For true fans of Diet Coke, soda is sacrament, and reverence comes with strict parameters. The fountain version served at McDonald's is thought to represent the peak of the form, but given the choice between plastic, glass, and metal vessels, conventional wisdom dictates that Diet Coke tastes best in aluminum cans. In recent weeks, those cans have reportedly been disappearing from shelves across India. Because the country's Diet Coke comes only in aluminum-can form, Reuters notes, it's at the mercy of ongoing supply issues stemming from the war in Iran. The Middle East has the capacity to produce 7 million metric tons of aluminum each year (75 percent of which is exported). That's 9 percent of the world's production capacity. And since the fighting began in late February, prices have continued to climb worldwide. The base price of a ton of aluminum surpassed $3,600 in April, a four-year high. The metal shows up everywhere in daily life: solar panels, MacBooks, airplane fuselage, deodorant, over-the-counter heartburn pills, cans of grocery-store cold brew. We're nowhere close to mass shortages in the United States, but around the world, the price shocks are already here....

Back in the early 1970s, psychologists at Northwestern University performed an experiment that, on the surface, looked like a child's fantasy. The researchers gathered 45 college women and asked some of them to drink a milkshake'or two. Then they placed three pints of ice cream in front of each woman and asked her to taste each one. Afterward, they told each participant to 'help herself to any of the remaining ice cream, as she wished,' the researchers wrote in the Journal of Personality. Finally'and this was key'each woman completed a survey meant to measure how much she dieted or 'restrained' her eating, outside of the treats she had just consumed. The findings were dramatic. On average, the women who said they didn't diet or have weight concerns ate less ice cream if they drank at least one milkshake. The first sweet treat satiated their hunger. But for the women who dieted and felt worried about their weight, the milkshake appeared to unleash a hidden hunger. On average, they ate 66 percent more ice cream after the milkshake than they did without it....

The researchers found that in response to a high-fat diet, mature hepatocytes in the liver revert to an immature, stem-cell-like state. This helps them to survive the stressful conditions created by the high-fat diet, but in the long term, it makes them more likely to become cancerous. 'If cells are forced to deal with a stressor, such as a high-fat diet, over and over again, they will do things that will help them survive, but at the risk of increased susceptibility to tumorigenesis,' says Alex K. Shalek, director of the Institute for Medical Engineering and Sciences (IMES), the J. W. Kieckhefer Professor in IMES and the Department of Chemistry, and a member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT, the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT, and Harvard, and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. The researchers also identified several transcription factors that appear to control this reversion, which they believe could make good targets for drugs to help prevent tumor development in high-risk patients....

A diet rich in the amino acid cysteine may have rejuvenating effects in the small intestine, according to a new study from MIT. This amino acid, the researchers discovered, can turn on an immune signaling pathway that helps stem cells to regrow new intestinal tissue. This enhanced regeneration may help to heal injuries from radiation, which often occur in patients undergoing radiation therapy for cancer. The research was conducted in mice, but if future research shows similar results in humans, then delivering elevated quantities of cysteine, through diet or supplements, could offer a new strategy to help damaged tissue heal faster, the researchers say. 'The study suggests that if we give these patients a cysteine-rich diet or cysteine supplementation, perhaps we can dampen some of the chemotherapy or radiation-induced injury,' says Omer Yilmaz, director of the MIT Stem Cell Initiative, an associate professor of biology at MIT, and a member of MIT's Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research. 'The beauty here is we're not using a synthetic molecule; we're exploiting a natural dietary compound.'...