Lifeboat Foundation

Ancient Palmyra has gripped public imagination since its picturesque ruins were “rediscovered” in the seventeenth century by western travelers. The most legendary story of ancient Palmyra is that of Queen Zenobia, who was ruling over a thriving city in the Syrian Desert and dared to challenge the Roman Empire, but ultimately was defeated.

Her kingdom was subjugated, and the city was reduced to a small settlement without any wide-ranging importance. This has only recently been overshadowed by the catastrophic events of the Syrian Civil War that saw the archaeological site and the museum plundered and many monuments destroyed.

A study led by Durham University’s Fetal and Neonatal Research Lab, UK, took 4D ultrasound scans of 100 pregnant women to see how their unborn babies responded after being exposed to flavors from foods eaten by their mothers.

Researchers looked at how the fetuses reacted to either carrot or kale flavors just a short time after the flavors had been ingested by the mothers.

Fetuses exposed to carrot showed more “laughter-face” responses while those exposed to kale showed more “cry-face” responses.

According to 130,000 years’ worth of data on what mammals have been eating, we’re in the midst of a mass biodiversity crisis. Not great!

This revelation was borne of a new study, conducted by an international team of researchers and published in the journal Science, that used machine learning to paint a detailed past — and harrowing future — of what happens to food webs when land mammals go extinct. Spoiler alert: it’s pretty grim stuff.

“While about 6 percent of land mammals have gone extinct in that time, we estimate that more than 50 percent of mammal food web links have disappeared,” Evan Fricke, ecologist and lead author of the study, said in a press release. “And the mammals most likely to decline, both in the past and now, are key for mammal food web complexity.”

The new fund will be focused on startups in energy, manufacturing, agriculture, healthcare, satellites and more.

As the poet Dylan Thomas once explained, it is “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower.”

Organic photochemistry brings life to Earth, allowing plants to “eat” sunlight. Using this power of light to make new molecules in the lab instead of the leaf, from fuel to pharmaceuticals, is one of the grand challenges of photochemical research.

What is old is new again. Sometimes gaining new insight requires a return to old tools, with a modern twist. Now, a collaborative team from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and Princeton University has resurrected a century-old microwave technique to reveal a surprising feature of well-established light-driven chemistry.

Say you live across from a bakery. Sometimes you are hungry and therefore tempted when odors waft through your window, but other times satiety makes you indifferent. Sometimes popping over for a popover seems trouble-free but sometimes your spiteful ex is there. Your brain balances many influences in determining what you’ll do. A new MIT study details an example of this working in a much simpler animal, highlighting a potentially fundamental principle of how nervous systems integrate multiple factors to guide food-seeking behavior.

All animals share the challenge of weighing diverse sensory cues and internal states when formulating behaviors, but scientists know little about how this actually occurs. To gain deep insight, the research team based at The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory turned to the C. elegans worm, whose well-defined behavioral states and 302-cell nervous system make the complex problem at least tractable. They emerged with a case study of how in a crucial olfactory neuron called AWA, many sources of state and sensory information converge to independently throttle the expression of a key smell receptor. The integration of their influence on that receptor’s abundance then determines how AWA guides roaming around for food.

“In this study, we dissected the mechanisms that control the levels of a single olfactory receptor in a single olfactory neuron, based on the ongoing state and stimuli the animal experiences,” said senior author Steven Flavell, Lister Brothers Associate Professor in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. “Understanding how the integration happens in one cell will point the way for how it may happen in general, in other worm neurons and in other animals.”

The global dairy industry is changing. Among the disruptions is competition from food alternatives not produced using animals – including potential challenges posed by synthetic milk.

Synthetic milk does not require cows or other animals. It can have the same biochemical make up as animal milk, but is grown using an emerging biotechnology technique know as “precision fermentation” that produces biomass cultured from cells.

More than 80 percent of the world’s population regularly consume dairy products. There have been increasing calls to move beyond animal-based food systems to more sustainable forms of food production.

Most neurons in the human brain are generated from neural stem cells during embryonic development. After birth, a small reservoir of stem cells remains in the brain that keeps on producing new neurons throughout life. However, the question arises as to whether these new neurons really support brain function? And if so, can we improve brain capacity by increasing the number of neurons? The research group of Prof. Federico Calegari at the Center for Regenerative Therapies Dresden (CRTD) of TU Dresden has answered these questions, now published in the EMBO Journal.

In their latest study, the scientists analysed healthy adult mice in which the small reservoir of stem cells was manipulated in order to increase in number. As a result, the number of neurons, generated from these stem cells, also increased. In mice, these neurons mainly populate the brain area responsible for interpreting odours. In fact, olfaction is one to the most powerful senses in mice, fundamental for finding food and escape from predators. As powerful as the sense of smell naturally is in mice, in the following behavioural experiments the scientists found that mice with more neurons were able to distinguish extremely similar odours that normal mice failed to. Hence, this study is fundamental in proving that stem cells can be used to improve brain function.

“Evolution gave mice an extremely sensitive olfactory system. It is amazing that by adding few neurons we could improve something that seemed already close to perfection,” states Prof. Federico Calegari. “This study sets the basis for our research, which now is focused on finding out whether we could apply our strategy as a therapeutic approach in neurodegenerative models.”

Nuro makes autonomous vehicles that can delivery groceries and food and have no space for humans on them. It reached a recent deal with Uber.