Lifeboat Foundation

Floating life (neuston) is a core component of the ocean surface food web, but the Sargasso Sea in the North Atlantic is the only known region of high neustonic abundance. This study reveals high densities of floating life in the plastic-rich Great Pacific Garbage Patch, suggesting that this area could be an important marine habitat.

The internet is full of many interesting things. Most of them are quite useful and even amazing, but the rest is often unnecessary and weird. And you gotta love it because there is probably no better outlet for creativity than the internet, regardless of what shape or form it might come in.

Meet Patrick from Patrick’s World, who has flexed his creativity muscle in a way that probably nobody has ever thought of. He took out some traditional German sausages, hooked them up to some wires that were connected to a number of sound equipment, and made a fully functional piano. Yes, you read that correctly.

So, this guy took out some traditional German sausages, hooked them up to some wires that were connected to sound equipment, and made a fully functional piano. Yes, you read that correctly. The internet is amazing.

An artificial intelligence system enables robots to conduct autonomous scientific experiments—as many as 10,000 per day—potentially driving a drastic leap forward in the pace of discovery in areas from medicine to agriculture to environmental science.

Reported today in Nature Microbiology, the research was led by a professor now at the University of Michigan.

Continue reading “AI could run a million microbial experiments per year, says study” »

Paleo’s CEO said there were “more aromatic compounds associated with grilled meat” present when the mammoth protein was added to plant-based burgers.

Harmful PFAS chemicals can now be detected in many soils and bodies of water. Removing them using conventional filter techniques is costly and almost infeasible. Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Interfacial Engineering and Biotechnology IGB are now successfully implementing a plasma-based technology in the AtWaPlas joint research project.

Contaminated water is fed into a combined glass and stainless steel cylinder where it is then treated with ionized gas, i.e., plasma. This reduces the PFAS molecular chains, allowing the toxic substance to be removed at a low cost.

Per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) have many special properties. As they are thermally and chemically stable as well as resistant to water, grease and dirt, they can be found in a large number of everyday products: Pizza boxes and baking paper are coated with them, for example, and shampoos and creams also contain PFAS. In industry they serve as extinguishing and wetting agents, and in agriculture they are used in plant protection products.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQsmABOadtQ&t=6018s

It was an honor to speak at MIT’s Broad Institute about some of my past and present synthetic biology research on redesigning bacteria and viruses to act as delivery systems for biomedicine! Video recording is now available! Here is a link which should take you to 1:40:18 when my talk starts:[ ]. My talk was part of the inaugural MIT Biosummit (https://mitbiosummit.com/), a forward-looking conference which this year focused on tackling challenges at the interface of climate change and health sciences. #futureofmedicine #future #biotech #mit Thank you Ryan Robinson for helping to organize this conference and for giving your own excellent talk!

Recording of the MIT Club of Boston 2023 BioSummit: Human Health 2050 held at the Broad Institute on April 27, 2023. Note: Although the video is almost 6 hours long, you can rapidly navigate and skip to a particular speaker or session by scrubbing along the video timeline (in Chrome or Edge) or using the time markers listed below in blue (in all browsers). You can also use chapter browsing in the YouTube app on platforms where it is available.

Continue reading “2023 MIT Club of Boston BioSummit” »

A team of scientists at the Instituto Italiano di Tecnologia in Italy has created the world’s first completely edible and rechargeable battery. The innovative battery could be used to power edible electronics for health diagnostics, food quality monitoring, and edible soft robotics.

Edible Rechargeable Battery

Continue reading “Scientists Create the World’s First Edible Rechargeable Battery” »

Researchers have taught an AI to make artificial genomes — possibly overcoming the problem of how to protect people’s genetic information while also amassing enough DNA for research.

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) pit two neural networks against each other to produce new, synthetic data that is so good it can pass for real data. Examples have been popping up all over the web — generating pictures and videos (a la “this city does not exist”). AIs can even generate convincing news articles, food blogs, or human faces (take a look here for a complete list of all the oddities created by GANs).

Now, researchers from Estonia are going more in-depth with deepfakes of human DNA. They created an algorithm that repeatedly generates the genetic code of people that don’t exist.

The Chinese billionaire will be teaching students about sustainable agriculture and food production.

Jack Ma, the co-founder of the multinational technology company, Alibaba, marks his return to teaching as he begins a public role as visiting professor at the Tokyo College in Japan today, Business Insider.

Once the richest man in China, Ma had humble beginnings and worked as an English lecturer for several years before he co-founded Alibaba.

Continue reading “Professor Jack Ma of Alibaba to begin classes at Tokyo College” »