Meatable has become the latest company to reveal a new cultured food product – lab-grown sausages, which could offer a more sustainable and ethical choice for consumers in the near future.
Category: food – Page 112
Designed for precision agriculture and environmental management use cases, the P4 Multispectral drone combines data from six separate sensors to measure the health of crops. It can be used to monitor everything from individual plants to entire fields, as well as weeds, insects, and a variety of soil conditions.
The P4 Multispectral drone is compatible with standard industry workflows including flight programming, mapping, and analytics software from DJI and other leading providers. Using the DJI GS Pro application, you can create automated and repeatable missions including flight planning, mission execution, and flight data management. Data collected can be easily imported into DJI Terra or a suite of third-party software including Pix4D Mapper and DroneDeploy, for analysis and to generate additional vegetation index maps.
The drone was first announced in 2019.
A midst the hustle and bustle in one of Chennai’s busiest streets, Chrompet, 51-year-old S Sathyanarayanan has created a green paradise on his 1,200 sq ft terrace. He grows 400 plants including ornamental flowers such as moss roses, medicinal plants like moringa, fruits like figs, and vegetables like lady’s finger, potatoes and more.
However, what’s unique about Sathya’s garden is that he prepares a variety of liquid fertilizers using kitchen ingredients to nourish his plants. Further, he also prepares a mix of water, jaggery, and an organic Waste Decomposer (WDC) solution in a 250-litre drum. This is fed to all plants regularly, which ensures healthy and pest-free growth.
“I started terrace gardening in 2015 after my family and I moved into our newly constructed home here. Earlier, we were living on the ground floor of a rented home and I could not grow many plants, as the availability of space was an issue. I started my gardening journey with 50 pots of money plants, tulsi, tomatoes and others. Today, my garden has over 400 pots, which grow ornamental flowers, fruits, and vegetables,” says Sathya, adding that regular visitors to his garden include buzzing honey bees and chirping love birds.
When Dong-Fang Deng and her students make feed for the fish they raise at UWM’s School of Freshwater Sciences, they often use ground fishmeal—dried fish parts from fisheries or wild catch—as the protein source.
It’s possible to find microplastics in commercial fish food, she said, because the wild fish that end up in fishmeal consume some of the microplastics that litter the waters they live in. But after Deng actually spotted tiny plastic beads in pre-ground fishmeal, it prompted a question.
“We wondered, ” If the fish eat the microplastics, could the particles accumulate inside their bodies?’” said Deng, professor of freshwater sciences who researches the role of diet in fish farming, or aquaculture.
Else Labs, the company behind the countertop home cooking robot called Oliver, announced today the launch of Oliver Fleet, a commercial kitchen reimagining of its original core product.
The new Fleet solution is a respin of its original standalone Oliver home cooking robot into a solution that allows multiple units to be used and managed simultaneously in professional kitchen environments to automate cooking tasks. According to company CEO Khalid Aboujassoum, while the Oliver Fleet units look the same from the outside as the original consumer unit, they’ve been built to withstand the more rugged requirements of the professional kitchen.
“It might look like the household unit from the outside, but the guts of the Oliver Fleet are different,” Aboujassoum said. “The Fleet units are designed for back-to-back cooking, for that harsh environment in the commercial kitchen compared to the household.”
The Dubai facility has the capacity to produce over two million pounds of leafy greens annually, and will grow lettuces, arugula, mixed salad greens, and spinach.
ECO stands for Emirates Crop One; the vertical farm is a joint venture between Crop One Holdings (a Massachusetts-based vertical farming company) and Emirates Flight Catering (the catering business that serves Emirates Airlines). Greens from the vertical farm will be served onboard Emirates flights, and will also be sold in grocery stores in the UAE. Since they’re grown in a sterile environment without pesticides, herbicides, or chemicals, the greens come ready-to-eat and don’t need to be washed.
The UAE is in many ways an ideal location for vertical farming, if not a place where the technology may soon become essential. It gets an abundance of sunlight but doesn’t have much water to speak of (it was, fittingly, the field testing site for a nanoparticle technology that helps sandy soil retain water and nutrients); that means vertical farms could use energy from solar panels to grow food indoors using 95 percent less water than traditional agriculture.
Researchers have created a biodegradable system based on silk to replace the microplastics used in paints, cosmetics, and agricultural products.
Microplastics, tiny particles of plastic that are now found worldwide in the air, water, and soil, are increasingly recognized as a serious pollution threat, and have been found in the bloodstream of animals and people around the world.
Some of these microplastics are intentionally added to a variety of products, including agricultural chemicals, paints, cosmetics, and detergents—amounting to an estimated 50,000 tons a year in the European Union alone, according to the European Chemicals Agency. The EU has already declared that these added, nonbiodegradable microplastics must be eliminated by 2025, so the search is on for suitable replacements, which do not currently exist.
Now, a team of scientists at MIT and elsewhere has developed a system based on silk that could provide an inexpensive and easily manufactured substitute. The new process is described in a paper in the journal Small, written by MIT postdoc Muchun Liu, MIT professor of civil and environmental engineering Benedetto Marelli, and five others at the chemical company BASF in Germany and the U.S.