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Blog – Page 1674

“There is still significant interest and potential in industrial uses of hemp,” said Dr. Jeffrey Steiner.

How can hemp production help boost local Native American economies? This is what a $10 million grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) National Institute of Food and Agriculture hopes to achieve as they recently awarded this grant to the Global Hemp Innovation Center at Oregon State University (OSU) to foster collaboration with 13 Native American Tribes across the western United States, including California, Montana, Nevada, Idaho, Washington, and Oregon with the goal of creating economic stimuli for those communities while improving hemp production.

The grant comes with four primary objectives in achieving collaboration with the 13 Tribal nations, including educational opportunities, technology development, building trade networks, and ensuring product quality. This grant comes as the 2018 Farm Bill helped legalize hemp, leading to hemp production reaching $824 million across the United States in 2021.

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“The challenge is getting into those hidden places,” says Machado. “It’s rare that Aedes aegypti breeding areas are found out in the open, like on a sidewalk, because when people see them, they destroy them. But with drones, we can get into areas we just can’t otherwise.”

Birdview has carried out studies with several partners since 2021, including the United Nations, the University of São Paulo (USP), and the state-owned Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa), to better understand the effectiveness of releasing the disease-fighting mosquitoes with drones. First they looked at how the mechanism of the drone and outside conditions, like wind turbulence, affected the survival rate of the mosquitoes and their ability to fly.

The results were positive, so they moved on to flight-and-release tests in the Brazilian states of Pernambuco and Paraná, as well as Florida, where they’ve been working with the Lee County Mosquito Control District to see how far the mosquitoes spread upon release. They used the “mark, release and recapture” method, which involves sterile male mosquitoes being marked with a certain color before being released and later recaptured with traps so the team could see how far they had flown. They also set traps where eggs could be laid and monitored.

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Marking a significant advancement in medical technologies, a team of researchers from the Medical University of Vienna and Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien) has 3D printed the world’s first high-resolution brain.

Modeled after the structure of brain fibers, the 3D-printed “brain phantom” can be imaged with a specialized form of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) known as dMRI.

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UK-based construction technology firm Automated Architecture (AUAR) has bagged $3.2 million in funding to advance its mission to automate the construction process to solve housing-related issues.

AUAR is creating a network of dispersed micro-factories for environmentally friendly timber homes. AUAR claims that it presents an alternative vision for the built environment, in which local ecosystems comprising developers, contractors, architects, and communities are empowered to construct better homes instead of centralized automation in massive factories.

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