Lifeboat Foundation

South Australian artificial intelligence (AI) company GoMicro is rolling out its new grain assessment technology in Australia, paving the way towards more consistent quality controls and stable grain and pulse prices.

Based at Flinders University’s high-tech New Venture Institute (NVI) at Tonsley Innovation District in Clovelly Park, Adelaide, GoMicro CEO Dr. Sivam Krish says the multi-grain assessor gives growers and domestic and export markets a quick and better way to grade crops, accurately testing more than 1,200 grains in one sample—compared to the existing scanner-based method which assesses about 200 well-separated grains at a time.

“GoMicro relies on the excellent quality of phone cameras and Amazon web services to deliver low-cost, high-precision quality grain and other produce assessments to farmers worldwide,” says Dr. Krish.

He’s hoping that his plastic orbs, which rest between 15 and 36 feet below the ocean’s surface and hold about 528 gallons of air, will provide a water-conserving, overall sustainable alternative to on-land agricultural operations, particularly helping dry coastal nations grow more food without having to desalinate more water — a costly and resource-intensive process. The plants require just a small bit of starter water, but from there, they’re self-sustaining. Sunlight heats the submerged spheres, which contain humid air that naturally condenses into freshwater on the walls and drips back into the soil.

“Since the underwater farm needs an external source of water only for the start-up of plants growing,” reads the company’s site, “our system could be useful for those locations far from the bodies of water available.”

European moles shrink their brains by 11% before the winter and grow them again by 4% by the summer.

European moles face an existential crisis in the depths of winter. Their high-limit mammal metabolisms need more food than is available during the coldest months. Instead of migrating or hibernating to deal with the seasonal challenge, moles have devised an unexpected energy-saving strategy: shrinking their brains.

In a recent study, a group from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior headed by Dina Dechmann found that European moles shrink their brains by 11% before the winter and grow them back by 4% by summer. They are a new group of mammals known for reversibly shrinking their brains through a process known as Dehnel’s phenomenon.

Other proteins work as well meaning the process can be scaled without interfering with food supplies.

Researchers at Princeton Engineering have found that egg whites can be used to cheaply remove salt and microplastics from seawater, according to a press release by the institution published on Thursday.

The scientists used the food substance to create an aerogel, a lightweight and porous material that can be used in many types of applications, including water filtration, energy storage, and sound and thermal insulation.

Continue reading “Eggs found to remove salt and microplastics from seawater” »

The size of the wing, made of compressed puffed rice, depends on the recipient’s nutrition requirements.

The IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems in Kyoto last week saw an ingenious creation presented by researchers from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne. Their paper described a drone made from rice cakes.

Mind you, this was no light matter. Titled ‘Towards Edible Drones for Rescue Missions: Design and Flight of Nutritional Wings,’ by Bokeon Kwak, Jun Shintake, Lu Zhang, and Dario Floreano from EPFL, the paper detailed a drone that could “boost its payload of food from 30 percent to 50 percent of its mass”, according to a release.

You can’t move a pharmaceutical scientist from a lab to a kitchen and expect the same research output. Enzymes behave exactly the same: They are dependent upon a specific environment. But now, in a study recently published in ACS Synthetic Biology, researchers from Osaka University have imparted an analogous level of adaptability to enzymes, a goal that has remained elusive for over 30 years.

Enzymes perform impressive functions, enabled by the unique arrangement of their constituent amino acids, but usually only within a specific cellular environment. When you change the cellular environment, the enzyme rarely functions well—if at all. Thus, a long-standing research goal has been to retain or even improve upon the function of enzymes in different environments; for example, conditions that are favorable for biofuel production. Traditionally, such work has involved extensive experimental trial-and-error that might have little assurance of achieving an optimal result.

Artificial intelligence (a computer-based tool) can minimize this trial-and-error, but still relies on experimentally obtained crystal structures of enzymes—which can be unavailable or not especially useful. Thus, “the pertinent amino acids one should mutate in the enzyme might be only best-guesses,” says Teppei Niide, co-senior author. “To solve this problem, we devised a methodology of ranking amino acids that depends only on the widely available amino acid sequence of analogous enzymes from other living species.”

Summary: Bergmann glial cell synaptic engulfing in the cerebellum was enhanced during motor learning in mice.

Source: Tohoku University.

Tohoku University researchers have shown that Bergmann glial cells, astrocyte-like cells in the cerebellum, ‘eat’ their neighboring neuronal elements within healthy living brain tissue.

“This represents a significant source of PFAS in the home environment,” said Sydney Evans, a science analyst with the EWG.

PFAS, or per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are a class of about 12,000 compounds used to make products resist water, stains and heat. They’re called “forever chemicals” because they don’t naturally break down, accumulating in humans and animals. PFAS are linked to a range of serious health problems like cancer, birth defects, kidney disease and liver disease.

The chemicals are likely used in pet food bags to make them repel grease. For cats, the highest levels were detected in the Meow Mix Tender Centers salmon and chicken flavors dry cat food, at more than 600 parts per million (ppm). Purina Cat Chow Complete chicken showed over 350 ppm, while Blue Buffalo, Iams and Rachael Ray Nutrish all had levels of less than 100 ppm.

Most delivery drones can only carry about one-third of their mass as payload, because most of their mass is both critical, like wings, and comes in the form of things that are essentially useless to the end user, like wings. But EPFL researchers have invented a drone with wings made from rice cakes.