went to college, where she played trumpet in the school band.
At nine o’clock every morning and evening, an alarm goes off on Barbara Nowak’s mobile phone. When she hears it, the 46-year-old geologist sits down at her kitchen table in Sprockhövel, northern Germany, and takes a powerful cocktail of immunosuppressant drugs. But today there’s a change in her routine. Before swallowing the pills, she downs a drink. It’s sweet, bitter, neon green—and tastes strongly of lavender.
In 1988, when she was 19, Nowak lost her kidneys to lupus. Receiving a donated kidney transformed her health. “It’s another life,” she says. But there’s a downside. She’s dependent on twice-daily medication to suppress the immune responses that would destroy her transplant—drugs that slowly poison the very organ she’s trying to save.
So Nowak is drinking this gaudy concoction as part of a pioneering trial. The green drink is an updated version of Marette’s rose and cod liver oil, invented to test conditioned responses. Manfred Schedlowski, a medical psychologist at the University of Essen in Germany, wanted something strange and unforgettable that stimulates several senses at once. He hit on strawberry milk mixed with green food coloring and essential oil. Its bright color and overwhelming lavender flavor create a bewildering mix of sensory cues.
So far, Schedlowski has shown that after the drink is associated with CsA, a drug similar to Cytoxan, it reliably induces immunosuppression in healthy volunteers, creating on average 60 to 80 percent of the effect of the drug. But will it work in sick patients?
In the learning phase of the study, Nowak drank the lavender milk alongside her drugs, morning and evening, for three days. Then, after a two-day break, came the “evocation” phase, using the drink to try to amplify the effect of her medication. She again downed the drink with her drugs, but also drank it two extra times during the day, along with a placebo pill.
A 2013 trial was promising: In all four patients, adding the green drink suppressed immune-cell proliferation by up to 40 percent more than drugs alone. Now Nowak is part of a larger study of about 20 patients. If that works, too, the next step will be to test whether the conditioned response can be maintained while doses start to be reduced.
Besides helping with organ transplants, there’s a plethora of uses that conditioning might have, by reducing harmful side effects or simply making treatment more cost-effective. Other possibilities include the relief of allergies and autoimmune conditions.
Ader carried out a small study in 1996 that paired Cytoxan with aniseed-flavored syrup in 10 people who had multiple sclerosis. When later given the syrup alongside a placebo pill, eight of them responded with immunosuppression similar to that produced by the active drug. In another study, published shortly before he died in 2011, Ader reported that quarter- or half-doses of corticosteroid ointment plus conditioned response could control psoriasis just as well as a full drug dose.
Animal studies hint that the approach might also be useful in the treatment of some cancers. Researchers at the University of Alabama, Birmingham, have trained mice to associate the taste of camphor with a drug that activates white blood cells that attack tumors. Then they transplanted aggressive tumors into the mice. The animals given doses of camphor survived longer than those treated with immunotherapy, and in one experiment, two mice defeated their cancer altogether, despite receiving no active drug.
Years of research are required before conditioning regimes for cancer or transplant patients reach the clinic, but Schedlowski says the principle could be used much sooner to reduce drug doses for conditions such as asthma or arthritis. Someone could be prescribed a suitable drug, and after two or three weeks of taking it regularly could switch to a pack in which real pills were interspersed with identical placebos.
But the idea is not widely accepted. Reducing drug doses isn’t attractive to drug companies, but a wider problem is that for most doctors and scientists, the concept of treatments with no pharmaceutical component just makes no sense.
Schedlowski is steadfastly optimistic that the benefits of conditioning are too great to ignore. “Ten years ago, nobody believed us,” he says. “Now, journals are much more open-minded to this kind of approach.”
Still, there’s a long way to go. Ader remains barely known, even among immunologists. Schedlowski leads one of the only teams researching conditioned immune response. “I like to say we’re the best in the world,” he jokes. “Because there is nobody else!”
Excerpted from an article that originally appeared in MosaicScience.com. Reprinted by The Week with permission.
March 11, 2016
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| Photograph taken from the Chicago Tribune here. |
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| Photo taken from here |
after researchers in Germany found that eating while blindfolded caused people to eat less and feel full faster than those who could see their food. Visual deprivation reduces the pleasure of eating, and triggers innate fears that food may be rotten.
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| Making a starter, apparently the yeast is robust! |
Australian brewers have created a tangy new beer using an unusual, locally sourced ingredient: yeast grown from their own belly-button fluff. Staff at Melbourne’s 7 Cent craft brewery began by swabbing their belly buttons and cultivating yeast colonies. One fragrant strain went into Belly Button Beer, a white beer with hints of “fresh orange zest and toasted coriander seeds,” the brewery said. Company founder Doug Bremner said drinkers shouldn’t be put off by the yeast’s origins. “Yeast is yeast,” he said. “This beer is no different from any other beer out there.
after researchers in Germany found that eating while blindfolded caused people to eat less and feel full faster than those who could see their food. Visual deprivation reduces the pleasure of eating, and triggers innate fears that food may be rotten.
Your favorite cold medicine could be shrinking your brain. A new study reveals that drugs used to treat colds and a range of other common health issues, including allergies, heartburn, hypertension, insomnia, and depression, may erode gray matter and increase the risk for dementia and other cognitive problems in older adults. Over-the-counter and prescription medications, such as Tylenol PM, Benadryl, Claritin, Dimetapp, Paxil, Xanax, Zyrtec, Lasix, and Coumadin, belong to a class of drugs known as anticholinergics. They work by blocking acetylcholine, a chemical that transmits electrical impulses between nerve cells. Using PET and MRI scans, researchers from Indiana University School of Medicine examined the brain structure and metabolism of 451 people with an average age of 73. The study found those taking anticholinergic drugs had smaller brains and lower levels of glucose metabolism, particularly in the hippocampus—a brain region involved with memory that is vulnerable to early-stage Alzheimer’s disease. People on anticholinergics also performed less well on tests measuring short-term memory and executive functions, including planning, verbal reasoning, and problem solving. Alzheimer’s patients are deficient in acetylcholine, which is why, the researchers warn, these drugs could trigger or worsen the disease. If taking them is absolutely necessary, study author Shannon Risacher tells Time.com, “I’d suggest that doctors monitor medications and their effects, and use the lowest dose that’s effective.”
Obesity could spread from person to person in a similar way to the contagious bug, C.difficile, a new study has suggested.
A growing body of evidence has placed increasing importance on the balance of bacteria in our gut.
Imbalances in the gut microbiome can contribute to a number of complex conditions, including obesity, inflammatory bowel disease, irritable bowel syndrome and allergies, studies have shown.
But, for the first time, scientists believe traces of the bacteria can survive outside the body, raising the possibility that it could be ingested.
If that bacteria disrupts a person's gut microbiome in a negative way, it is possible, the researchers say, for these complex diseases to manifest themselves.
A team from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute turned their attention to the proportion of bacteria that form spores within the gut.
Spores are a form of bacterial hibernation, that allows some bacteria to remain dormant for long periods of time.
Researchers from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute discovered approximately one third of the gut microbiota from a healthy person produced spores that allow bacteria to survive in open air and potentially move between people.
They said this provides a means of microbiota transmission that has not been considered before.
And, furthermore, the authors suggest it could imply that health and certain diseases could be passed, not just through human genetics, but also via the microbiome.
Dr Trevor Lawley, group leader at the Sanger Institute, said: 'Being able to cast light on this microbial "dark matter" has implications for the whole of biology and how we consider health.
'We will be able to isolate the microbes from people with a specific disease, such as infection, cancers or autoimmune diseases, and study these microbes in a mouse model to see what happens.
'Studying our "second" genome, that of the microbiota, will lead to a huge increase in our understanding of basic biology and the relationship between our gut bacteria and health and disease.'
This research will allow scientists to start to create tailor-made treatment with specific beneficial bacteria, they said.
Research in this field has expanded greatly in recent years, with the intestinal microbiome being labeled the 'forgotten organ', such is its importance to human health.
Around two per cent of a person's body weight is linked to bacteria.
Many of these bacteria are sensitive to oxygen and are difficult to culture in the laboratory, so until now it has been very difficult to isolate and study them.
Hilary Browne from the Sanger Institute, explained: 'It has become increasingly evident that microbial communities play a large role in human health and disease.
'By developing a new process to isolate gastrointestinal bacteria, we were able to sequence their genomes to understand more about their biology.
'We can also store them for long periods of time making them available for further research.'
Antibiotics wipe out our gut bacteria - killing both the pathogen targets and the beneficial bacteria too.
There is then the potential for less desirable bacteria, such as those with antibiotic resistance, to repopulate the gut faster than the beneficial bacteria, leading to further health issues, such as Clostridium difficile infection.
Current treatment for C. difficile infection can involve transplants of faeces from healthy people, to repopulate the gut.
However this treatment is far from ideal.
Using the library of new bacteria, Dr Lawley and his team are hoping to create a pill, containing a rationally selected, defined mix of bacteria, which could be taken by patients and replace faecal transplants.
Dr Sam Forster from the Sanger Institute and Hudson Institute of Medical Research in Australia said: 'The extensive database of genomes we have generated from these bacteria is also essential for studying which bacteria are present or absent in people with gastrointestinal conditions.
'Now we can start to design mixtures of therapeutics candidates for use in these diseases.'
The findings are published in Nature.
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J.M.W. TURNER, THE 'FIGHTING TEMERAIRE' TUGGED TO HER LAST BERTH TO BE BROKEN UP 1838-39
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Conscious consumption, after a British study found that roughly 15 percent of young adults do not know that pork comes from pigs and lamb comes from sheep. Some 20 percent believed that “fish fingers” are made from the fingers of fish.
The way people metabolize food varies dramatically from person to person, so no one diet can work for everyone. That’s the conclusion of a new study that finally explains why a weight-loss plan that helps one person might do absolutely nothing for another. Researchers in Israel asked 800 healthy and pre-diabetic adults between 18 and 70 to keep a record of their meals, sleep, and exercise for one week. An analysis of participants’ gut microbes, along with continuous monitoring of their blood sugar levels, showed significant variations among people eating identical foods. “In some cases, individuals have opposite responses to one another,” co-author Eran Segal tells The Washington Post. For example, some people who ate supposedly healthful bananas or tomatoes experienced a sharp blood sugar spike, while having no adverse reaction to a glass of wine or a slice of pizza. The opposite was true for other people. In a follow-up study, Segal’s team created individually tailored diets based on people’s lifestyle, medical history, and other factors. Many of these customized diets were unorthodox, enabling some people to enjoy small amounts of alcohol, chocolate, or ice cream. The findings, researchers say, could transform the treatment of obesity, diabetes, and other conditions, and lead to personalized diet plans. “We think we know how to treat these conditions, and it’s just that people are not listening and are eating out of control,” Segal said. But “in many cases we were giving them the wrong advice.”
Everyday products are “contaminating our bodies” with toxic chemicals, said Nicholas Kristof. Two mainstream medical organizations have recently issued independent warnings about chemicals found in such products as pesticides, plastics, shampoos and cosmetics, food-can linings, and flame retardants in furniture. The toxins, says the International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics, are linked to breast, prostate, and uterine cancers, genital deformities, obesity, diabetes, and infertility. The doctors’ group also warns that “exposure to toxic chemicals during pregnancy and lactation is ubiquitous,” with pregnant women having at least 43 different chemical contaminants in their bodies. Today, “babies are born pre-polluted,” says the National Cancer Institute, with the resulting cancers and fertility problems showing up decades later, in adulthood. The chemical industry insists there’s no causal proof that the 80,000 new chemicals it’s introduced into the environment cause damage, and U.S. regulators simply assume that these substances are safe unless proven otherwise. So for now, “experts say the best approach is for people to try to protect themselves” by minimizing their exposure to pesticides, plastics, and other chemicals. It’s the best we guinea pigs can do.
Households tend to take pantry food for granted, but canned beans, powdered cheese, and bags of moist cookies were not designed for everyday convenience. These standard products were made to meet the needs of the military.
Food and combat have been intertwined ever since the earliest military rations. Ancient Sumerians rode into battle with barley cakes and beer. In the 11th and 12th Centuries, Mongols preserved their meat by storing it under saddles, using salt from the horses and the weight of riders as a mobile preservation technique.
Drying, salting, smoking and pickling were the go-to methods until 1795, when the French government held a contest to find a new preservation technique. A chef Nicolas Appert came forward with canning, which revolutionized food preservation.
During World War II, however, the United States realized there remained a need for preserved food production to ramp up more quickly in times of crisis, and started investing heavily in food technologies.
In the 1950s, the Combat Feeding Directorate was established at the Natick Soldier System Center on a US Army Base in Massachusetts. Today it remains the epicenter of the modern military diet.
The primary purpose of the Natick Center is to overcome the challenges inherent in food: it spoils, grows mold, or it loses flavor. And their food scientists have come up with inventions like the MRE (Meal Ready-to-Eat).
MREs come packaged with chemical heaters to warm food, oxygen scavengers to prevent spoilage and carefully-concocted meals made to be edible for years after their creation date.
MREs may also contain condiments and side dishes, all the various packets tucked into a lightweight pouch and designed to survive in any climate.
One of the Natick Center’s current goals is to finally grant a longtime wish from servicemen: pizza on the battlefield. They hope to have a shelf-stable pizza, which would last for years without refrigeration, available to the military by 2017. And, soon after that, in your grocery store.
As a means of cost reduction, and as way to readily tap the private sector during wartime, the government has forged a series of public/private partnerships with commercial food producers. The military’s technology and influence can be seen in effectively every grocery aisle.
Many military innovations make their way, in some form or another, into American kitchens. TV dinners, freeze-dried coffee, semi-moist cookies, and condiment packets, were all developed to feed soldiers, sailors, and pilots stationed remotely.
While all these processed and packaged foods have become familiar fare for the American household, most of these products are made to last far longer than the average civilian would need.
There haven’t been many studies about the long-term health impacts of the specific food technologies pioneered by the military, but whether its good for us or not, in the years to come, pizza is moving out of the freezer section and onto room-temperature shelves.
Reporter Tina Antolini, host of the podcast Gravy, spoke with Anastacia Marx de Salcedo, author of Combat-Ready Kitchen; Stephen Moody, the Director of Combat Feeding at the Natick Soldier Research, Development, and Engineering Center and Louisiana-native Ben Armstrong, who spent five years in the United States Marine Corps.
