Lifeboat Foundation

This edible digital “fingerprint” can detect counterfeit drugs and make it harder for them to enter the global market 🤯.

The harmfulness of pesticides to beneficial organisms is one of the most serious concerns in agriculture. Therefore scientists are eagerly looking for new, more environmentally friendly and species-specific solutions. Researchers at the Estonian University of Life Sciences, Ghent and the University of Maastricht took a long step forward in this regard.

The detrimental impact of pesticides on non-target organisms is one of the most urgent concerns in current agriculture. Double-stranded RNAs (dsRNAs) represent the most species-specific class of pesticides to date, potentially allowing control of a target pest without effecting other species. The unprecedented target-specificity of dsRNA is due to its nucleotide sequence-specific mode of action that results in post-transcriptional gene silencing, or RNA interference (RNAi), in the target species. The development and field use of dsRNAs, via both the insertion of transgenes into the plant genome and the application of dsRNA sprays, is a rapidly growing area of research. Simultaneously, there exists the growing prospect of harnessing RNAi within integrated pest management schemes.

Using the pollen beetle (Brassicogethes aeneus) and its host crop oilseed rape (Brassica napus) as a model crop-pest system, a team of researchers collectively from Estonian University of Life Sciences, Ghent University and Maastricht University examined how RNAi efficacy depends on duration of dietary exposure to dsRNA. To this end, the authors applied dsRNA (specifically designed to induce RNAi in the pollen beetle) to oilseed rape flowers, and analyzed RNAi-induced mortality between insects chronically fed dsRNA and insects fed dsRNA for 3 days. Most notably, their data suggest that, with chronic dietary exposure to dsRNA, reduced dsRNA concentrations can be applied in order to achieve a similar effect compared to short-term (e.g. 3 days) exposure to higher concentrations. This observation has important implications for optimizing dsRNA spray approaches to managing crop pests.

French businesses are betting on insects as food. We explore the off-limit foods that might soon be on our plates.

Check out VICE News for more: http://vicenews.com.

Continue reading “Inside One of the World’s Largest Edible Insect Factories” »

“Gene editing offers unique opportunities to make food production more sustainable and to further improve the quality, but also the safety, of food. With the help of these new molecular tools, more robust plants can be developed that deliver high yields for high-quality nutrition, even with less fertiliser,” says co-author Stephan Clemens, Professor of Plant Physiology at the University of Bayreuth and founding Dean of the new Faculty of Life Sciences: Food, Nutrition & Health on the Kulmbach campus.

For more sustainability on a global level, EU legislation should be changed to allow the use of gene editing in organic farming. This is what an international research team involving the Universities of Bayreuth and Göttingen demands in a paper published in the journal “Trends in Plant Science”.

In May 2020, the EU Commission presented its “Farm-to-Fork” strategy, which is part of the “European Green Deal”. The aim is to make European agriculture and its food system more sustainable. In particular, the proportion of organic farming in the EU’s total agricultural land is to be increased to 25 percent by 2030. However, if current EU legislation remains in place, this increase will by no means guarantee more sustainability, as the current study by scientists from Bayreuth, Göttingen, Düsseldorf, Heidelberg, Wageningen, Alnarp, and Berkeley shows.

Three billion years ago, light first zipped through chlorophyll within tiny reaction centers, the first step plants and photosynthetic bacteria take to convert light into food.

Heliobacteria, a type of bacteria that uses photosynthesis to generate energy, has reaction centers thought to be similar to those of the common ancestors for all photosynthetic organisms. Now, a University of Michigan team has determined the first steps in converting light into energy for this bacterium.

“Our study highlights the different ways in which nature has made use of the basic reaction center architecture that emerged over 3 billion years ago,” said lead author and U-M physicist Jennifer Ogilvie. “We want to ultimately understand how energy moves through the system and ends up creating what we call the ‘charge-separated state.’ This state is the battery that drives the engine of photosynthesis.”

What is the difference between vitamin D2 and D3? Read on to learn the differences, including which foods are high in vitamin D2 and D3.

TOKYO — India is rapidly closing the gap with China in minting new unicorns — privately held startups valued at $1 billion or more — highlighting growing investor appetite for tech startups in the country as the pandemic accelerates adoption of digital services.

Over the past year, 15 companies from India raised capital at a valuation of $1 billion or more for the first time, according to CB Insights and company announcements gathered by Nikkei Asia. Ten of them became unicorns in 2021. By comparison, only two of the 16 companies from China that joined the list over the past year did so in 2021, according to CB Insights.

A successful listing of online food delivery company Zomato, which recently filed a draft prospectus with India’s securities regulator, would set the stage for many of these unicorns to follow suit. Zomato, a loss-making company operating in a nascent industry once considered too risky to invest, is planning to raise 82.5 billion rupees ($1.1 billion), including through a pre-IPO placement.

Have you seen those plant trees instead of go to space memes recently? Well, aside from believing we can do both, I wanted to remind people what great things we use everyday due to the technological developments that the space race has spawned. Not least, the monitoring of illegal deforestation, but right through to better baby food, cleaner water and incredible digital cameras!! But that is not all, so here is my Top 10 technologies, that we have the space industry to thank for…

In the last decade, lab-grown meat has emerged a sustainable alternative to traditional livestock methods. Livestock strain Earth’s land resources and account for about 14.5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. But while scientists can grow thin sheets of cow meat and scrape it together to form a patty, people eat with their eyes as much as their mouths. For lab-grown meat to replace a fresh steak, it needs to look like a steak.

Growing lab-based meat into 3D structures is difficult because it needs constant delivery of oxygen and nutrients. In living organisms, vascular systems fill that need. Researchers at Boston College previously showed that skeletonized spinach leaves, stripped of everything but their veiny, oxygen-dispersing, vascular system, can support patches of heart muscle cells. Now, they show that lab-grown meat can grow on skeletonized spinach, an essential step to growing steak-shaped meat in the lab.