Studying Microbiome

In 1665 Robert Hooke and Anton Van  Leeuwenhoek discovered the existence of tiny microorganism using microscope magnifying x 25 to x 250 . The microscope was used to understand microbes. Much later other techniques were discovered, such as culturing (the isolation of a specific type of bacteria which will grow on a specific media that supports its growth). Culturing will enable you to find out how  does it look like and what does it produce, and to test its sensibility to certain antibiotics. Not all bacteria can be cultured yet, as , as we do not know what certain microbes need to grow. , From the human macrobiome, we are able to culture only 30%. Today culture independent techniques are used to study the microbiome, making use of the DNA, proteins and/or metabolites from the microbiota to understand what microbes are there and what they are capable of doing. A fecal sample can tell you how your microbiota is interacting with your body and ( using informations from proteins and metabolites). You can find out about your food digestion and vitamin production of your microbiome. One of the most used techniques to find out what microbe we deal with is the one using the 16s rRNA gene, a gene found in bacteria and archaea, but missing in humans and other eukaryotes. It has a conserved region that is common to all bacteria and a variable part, specific to every species, and can be used to tell species apart. Using 16s rRNA gene, we can find out which bacteria is present in the sample. Using culture in dependent molecular approaches we can see what they are doing in our bodies.

Another more important group of techniques are known as Omics Techniques. We will find more about these in the next blog post.

Wish you a nice day!

G.

The Microbiome

These days we keep hearing different opinions about this elusive thing called microbiome. What is that and how it can help us? You are in the right place to find out, through my next series of blog posts about it.

Every human microbiome is different and it is continuously changing during the course of one's life. Many factors play a role in the development of the human microbiome. Even early life events, like mode of delivery and gestational age at birth can play a role in seeding and shaping the microbes that colonize the gastro-intestinal tract. Later in life there are also changes in the macrobiome, correlated with the ageing process. Dietary habits impact on the microbiome, and diet related diseases such as obesity and metabolic syndrome will influence it. Effects of the short term dietary changes will be analyzed too.

There are many benefits coming from our microbiome, as microbes digest food components, produce some of the vitamins ( K, B12 ) and stimulate our immune system. Our entire body is colonized by microbes, and those microbes are actually keeping us healthy. They protect against pathogens (microbes that make us ill), by simply taking up the space, preventing colonization by other microbes. A system without microbes is very vulnerable to infectious microorganisms (we are talking here about newborns and germ-free pets). Having a healthy microbiome will stimulate our immune system, as a healthy immune system needs to be exposed to different microbes and compounds and find out what is harmless and what can cause a disease, other way it cannot maturate. If the immune system is not mature, it can turn its attention to non-pathogenic substances, attacking them. Turning against food particles, it can cause allergies. Turning against own body, it can cause auto-immune diseases like multiple sclerosis or diabetes type 1. Working in the right way, the immune system will be on symbiosis with the macrobiota, a mutual helping alliance that helps the immune system to figure out which microbes and particles are trustworthy and which are not. The microbiota also produces some substances that can influence our metabolism, our feeling of hunger and our weight gain or weight loss. The digestion of fiber by our microbes leads to secondary products that our body can use as an energy source (they increase the energy yield from our food, so we need to eat less). The microbiome can produce vitamins that we absorb and use (vitamin B complex and vitamin K).

At the moment we wash our hands a lot, sometime using soap that kill 99.99% of bacteria, we eat meat that was previously treated with potent antibiotics or we use antibiotics directly, and in doing this, we kill the pathogens, but we also kill a part of our "friendly" microbes. We strongly suggest to check the products you use to see if they contain any antibiotics, as excessive and unnecessary use of it, especially at young age, can lead to obesity risk, diabetes type 2 and auto-immune diseases. There are many other diseases linked to the macrobiome disruption. There is a hygiene hypothesis  stating that lack of early childhood exposure to all kind of microbes, infectious agents and parasites will suppres the natural development of our immune system.

Next post: Microbiome study

ENKRONOS ICO

ENKRONOS ICO (full review)

Enkronos is a Slovenian digital strategy company. They promote the creation of Enkronos Apps (a completely trusted blockchain credit system for ethic campaigns. The Total Available Market (TAM) is approximated at 700 billions USD. The Serviceable Available Market (SAM) is 100 billions USD, and the Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM) is somewhere around 5 billions USD. 

What are those Apps, you will ask? They are defined as a data driven multi-application platform for advertising, big data solutions, marketing and AI, focusing on centralizing the entire idea of engagement made by the companies with their customers. The Apps are build on a highly modular concept, making improving, scaling, removing and adjusting a clean and simple process. The content creators can use one single dashboard to manage all sources of data gathered by the apps. Enkronos is supporting and respecting an ethical conduct (this unsolved problem was the main reason behind Facebook share devaluation after the Cambridge Analytica scandal).The target groups are: financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, retail, wine producers, organic agriculture, public sector issues (defense, smart city, waste management, water management, air pollution), construction sector, health, energy, security, automotive, developers, tech, VC, startups, governments. 

What about the security protection? According to their White Paper there are three levels of security verification. Level 1 is for all software, level 2 is for apps containing sensitive data and level 3 is for highly sensitive data apps. Enkronos was tested by an independent primary auditor and no critical severity vulnerability was found. The company is compliant with EU GDPR (general data protection regulations) and this means that any breach notification is mandatory within 72 hours, there is a right for data subjects to obtain confirmation if their personal data is being processed, right to be forgotten-complete erase of personal data, right to data portability, privacy by design and a data protection officer assigned to enforce GDPR requirements internally. 

Tokenomics

The software development cycle is based on planning, analysis, design, implementation, testing and maintenance. What can one of this Apps do?

• combined Ad management (multiple Ads management on Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Snapchat and Telegram);
• E-voting and E-democracy;
• Wide area sensor monitoring;
• Location tracking;
• Augmented reality engagement;
• In-depth report generation of owning data;
• AI support in decision making;
• Gaming platform;
• Crowd-sourcing;
• Loyalty campaigns management;
• Multiple contest creation channels (contest walls, location contest, combination of contests, multiple types- art, video, quiz, survey, unique code);
• Digital ticketing and pass distribution;
• Couponing;
• E-commerce and its management;
• Centralized user database- easily to move existing databases with advanced user categorization on individual segmentation of interest and features to make it easy to create automated questions of top of segments;
• Universal billing system -an universal payment system with full transparency of the Enkronos apps creators and Enkronos credit/token/coin purchasers.

Are there any apps already available? Yes, there are already made apps such as YourGamify (gamification management system), LoyaltyVenue (customer loyalty and fidelity campaigns) and ContestDream (promotion and contest management platforms). Also, there are apps soon to be launched, like McAudience (lead generation, audience building and management) and FeelGrid (IoT and AI based wide area monitoring) in the third or forth quarter of 2018, and CryptoState (e-democracy blockchain platform) in the second quarter of 2019. 

Apps release dates

The token is called Enkronos token (ENK) and it has a softcap of 2500 ETH and a hardcap or 500.000 ETH. 

Token allocation:

• 51% community (pre-sale and public sale);
• 26% locked reserve (10% ENK reserve for future unforeseeable expenses and token threatening situations, 16% reserve for future growth — partnerships and acquisitions);
• 12% founders and future and current team;
• 6% advisers;
• 5% bounty campaign promotion.

ENK distribution

Funding allocation :

• 30% advertising and PR (to enter different international markets and single apps launching);
• 25% development (application and web platform development, technical development);
• 20% internal business (business development and employment hiring and wages);
• 20% integration (worldwide integration of the platform);
• 5% in case of legal issues , it servers and infrastructure, admin.

Funding allocation

What is the role of the ENK token? How are they used to build the circulation of the currency and create a viable supply and demand mechanism? They are used as currency for crowdfunding and crowdsourcing various processes on the platform, and as payment for Enkronos apps usage and for supporters (for crowdholding bonuses paid in ENK tokens proportionally to all holders, for investing into companies available on the platform and for purchasing products/services on the crowdholding market). 

They are quite advance of their own Roadmap, as they started to launch apps on 15.05.18, and one month later third-parties were able to publish their apps.

30.06.2018 -Swee.io app was released.

31.07.2018 -McAudience app was released.

30.11.2018 -FeelGrid app will be released.

31.03.2019 -Blockchain based Enkronos apps will be released.

30.06.2019 -CryptoState app will be released. 

Enkronos is a solid platform with a well prepared Whitelist, and we can only check in the future to see if they will achieve enough traction in a ultra-competitive market. 

(Disclaimer: This article was created in exchange for a potential token reward through BountyOx. BountyOx username: Heruvim78)

ONAM ICO review

A first look at their site will inform us that they are promoting compliance, security and usability. Let’s explore this a bit further. ONAM define themselves as a high performance, regulatory compliant with current and future regulations set forth by SEC and other regulatory bodies, trading platform with good risk management, trade surveillance, advanced tools and state of the art security system powered by machine learning (using proprietary Advanced Threat Prevention, Intrusion Detection and Trade Surveillance). Quite a mouthful, but it is all supported by an extended Whitelist. Shall we look at this then, and check the main points.

First, they point out the challenges met by any actual trading platform. We are talking here about unsafe exchanges (just check the news), security breaches, scalability, market manipulation, long waiting time for the customer support and poor market liquidity. Their solutions to every challenge are explained one by one. In terms of security, they will use proprietary Advanced Threat Prevention, Intrusion Detection and Trade Surveillance powered by Machine Learning, added to the standard DDOS Mitigation, Anti-Phishing and 2FA solutions. In term of scalability, they estimate a whooping 10+ millions transactions per second, with less than 40 nanoseconds latency (compare this with VISA actual speed -24.000 transactions per second). Market manipulation will be prevented monitoring for suspicious trading activity using real-time surveillance, supervision and compliance system (potentially generating Suspicious Activity Reports when it is the case). A dedicated 24/7/365 Customer Service will be created, aiming to answer within 15 minutes after a support ticket was submitted. The poor market liquidity will be solved being committed to attract large market makers, volume traders and miners. All happening this while being fully compliant with regulations.

Another brownie point is gained looking at their partnership with BIT GO, a market leader in institutional grade cryptocurrency investment services since 2013.

Let’s take a look at the platform features.

We already mentioned the speed (10 millions TRX/sec) and the latency (under 40 nanoseconds), and we can see all kind of order types (trailing stops, iceberg orders, fill or kill, good till cancelled, one cancels another and the regular limit order, market order or stop-limit). They promise a regulatory compliant Margin Trading, for a small fee on borrowed funds in exchange for a larger buying power. They plan to support this using Margin Lending, where you can earn interest of the funds provided for margin traders. The clients will get access to a monthly re-balanced ONAM composite fund, a smart and secure way to get diversified exposure to crypto assets. A Paper Training feature will be offered to train and improve your trading skills, and the platform will have a modular UI to customize your trading page according to your needs.

UI Preview

UI Preview

A Machine Learning powered Trade Assistant to provide trade alerts and signal is mentioned, and you can create or use ready made strategies through auto-trading bots. A social media and market sentiment analysis tool is also provided for a ultra-fast sentiment analysis of the market. Another interesting feature is the Institutional Grade Market Scanning Tool to find coins and tokens based on your specific criteria (this will be available only for ONAM token holders). We will also have advanced charting (technical analysis tool), trading experts to educate novice and intermediate traders and a news and announcement feed for the latest news, with or without push notifications.

A special mention for OTC Trading — facilitating buying and selling of assets for institutional investors and large traders, multilingual UI ( you can choose your preferred language, multilingual 24/7 live chat support, FIX server for institutional traders, advanced and custom API and an affiliate program.

Another important part that we need to talk about is the exchange fees. This is what can make an exchange attractive or not, and the announced exchange fees are 0.1% maker fee, 0.05% taker fee, free deposits and margin trading, withdrawal and listing fee are yet to be announced.

In the next paragraph we will discuss about token details and ICO. The token is called ONAM and it is ERC-20. It will be used for trade fees saving, to unlock extra tools and features and every quarter 25% of the company profits will be used to buy-back and destroy tokens up to 150 millions of them(50%). In the following table you have the important informations related to the token.

Token informations

The token allocation is the following:

-65% Crowd sale;

-20% For the team;

-10% As an emergency reserve

-5% Bounty, advisers and strategic partners.

The token sale funds are allocated for Development (50%), Marketing (25%), Day to day operations (15%) and Legal expenses (10%).

The ICO most important dates are presented in the next table.

ICO schedule

The main points of interest on the Road-map are:

*Quarter 4 of 2018

-Private sale, pre-sale and public crowd sale;

-Platform beta release and stress testing;

*Quarter 1 of 2019

-Trading pairs announcement;

-Full platform release;

-IOS and Android app;

-Trading pairs expansion;

*Quarter 2 of 2019

-Fiat pairings;

-ONAM token buy-back.

The Road-map is promising and doable, and they are showing great potential, if they can follow it and deliver what they promised, while keeping up with the similar market.

(Disclaimer: This article was created in exchange for a potential token reward through BountyOx. BountyOx username: Heruvim78)

• Bitcoin
• Onam
• Erc20
• Token
• Trading Platforms

Berminal ICO (complete review)

What is Berminal? The name is a mix of two words (Blockchain and Terminal), and is trying to be an impartial, decentralized cryptocurrency and blockchain information app. Berminal ICO went online on 21.07.18 and just finished two days ago on 30.09.18. Initially starting as a mobile solution for all the news about cryptocurrency, slowly evolved into a real time cryptocurrency price and news alert service. The BERM protocol is using blockchain to build a honest, unbiased information feed. We got the Protocol Layer, where users got paid to vote for delegates that are producing the most value with the least bias, and the Application Layer, to give to the developers the possibility to build their own apps on top of the protocol and monetize it (similar with building a DEX on 0x protocol).

Here is the initial screen view, as you can see it on your mobile.

Opening screen

In the left upper corner we have an icon for the language selection, with 11 languages at this moment, at the top we can also see the news, divided by the featured and the regulation screens. On some featured news you have a quiz added, answering to it correctly will reward you with 2 BERM. Each news has a time and a date, a Bull/Bear voting option and a Share button. You can click on each news title to see the whole text.

As we scroll down, we can see our selected cryptocurrency watch list, with the top performers list coming right after (real-time also).

Watch list — in real time

Top performers — also in real time

At the bottom we have 4 icons: Home, which we already discussed about, Market, Rewards and Me tab.

The Market tab is offering two options, first being the Portfolio, where we can see the balance of their own coin called Berminal (BERM) with a fixed value of 0.05$ (whatever you gain playing the Rewards tasks), followed by your watch list (you can select each coin to see a graph of the last day, week, month or 3 months, 1 year, 5 years, and long-short ration for Binance and Bitfinex). The second tab is containing all the coins, with the same utilities as in your watch list.

Your watch list

The coin list

When you select one coin, you can also see the latest news related to that specific coin.

Selected coin

Next is the My Rewards tab, showing the amount of BERM earned and two daily task options. First is the Vote Reward, where you can vote 10 times every day for 1 BERM reward for each vote. The second task is a game called Crypto Psychic, where you can predict the BTC price and win BERM from a daily pool if you are part of the top 50% players predicting the price that day. The submission window is usually opening at 1:00 AM and it is closing at 5:00 PM. The winning price is revealed daily.

The daily tasks

The last tab is the Me one, where you can find information about your account, your name, you have a Redeem Tokens option and your Invite code (by the way, mine is 75c5e59a , if you make download the app and you are kind enough to use it). There is also a Join Telegram link, a Support link and a shortcut to Frequently Asked Questions. And at last, you can see your login/logout option.

(The version reviewed here is V1.7.2.)

Macrobiome

At some moment in the near future i will start a series of articles about Microbiome. With the last post from today, i consider the Macronutrients series closed for the moment.

Have a nice day!
G.

Nutrition and sport study

We will talk about an experiment where we compared two diets and performance. We have used the high fat and high carbs diets, using a maximal O2 uptake test (VO2 max). This is an indicator for cardio-pulmonary fitness and breathing at sea level  has the normal value of 61 ml/min/kg, using a maximal power of 310 watts.

On high carbs diet the time to exhaustion was 65 minutes and the glucose level in the blood after the exercise was 5.6 mmol/liter.

On high fats diet the time to exhaustion was 45 minutes and the blood glucose level after the exercise was 4.4 mmol/liter.

We know that performance is influenced by genetics (trainability and age), training (psychology, physiology and technique) and health (sickness, injury, fatigue and nutrition). Glucose as fuel has the advantage of being locally available (stored in the liver and muscle as glycogen) and has more power than the fat, but we got a limited storage (2000 kcal). Fat as fuel is a huge resource (at least 100.000 kcal), but is slow to mobilize and has less power than the carbohydrates. For high intensity exercise, glucose is ideal, for endurance exercise, fat is better. It is good to know that we can exercise for a bit over one hour is we have full glycogen stores.

Strategy for endurance exercises: we should have the glycogen stores completely filled, ingesting more carbs if the exercise is taking more than 45 minutes. You have no real benefit if you have carbs before the 45 minutes of exercise if you started fully loaded with glycogen.

Strategy for strength or power exercises: glycogen stores should be filled prior to the training or competition, you should also aim for 1.4 grams of protein per kg consumption, avoiding prolonged catabolic periods (do not fast or avoid food). If you are vegan or vegetarian, in order to achieve muscular physique, you should choose the right protein sources (beans, soy etc). Do not forget about the fluid intake during exercise, if it is cold you do not need it for very short bursts, but if it is warm and you are sweating a lot, take care of your re-hydration. Ketosis as a diet works well for medium intensity and long interval trainings (it is a high fat/low carbs diet).

Exercise benefits are important: we can lose weight if it is done long enough, but sometimes it is not apparent, as we lose fat and gain muscle, it is increasing our physical activity and functionality (especially the endurance or resistance training) and it is improving our health parameters (lowering high blood pressure, increasing the plasma HDL level, lowering the triglycerides level and improving insulin sensitivity). Talking about exercise, we need to mention supplements and ergogenic aids.

The ergogenic aids can be classified as:
-metabolic fuels (energy drinks and gels), which are good for endurance training, higher than 45 minutes;
-caffeine and caffeine related stimulants, good to exercise longer (endurance training);
-creatine monophosphate, good for high intensity training as is maintaining ATP levels up (fuel for muscle);
-anabolic substances (protein, aminoacids and other ones that will be not mentioned, as they are illegal in most countries);
-rehydrating fluids, like water, with or without electrolytes.

I mentioned ketosis earlier, i will try to explain this concept a bit more. Ketosis is defined as the formation of ketone bodies in our system. There are three ketone bodies: acetone, acetoacetate and beta-hydroxybutyrate, all of them made from fatty acids in the liver when the supply of fatty acids is highly elevated, as in the case of  prolonged fasting and uncontrolled diabetes. Normally the concentration of ketone bodies in our blood is very low, but if we try a ketogenic diet, with a high fat/low carbs content, even if some of the ketones are lost via urine, the concentration in our blood can reach 0.5 mmol or even higher if it is combined with exercise. The advantage of the ketone bodies is that even if the liver produce ketones, cannot use them, but to supply glucose to the brain during prolonged fasting, the glycogen stores are depleted after one day, and when proteins are used to convert into glucose, we experience muscle loss, this is the moment when our survival mode is activated, and the liver take the fatty acids and it will convert it into ketone bodies, delivering them to the brain as a fuel. Stored fat is used indirectly by the brain, and the need to degrade proteins is reduced.

However, the ketogenic process is dangerous during uncontrolled diabetes (diabetic keto-acidosis) or  alcohol abuse (alcoholic keto-acidosis). High levels of ketones will lower the blood Ph, being a life threatening condition. Carbs based diets leads to undetectable levels of ketones, but one day of fasting will result in 0.5-1 mmol ketosis. Prolonged fasting will increase it up to 6 mmol, and diabetic ketosis is bigger than 20 mmol.

The glycogen is prioritized to extra-hepatic tissues, the brain and the other tissues take out their share first, then the muscle is filled, followed by the liver. Both stores of glycogen to be empty is a very rare occurrence, but can happen if you do heavy training in the morning without breakfast. Our glycogen stores are mostly filled up, unless we do intense exercise or low carbs dieting or spend too much time without eating. The liver store is fully depleted after 24 hour fasting. Muscle stores are filled first in case of low carbs diet, the liver store being minimized.