Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: food – Page 127

Your appliances, car and home are designed to make your life easier and automate tasks you perform daily: switch lights on and off when you enter and exit a room, remind you that your tomatoes are about to go bad, personalize the temperature of the house depending on the weather and preferences of each person in the household.

To do their magic, they need the internet to reach out for help and correlate data. Without internet access, your smart thermostat can collect data about you, but it doesn’t know what the weather forecast is, and it isn’t powerful enough to process all of the information to decide what to do.

But it’s not just the things in your home that are communicating over the internet. Workplaces, malls and cities are also becoming smarter, and the smart devices in those places have similar requirements. In fact, the Internet of Things (IoT) is already widely used in transport and logistics, agriculture and farming, and industry automation. There were around 22 billion internet-connected devices in use around the world in 2018, and the number is projected to grow to over 50 billion by 2030.

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Officials and engineers at Kawasaki have unveiled Bex, a quadruped robot that can walk, roll around and even carry a human passenger on its back—at this year’s 2022 International Robot Exhibition in Tokyo. At the exhibition, Bex was configured to look like an Ibex, a type of wild goat, which is where it gets its name.

Bex was created as part of an effort at Kawasaki the company calls a “robust humanoid platform” with a project called Kaleido. Most such efforts from the project have involved robots that are halfway between human-like robots and wheeled bots. Bex appears to be an aberration—it is a quadruped with on its knees. The robot can walk around, similar in many respects to a quadruped from Boston Dynamics, though much slower. But it also squats down to its knees, locks its joints and fires up a motor that drives the robot around like a car. Bex can also carry cargo (up to 100 kilograms) such as crops or humans. At the , Bex was mounted by an and ridden in circles like a pony. The team at Kawasaki has also made the robot a little glitzier than many of its competitors—it has flashing lights that run up and down its neck and antlers.

Officials with Kawasaki noted at the show that the robot’s head can be replaced with other suitable alternatives such as a horse’s head or even nothing at all. They also noted that Bex has been engineered to move quickly in its wheeled configuration and that the walking configuration is to deal with uneven terrain. Also, the team put stability at the forefront. When the robot is rolling, all of its wheels are always on the ground, and when it is walking, its gait keeps at least two feet on the ground. This reduced computation requirements and made the robot safer to use around humans.

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ANDERSON — For Sam Johnson, organic farming isn’t only a practical way of protecting the environment. It’s also a vital part of a healthy lifestyle.

“My main reason for doing it is just to get away from all these problems we’re having with herbicide and pesticide resistance,” Johnson said. “We’re just getting back to the natural ways our bodies process food.”

Organic farming is becoming undeniably more mainstream in the U.S. agriculture industry. According to an analysis of data in the USDA’s 2019 Survey of Organic Agriculture by Commodity.com, the number of organic farms in the U.S. rose by more than 50% in the last decade. The country’s estimated 16,500 organic farms now cover about 5.5 million acres, a 38% increase from 2008.

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Quantum computers are getting bigger, but there are still few practical ways to take advantage of their extra computing power. To get over this hurdle, researchers are designing algorithms to ease the transition from classical to quantum computers. In a new study in Nature, researchers unveil an algorithm that reduces the statistical errors, or noise, produced by quantum bits, or qubits, in crunching chemistry equations.

Developed by Columbia chemistry professor David Reichman and postdoc Joonho Lee with researchers at Google Quantum AI, the uses up to 16 qubits on Sycamore, Google’s 53- , to calculate ground state energy, the lowest energy state of a molecule. “These are the largest quantum chemistry calculations that have ever been done on a real quantum device,” Reichman said.

The ability to accurately calculate ground state energy, will enable chemists to develop new materials, said Lee, who is also a visiting researcher at Google Quantum AI. The algorithm could be used to design materials to speed up for farming and hydrolysis for making , among other sustainability goals, he said.

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And going forward, we’ll do this with far more knowledge of what we’re doing, and more control over the genes of our progeny. We can already screen ourselves and embryos for genetic diseases. We could potentially choose embryos for desirable genes, as we do with crops. Direct editing of the DNA of a human embryo has been proven to be possible — but seems morally abhorrent, effectively turning children into subjects of medical experimentation. And yet, if such technologies were proven safe, I could imagine a future where you’d be a bad parent not to give your children the best genes possible.

Computers also provide an entirely new selective pressure. As more and more matches are made on smartphones, we are delegating decisions about what the next generation looks like to computer algorithms, who recommend our potential matches. Digital code now helps choose what genetic code passed on to future generations, just like it shapes what you stream or buy online. This might sound like dark science fiction, but it’s already happening. Our genes are being curated by computer, just like our playlists. It’s hard to know where this leads, but I wonder if it’s entirely wise to turn over the future of our species to iPhones, the internet and the companies behind them.

Discussions of human evolution are usually backward looking, as if the greatest triumphs and challenges were in the distant past. But as technology and culture enter a period of accelerating change, our genes will too. Arguably, the most interesting parts of evolution aren’t life’s origins, dinosaurs, or Neanderthals, but what’s happening right now, our present – and our future.

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As the U.S. corporate world continues its withdrawal from Russia due to the invasion of Ukraine, a growing stigma against anything Russian is reverberating in Silicon Valley as tech start-ups and venture capital firms reassess their exposure and limit risks.

DoorDash and GrubHub recently cancelled deals with now-shut U.S. food delivery start-ups launched by Russian founders. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology pulled out of a multi-year partnership with Moscow’s Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology, while Index Ventures halted further deals in the country.

For Silicon Valley, the issues with Russian business run to the heart of immigrant founder-led culture and a global world of institutional investors that in recent years sought more access to top VC ideas.

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The teeth of a mollusk can not only capture and chew food to nurture its body, but the marine choppers also hold insights into creating advanced, lower-cost and environmentally friendly materials.

David Kisailus, UC Irvine professor, and graduate student Taifeng Wang, both in and engineering, took a close look at the ultrahard teeth of the Northern Pacific Cryptochiton stelleri or gumboot chiton. Their findings are published in the Small Structures April 2022 issue.

“The findings in our work are critical, as it not only provides an understanding of the precision of in mineralization to form high-performance architected materials, but also provides insights into bioinspired synthetic pathways to a new generation of advanced materials in a broad range of applications from wear-resistant materials to ,” said Kisailus.

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