Lifeboat Foundation

And as well as producing less waste, insects can also live off food and biomass that would otherwise be thrown away, says Collins, contributing to the circular economy, where resources are recycled and reused. Insects can be fed agricultural waste, such as the stems and stalks from plants that people don’t eat, or scraps of food waste. To complete the recycling chain, their excrement can be used as fertiliser for crops.

Insects are a nutrition-dense source of protein embraced by much of the world. Why are some of us so squeamish about eating them?

Mastering meat production in this way will lead to advances in medical science and treatment.

“Cultured meat also ultimately offers the opportunity to create meat products that are more well-defined, tunable, and potentially healthier than meat products today, which are constrained by the biological limitations of the domestic animals from which they are derived.”

Owing to advances in industrial-scale cell culture process, the production of cultured meat has been largely standardized. Typically stem cells are first seeded into extracellular matrix scaffolds usually made of edible biomaterials like collagen and chitin. To support cellular metabolic activities, culture media containing nutrients like glucose and sera are next added to the bioreactor where continual mechanical motion facilitates good diffusion of nutrients and oxygen into and removal of metabolic waste products from the cells. After about 2–8 weeks, the cells grow into tissue layers and can be harvested and packaged.

Continue reading “Scientific Challenges and Solutions for Cultured Meat Manufacturing” »

Unlocking The Potential Of Salt and Drought Tolerant Crops And Seawater Agriculture — Professor Dr. Mark Tester — Center for Desert Agriculture, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology; Co-founder & CSO, Red Sea Farms.

Professor Dr. Mark Tester is Professor, Plant Science, and Associate Director, Center for Desert Agriculture, Biological and Environmental Science and Engineering Division, of King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia.

Continue reading “Professor Dr. Mark Tester — Center for Desert Agriculture — KAUST — Red Sea Farms — Saudi Arabia” »

Researchers have developed a brain-like computing device that is capable of learning by association.

Similar to how famed physiologist Ivan Pavlov conditioned dogs to associate a bell with food, researchers at Northwestern University and the University of Hong Kong successfully conditioned their circuit to associate light with pressure.

The research will be published today (April 30, 2021) in the journal Nature Communications.

But the biotech industry has argued that much of gene-editing simply accelerates processes that occur naturally, and that GMO-style regulation would shackle efforts to develop sustainable crops or advance research into human disease.

The European Commission launched a review of EU rules on genetically modified organisms (GMOs) on Thursday, opening the door to a possible loosening of restrictions for plants resulting from gene-editing technology.

Prompted by a 2018 ruling from the European Union’s top court that techniques to alter the genome of an organism should be governed by existing EU rules on GMOs, the Commission concluded that its 2001 legislation was “not fit for purpose”.

Continue reading “EU calls for rethink of GMO rules for gene-edited crops” »

Novel bio-sensing technologies to reduce food waste and optimize supply chains — a US$1 trillion need — katherine sizov — founder, strella biotechnology.

An estimated 40% of all global produce is wasted due to spoilage that occurs before it ever reaches consumers’ grocery bags. And this loss, not only represents loss due to quality or ripeness standards that consumers desire, but also a significant impact on global emissions and fresh water supplies that it took to produce and transport that produce, representing a combined figure of US$1 Trillion annually.

Continue reading “Katherine Sizov — Strella Biotech — Bio-Sensing To Reduce Food Waste And Optimize Supply Chains” »

The subseafloor constitutes one of the largest and most understudied ecosystems on Earth. While it is known that life survives deep down in the fluids, rocks, and sediments that make up the seafloor, scientists know very little about the conditions and energy needed to sustain that life.

An interdisciplinary research team, led from ASU and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), sought to learn more about this ecosystem and the microbes that exist in the subseafloor. The results of their findings were recently published in Science Advances, with ASU School of Earth and Space Exploration assistant professor and geobiologist Elizabeth Trembath-Reichert as lead author.

To study this type of remote ecosystem, and the microbes that inhabit it, the team chose a location called North Pond on the western flank of the mid-Atlantic Ridge, a plate boundary located along the floor of the Atlantic Ocean.

An animal scientist with Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands has created an artificial-intelligence-based application that can gauge the emotional state of farm animals based on photographs taken with a smartphone. In his paper uploaded to the bioRxiv preprint server, Suresh Neethirajan describes his app and how well it worked when tested.

Prior research and anecdotal evidence has shown that farm animals are more productive when they are not living under stressful conditions. This has led to changes in farming practices, such as shielding cows’ eyes from the spike that is used to kill them prior to slaughter to prevent stress hormones from entering the meat. More recent research has suggested that it may not be enough to shield farm animals from stressful situations—adapting their environment to promote peacefulness or even playfulness can produce desired results, as well. Happy cows or goats, for example, are likely to produce more milk than those that are bored. But as Neethirajan notes, the emotional state of an animal can be quite subjective, leading to incorrect conclusions. To address this problem, he adapted human face recognition software for use in detecting emotions in cows and pigs.

The system is called WUR Wolf and is based on several pieces of technology: the YOLO Object Detection System, the YOLOv4 that works with a convolution neural network and Faster R-CNN, which also allows for detection of objects, but does so with different feature sets. For training, he used the Nvidia GeForece GTX 1080 Ti GRP running on a CUDA 9.0 computer. The data consisted of thousands of images of cows and pigs taken with a smartphone from six farms located in several countries with associated classification labels indicating which physical features could be associated with which mood—raised ears on a cow, for example, generally indicate the animal is excited.

The Autonomous Weeder, developed by Carbon Robotics, uses a combination of artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, and laser technology to safely and effectively drive through crop fields – identifying, targeting and eliminating weeds.

Unlike other weeding technologies, the robot utilises high-power lasers to eradicate weeds through thermal energy, without disturbing the soil. This could allow farmers to use less herbicides, while reducing labour costs and improving the reliability and predictability of crop yields.

“AI and deep learning technology are creating efficiencies across a variety of industries and we’re excited to apply it to agriculture,” said Paul Mikesell, CEO and founder of Carbon Robotics. “Farmers, and others in the global food supply chain, are innovating now more than ever to keep the world fed. Our goal is to create tools that address their most challenging problems, including weed management and elimination.”