Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 8614

Engineering Food: The Impossible Whopper.

“Now, let’s compare the estrogen hormone in an impossible whopper to the whopper made from hormone implanted beef. The impossible whopper has 44 mg of estrogen and the whopper has 2.5 ng of estrogen. Now let me refresh your metric system. There are 1 million nanograms (ng) in one milligram (mg). That means an impossible whopper has 18 million times as much estrogen as a regular whopper. Just six glasses of soy milk per day has enough estrogen to grow boobs on a male. That’s the equivalent of eating four impossible whoppers per day. You would have to eat 880 pounds of beef from an implanted steer to equal the amount of estrogen in one birth control pill.”

The impossible whopper is being advertised by Burger King as a plant based alternative to the whopper. When food manufacturers started talking about making artificial meat, I, too, thought it would be impossible to make a hamburger cheaply enough to make it competitive. You see, I assumed that they would have to buy the individual amino acids (the building blocks for protein) and chemically string them together in the proper order, then remove the reagents (chemicals needed to cause the chain reactions) and then add something to give it the right textures.

The impossible whopper (made by Impossible Foods) bypassed all of those steps. Let’s compare the two. The impossible whopper patty is made from 24 ingredients. The most important ingredient is soy protein. The whopper patty has just one ingredient. That would be beef.

Continue reading “Stangle: Impossible burgers are made of what?” | >

Writing in Nature Medicine, an international team headed by researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine describe a new way to effectively deliver a gene-silencing vector to adult amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) mice, resulting in long-term suppression of the degenerative motor neuron disorder if treatment vector is delivered prior to disease onset, and blockage of disease progression in adult animals if treatment is initiated when symptoms have already appeared.

The findings are published in the December 23, 2019 online issue of the journal Nature Medicine. Martin Marsala, MD, professor in the Department of Anesthesiology at UC San Diego School of Medicine and a member of the Sanford Consortium for Regenerative Medicine, is senior author of the study.

ALS is a neurodegenerative that affects nerve cells in the brain and . Motor neurons responsible for communicating movement are specifically harmed, with subsequent, progressive loss of muscle control affecting the ability to speak, eat, move and breathe. More than 5,000 Americans are diagnosed with ALS each year, with an estimated 30,000 persons currently living with the disease. While there are symptomatic treatments for ALS, there is currently no cure. The majority of patients succumb to the disease two to five years after diagnosis.

Read more | >

Raising hope of effective treatment for age-related macular degeneration (AMD), researchers have found that the brain knows how to integrate natural and artificial vision, while maintaining information processing that is important for vision.

AMD is a common cause of severe vision loss in among those aged 50 and over.

Though there is no cure for AMD, significant recent advancements in artificial retina implants may lead to effective treatment.

Read more | >

When it comes to kefir benefits, there are more than you can shake a well populated gut microbiome at. Because the drink – typically made from cow, goat or sheep milk, that gets the funky, fermented treatment – is resplendent in potential wins for your health.

But it can be a bit of a, erm, challenging concept. Why? Well, the texture can wind up somewhat lumpy, and the taste is distinctly sour. It’s fermented by adding kefir grains, which are colonies of yeast and lactic acid bacteria that look like tiny gel-like beads, similar to those used for sourdough, to milk and leaving for 24 hours, allowing the microorganisms to multiply and ferment the lactose to lactic acid. Bang: you’ve got DIY kefir.

Though — shocker — is isn’t vegan, it is possible to make from non-dairy milks or drinks, like coconut water, but the benefits proven in the same way. It is however low in lactose (the natural sugar in the milk), as the process of making kefir turns the lactose into lactic acid, so often lactose intolerant people can drink it.

Read more | >

Dr Shima Beigi BSc, MSc, MSc, Ph.D. founder of Mindfulness Engineering™️ and ideaXme Rich Connectedness™️ ambassador interviews Dr Jon Finn founder Tougher Minds.

Dr Jon Finn:

Jon began his career in elite sport — mainly professional football, rugby, cricket and golf. His work focused on helping people to perform to their potential. He realised that the same approach could be adapted to help a broader range of people, of all ages and in all walks of life.

So he founded Tougher Minds and began developing and delivering training in education and business to groups of varying sizes. The programmes has reached over 10,000 people during the last decade. The consultancy is now well established in the corporate sector and works with companies in the City of London, the US and Europe.

Continue reading “How To Build A Tougher Mind: Dr Jon Finn” | >

Scientists at the University of Bristol and the Technical University of Denmark have achieved quantum teleportation between two computer chips for the first time. The team managed to send information from one chip to another instantly without them being physically or electronically connected, in a feat that opens the door for quantum computers and quantum internet.

This kind of teleportation is made possible by a phenomenon called quantum entanglement, where two particles become so entwined with each other that they can “communicate” over long distances. Changing the properties of one particle will cause the other to instantly change too, no matter how much space separates the two of them. In essence, information is being teleported between them.

Hypothetically, there’s no limit to the distance over which quantum teleportation can operate – and that raises some strange implications that puzzled even Einstein himself. Our current understanding of physics says that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, and yet, with quantum teleportation, information appears to break that speed limit. Einstein dubbed it “spooky action at a distance.”

Read more | >

Talk with an Alzheimer’s researcher and you’ll likely hear the same lament: Finding a treatment or cure is incredibly challenging because scientists are not even certain what exactly causes the neurological disease in the first place.

In fact, researchers speak of a “web of causation” that can lead to Alzheimer’s. In addition to genetics, scientists look to so-called lifestyle elements such as blood pressure and blood sugar levels. Even the bacteria that live in our mouths are being scrutinized for their potential role in Alzheimer’s.

One element that researchers are completely certain about is that people who carry the apolipoprotein E4 gene — known as APOE4 — are at a greater risk of developing Alzheimer’s.

Read more | >