Lifeboat Foundation

The sci-fi dream that gardens and parks would one day glow like Pandora, the alien moon in Avatar, is decades old. Early attempts to splice genes into plants to make them glow date back to the 1980s, but experiments emitted little light and required special food.

Then in 2020, scientists made a breakthrough. Adding genes from luminous mushrooms yielded brightly glowing specimens that needed no special care. The team has refined the approach—writing last month they’ve increased their plants’ luminescence as much as 100-fold—and spun out a startup called Light Bio to sell them.

Light Bio received USDA approval in September and this month announced the first continuously glowing plant, named the firefly petunia, is officially available for purchase in the US. The petunias look and grow like their ordinary cousins—green leaves, white flowers—but after sunset, they glow a gentle green. The company is selling the plants for $29 on its website and says a crop of 50,000 will ship in April.

Drawing together an array of interdisciplinary studies across archaeology, ecology, anthropology, and evolutionary theory, Erle Ellis, professor of geography and environmental systems at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, explains the evolution of the cultural practices that have enabled societies to develop unprecedented capabilities to scale up and transform the ecological systems that sustain them.

From using fire to cook food and manage vegetation to the technologies and institutions that support intensive agriculture, increasingly urbanized societies, and global supply chains stretching across the planet, human societies have evolved the social, cultural, and ecological capabilities to reshape the planet and to thrive in the process.

Ellis is a leading scientist investigating the Anthropocene, the current geological age defined by the human transformation of the planet. He is the founder and director of the Anthroecology Lab, which studies relationships between human societies and ecosystems at local to planetary scales with the aim of guiding more sustainable human relations with the biosphere. He is currently a visiting fellow at the Oxford Martin School, where he recently presented his work on Anthropocene opportunities.

Scientists have long thought of the fluid-filled sac around our lungs merely as a cushion from external damage. Turns out, it also houses potent virus-eating cells that rush into the lungs during flu infections.

Not to be confused with phages, which are viruses that infect bacteria, these cells are macrophages, immune cells produced in the body.

“The name macrophage means ‘big eater.’ They gobble up bacteria, viruses, cancer cells, and dying cells. Really, anything that looks foreign, they take it up and destroy it,” said UC Riverside virologist Juliet Morrison, who led the discovery team. “We were surprised to find them in the lungs because nobody has seen this before, that these cells go into the lung when there’s an infection.”

Tesla’s Supercharger network might be good enough to push other automakers to join the standard, but that hasn’t stopped several companies from banding together to build their own Tesla-rivaling charging network. Ionna is a joint venture between seven automakers that promises to bring tens of thousands of chargers to North America — along with food and restrooms.

BMW, GM, Honda, Hyundai, Kia, Mercedes-Benz, and Stellantis are working together on the project with the slogan “We charge North America.” The group announced that it had gained regulatory approval and was officially starting work last Friday.

Ionna aims to build a network of 30,000 fast chargers to facilitate long-distance driving across the continent. The company said it is targeting 2030 to build the network and promised charging locations in urban areas and along highways. The first chargers will open this year, and the focus will be on an “elevated customer experience” that includes 350kW fast chargers, food, retail stores, and other amenities within the charging complex. Electrify America, created using money from VW’s Dieselgate settlement, also recently announced a shift to a more upscale charging experience.

Today we’ll look at colonizing Ceres and asteroid mining, farming in space, and a potential distant future of a developed asteroid belt.

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Continue reading “Colonizing Ceres” »

Climate change and increasingly extreme weather conditions are predicted to wreak havoc with humanity’s food security. But hopefully, at least tomatoes will stay safe.

Researchers from Tel Aviv University have succeeded in cultivating tomato varieties that consume less water as they grow without compromising on yield, quality or taste, using CRISPR genome editing technology.

Their study, which contributes to growing efforts to ensure food security in a world of diminishing freshwater resources, was recently published in the journal PNAS.

A Chinese team of life scientists, microbiologists, plant researchers and seed designers has developed a way to grow engineered moss with partially synthetic genes. In their project, reported in the journal Nature Plants, the group engineered a moss that is one of the first living things to have multiple cells carrying a partially artificial chromosome.

Several research projects have been working toward the goal of creating plants with synthetic genes —such plants could be programmed to produce more food, for example, or more oxygen, or to pull more carbon dioxide from the air. Last year, one team of researchers developed a way to program up to half of the genome of yeast cells using synthetic genes.

In this new effort, the team in China upped the ante by replacing natural moss genes with genes created in a lab—moss is far more genetically complex than yeast. They call their project SynMoss.

The newly understood text thought to be from Epicurean philosopher Philodemus, talks about music, food, and enjoying life.

A grand prize of $700,000 has been awarded to three scholars for producing the first readable text of the scrolls that were charred during the Mount Vesuvian eruption in 79 AD.

An Australian cultured meat startup has “resurrected” the woolly mammoth — in the hope that people will think about eating it.

The challenge: Our traditional way of producing meat — by raising and slaughtering animals — is both bad for the environment and arguably unethical, yet demand for meat continues to increase.

Continue reading “Meatball made from woolly mammoth unveiled in the Netherlands” »