These underground farms could feed 9 billion people, using 1/3 the space of Hawaii.
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Category: food – Page 329
A new fully-automated farm in Japan can be used to grow vegetables anywhere on Earth with little human input, but it may not yet be a solution to solve hunger, the company’s CEO told Sputnik Japan.
Vertical Farming
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Anjan Contractor’s 3D food printer might evoke visions of the “replicator” popularized in Star Trek, from which Captain Picard was constantly interrupting himself to order tea. And indeed Contractor’s company, Systems & Materials Research Corporation, just got a six month, $125,000 grant from NASA to create a prototype of his universal food synthesizer.
But Contractor, a mechanical engineer with a background in 3D printing, envisions a much more mundane—and ultimately more important—use for the technology. He sees a day when every kitchen has a 3D printer, and the earth’s 12 billion people feed themselves customized, nutritionally-appropriate meals synthesized one layer at a time, from cartridges of powder and oils they buy at the corner grocery store. Contractor’s vision would mean the end of food waste, because the powder his system will use is shelf-stable for up to 30 years, so that each cartridge, whether it contains sugars, complex carbohydrates, protein or some other basic building block, would be fully exhausted before being returned to the store.
Ubiquitous food synthesizers would also create new ways of producing the basic calories on which we all rely. Since a powder is a powder, the inputs could be anything that contain the right organic molecules. We already know that eating meat is environmentally unsustainable, so why not get all our protein from insects?
What will be interesting most about block chaining is when more countries drop their own traditional currency models & move to block chaining like one of the countries in Africa announced 2 weeks ago. I do know that many 2nd & 3rd world countries are finding electronic currency more appealing due to the Central Bank’s policies; however, what will be the impacts at the end of the day felt across the world as more and more 2nd & 3rd world markets switch their models. Immediately, we see risks with central banks; the question is where else (WBO, WTO, US, etc)
Many countries have experimented with price fixing and central planning over the last century. Right now, Venezuela’s government is fixing the prices of many products. This has resulted in widespread shortages of goods which we, as the lucky inhabitants of semi-free economies, take for granted.
Price fixing has failed in every area of the economy in which it has been tried. But while few serious economists would suggest that we have a team of bureaucrats set the price of rubber, wheat or coffee, we do have one sphere of the economy which is still centrally planned – our monetary system. This will fail just like all central planning fails. We are now moving into a dangerous new phase of price fixing by central banks. Having failed to stimulate economies with years of zero per cent interest rates, they are now discussing the prospect of negative interest rates (and some have even introduced them), the reductio ad absurdum of modern monetary economics.
Economist Friedrich von Hayek won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1974 for his exposition of how central banks’ manipulation of money and interest rates causes distortions to the market and generates the boom bust cycle. He also wrote several papers in the 1970s on how allowing companies to issue their own private money would be the only long-term solution. If people could choose which money to use, it is highly unlikely that they would go with that which is routinely debased by the government or used for wild credit expansion by the banking sector.
Here is a funny Time Magazine article highlighting all those dire predictions made decades ago:
Mind control, a steep uptick in kelp farming, and other crazy predictions that have yet to come true.
However, one also must look at the past for insights and guidance on things that were done wrong to ensure bad history is not repeated.
Therefore, let me share with you a part of history that we need to be aware of and protect our future from ever repeating again.
Many folks have never heard of Poor Farms in the South and Poor Houses in some parts of the Midwest. Before soc. Security and Welfare we had poor farms/ houses. They date from the late 1800s until 1930s.
Poor farms/ houses were often filled with the elderly and others that had no money or anyone to take care them. People often worked the land for 16+ hours days, dressed in rags, and had very little to eat. Once you were there you could not leave ever until you died.
My grandfather always taught us that if Social Security and Welfare were ever eliminated, that a model of Poor Farms/ houses would return.
Cotton Candy’s new inspiration.
Scientists are now able to spin a three-dimensional slab of gelatin that contains a microvascular network, something very like our capillaries, using a cotton candy-esque machine.
What do cotton candy and artificial organs have in common? More than you might think.
Leon Bellan, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Vanderbilt University, is using a cotton candy machine to spin out networks of tiny threads comparable in size, density, and complexity to the patterns formed by capillaries.
Interesting Futurism Animation 22
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Interesting. What do you think of this?
A mammal brain has been defrosted from cryogenic storage in an almost perfect state for the first time. This breakthrough, accomplished using a rabbit brain, brings us one – albeit tiny – step closer to the prospect of reanimating a human brain that has been cryogenically preserved.
After death, organs begin to decay, but we can delay this by cooling these tissues, just like freezing food. But in the same way that a frozen strawberry becomes soggy when defrosted, it is difficult to perfectly preserve mammals at cold temperatures. We, and strawberries, contain large amounts of water, which freezes into ice crystals that damage cells.
Cryoprotectants can prevent this ice damage, working like medical-grade antifreezes and preventing organs from freezing. This works in small worms and rabbit kidneys, but it needs to be administered quickly, which usually causes brains to dehydrate and shrink.