Toggle light / dark theme

Human civilization wouldn’t be where it is today if we hadn’t domesticated animals to be either loyal and cuddly or dumb and tasty. Now, researchers in Australia have discovered what they claim is the very first example of an animal domesticating another animal – a fish species found to recruit tiny shrimp to help tend their algae farms.

It’s believed that humans first domesticated the wolf around 15,000 years ago to help us hunt, and later for companionship. Over the following millennia, we added goats, pigs, sheep and cattle for food and materials. And almost every plant we eat looks nothing like their original wild counterparts, having been honed for thousands of years at our hands to be bigger, hardier, tastier, more nutritious or easier to grow, harvest and eat.

So far, the only other organisms known to domesticate others have been insects – for example ants farm aphids, protecting them from predators in exchange for the sweet sticky goo they excrete. But the behavior has never been observed in other vertebrate species before.

Dr. Carolina Reis Oliveria, is the CEO and Co-Founder of OneSkin Technologies, a biotechnology platform dedicated to exploring longevity science.

Carolina holds her Ph.D. in Immunology at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, in collaboration with the Rutgers University, where she conducted research with pluripotent stem cells as a source of retinal pigmented epithelium (RPE) cells, as well as the potential of RPE-stem cells derived as toxicological models for screening of new drugs with intra-ocular applications.

She founded a company called CELLSEQ solutions in Brazil which develops tools to revolutionize the safety and toxicology assays performed by pharmaceutical, cosmetic, agro-chemical and food industries, with technology based on stem cells and big data analysis.

She is an alumnus of IndieBio, the world’s leading biotechnology accelerator.

In 2016, Carolina relocated to Silicon Valley from Latin America to co-found OneSkin, and to lead the development of the company’s technologies.

I didn’t even know we could eat jellyfish! 😃


According to a new study conducted by scientists at the University of Queensland, Australia, we should eat more jellyfish and less fish if we want to save the planet.

The research, published in Nature Communications, suggests increasing our jellyfish consumption worldwide to protect threatened fish species and guard marine conservation efforts. IUCN figures show that fishing is an ongoing threat to 96% of threatened fish species and the only constant threat for some.

Globally, up to 91 threatened fish species, including Atlantic horse mackerel, haddock, and bigeye tuna, are legally caught on an industrial scale. Approximately 15% of these species are then traded internationally, primarily for consumption in Europe.

Slaughter-free meat is finally starting to make the jump from the lab to the factory line.

As Singapore becomes the first country to allow the sale of cultured meat, more startups around the world are preparing to test production of lab-grown meats like beef and chicken in factories. While there’s a long way to go, it’s a crucial step in getting cell-based products ready for supermarket shelves.

The device fooled participants into experiencing “the flavor of everything from gummy candy to sushi without having to place a single item of food in their mouths,” according to Miyashita.

Candy Sushi

“When we wrapped the device in dried seaweed, presenting taste of salty and sour with seaweed scent causes illusion of actually eating sushi,” he added.

Ever wondered if your urine could help with food security in Africa? We go to Malawi this week to hear how a ‘magic liquid’ is helping farmers cope with the high cost of synthetic fertilisers, while keeping the marketplaces cleaner and smelling fresher.

For the first time in history manmade materials now likely outweigh all life on Earth, scientists said Wednesday in research detailing the “crossover point” at which humanity’s footprint is heavier than that of the natural world.

The of roads, buildings and other constructed or manufactured materials is doubling roughly every 20 years, and authors of the research said it currently weighed 1.1 teratonnes (1.1 trillion tonnes).

As mankind has ramped up its insatiable consumption of natural resources, the weight of living biomass—trees, plants and animals—has halved since the to stand at just 1 teratonne currently, the study found.

NEW YORK (AP) — Brain scans offer a tantalizing glimpse into the mind’s mysteries, promising an almost X-ray-like vision into how we feel pain, interpret faces and wiggle fingers.

Studies of brain images have suggested that Republicans and Democrats have visibly different thinking, that overweight adults have stronger responses to pictures of food and that it’s possible to predict a sober person’s likelihood of relapse.

But such buzzy findings are coming under growing scrutiny as scientists grapple with the fact that some brain scan research doesn’t seem to hold up.