Lifeboat Foundation

Forget Netflix and binge watch these awesome farm-bot videos.

A video on lab grown meat. Meat grown from cells taken from animals. 😃

How do you like your beef, the traditional way or 3D-printed? 🍖 🤔

Find out more at https://bit.ly/39kIeCN # engineering.

With fall and winter holidays coming up, many will be pondering the relationship between food and sleep. Researchers led by Professor Masashi Yanagisawa at the University of Tsukuba in Japan hope they can focus people on the important middlemen in the equation: bacterial microbes in the gut. Their detailed study in mice revealed the extent to which bacteria can change the environment and contents of the intestines, which ultimately impacts behaviors like sleep.

The experiment itself was fairly simple. The researchers gave a group of mice a powerful cocktail of antibiotics for four weeks, which depleted them of intestinal microorganisms. Then, they compared intestinal contents between these mice and control mice who had the same diet. Digestion breaks food down into bits and pieces called metabolites. The research team found significant differences between metabolites in the microbiota-depleted mice and the control mice. As Professor Yanagisawa explains, “we found more than 200 metabolite differences between mouse groups. About 60 normal metabolites were missing in the microbiota-depleted mice, and the others differed in the amount, some more and some less than in the control mice.”

The team next set out to determine what these metabolites normally do. Using metabolome set enrichment analysis, they found that the biological pathways most affected by the antibiotic treatment were those involved in making neurotransmitters, the molecules that cells in the brain use to communicate with each other. For example, the tryptophan–serotonin pathway was almost totally shut down; the microbiota-depleted mice had more tryptophan than controls, but almost zero serotonin. This shows that without important gut microbes, the mice could not make any serotonin from the tryptophan they were eating. The team also found that the mice were deficient in vitamin B6 metabolites, which accelerate production of the neurotransmitters serotonin and dopamine.

Artificial intelligence is being applied to virtually every aspect of our work and recreational lives. From determining calculations for the construction of towering skyscrapers to designing and building cruise ships the size of football fields, AI is increasingly playing a key role in the most massive projects.

But sometimes, all we want to do is move a can of beans.

Continue reading “AI system finds, moves items in constricted regions” »

Sales for the category have exploded as the pandemic disrupts business as usual. Is this because people are turning away from animal-based eating, or is it keeping with the segment’s trends?

The farm has been placed under quarantine, and staff have been told to self-isolate.

AI, Genetics, and Health-Tech / Wearables — 21st Century Technologies For Healthy Companion Animals.

Ira Pastor ideaXme life sciences ambassador interviews Dr. Angela Hughes, the Global Scientific Advocacy Relations Senior Manager and Veterinary Geneticist at Mars Petcare.

Continue reading “Mars Personalised Petcare: High Tech, Genetics and Wearables” »

Scientists find that A. echinatior ants have biomineral armour to help them in battle with other ants and protect them from pathogens. 😃

Ants are pretty organised little creatures. Highly social insects, they know how to forage, build complicated nests, steal your pantry snacks, and generally look after the queens and the colony, all by working together.

Leaf-cutter ants turn that cooperation up several notches. Leaf-cutter ant colonies like Acromyrmex echinatior can contain millions of ants, split into four castes that all have different roles to maintain a garden of fungus that the ants eat.

Continue reading “These Ants Suit Up in a Protective ‘Biomineral Armor’ Never Seen Before in Insects” »

10% longer.

Reduced food intake, known as dietary restriction, leads to a longer lifespan in many animals and can improve health in humans. However, the molecular mechanisms underlying the positive effects of dietary restriction are still unclear. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Aging have now found one possible explanation in fruit flies: they identified a protein named Sestrin that mediates the beneficial effects of dietary restriction. By increasing the amount of Sestrin in flies, researchers were able to extend their lifespan and at the same time these flies were protected against the lifespan-shortening effects of a protein-rich diet. The researchers could further show that Sestrin plays a key role in stem cells in the fly gut thereby improving the health of the fly.

The health benefits of dietary restriction have long been known. Recently, it has become clear that restriction of certain food components, especially proteins and their individual building blocks, the amino acids, is more important for the organism’s response to dietary restriction than general calorie reduction. On the molecular level, one particular well-known signaling pathway, named TOR pathway, is important for longevity.

Continue reading “Sestrin makes fruit flies live longer” »