Lifeboat Foundation

Watch out, Earth gardens: Space is set to become the next destination for growing fresh vegetables.

Following the successful cultivation of lettuce at the International Space Station (ISS) in 2015, beans could be the next legume to leave our planet in 2021, said a Norwegian University of Science and Technology NTNU) press release. Other salad essentials could also be cultivated in space, and they would provide cosmonauts and other intergalactic travelers with the nutrition they need to live on other planets.

“The dream of every astronaut is to be able to eat fresh food – like strawberries, cherry tomatoes or anything that’s really flavorful. Someday that will certainly be possible,” said Silje Wolff, a plant physiologist at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Space (CIRiS) at NTNU, in the press release. “We envision a greenhouse with several varieties of vegetables.”

Continue reading “Cosmonauts Could Be Growing More Veggies in Space” »

Check out the SPACe_C eMart, the ice cream truck-style food delivery service of the future that offers fresh food and educates consumers on farm-to-table eating.

We take a somewhat humorous look at the messaging and the comfort stories people tell themselves to distract themselves from seeing why age-related diseases and dying from them is a problem that needs solving.

Here’s what might be considered a paradox: right now, the Facebook page of Death Cafe—a place where you go to talk about death—is a rather lively place, whereas pages about life extension are comparatively rather dead places. This screenshot shows the activity of a Death Cafe post:

Continue reading “Mental Candy Is Also Unhealthy” »

These technologies will be applied to produce self- cleaning and aseptic machine parts for food industry.

Project will develop high-throughput laser-based texturing for fluid-repellent and antibacterial metal surfaces using innovative industrial high-average power ultrashort-pulsed lasers in combination with high-performance scanning heads. These technologies will be applied to produce self-cleaning and aseptic machine parts for food industry (e.g. components in contact with biological foods) and home appliances (e.g. dishwashers) by utilising a beam deliverary method over areas that can reach 250mm2.

Spicy food is popular the world over, but the active ingredient that makes food taste “hot”—capsaicinoids, a group of chemical compounds has useful properties beyond making food taste delicious. However, the plants that make them (the chili pepper family, or Capsicum) are small and have relatively low yields. A new paper published today in the journal Trends in Plant Science proposes an alternative: engineering tomato plants to produce capsaicinoids. If all goes well, someday, you could enjoy a spicy tomato, or even be treated with capsaicinoids extracted from one.

The paper, written by a group at Brazil’s Federal University of Viçosa, builds on recent work that showed the tomato has all the genetic information it needs to produce capsaicinoids. “We know that all the genes are there, but in the tomato they are silent,” study author Agustin Zsӧgӧn says. His paper proposes a method for using gene-editing techniques to activate the genetic machinery in the tomato that tells it how to produce capsaicinoids, transforming the plant into both a “biofactory” that could produce larger amounts of the chemicals than it’s currently possible to grow and a spicy snack.

Tomatoes have capsaicinoid genetic pathways like peppers because the two South American plants are related. “In our lab, we work with both species,” Zsӧgӧn says. Last year, his team used gene editing to “domesticate” a wild tomato in just a few generations, engineering the strain to produce larger fruit, and greater quantities of it, than in the wild. This kind of process is how we ended up with the crops we eat today—early farmers planted the offspring of the most fruitful plants of each generation, enabling their genetic survival. CRISPR-Cas9 is just a shortcut.

ARMONK, N.Y., Jan. 4, 2019 /PRNewswire/ — IBM (NYSE: IBM) Chairman, President and CEO Ginni Rometty will deliver the opening keynote at CES 2019 on Tuesday, Jan. 8. CES is the largest and one of the most influential technology events in the world.

Rometty will show how technologies like artificial intelligence, blockchain and cloud are reshaping the world of business, and, in turn, our daily lives. She also will talk about what’s coming next in these pioneering technologies – and how new data will revolutionize how we live, work and play. Rometty shares perspective on the future of technology in the Consumer Technology Association magazine It Is Innovation (i3) CES edition: https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/manifest/i3_20190102

Rometty will be joined onstage by Ed Bastian, CEO of Delta Air Lines; Charles Redfield, executive vice president of Food for Walmart; and Vijay Swarup, vice president of R&D for ExxonMobil.

Continue reading “IBM CEO Ginni Rometty Delivers Opening Keynote at CES 2019 on What’s Next in Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain and Quantum Computing” »

China’s Chang’e-4 lander contains a living experiment that could lay the groundwork for agriculture at its future lunar base.

An international team of researchers has, for the first time, demonstrated that by fixing a common glitch in photosynthesis, a crop’s yield could be improved by around 40 percent. The landmark study suggests optimizing a plant’s photosynthetic efficiency could significantly increase worldwide food productivity.

Scientists have fixed a natural flaw in photosynthesis, and as a result have boosted plant productivity by an incredible 40 percent compared to wild relatives.

Photosynthesis is the chemical reaction that lets plants turn sunlight and carbon dioxide into food, and this new hack could result in enough calories to help feed another 200 million people on our planet, from the same volume of crops.

As of now, the fix has only been applied to tobacco plants, so we’re a long way off using this to boost our food supply. But it’s an incredibly promising first step.

Continue reading “Scientists Fix a Crucial Photosynthesis ‘Glitch’, Boosting Crop Growth” »