Lifeboat Foundation

“It was so easy to get support from Northeastern, especially considering that we were fresh out of college,” Gurijala says. Through the Venture Mentoring Network, the co-founders were advised on how to create a business model and pitch investors. “They even connected us to our first investor. I’m not sure we could have started Boston Materials without the support of the whole entrepreneurial ecosystem at Northeastern.”

Boston Materials, which recently raised $8 million from investors, is looking to expand its team.

“We’re looking to grow across the company, from the manufacturing team, to the engineering team, to the technical sales team,” Gurijala says. “It’s an exciting time. There’s so much momentum behind us right now.”

Circa 2011

It sounds like a late-night infomercial: Kill germs and clean surfaces with nothing more than water and a few volts of electricity! Pay pennies a gallon! Strong enough to kill germs but gentle on your skin!

The use of electricity and water to clean and disinfect has been embraced by some food and hospitality businesses looking to save money and go green by swapping out conventional products.

Continue reading “Electrified water lets cleaners ditch the bleach” »

Researchers at Oxford University have developed an AI-enabled system that can comprehensively identify people in videos by conducting detective-like, multi-domain investigations as to who they might be, from context, and from a variety of publicly available secondary sources, including the matching of audio sources with visual material from the internet.

Though the research centers on the identification of public figures, such as people appearing in television programs and films, the principle of inferring identity from context is theoretically applicable to anyone whose face, voice, or name appears in online sources.

Indeed, the paper’s own definition of fame is not limited to show business workers, with the researchers declaring ‘We denote people with many images of themselves online as famous‘.

In your business you need to learn how to distinguish between chatbots and conversational AI, here are some tips on how to do that.

An emerging ransomware strain in the threat landscape claims to have breached 30 organizations in just four months since it went operational, riding on the coattails of a notorious ransomware syndicate.

First observed in February 2021, “Prometheus” is an offshoot of another well-known ransomware variant called Thanos, which was previously deployed against state-run organizations in the Middle East and North Africa last year.

The affected entities are believed to be government, financial services, manufacturing, logistics, consulting, agriculture, healthcare services, insurance agencies, energy and law firms in the U.S., U.K., and a dozen more countries in Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and South America, according to new research published by Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42 threat intelligence team.

OmniFoods is far from the only player breaking into the space. Last year, Nestlé announced its entrance into the category, rolling out a vegan tuna product in Switzerland. Impossible has also previously announced it was working on an alternative fish product.

OmniFoods, the Hong Kong startup best known for its fake pork product “OmniPork,” is jumping on what it sees as the next phenomenon: plant-based seafood.

In an announcement first shared with CNN Business, the company said Tuesday it is launching a new line of products that include alternatives to fish fillets, fish burgers and cuts of tuna.

Continue reading “First on CNN Business: Asia’s fake pork titan sets its sights on the next ‘big’ thing” »

Misfits Market is an online grocery delivery service that sells “ugly” organic produce for cheap. In the first four months of 2021 alone, Misfits Market rescued the same amount of food it saved in 2020 as a whole. In 2020, Misfits Market shipped 77 million pounds of food to more than 400000 households across the U.S. Since launching in 2018, Misfits Market has expanded to both coasts, has over 1000 employees and has received over $300 million in funding. Bloomberg reports its valuation tops $1 billion, putting it into unicorn territory. But Misfits Market wasn’t an obvious success. In fact, it was just one of many businesses started by its 29-year-old founder Abhi Ramesh.

» Subscribe to CNBC Make It.: http://cnb.cx/2kxl2rf.

Continue reading “How I Built a $1 Billion Start-Up Called Misfits Market” »

The latest from Calico. A bit technical.

Reprogramming of ordinary somatic cells into induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) was initially thought to be a way to obtain all of the patient matched cells needed for tissue engineering or cell therapies. A great deal of work has gone towards realizing that goal over the past fifteen years or so; the research community isn’t there yet, but meaningful progress has taken place. Of late, another line of work has emerged, in that it might be possible to use partial reprogramming as a basis for therapy, delivering reprogramming factors into animals and humans in order to improve tissue function, without turning large numbers of somatic cells into iPSCs and thus risking cancer or loss of tissue structure and function.

Reprogramming triggers some of the same mechanisms of rejuvenation that operate in the developing embryo, removing epigenetic marks characteristic of aged tissues, and restoring youthful mitochondrial function. It cannot do much for forms of damage such as mutations to nuclear DNA or buildup of resilient metabolic waste, but the present feeling is there is nonetheless enough of a potential benefit to make it worth developing this approach to treatments for aging. Some groups have shown that partial reprogramming — via transient expression of reprogramming factors — can reverse functional losses in cells from aged tissues without making those cells lose their differentiated type. But this is a complicated business. Tissues are made up of many cell types, all of which can need subtly different approaches to safe reprogramming.

Today’s open access preprint is illustrative of the amount of work that lies ahead when it comes to the exploration of in vivo reprogramming. Different cell types behave quite differently, will require different recipes and approaches to reprogramming, different times of exposure, and so forth. It makes it very hard to envisage a near term therapy that operates much like present day gene therapies, meaning one vector and one cargo, as most tissues are comprised of many different cell types all mixed in together. On the other hand, the evidence to date, including that in the paper here, suggests that there are ways to create the desired rejuvenation of epigenetic patterns and mitochondrial function without the risk of somatic cells dedifferentiating into stem cells.

Continue reading “A Great Deal of Work Lies Ahead in the Development of In Vivo Reprogramming as a Therapy” »

The Perseverance rover began a two-year mission to collect Martian soil samples this year. It’s the first of three missions, jointly sponsored by NASA and ESA, aiming to bring Martian soil back to Earth in hopes of finding evidence of past life. The total costs of the missions will likely exceed more than $9 billion.

MORE SO EXPENSIVE VIDEOS:
Why Japanese Eel Is So Expensive.

Why Black Opal Is So Expensive.

Why Ceylon Cinnamon Is So Expensive.

Continue reading “Why Two Pounds Of Dirt From Mars Costs $9 Billion | So Expensive” »