Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: food – Page 208

Compassion in World Farming: Protecting Animals Means Protecting People and the Planet

Ira Pastor, ideaXme life sciences ambassador and CEO of Bioquark, interviews Philip Lymbery, award winning author of books Farmageddon and Dead Zone and CEO of Compassion in World Farming.

Ira Pastor Comments:

Compassion in World Farming (CIWF)is a campaigning and lobbying animal welfare organization which campaigns against the live export of animals, certain methods of livestock slaughter, and all systems of factory farming.

Philip Lymbery, founder of Compassion in World Farming:

Philip Lymbery is the CEO of CIWF, as well as visiting professor at the University of Winchester, ornithologist, photographer, naturalist, self-confessed animal advocate, and award winning author of both Farmageddon: The True Cost of Cheap Meat (listed as one of The Times Writers Books of the Year) as well as Dead Zone: Where the Wild Things Were.

Protecting Animals is about Protecting People and the Planet:

Continue reading “Compassion in World Farming: Protecting Animals Means Protecting People and the Planet” | >

Female-to-male sex conversion in Ceratitis capitata

The Sterile Insect Technique (SIT) is based on the mass release of sterilized male insects to reduce the pest population size via infertile mating. Critical for all SIT programs is a conditional sexing strain to enable the cost-effective production of male-only populations. Compared to current female-elimination strategies based on killing or sex sorting, generating male-only offspring via sex conversion would be economically beneficial by doubling the male output. Temperature-sensitive mutations known from the D. melanogaster transformer-2 gene (tra2ts) induce sex conversion at restrictive temperatures, while regular breeding of mutant strains is possible at permissive temperatures. Since tra2 is a conserved sex determination gene in many Diptera, including the major agricultural pest Ceratitis capitata, it is a promising candidate for the creation of a conditional sex conversion strategy in this Tephritid. Here, CRISPR/Cas9 homology-directed repair was used to induce the D. melanogaster-specific tra2ts SNPs in Cctra2. 100% female to male conversion was successfully achieved in flies homozygous for the tra2ts2 mutation. However, it was not possible, to identify a permissive temperature for the mutation allowing the rearing of a tra2ts2 homozygous line, as lowering the temperature below 18.5 °C interferes with regular breeding of the flies.

Israeli anti-algae technology to save Florida waterways

Florida will use BlueGreen Water Technologies’ treatment to stop harmful algae blooms in Lake Okeechobee from reaching the state’s waterways.

Lake Okeechobee, also known as Florida’s Inland Sea, is the state’s largest freshwater lake. It has become overrun by cyanobacterial blooms (“blue green algae”) that render the water toxic for drinking and agriculture. It’s also not safe to eat fish from the lake or to swim in its waters.

Left untreated, cyanobacterial blooms can hijack all the resources in a lake or reservoir and turn it a dead aquatic zone.

Scientists induce “suspended animation” state in mice and rats

Some animals, like mice and birds, are able to bring their body temperature and metabolism way down to conserve energy, going into a sleep-like state called torpor. Now researchers have identified the brain cells that trigger this state, showing they can activate it on demand. The team was even able to do it in rats, which don’t normally do it at all, suggesting that such a “suspended animation” state might eventually be possible in humans.

Torpor seems to have evolved as a survival strategy during times of food scarcity, allowing animals to snooze through cold nights or even entire winters without wasting too much energy keeping their body temperature up. That of course allows them to survive until things warm up again, and food becomes more plentiful.

Scientists have toyed with the idea of inducing this kind of hibernation state in humans to reduce the resources and room required for long treks into space. Now researchers at Harvard and the University of Tsukuba in Japan may have made progress towards doing just that.

/* */