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“We are very pleased that we can now start with the first activities to stimulate and consolidate cellular agriculture in the Netherlands,” said Ira van Eelen, CEO of KindEart. Tech and a board member of Cellular Agriculture Netherlands. “With this we can guarantee that the Netherlands remains the ideal place for cellular agriculture to thrive. We have a rich history in cellular agriculture and are a global leader in biotechnology, alternative proteins and food innovation. Supported by this visionary leadership that the Dutch government is showing again today, we will expand our team in the coming months and roll out the first activities around public research, scaling up, and education.”

Indeed, the Netherlands has been demonstrating considerable progress in developing cultured meat. In July, for example, Dutch company Meatable revealed its first lab-grown sausages, which are expected to go on sale to consumers by 2025. The addition of €60 million in government funding will make the Netherlands an even more attractive location for companies in the sector.

Currently a niche and miniscule part of the overall food market, cultured meat has potential to become another “exponential” technology – much like the semiconductor industry, solar energy, genome sequencing, and so on. The benefits in terms of animal welfare, climate change, food safety, antibiotic resistance, land and water usage could be substantial.

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Picking your nose might seem harmless albeit gross, but new research is showing it may have some devastating consequences, according to a press release published by Griffith University Friday.

A direct path to the brain

The new research demonstrates that a bacteria can travel through the olfactory nerve in the nose and into the brain in mice, where it creates markers that are a tell-tale sign of Alzheimer’s disease.

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Semiconductors are small, ubiquitous, and underappreciated. They are the brains of every modern device.

When Nancy Pelosi traveled to Taiwan in August, it made front-page news around the world and raised the specter of an all-out war between the U.S. and China.

Early in October, the Biden administration made a far more decisive move against China — but it barely made the news in Australia.

Biden decided to unequivocally sever China’s access to high-end computer chips (aka semiconductors).

William_Potter/iStock.

Early in October, the Biden administration made a far more decisive move against China – but it barely made the news in Australia.

Continue reading “Tech war: How the US chip embargo is eroding China’s research base” | >

If you’ve been closely following the progress of Open AI, the company run by Sam Altman whose neural nets can now write original text and create original pictures with astonishing ease and speed, you might just skip this piece.

If, on the other hand, you’ve only been vaguely paying attention to the company’s progress and the increasing traction that other so-called “generative” AI companies are suddenly gaining and want to better understand why, you might benefit from this interview with James Currier, a five-time founder and now venture investor who cofounded the firm NFX five years ago with several of his serial founder friends.

Currier falls into the camp of people following the progress closely — so closely that NFX has made numerous related investments in “generative tech” as he describes it, and it’s garnering more of the team’s attention every month. In fact, Currier doesn’t think the buzz about this new wrinkle on AI isn’t hype so much as a realization that the broader startup world is suddenly facing a very big opportunity for the first time in a long time. “Every 14 years,” says Currier, “we get one of these Cambrian explosions. We had one around the internet in ’94. We had one around mobile phones in 2008. Now we’re having another one in 2022.”

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New U.K. law indicates sperm can be used from as far back as 55 years.

When a boy was born this week in the U.K. using sperm frozen in 1996, the issue arose of how long sperm can be stored for before it is actually put to use.

A timeframe extended by 45 years.

Bluecinema/iStock.

A recent change in one of the country’s laws will now allow for more babies to be born from sperm frozen more than 50 years ago, according to a report by The Guardian published on Friday.

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The NASA Perseverance rover isn’t only exploring Mars for the scientific discoveries it can make now — it’s also paving the way for future missions which intend to bring samples back from Mars to Earth for the first time. This complicated plan involves multiple vehicles including spacecraft, a lander, and two helicopters, which will work together to collect the samples from the Martian surface, take them to orbit, and return them to Earth. But Perseverance is getting the process started by collecting samples, sealing them up in tubes, and leaving these tubes on the surface for future missions to collect.

Now, NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) have announced that they have selected the first samples to be deposited on the surface ready for collection. “Never before has a scientifically curated collection of samples from another planet been collected and placed for return to Earth,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for science at NASA Headquarters, in a statement. “NASA and ESA have reviewed the proposed site and the Mars samples that will be deployed for this cache as soon as next month. When that first tube is positioned on the surface, it will be a historic moment in space exploration.”

Ten of the 14 samples which Perseverance has collected so far will be deposited in a region of the Jezero Crater called Three Forks. This region was chosen as it is flat and does not have obstacles like large boulders which could cause issues for future collection. The samples chosen for collection include both igneous and sedimentary rocks collected from the rover’s 8-mile journey across Jezero.

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New research from SAHMRI has found a link between the omega-3 fatty acid known as docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) and increased IQ among children born prematurely.

Preterm children are more likely to have lower IQ scores and cognitive impairments compared with term-born children.

Dr. Jacqueline Gould, who led the study now published in the New England Journal of Medicine, says infants born at the earliest gestations are deprived of the natural supply of DHA that normally builds up in the brain during the last trimester of pregnancy.

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Biomedical and electrical engineers at UNSW Sydney have developed a new way to measure neural activity using light—rather than electricity—which could lead to a complete reimagining of medical technologies like nerve-operated prosthetics and brain-machine interfaces.

Professor François Ladouceur, with UNSW’s School of Electrical Engineering and Telecommunications, says the multi-disciplinary team has just demonstrated in the lab what it proved theoretically shortly before the pandemic: that sensors built using liquid crystal and integrated optics technologies—dubbed “optrodes”—can register nerve impulses in a living animal body.

Not only do these optrodes perform just as well as conventional electrodes—that use electricity to detect a nerve impulse—but they also address “very thorny issues that competing technologies cannot address,” says Prof. Ladouceur.

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