This is the ‘smart sea’.
🎣 Are you an innovator with ideas for nutritional, sustainable, ethical and economically viable blue food? Submit your solution to the Blue Food challenge on UpLink: https://bit.ly/3AlRD8j UpLink — World Economic Forum Syntech System Solutions Inc.
Would you eat chicken nugget grown in a bioreactor (and not the old fashioned inside-a-chicken way)? What if that nugget was as cheap as the old kind? A fascinating short film from our friends at @Freethink.
Vinegaroons shoot “well-aimed” vinegar spray, eat cockroaches for dinner — and emerge from the ground looking for love.
Investigating the relationship between diet, gut bacteria and systemic inflammation, a team of Stanford University researchers has found just a few weeks of following a diet rich in fermented foods can lead to improvements in microbiome diversity and reductions in inflammatory biomarkers.
The new research pitted a high-fiber diet against a diet with lots of fermented food. Thirty-six healthy adults were recruited and randomly assigned one of the two diets for 10 weeks.
“We wanted to conduct a proof-of-concept study that could test whether microbiota-targeted food could be an avenue for combatting the overwhelming rise in chronic inflammatory diseases,” explains Christopher Gardner, co-senior author on the new study.
Bad news for coffee lovers. Global warming will limit our coffee consumption.
Global coffee prices are climbing and threatening to drive up costs at the breakfast table as the world’s biggest coffee producer, Brazil, faces one of its worst droughts in almost a century.
Prices for arabica coffee beans—the main variety produced in Brazil—hit their highest level since 2016 last month. New York-traded arabica futures have risen over 18% in the past three months to $1.51 a pound. London-traded robusta—a stronger-tasting variety favored in instant coffee—has risen over 30% in the past three months, to $1749 a metric ton, a two-year high.
Continue reading “Coffee Prices Soar After Bad Harvests and Insatiable Demand” »
“The trend for feeding dogs raw food may be fuelling the spread of antibiotic resistant-bacteria”, the researchers said in a press release for their study, to be presented at the European Congress of Clinical Microbiology & Infectious Diseases.
Separate research to be presented at the same conference found resistance to a last-resort antibiotic may be passing between pet dogs and their owners.
Antibiotic-resistant “superbugs” — which the World Health Organization calls one of the top global threats to public health — usually conjure images of hospital settings.
Continue reading “Bad Dog? Research Suggests Superbug Link To Man’s Best Friend” »
Most plastic persists in the environment. A recently developed polymer degrades in a week and doesn’t leave microplastics behind. Image credit: Larina Marina/ Shutterstock.
Plastic trash chokes shorelines and oceans, in part because plastic polymers do not easily decompose. But a new kind of environmentally degradable plastic could help change that: It breaks down in about a week in sunlight and air, according to a recent study in the Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS). Chemical characterization using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and mass spectroscopy, among other techniques, revealed that the plastic decomposed rapidly in sunlight from a petroleum-based polymer into succinic acid, a naturally occurring nontoxic small molecule that doesn’t leave microplastic fragments in the environment.
Although a sun-sensitive plastic might not be a good choice for bottles or bags that need to last more than a week on shelves, integrating the environmentally degradable polymer as a minor ingredient, or with other biodegradable polymers, could help speed breakdown of these materials in landfills, says coauthor Liang Luo, an organic materials scientist at Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Wuhan, China. The flexible and degradable material would be potentially useful inside electronics, he says. Sealed inside a cell phone or other flexible electronic device, the polymer could last for years isolated from light and oxygen, Luo notes, while making smartphones easier to dispose of at the end of their service life. And the byproduct succinic acid could be upcycled for commercial uses in the pharmaceutical and food industries, Luo adds.
Breaking — Branson Beats Bezos to Space! Some history of the Virgin Galactic propulsion development, flight analysis and more background with Tim Pickens.
Tim Pickens is an entrepreneur, inventor, innovator, engineer and educator. He specializes in commercial space, technical product development and solutions, and business consulting and strategy for space and technical companies. Pickens’ 25+ years of experience in the aerospace industry, specializing in the design, fabrication and testing of propulsion hardware systems, has earned him a reputation as one of the industry’s leaders in these areas. Early in his career, Pickens served as propulsion lead for Scaled Composites on SpaceShipOne, winner of the $10 million Ansari X Prize. He also worked for small hardware-rich aerospace companies in Huntsville, and later supported the Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo venture.
Continue reading “Branson Beats Bezos to Space History and Flight Analysis with Tim Pickens” »
A new pizzeria, called Pazzi, is staffed entirely by robots, which can handle everything from order-taking to prepping the dough, to boxing the finished meal.
The restaurant, found in the Beaubourg area of Paris, has taken eight years of research and development. Its creators are two inventors, Cyril Hamon and Sébastien Roverso – both passionate about robotics and electronics since childhood – who began designing the machines in a family garage. Their goal has been to reinvent the fast food experience with a fully automated system that is more convenient and empowering to customers, while maintaining the same or better quality food as conventional restaurants and also being environmentally sustainable.
Pazzi builds on the success of a pilot, tested at the Val d’Europe shopping centre in 2019. The 120m² establishment is more visible and centrally located than that earlier demonstration, being opposite the famous Pompidou centre, benefiting from a high attendance.
Adding absorbent nanoparticles to polymer membranes simplifies desalination.
University of California, Berkeley, chemists have discovered a way to simplify the removal of toxic metals. like mercury and boron. during desalination to produce clean water, while at the same time potentially capturing valuable metals, such as gold.
Desalination — the removal of salt — is only one step in the process of producing drinkable water, or water for agriculture or industry, from ocean or waste water. Either before or after the removal of salt, the water often has to be treated to remove boron, which is toxic to plants, and heavy metals like arsenic and mercury, which are toxic to humans. Often, the process leaves behind a toxic brine that can be difficult to dispose of.
