Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: food – Page 127

Why 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’

Ask medieval historian Michael McCormick what year was the worst to be alive, and he’s got an answer: “536.” Not 1,349, when the Black Death wiped out half of Europe. Not 1918, when the flu killed 50 million to 100 million people, mostly young adults. But 536. In Europe, “It was the beginning of one of the worst periods to be alive, if not the worst year,” says McCormick, a historian and archaeologist who chairs the Harvard University Initiative for the Science of the Human Past.

A mysterious fog plunged Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia into darkness, day and night—for 18 months. “For the sun gave forth its light without brightness, like the moon, during the whole year,” wrote Byzantine historian Procopius. Temperatures in the summer of 536 fell 1.5°C to 2.5°C, initiating the coldest decade in the past 2,300 years. Snow fell that summer in China; crops failed; people starved. The Irish chronicles record “a failure of bread from the years 536–539.” Then, in 541, bubonic plague struck the Roman port of Pelusium, in Egypt. What came to be called the Plague of Justinian spread rapidly, wiping out one-third to one-half of the population of the eastern Roman Empire and hastening its collapse, McCormick says.

Historians have long known that the middle of the sixth century was a dark hour in what used to be called the Dark Ages, but the source of the mysterious clouds has long been a puzzle. Now, an ultraprecise analysis of ice from a Swiss glacier by a team led by McCormick and glaciologist Paul Mayewski at the Climate Change Institute of The University of Maine (UM) in Orono has fingered a culprit. At a workshop at Harvard this week, the team reported that a cataclysmic volcanic eruption in Iceland spewed ash across the Northern Hemisphere early in 536. Two other massive eruptions followed, in 540 and 547. The repeated blows, followed by plague, plunged Europe into economic stagnation that lasted until 640, when another signal in the ice—a spike in airborne lead—marks a resurgence of silver mining, as the team reports in this week.

DJI releases new firmware update for Phantom 4 Multispectral drone

Designed for precision agriculture and environmental management use cases, the P4 Multispectral drone combines data from six separate sensors to measure the health of crops. It can be used to monitor everything from individual plants to entire fields, as well as weeds, insects, and a variety of soil conditions.

The P4 Multispectral drone is compatible with standard industry workflows including flight programming, mapping, and analytics software from DJI and other leading providers. Using the DJI GS Pro application, you can create automated and repeatable missions including flight planning, mission execution, and flight data management. Data collected can be easily imported into DJI Terra or a suite of third-party software including Pix4D Mapper and DroneDeploy, for analysis and to generate additional vegetation index maps.

The drone was first announced in 2019.

Chennai Teacher Makes Homemade Fertilizers From Kitchen Waste, Grows Over 400 Plants

A midst the hustle and bustle in one of Chennai’s busiest streets, Chrompet, 51-year-old S Sathyanarayanan has created a green paradise on his 1,200 sq ft terrace. He grows 400 plants including ornamental flowers such as moss roses, medicinal plants like moringa, fruits like figs, and vegetables like lady’s finger, potatoes and more.

However, what’s unique about Sathya’s garden is that he prepares a variety of liquid fertilizers using kitchen ingredients to nourish his plants. Further, he also prepares a mix of water, jaggery, and an organic Waste Decomposer (WDC) solution in a 250-litre drum. This is fed to all plants regularly, which ensures healthy and pest-free growth.

“I started terrace gardening in 2015 after my family and I moved into our newly constructed home here. Earlier, we were living on the ground floor of a rented home and I could not grow many plants, as the availability of space was an issue. I started my gardening journey with 50 pots of money plants, tulsi, tomatoes and others. Today, my garden has over 400 pots, which grow ornamental flowers, fruits, and vegetables,” says Sathya, adding that regular visitors to his garden include buzzing honey bees and chirping love birds.

Microplastics pass through fish, altering nutrient metabolism

When Dong-Fang Deng and her students make feed for the fish they raise at UWM’s School of Freshwater Sciences, they often use ground fishmeal—dried fish parts from fisheries or wild catch—as the protein source.

It’s possible to find microplastics in commercial fish food, she said, because the that end up in fishmeal consume some of the microplastics that litter the waters they live in. But after Deng actually spotted tiny plastic beads in pre-ground fishmeal, it prompted a question.

“We wondered, ” If the fish eat the microplastics, could the particles accumulate inside their bodies?’” said Deng, professor of freshwater sciences who researches the role of diet in , or aquaculture.

Else Labs Announces Pro Kitchen Focused Oliver Fleet As It Pauses Rollout of Home Cooking Robot

Else Labs, the company behind the countertop home cooking robot called Oliver, announced today the launch of Oliver Fleet, a commercial kitchen reimagining of its original core product.

The new Fleet solution is a respin of its original standalone Oliver home cooking robot into a solution that allows multiple units to be used and managed simultaneously in professional kitchen environments to automate cooking tasks. According to company CEO Khalid Aboujassoum, while the Oliver Fleet units look the same from the outside as the original consumer unit, they’ve been built to withstand the more rugged requirements of the professional kitchen.

“It might look like the household unit from the outside, but the guts of the Oliver Fleet are different,” Aboujassoum said. “The Fleet units are designed for back-to-back cooking, for that harsh environment in the commercial kitchen compared to the household.”

The World’s Biggest Vertical Farm Just Opened in Dubai

The Dubai facility has the capacity to produce over two million pounds of leafy greens annually, and will grow lettuces, arugula, mixed salad greens, and spinach.

ECO stands for Emirates Crop One; the vertical farm is a joint venture between Crop One Holdings (a Massachusetts-based vertical farming company) and Emirates Flight Catering (the catering business that serves Emirates Airlines). Greens from the vertical farm will be served onboard Emirates flights, and will also be sold in grocery stores in the UAE. Since they’re grown in a sterile environment without pesticides, herbicides, or chemicals, the greens come ready-to-eat and don’t need to be washed.

The UAE is in many ways an ideal location for vertical farming, if not a place where the technology may soon become essential. It gets an abundance of sunlight but doesn’t have much water to speak of (it was, fittingly, the field testing site for a nanoparticle technology that helps sandy soil retain water and nutrients); that means vertical farms could use energy from solar panels to grow food indoors using 95 percent less water than traditional agriculture.