Lifeboat Foundation

Leading The Global Fight Against Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) — Dr. Haileyesus Getahun, MD, MPH, Ph.D., Director of AMR Global Coordination, World Health Organization (WHO)

Dr. Haileyesus Getahun, MD, MPH, Ph.D. is Director of AMR (Antimicrobial Resistance) Global Coordination at the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Quadripartite (FAO/UNEP/WHO/WOAH) Joint Secretariat on Antimicrobial Resistance. (https://www.who.int/about/people/biography/dr-haileyesus-getahun)

Continue reading “Dr Haileyesus Getahun, MD, MPH, PhD — WHO — Leading The Fight Against Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR)” »

Year 2015 😀

The food that will sustain future generations as we colonise our way across space may be none other than our own sh*t, if a new NASA-funded project is successful.

Continue reading “NASA’s Given Researchers $200,000 to Turn Human Poop Into Food” »

Simon Waslander is the Director of Collaboration, at the CureDAO Alliance for the Acceleration of Clinical Research (https://www.curedao.org/), a community-owned platform for the precision health of the future.

CureDAO is creating an open-source platform to discover how millions of factors, like foods, drugs, and supplements affect human health, within a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), making suffering optional through the creation of a “WordPress of health data”.

Continue reading “Open-Sourcing And Accelerating Precision Health Of The Future: Progress, Potential and Possibilities Podcast episode” »

A little over two years after its public debut, Mineral is becoming its own Alphabet company. The team, which was formerly known as the “Computational Agriculture Project” (no prizes for guessing why they adopted the new name), just graduated from the X “moonshot” labs.

“After five years incubating our technology at X, Alphabet’s moonshot factory, Mineral is now an Alphabet company,” CEO Elliott Grant said in a blog post. “Our mission is to help scale sustainable agriculture. We’re doing this by developing a platform and tools that help gather, organize, and understand never-before known or understood information about the plant world — and make it useful and actionable.”

Continue reading “Alphabet X graduates robotic agtech firm Mineral” »

An international team has succeeded in propagating a commercial hybrid rice strain as a clone through seeds with 95 percent efficiency. This could lower the cost of hybrid rice seed, making high-yielding, disease resistant rice strains available to low-income farmers worldwide. The work was published Dec. 27 in Nature Communications.

First-generation hybrids of crop plants often show higher performance than their parent strains, a phenomenon called hybrid vigor. But this does not persist if the hybrids are bred together for a second generation. So when farmers want to use high-performing hybrid plant varieties, they need to purchase new seed each season.

Rice, the staple crop for half the world’s population, is relatively costly to breed as a hybrid for a yield improvement of about 10 percent. This means that the benefits of rice hybrids have yet to reach many of the world’s farmers, said Gurdev Khush, adjunct professor emeritus in the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of California, Davis. Working at the International Rice Research Institute from 1967 until retiring to UC Davis in 2002, Khush led efforts to create new rice high-yield rice varieties, work for which he received the World Food Prize in 1996.

A variety of healthy eating patterns are linked to reduced risk of premature death, according to a new study led by Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health researchers. They found that participants who scored high on adherence to at least one of four healthy eating patterns were less likely to die during the study period from any cause and less likely to die from cardiovascular disease, cancer, or respiratory disease, compared with people with lower scores. The findings are consistent with the current Dietary Guidelines for America, which recommend multiple healthy eating patterns.

“The Dietary Guidelines for Americans are intended to provide science-based dietary advice that promotes good health and reduces major chronic diseases. Thus, it is critical to examine the associations between DGAs-recommended dietary patterns and long-term health outcomes, especially mortality,” said corresponding author Frank Hu, Fredrick J. Stare Professor of Nutrition and Epidemiology and chair of the Department of Nutrition.

The study will be published online January 9, 2023, in JAMA Internal Medicine.

Researchers at Princeton’s Department of Chemistry discovered the first known de novo protein that catalyzes, or drives, the synthesis of quantum dots.

Nature uses 20 canonical amino acids.

Continue reading “Princeton Chemists Create Quantum Dots at Room Temperature Using Custom Protein” »

Year 2019 face_with_colon_three

The matter of taste and how it is influenced by external factors is a subject of fascination for many people (witness the proliferation of polls about which sense you would give up if needed, for example). In the foodservice industry, the question of how people perceive flavors is big business, used to predict upcoming food trends and what will resonate with tomorrow’s fickle diner.

Continue reading “How Robot Tongues Are Measuring Taste For The Food And Beverage Industry” »

Princeton Engineering researchers have developed a cost-effective way to use breakfast foods to create a material that can remove salt and microplastics from seawater.

The researchers used egg whites to create an aerogel, a versatile material known for its light weight and porosity. It has a range of uses, including water filtration, energy storage, and sound and thermal insulation. Craig Arnold, the Susan Dod Brown Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and vice dean of innovation at Princeton, leads a lab that focuses on creating new materials, including aerogels, for engineering purposes.

One day, sitting in a faculty meeting, he had an idea.