Plants have “intent”? 😃
The next frontier of conciousness science! 🙂
Many botanists dispute idea of plant sentience, but study of climbing beans sows seed of doubt.
Continue reading “Food for thought? French bean plants show signs of intent, say scientists” »
Executive director & co-founder of kiss the ground, and producer of kiss the ground the movie, discussing regenerative agriculture for planetary regeneration.
Ryland Engelhart, is Executive Director & Co-Founder of Kiss The Ground (https://kisstheground.com/), a non-profit organization dedicated to planetary regeneration, and is the producer of Kiss The Ground, the Movie, recently released on Netflix.
After the tweet by David Sinclair just recently regarding a study looking at dietary restriction and the circadian clock, and the way it may impact longevity and health, I decided to have a bit of a deeper look.
Join me as I dive a little deeper, and don’t forget to subscribe to the channel to keep up with all the latest releases.
Brown fat is that magical tissue that you would want more of. Unlike white fat, which stores calories, brown fat burns energy and scientists hope it may hold the key to new obesity treatments. But it has long been unclear whether people with ample brown fat truly enjoy better health. For one thing, it has been hard to even identify such individuals since brown fat is hidden deep inside the body.
Now, a new study in Nature Medicine offers strong evidence: among over 52000 participants, those who had detectable brown fat were less likely than their peers to suffer cardiac and metabolic conditions ranging from type 2 diabetes to coronary artery disease, which is the leading cause of death in the United States.
The study, by far the largest of its kind in humans, confirms and expands the health benefits of brown fat suggested by previous studies. “For the first time, it reveals a link to lower risk of certain conditions,” says Paul Cohen, the Albert Resnick, M.D., Assistant Professor and senior attending physician at The Rockefeller University Hospital. “These findings make us more confident about the potential of targeting brown fat for therapeutic benefit.”
The new facility is a product of the partnership between Danish startup Nordic Harvest and Taiwanese tech company YesHealth Group. It’s an indoor farm that covers an area of over 75000 square feet, situated just on the outskirts of Copenhagen. Featuring a 14-shelf grow rack system, it boasts an annual production capacity of about 1000 tons of greens. That’s almost equivalent to the capacity of farms covering an area that’s the size of 20 soccer fields!
Proteins are essential to cells, carrying out complex tasks and catalyzing chemical reactions. Scientists and engineers have long sought to harness this power by designing artificial proteins that can perform new tasks, like treat disease, capture carbon or harvest energy, but many of the processes designed to create such proteins are slow and complex, with a high failure rate.
In a breakthrough that could have implications across the healthcare, agriculture, and energy sectors, a team lead by researchers in the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago has developed an artificial intelligence-led process that uses big data to design new proteins.
By developing machine-learning models that can review protein information culled from genome databases, the researchers found relatively simple design rules for building artificial proteins. When the team constructed these artificial proteins in the lab, they found that they performed chemical processes so well that they rivaled those found in nature.
The European Food Safety Authority has taken in more than 156 innovative food applications for substances such as apple cell cultures and mung bean proteins since January 2018, when new EU legislation took effect, aiming to make it easier for businesses to bring their unusual products to market. Of those 156114 are still under consideration, 39 were approved and three were rejected, officials said.
More products have been submitted for approval since 2018 than in prior 14 years combined.
MIT anthropologist Amy Moran-Thomas reflects on the deep connection between planetary and human well-being.
When anthropologist Amy Moran-Thomas first went to Belize to begin ethnographic research in 2008, she planned to chronicle human health concerns, focusing on diabetes. Then she learned that local diets contributing to such chronic conditions were changing, in part due to losses in ocean food webs, and kept hearing stories about how local plants were in trouble.
“Listening and trying to learn from what people were saying, over the years I came to see human health and planetary health as deeply interconnected,” says Moran-Thomas, the Morrison Hayes Career Development Associate Professor of Anthropology at MIT. “When I think of health now, I think of disarray in bigger ecosystems and infrastructures that’s also landing in human bodies.”
From the outside, VertiVegies looked like a handful of grubby shipping containers put side by side and drilled together. A couple of meters in height, they were propped up on a patch of concrete in one of Singapore’s nondescript suburbs. But once he was inside, Ankesh Shahra saw potential. Huge potential.
Shahra, who wears his dark hair floppy and his expensive-looking shirts with their top button casually undone, had a lot of experience in the food industry. His grandfather had founded the Ruchi Group, a corporate powerhouse in India with offshoots in steel, real estate, and agriculture; his father had started Ruchi Soya, a $3 billion oilseed processor that had been Shahra’s training ground.
AUSTIN, Texas — Producing clean water at a lower cost could be on the horizon after researchers from The University of Texas at Austin and Penn State solved a complex problem that had baffled scientists for decades, until now.
Desalination membranes remove salt and other chemicals from water, a process critical to the health of society, cleaning billions of gallons of water for agriculture, energy production and drinking. The idea seems simple — push salty water through and clean water comes out the other side — but it contains complex intricacies that scientists are still trying to understand.
The research team, in partnership with DuPont Water Solutions, solved an important aspect of this mystery, opening the door to reduce costs of clean water production. The researchers determined desalination membranes are inconsistent in density and mass distribution, which can hold back their performance. Uniform density at the nanoscale is the key to increasing how much clean water these membranes can create.
