Lifeboat Foundation

A Finnish research project has created a batch of single-cell protein using just electricity, water, carbon dioxide and microbes, in a small portable lab. While we’re hesitant to call it “food” in its current state, the stuff is edible and nutritious enough to be used for cooking or livestock feed, and the team hopes that the system can eventually be used to grow food in areas where it’s needed the most.

Autonomous driving technologies are already established in mining and agriculture thanks to companies such as Caterpillar and John Deere.

Summary: Funding bias is junk science used by industry to hoodwink consumers. This report shows you how to protect yourself against the problem.

The funding bias scandal made headlines recently when the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) broke the news that the sugar industry had paid-off Harvard scientists to down-play sugars role in heart disease. JAMA reported that the sugar industry trade group called the Sugar Research Foundation instructed Harvard researchers to publish reports that down-played sugar’s connection to heart disease, and instead cast doubts on saturated fat.

And in another study, after examining over 200 research studies paid for by a food or beverage organization, researchers from Children’s Hospital Boston found that industry-funded studies were four to eight times more likely to report positive health benefits from consuming those products.

Continue reading “The Dirty Secret of the Food Industry — Funding Bias” »

The future of food?

This substance is a complex natural polymer called lignin, and it is the second largest renewable carbon source on the planet after cellulose.

This natural abundance has drawn high interest from the research community to chemically convert lignin into biofuels. And if plant life really does hold the building blocks for renewable fuels, it would seem that we are literally surrounded by potential energy sources everywhere green grows.

But untangling the complex chains of these polymers into components, which can be useful for liquid fuel and other applications ranging from pharmaceuticals to plastics, has presented an ongoing challenge to science and industry.

Continue reading “Surrounded: In every plant—from trees to crops—there exists a substance that makes up its wood or stems, fiber, and cell walls” »

Throwback from 6 October 2016…

According to Eugenia Kuyda, co-founder of the AI startup Luka, memorial bots are ‘the future.’ The CEO recently unveiled the ‘digital monument’ to her deceased friend Roman Mazurenko, feeding thousands of text messages to a neural network to create a Luka chatbot in his image.

In the App Store, Luka is described as ‘a new messenger with AI-powered chatbots. They help you find GIFs and funny videos, make plans together, pick places to eat, play trivia games and have fun.’

Continue reading “Would YOU talk to a dead friend an as AI? ‘Memorial’ chatbot revealed” »

New film, New Ideas New Inventions. Billions in Change 2 shows how simple life-changing inventions provide clean water, electricity, and improve the lives of farmers. See how these inventions will enable the unlucky half of the world to improve their lives.

For more information go to BillionsInChange.com

Continue reading “Billions In Change 2 Official Film” »

The shift will occur with the advent of cheap artificial meat. Technological change has often helped to catalyse ethical change. The $300m deal China signed last month to buy lab-grown meat marks the beginning of the end of livestock farming. But it won’t happen quickly: the great suffering is likely to continue for many years.

The suffering inherent in mass meat production can’t be justified. And as the artificial meat industry grows, the last argument for farming animals has now collapsed.

Many of us have experienced the uphill struggle to control our weight as we get older. We cannot eat whatever we like and stay slim like when we were younger, our holiday indulgences refusing to go away. The battle of the bulge gets harder the older we get, and there was little we could do about it, but now science has come to the rescue and is starting to unravel the mystery of why we find it harder to lose weight as we get older.

A new study led by Professor Vishwa Deep Dixit at Yale University shows how both the nervous system and the immune system talk to each other and, in doing so, control metabolism and inflammation in the body[1]. This study sheds light on why older adults often find it difficult to burn stored belly fat, increasing the risk of a number of metabolic disorders.

Perhaps more intriguingly, the study also shows some potential approaches to targeting the problem, thus helping older adults to improve their metabolism, improve weight control and reduce the risk of metabolic disorders.

Continue reading “The Immune System Makes It Harder to Lose Weight as We Age” »