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Category: food – Page 317

Happy Holidays; happy end of the year, happy launch of next year, happy snow days, happy hot chocolate day, etc. Nonetheless, my gift to you this year is a Nanoscale Snowman.

Would a jewel-encrusted snowman make the perfect Christmas present? At only 5 nanometres in size, the price might be lower than you think. And it’s functional too, catalysing the splitting of water to make green hydrogen for fuel cells.

The nanoparticle, as imaged with the aberration-corrected scanning transmission electron microscopes, features eyes, nose and mouth of precious-metal platinum clusters embedded in a titanium dioxide face. Each platinum cluster typically contains 30 platinum atoms; within the whole nanoparticle there are approximately 1680 and 180 platinum atoms.

The nano-snowman formed spontaneously from a self-assembled platinum-titanium nanoparticle which was oxidised in air, drawing the titanium atoms out to the surface. The self-assembly occurred in a gas phase, cluster beam condensation source, before size-selection with a spectrometer and deposition onto a carbon surface for oxidation and then imaging. The mass of the snowman was 120,000 atomic mass units. Compared with a more conventional pure platinum catalyst particle, the inclusion of the titanium atoms offers two potential benefits: dilution of how much precious platinum is needed to perform the catalysis, and protection of the cores against sintering (i.e. aggregation of the nanoparticles). The shell is porous enough to allow hydrogen through and the particles are functional in the evolution reaction.

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(FoxNews.com) — Food producer Del Monte has received approval from the Food and Drug Administration to start selling a genetically engineered pineapple with pink flesh.

The new species Ananas comosus has been given the more consumer-friendly name of the “Rosé” and, according to The Packer, Del Monte has quietly been working on the fruit’s development since 2005.

So what makes the usually golden-colored fruit pink? The patened pineapple DNA is injected with a healthy dose of lycopene, the bright red pigment found in tomatoes and watermelons.

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A crop spray which can boost farmer’s wheat yields by one fifth, without the need for genetic modification, has been developed by scientists at Oxford University.

Researchers have found a molecule which helps plants make the best use of the sugary fuel that they generate during photosynthesis. And with more fuel, the plants can produce bigger grains.

Other scientists in Britain have developed ways to genetically modify crops to increase yields, and the Department of Environment is currently deciding whether to allow a field trial for GM wheat in Hertfordshire.

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Those “sell by” or “best by” dates that you see on food packaging? They’re so last century. In the future, built-in sensors in food labels will not only tell you when a product is going bad but also if you’re storing it correctly. Some might even be able to give you a breakdown of its nutritional data. All this is thanks to developments in the burgeoning world of printable electronics. Now researchers at MIT have invented a printing process that could turn a lot of the potential breakthroughs, such as electricity-generating clothing and smart sutures we’ve been seeing in this space, into an inexpensive reality.

“There is a huge need for printing of electronic devices that are extremely inexpensive but provide simple computations and interactive functions,” says A. John Hart, an associate professor in contemporary technology and mechanical engineering.

While some researchers have been studying the possibility of using inkjet printing and rubber stamping, these techniques have produced mixed results at best, often resulting in fuzzy, coffee-ring patterns or incomplete circuits due to the difficulty of controlling ink flow at such small scales.

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JBEI researchers develop efficient and affordable method for plant DNA assembly.

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) in collaboration with Berkeley Lab’s Environmental Genomics & Systems Biology Division and the DOE Joint Genome Institute developed a versatile system (named jStack) which utilizes yeast homologous recombination to efficiently assemble DNA into plant transformation vectors. The new approach will impact plant engineering for the bioenergy, agricultural and pharmaceutical industries.

Although synthetic biology has provided solutions to many societal challenges, little research has been devoted to advancing synthetic biology in plants. Microbes, such as yeast and Escherichia coli (E. coli), have received much of the attention in developing synthetic biology tools due to their fast generation time and the ease of working with these organisms in laboratories. A shortage of characterized DNA parts, along with the difficulty of efficiently assembling multiple and large fragments of DNA into plant transformation vectors, has limited progress in studying and engineering plants to the same degree as their microbial counterparts.

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PHILADELPHIA (CBS) — All the years of your parents saying “NO” to ice cream for breakfast may have actually stunted your brilliance.

According to The Telegraph, a new study performed by Yoshihiko Koga, a professor at Kyorin University in Tokyo, revealed that eating a certain amount of ice cream immediately after waking up in the morning can actually make you smarter.

No, you did not misread that!

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