Lifeboat Foundation

Engineers at the University of Pennsylvania have found a new way to build and package microbatteries that drastically improve energy and power density even at the smallest sizes. They developed a new kind of current collector and cathode that increases the fraction of materials that store energy while simultaneously serving as a protective shell. This reduces the need for non-conductive packaging that normally protects a battery’s sensitive internal chemicals.

It weighs the same as two grains of rice but has the energy density of a much larger, heavier battery.

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It’s hard to avoid garbage when you’re chemically attracted to it. But such is the life of a hermit crab.

It’s no secret that AI is everywhere, yet it’s not always clear when we’re interacting with it, let alone which specific techniques are at play. But one subset is easy to recognize: If the experience is intelligent and involves photos or videos, or is visual in any way, computer vision is likely working behind the scenes.

Computer vision is a subfield of AI, specifically of machine learning. If AI allows machines to “think,” then computer vision is what allows them to “see.” More technically, it enables machines to recognize, make sense of, and respond to visual information like photos, videos, and other visual inputs.

Over the last few years, computer vision has become a major driver of AI. The technique is used widely in industries like manufacturing, ecommerce, agriculture, automotive, and medicine, to name a few. It powers everything from interactive Snapchat lenses to sports broadcasts, AR-powered shopping, medical analysis, and autonomous driving capabilities. And by 2,022 the global market for the subfield is projected to reach $48.6 billion annually, up from just $6.6 billion in 2015.

I would say this is probably aimed at a few things. It’s a work around to the national fight to raise the minimum wage. These will be out of sight out of mind, so no one, besides the workers, will see as they are gradually automated to 100% by around 2027. And, the delivery is gradually fully automated with long distance drones and self driving vehicles. Also, be sure every other chain is working on the same stuff.

The ‘ghost kitchens’ are coming to the UK, US and Canada.

Many researchers are working to develop lab-grown meat, partly to reduce the environmental impact of meat production, and partly because of ethical concerns about the treatment of livestock. While some substitutes use plant-based materials to mimic meat, others aim to grow animal cells in culture to create true artificial meat.

So far, this kind of artificial meat doesn’t match the structure of the real thing. It is missing the complex layers of muscle, fat and sinew. The result is mince that can be used to make burgers, like the one famously cooked at a press conference in 2013. Now, researchers are attempting to make something that mimics a steak or chop.

A team led by Shoji Takeuchi at the University of Tokyo in Japan has found a new way to grow cow muscle cells in culture. The cells arrange themselves into long strands, resembling real muscle fibres. “We have developed steak meat with highly aligned muscle fibres that are arranged in one direction,” says Takeuchi.

Evidence has been accumulating for almost a decade that the microbiome composition changes with age. In 2,012 research by my colleagues at University College Cork showed that diversity in the microbiome was linked to health outcomes in later life, including frailty.

In 1,895 on turning 50 Elie Metchnikoff became increasingly anxious about aging. As a result, the Russian Nobel prize-winning scientist, and one of the founders of immunology, turned his attention away from immunology and towards gerontology – a term that he coined.

He was fascinated by the role that intestinal bacteria play in health and disease and suggested that people from parts of eastern Europe lived longer because they ate a lot of fermented foods containing lactic acid bacteria.

Continue reading “Scientists Reversed Aging in Mouse Brains With Poo Transplants From Young Mice” »

Discussions about how and where we produce food are set to continue for a long time to come as businesses, governments and citizens try to find ways to create a sustainable system that meets the needs of everyone.

It’s perhaps no surprise then that some of the topics covered above are starting to generate interest among the investment community.

Speaking to CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” in June, Morgan Stanley’s global head of sustainability research, Jessica Alsford, highlighted this shift.

Drones are neat and fun and all that good stuff (I should probably add the caveat here that I’m obviously not referring to the big, terrible military variety), but when it comes to quadcopters, there’s always been the looming question of general usefulness. The consumer-facing variety are pretty much the exclusive realm of hobbyists and imaging.

We’ve seen a number of interesting applications for things like agricultural surveillance, real estate and the like, all of which are effectively extensions of that imaging capability. But a lot can be done with a camera and the right processing. One of the more interesting applications I’ve seen cropping up here and there is the warehouse drone — something perhaps a bit counterintuitive, as you likely (and understandably) associate drones with the outdoors.

Looking back, it seems we’ve actually had two separate warehouse drone companies compete in Disrupt Battlefield. There was IFM (Intelligent Flying Machines) in 2016 and Vtrus two years later. That’s really the tip of the iceberg for a big list of startups effectively pushing to bring drones to warehouses and factory floors.

Upon an otherwise unruly landscape of choppy sea and craggy peaks, the salmon farms that dot many of Norway’s remote fjords impose a neat geometry. The circular pens are placid on the surface, but hold thousands of churning fish, separated by only a net from their wild counterparts. And that is precisely the conundrum. Although the pens help ensure the salmon’s welfare by mimicking the fish’s natural habitat, they also sometimes allow fish to escape, a problem for both the farm and the environment.

In an attempt to prevent escaped fish from interbreeding with their wild counterparts and threatening the latter’s genetic diversity, molecular biologist Anna Wargelius and her team at the Institute of Marine Research in Norway have spent years working on ways to induce sterility in Atlantic salmon. Farmed salmon that cannot reproduce, after all, pose no threat to the gene pool of wild stocks, and Wargelius has successfully developed a technique that uses the gene-editing technology Crispr to prevent the development of the cells that would otherwise generate functioning sex organs.

Continue reading “A sterile solution: How Crispr could protect wild salmon” »