Lifeboat Foundation

2021 may not turn out well.

He’s hoping the world’s billionaires will donate their pandemic profits.

Circa 2017 o.o

When life gave one Chinese company giant panda poop, it decided to make paper — and profits. The Qianwei Fengsheng Paper Company in southwest Sichuan province has teamed up with the China Conservation and Research Center for the Giant Panda to recycle the animal’s faeces and food debris into toilet paper, napkins and other household products, state media reported Wednesday. The goods, soon to be released on the Chinese market, will be marketed as part of a “panda poo” product line decorated with a picture of the bamboo-eating, black-and-white bear. “They’re taking care of our garbage for us,” Huang Yan, a researcher at the giant panda centre, told the Chengdu Business Daily. Huang told Xinhua state news agency that the 10 kilograms (22 pounds) of bamboo poo that adult pandas unleash daily are rich in fibre after absorbing the fructose from the shoots. In addition to their valuable dung, pandas also produce 50 kilograms of food waste every day from the bamboo husks they spit out after chewing. While the process of turning bamboo into paper generally involves the breaking down of fructose to extract fibre, this step naturally occurs in the pandas’ digestive tract, the paper company’s president, Yang Chaolin, told Xinhua. Fengsheng will collect the faeces from three panda bases in Sichuan a couple of times a week. After it is boiled, pasteurised and turned into paper, it will be tested for bacteria before going on sale. Boxes of “panda poo” tissues will be sold at 43 yuan ($6.5) a pop. “Pandas get what they want and we do too,” Yang said. “It’s a win-win.”

https://media.blubrry.com/drjohnday/p/drjohnday.com/podcasts/Podcast217.mp3 Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadSubscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | RSS6 Foods to Reverse Aging with Lithium Could a microscopic dose of the psychoactive drug lithium, which occurs naturally in mineral water and certain foods, actually be the secret to less heart disease, better moods, and a longer life? In this article, I share how eating six foods may reverse aging with lithium.

Teaching birds to help us with recycling!

A very interesting approach! 😃

Who knew birds would be absolutely crushing it in the recycling game? If they can do it, so can you!

MIT researchers have developed a new material inspired by camel fur made from two layers that can keep perishable goods cool without needing any power. The two-layer passive cooling system is made of hydrogel and aerogel. Researchers say that it can be used to keep foods or pharmaceutical cool for days without needing electricity.

The material can be seen in the photo above, its top layer is aerogel, and the bottom layer is a hydrogel. Material is inspired by camel fur, which helps keep the animals cool and helps them to conserve water in the scorching desert environment. It seems counterintuitive that a thick coat of fur would help camels to stay cool, but tests have shown that a shaved camel loses 50 percent more moisture than an unshaved one under ideal conditions.

The bottom layer of MIT’s material is a substitute for sweat glands made of hydrogel. This gelatin-like substance is mostly water contained in a sponge-like matrix that allows the water to evaporate easily. The upper aerogel layer plays the part of the fur, keeping out external heat while allowing the vapor to pass through. Hydrogels have been used for cooling applications in the past. Field tests have found that MIT’s material can provide cooling of more than seven degrees Celsius for five times longer than hydrogel alone despite being less than half an inch thick.

Ira Pastor, ideaXme life sciences ambassador and CEO of Bioquark, interviews Philip Lymbery, award winning author of books Farmageddon and Dead Zone and CEO of Compassion in World Farming.

Ira Pastor Comments:

Continue reading “Compassion in World Farming: Protecting Animals Means Protecting People and the Planet” »

It seems solar power is really benefiting these chicken farmers from Australia. It allows them to slash their electricity bill.

This 10-million-bird chicken farm has slashed its power bill and reduced its CO₂ emissions by 1,500 tonnes after installing one of agriculture’s most extensive solar and battery systems.

The Sterile Insect Technique (SIT) is based on the mass release of sterilized male insects to reduce the pest population size via infertile mating. Critical for all SIT programs is a conditional sexing strain to enable the cost-effective production of male-only populations. Compared to current female-elimination strategies based on killing or sex sorting, generating male-only offspring via sex conversion would be economically beneficial by doubling the male output. Temperature-sensitive mutations known from the D. melanogaster transformer-2 gene (tra2^ts) induce sex conversion at restrictive temperatures, while regular breeding of mutant strains is possible at permissive temperatures. Since tra2 is a conserved sex determination gene in many Diptera, including the major agricultural pest Ceratitis capitata, it is a promising candidate for the creation of a conditional sex conversion strategy in this Tephritid. Here, CRISPR/Cas9 homology-directed repair was used to induce the D. melanogaster-specific tra2^ts SNPs in Cctra2. 100% female to male conversion was successfully achieved in flies homozygous for the tra2^ts2 mutation. However, it was not possible, to identify a permissive temperature for the mutation allowing the rearing of a tra2^ts2 homozygous line, as lowering the temperature below 18.5 °C interferes with regular breeding of the flies.

Florida will use BlueGreen Water Technologies’ treatment to stop harmful algae blooms in Lake Okeechobee from reaching the state’s waterways.

Lake Okeechobee, also known as Florida’s Inland Sea, is the state’s largest freshwater lake. It has become overrun by cyanobacterial blooms (“blue green algae”) that render the water toxic for drinking and agriculture. It’s also not safe to eat fish from the lake or to swim in its waters.

Left untreated, cyanobacterial blooms can hijack all the resources in a lake or reservoir and turn it a dead aquatic zone.