Lifeboat Foundation

Antidepressant-soil.

Soil microbes have been found to have similar effects on the brain as prozac, without the negative side effects and potential for chemical dependency and withdrawal.

It turns out getting in the garden and getting dirty is a natural antidepressant due to unique microbes in healthy organic soil. Working and playing in soil can actually make you happier and healthier.

Continue reading “Antidepressant Microbes In Soil: How Soil Makes Your Brain Happy” »

Circa 2016 o.o

Americans dump 251 million tons of trash annually into landfills. Bike seat ripped? Toss it. Hole in the old garden hose? Get rid of it. Spandex not tucking in your tummy? Loose it and replace it. This linear process of extracting a resource, processing it, selling it than discarding it is creating a mound of trash dangerously equivocal to the ball of trash in Futurama episode 8 season 1.

Continue reading “Plastic Eating Plants: Will they Save our Environment?” »

Sharks are at the top of the marine food chain for a reason. Their massive size along with a dazzling row of extra-sharp teeth make them the fiercest hunters in our oceans. But it turns out that the shark’s aquatic dominance reaches down into its very DNA, and through its mutations, sharks could teach us how to fight our most deadly affliction—cancer.

This isn’t the first evidence that mutations can prove beneficial for disease resistance and long-term survival. High bone density, a hemoglobin that boosts malaria resistance, and a third retinal cone that improves color vision are some human examples. But new gene mapping conducted by scientists at the Save Our Seas Foundation Shark Research Center at Florida’s Nova Southeastern University, the Guy Harvey Research Institute, and the Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine shows that sharks have developed genomic adaptations that repair damaged DNA, effectively protecting them against cancer and other diseases.

New Yorkers will be able to have their dessert delivered via drone.

Thoughts?

Despite centuries of colonization and agriculture, Cuba’s rivers are in good health.

Sugarcane and cattle farming on the island date back to the late fifteenth century. To measure water quality in Cuba’s rivers today, Paul Bierman at the University of Vermont in Burlington, Rita Hernández at the Cienfuegos Center for Environmental Studies in Cuba and their colleagues sampled water in 25 river basins in central Cuba. This is the first time in more than 60 years that scientists from Cuba and the United States have joined forces to study the island’s hydrology.

Continue reading “Cuba’s rivers run clean after decades of sustainable farming” »

Aeroponics grows fruits and vegetables faster, cheaper and better. RELATED: Making superfood chocolate from raw cacao: https://youtu.be/SrQlCI3Tq58

Vertical farming with Tower Gardens is on the ‘rise’ and rightfully so. You can grow a variety of plants without ANY soil and 90% LESS water. It also requires 10x less space so you can do a lot more in a smaller area. That means easily growing fresh herbs, fruits, vegetables, and flowers both indoors and out. And because everything is grown and picked fresh, the flavor is unbelievable!

Continue reading “Next Gen Farming Without Soil and 90% Less Water | GRATEFUL” »

The diamondback moth is a huge pest. It eats a variety of crops, but is largely resistant to insecticides, resulting in upwards of $5 billion in losses every year.

That could soon change, though, as an international team of researchers has created a strain of genetically engineered diamondback moths that could suppress the pest population in a sustainable way — and they just released them into the wild for the first time.

For the study, published Wednesday in the journal Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology, the researchers engineered the moths so that when the males of the strain mated with wild females, the female offspring would die during the caterpillar life stage.

O.o.

While eating takeout one day, University of Chicago scientists Bozhi Tian and Yin Fang started thinking about the noodles—specifically, their elasticity. A specialty of Xi’an, Tian’s hometown in China, is wheat noodles stretched by hand until they become chewy—strong and elastic. Why, the two materials scientists wondered, didn’t they get thin and weak instead?

They started experimenting, ordering pounds and pounds of noodles from the restaurant. “They got very suspicious,” Fang said. “I think they thought we wanted to steal their secrets to open a rival restaurant.”

Continue reading “Breakthrough creates tough material able to stretch, heal and defend itself” »

The company’s protein powder, “Solein,” is similar in form and taste to wheat flour.