Lifeboat Foundation

It’s happening…

MOSCOW — KFC has partnered with a Russian bioprinting company to bring 3D printed chicken nuggets to the table.

Coined as the “meat of the future,” the lab-created chicken meat is KFC’s response to the growing interest of healthy lifestyles, the rise in demand for meat alternatives and the increasing need to develop more environmentally friendly methods of food production.

Continue reading “‘Meat of the future’: KFC to ‘3D bioprint’ meat using ‘animal flesh cells’” »

Proteins are essential to the life of 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 (PME) 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 chemistries so well that they rivaled those found in nature.

Researchers from Brazil have found a way to use leftover kitchen grease and lithium battery waste to create a reliable, eco-friendly biofuel.

What do you think?

Seems great, until that kid that’s flicking popcorn or spilling their drink is now doing so from 40 feet overhead. Still, a movie-going experience that makes me feel like I’m in the Galactic Senate Chamber is tempting, and it’d make food/drink service far less disruptive for everyone else. The verticality makes me think we’ll see a version of this in Hong Kong or Shanghai first.

Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars: Space, Exploration, and Life on Earth by Kate Greene St. Martin’s Press, 2020 hardcover, 240 pp. ISBN 978−1−250−15947−2 US$27.

While the robotic missions launching to Mars this year have a wide range of science goals, they are widely seen as precursors for eventual human missions to the Red Planet. NASA’s Mars 2020 mission includes an experiment called MOXIE that will demonstrate a way to produce oxygen from the carbon dioxide in the Martian atmosphere, a capability that will be essential for future human expeditions. NASA’s fiscal year 2021 budget proposal included a request to start work on a Mars Ice Mapper mission, an orbiter that would search for subsurface ice deposits that could be resources for future human expeditions.

Much of the planning for future Mars missions is focused on various capabilities needed to safely transport humans to the surface of Mars and bring them back. But beyond technologies like in situ resource utilization and supersonic retropropulsion are more mundane, but no less essential, matters: How will the crew eat? How will they deal with boredom on the long mission? How will they get along with one another in a confined space?

Interesting.

No word on whether they’ve tried to print chicken nuggets in space, though.

Imagine if this very cheap thing could treat coronavirus 🤔

That would put a wrench in profiteers plans:

Green coffee bean extract is a popular weight loss and health supplement, but does it work, and is it safe?

Continue reading “Does green coffee bean extract work? A detailed review” »

Japan boasts one of the longest life expectancies on earth, and it also a world leader in “healthy life expectancy”—the number of years of good health people can expect on average. Since diet is believed to play a key role in a population’s health and longevity, researchers around the world have been studying the benefits of the Japanese diet for some time now.

But what exactly is the Japanese diet? The people of Japan do not dine primarily on sushi, tempura, or other well-known Japanese specialties. Moreover, their eating habits have changed over the years. For our research, we used national surveys to compile weekly menus representative of the Japanese diet at various points in time over the past half century. In the following, we will take a look at the comparative health effects of these menus.

The health benefits of Japanese cooking are widely touted, but what exactly is a healthy Japanese diet? Food scientists in Japan have homed in on the nutritional keys to health and longevity, and their conclusions may bode ill for the younger generation.

Continue reading “The ‘1975 Diet’ and the Secret of Japanese Longevity” »

California (CNN) (07/17/20) — Scientists have discovered a type of bacteria that eats and gets its calories from metal, after suspecting they exist for more than a hundred years but never proving it.

Now microbiologists from the California Institute of Technology (or Caltech) accidentally discovered the bacteria after performing unrelated experiments using a chalk-like type of manganese, a commonly found chemical element.

Dr. Jared Leadbetter, professor of environmental microbiology at Caltech in Pasadena, left a glass jar covered with the substance to soak in tap water in his office sink, and left the vessel for several months when he went to work off campus.