Lifeboat Foundation

Scientists called for a bigger say over research funding under a stifling bureaucratic application system. Yuan Zhiming, an agricultural scientist from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Wuhan, said he spent so much time filling out funding applications that he did not have time for any research. Senior officials responded that they understood the need to speed up research for China to transform itself into an innovation powerhouse. Minister of Science and Technology Wang Zhigang said the government would overhaul funding management to give researchers more incentives.

The country has to address a lot of shortcomings, but when it sets course to remedy them and commits a bigger share of resources, it could become a leading scientific power within a decade.

5. Division of labor

Much like division of labor in human societies, parts of the thick-footed morel fungus cultivate the bacteria while other parts help store the carbon for future use. This source-sink system is similar to human agricultural systems, where we move food from the fields to be processed and sold at grocery stores.

These five characteristics were confirmed experimentally using cell counting and 13C isotopic labeling. Much like humans, fungi can use cultivation, harvesting, storage, dispersal, and division of labor to farm bacteria. Don’t fear, hallmarks of agriculture that we can still claim as unique to humans include artificial selection or development as well as cultural transmission of agricultural innovations.

It’s a difficult choice: Go hungry or go it alone.

When soldiers are weighed down on the battlefield by food supplies and the heavy battery packs that power their communication equipment, they often choose to ditch the rations. It’s a sacrifice made to keep devices powered up and communication lines open in the field.

Smaller, longer-lasting batteries would help lighten a soldier’s load, so USC researchers are working with the U.S. Department of Defense to develop better batteries that weigh half as much as current power packs.

Continue reading “The better batteries that will power your phone—and a green future” »

What goes into making plants taste good? For scientists in MIT’s Media Lab, it takes a combination of botany, machine-learning algorithms, and some good old-fashioned chemistry.

Using all of the above, researchers in the Media Lab’s Open Agriculture Initiative report that they have created basil plants that are likely more delicious than any you have ever tasted. No genetic modification is involved: The researchers used computer algorithms to determine the optimal growing conditions to maximize the concentration of flavorful molecules known as volatile compounds.

But that is just the beginning for the new field of “cyber agriculture,” says Caleb Harper, a principal research scientist in MIT’s Media Lab and director of the OpenAg group. His group is now working on enhancing the human disease-fighting properties of herbs, and they also hope to help growers adapt to changing climates by studying how crops grow under different conditions.

Continue reading “Agriculture: Machine learning can reveal optimal growing conditions to maximize taste, other features” »

Biotech is the solution to tackle the environmental impact of meat and the fertilizer shortage.

The world has focused first on energy in its effort to stop greenhouse gas emissions, but former Energy Secretary Steven Chu puts agriculture at the top of his list of climate challenges—particularly animal agriculture.

The Nobel Prize winning physicist surveyed the world’s carbon-polluting industries in a lecture at the University of Chicago, and he started with meat and dairy.

Continue reading “Meat And Agriculture Are Worse For The Climate Than Power Generation, Steven Chu Says” »

Whether we like it or not, our society has become completely reliant on plastic. From food preservation to water transportation, computer technology to healthcare and medicine, plastic can be found in nearly every facet of the human experience.

But as we well know, plastic is a double-edged sword, with massive amounts of plastic waste not only piling up in landfills, but floating in the most remote depths of our oceans and water supplies. And despite our knowledge of plastic’s harmful effects on the environment, we’ve become so reliant on plastic that there seems to be no end in sight. In fact, plastic production is growing on a yearly basis–and posing a potentially mortal threat to us all.

Continue reading “Scientists Found an Edible Mushroom That Eats Plastic, and It Could Clean Our Landfills” »

If you’ve heard of “zombie deer,” you’ve heard of the horrors of chronic wasting disease. CWD causes infected animals to stumble through the forest, sometimes drooling and becoming aggressive towards humans they once feared. They lose weight. They’re listless. The spookiest thing about it, though, isn’t its resemblance to zombie-dom—it’s the fact that it’s an incurable prion disease.

Prions are misfolded proteins that are somehow infectious (we’re still not really sure how or why) and for which we have no treatments or cures. If you were to catch one, you’d basically deteriorate over the course of several months, possibly losing the ability to speak or move, and eventually you would die. Doctors wouldn’t be able to do anything to save you.

Right now, CWD appears limited to deer, moose, and elk. But University of Minnesota researchers warned local lawmakers this week that we should be taking action now to prevent the potential spread to humans. Michael Osterholm, director of the university’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Prevention, testified that “It is my best professional judgment based on my public health experience and the risk of BSE transmission to humans in the 1980s and 1990s and my extensive review and evaluation of laboratory research studies … that it is probable that human cases of CWD associated with the consumption of contaminated meat will be documented in the years ahead. It is possible that number of human cases will be substantial and will not be isolated events,” according to the Pioneer Press.

Continue reading “Scientists worry ‘zombie deer’ disease could jump to humans” »

From precision GPS to batteries for one of the world’s first commercial all-electric airplanes, NASA technology turns up in nearly every corner of modern life. The latest edition of NASA’s Spinoff publication features dozens of commercial technologies that were developed or improved by the agency’s space program and benefit people everywhere.

“NASA works hard, not only to develop technology that pushes the boundaries of aeronautics and space exploration, but also to put those innovations into the hands of businesses and entrepreneurs who can turn them into solutions for challenges we all face here on Earth,” said Jim Reuter, acting associate administrator of the agency’s Space Technology Mission Directorate. “These are sometimes predictable, like the many NASA technologies now adopted by the burgeoning commercial space industry, but more often they appear in places that may seem unrelated, like hospitals, farms, factories and family rooms.”

Continue reading “New Spinoff Publication Highlights NASA Technology Everywhere” »

Oops, duh, Eureka… shouted Archimedes… Or something.

Corn leaves are teaming with bacteria communities (the leaf “microbiome”) that influence plant health and performance, and scientists are still figuring out how. A team of scientists led by Dr. Jason Wallace recently published a study in the open access Phytobiomes Journal that advances what we know about these bacterial communities by investigating their relationships with corn genetics. According to Dr. Wallace, “the end-goal of all this research is to understand how crops interact with their microbial communities so we can harness them to make agriculture more productive and sustainable.”

In one of the largest and most diverse leaf microbe studies to date, the team monitored the active bacteria on the leaves of 300 diverse lines of corn growing in a common environment. They were especially interested to see how corn genes affected bacteria and found there was little relationship between the two — in fact, the bacteria were much more affected by the environment, although genetics still had a small role.

This is an interesting discovery that “breeding probably isn’t the best way to address this,” Dr. Wallace says. Instead, “the leaf community is probably better changed through farmer management.” That is, farmers should be able to change growing practices to enhance their current crops rather than seek out new plant varieties.