Food – Lifeboat News: The Blog

Mar 16
2016

Soil Biodiversity Product Earns Organic Certification

Cape Coral, FL-based Ecological Laboratories Inc. has received organic certification for Quantum Light, its flagship beneficial bacteria product specifically formulated to improve soil biodiversity and increase crop yields. With this certification, Ecological can now support the rapidly growing organic farming and lawn care markets with its all-natural product technologies.

“Our objective continues to be the development of products focused on improving crop yields which at the same time contribute to the protection of farms, and the land and water surrounding them,” said Alan Schatten, chief operating officer of Ecological. “This certification is the first of many steps we intend to take to further our mission.”

“Our technology platform, which has been used to solve environmental problems worldwide for over 40 years, continues to grow and improve,” said Delvia Lukito, assistant vice president of research, development and laboratory operations. “Our team will continue to focus its efforts on developing products to support the good work being carried out by the organic farming community.”

Mar 16
2016

DOE’s ARPA-E TERRA projects seek to accelerate sustainable energy crop development

ARPA-E creating sustainable energy crops for the production of renewable transportation fuels from biomass.

In Washington, the DOE’s ARPA-E TERRA projects seek to accelerate the development of sustainable energy crops for the production of renewable transportation fuels from biomass. To accomplish this, the projects uniquely integrate agriculture, information technology, and engineering communities to design and apply new tools for the development of improved varieties of energy sorghum. The TERRA project teams will create novel platforms to enhance methods for crop phenotyping (identifying and measuring the physical characteristics of plants) which are currently time-intensive and imprecise.

The new approaches will include automated methods for observing and recording characteristics of plants and advanced algorithms for analyzing data and predicting plant growth potential. The projects will also produce a large public database of sorghum genotypes, enabling the greater community of plant physiologists,

Bioinformaticians and geneticists to generate breakthroughs beyond TERRA. These innovations will accelerate the annual yield gains of traditional plant breeding and support the discovery of new crop traits that improve water productivity and nutrient use efficiency needed to improve the sustainability of bioenergy crops.

Mar 15
2016

This Sweet, Sweet Treat May Protect The Brain Against Alzheimer’s

Eat plenty of “real” pure Maple Syrup from VT or Maine; and reduce Alzheimers.

Alzheimer’s prevention may be closer — and tastier.

Mar 15
2016

Meet the electric life forms that live on pure energy

Unlike any other life on Earth, these extraordinary bacteria use energy in its purest form – they eat and breathe electrons – and they are everywhere.

Geobacter – a current favourite

Mar 9
2016

Scientists just grew vegetables in ‘Martian’ soil — but there’s a catch

There’s no way of knowing how good our fake Mars soil really is — plus, the plants might be toxic.

Mar 9
2016

Welcome to the CRISPR zoo

Modifying animals to improve food quality consumption.

Birds and bees are just the beginning for a burgeoning technology.

Mar 7
2016

High Glycemic Index Associated With Increased Risk of Lung Cancer

“Lung cancer is one of the most commonly diagnosed cancers and the most common cause of cancer-related deaths in Manitoba”, said Dr. Sri Navaratnam, president and CEO of CancerCare Manitoba. They all are carbohydrate-containing foods with a high glycemic index (GI).

Almost two years ago, the American Lung Association launched LUNG FORCE, an initiative to defeat lung cancer and rally Americans to raise their voices in support of a cure.

Eating a lot of white bread, processed breakfast cereals, cakes and biscuits may increase your risk for lung cancer, warns a new study. Why? However, they recommend individuals to limit food items high in GI such as white bread, corn flakes, bagels and puffed rice. The study results encompass 1,905 cases and 2,413 controls.

Mar 7
2016

Cancer cells get their fuel from neighbours‘ ’words‘

Very bizarre — cancer cells were modifying their metabolism based on communications they were receiving from cells in the microenvironment near the tumor.

Washington D.C., Mar 8 (ANI): A recent study has revealed that cancer cells get 30–60 percent of their fuel from eating their neighbours’ ‘words’.

Researcher Deepak Nagrath from Rice University said their original hypothesis was that cancer cells were modifying their metabolism based on communications they were receiving from cells in the microenvironment near the tumor, but none of them expected to find that they were converting the signals directly into energy.

The results were part of a four-year study by Nagrath, his students and collaborators at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and other institutions about the role of exosomes in cancer metabolism.

Mar 7
2016

ACD/Labs Highlights its Mixture Analysis Software Capabilities at PITTCON 2016

ACD Labs new solution is streamlining lab analysis.

ACD/Labs, a leading cheminformatics company, today announced it will introduce a set of new mixture analysis capabilities to its ACD/ChemAnalytical Workbook and ACD/Spectrus Platform. For more than a decade ACD/Labs’ software solutions have been used for analysis of complex chemical mixtures in a variety of industries including, but not limited to, pharmaceuticals, coatings, petroleum and lubricants, polymers, food and beverages, and environmental elements.„„ With the introduction of t…

Mar 4
2016

The world’s biggest source of freshwater is beneath your feet

You might not give it more than a passing thought, but groundwater is a vital freshwater resource. In Australia alone, the reserves of groundwater help to earn the nation a steady A$34 billion a year from mining, food production and manufacturing.

But it’s also a vulnerable resource. Worldwide, about 1.7 billion people live in regions where groundwater is under stress, 60 percent of them in India and China.

US and Canadian researchers recently calculated the total amount of the world’s groundwater and estimated that it is equivalent to a lake 180 metres deep covering the entire Earth. This makes groundwater the largest active freshwater resource on the planet.