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Category: food – Page 47

If you give a rat a camera, it will apparently take selfies.

That was the biggest takeaway from a fresh riff on a classic rat experiment undertaken by French photographer and amateur behaviorist Augustin Lignier, who told the New York Times that when he taught some pet store rats how to take selfies using a lever that snapped a pic and rewarded them with some sugar, the photo-snapping continued even after the treats stopped.

Born from a desire to understand why people take and post so many self-portraits online, Lignier designed a modified version of behaviorist B.F. Skinner’s conditioning experiments wherein rats were given food for pushing a button inside a box. Known now as the “Skinner box,” this groundbreaking methodology developed in the 1930s has been used repeatedly in the past century not just to study behavior but also as an allegory — and has even served to describe humans’ relationship to social media.

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Aniai, a startup that has built a burger-grilling robot, Alpha Grill, said today it has raised $12 million, bringing its total raise to $15 million. The money will go toward launching its first manufacturing facility, Factory One, in South Korea. The firm will also be deploying a cloud-based AI software platform for the robot called Alpha Cloud.

Robot adoption in the restaurant business is becoming popular as it can help restaurants address their high pain points like labor shortages, and rising wage issues. Robotics enables restaurants to save 30% to 70% of labor costs, and restaurants could replace more than 80% of restaurant positions with robots, according to a research report.

“Burger chains hire six to eight kitchen staff per shift to grill burgers,” Aniai CEO Gunpil Hwang said. “Alpha Grill enables restaurants to engage only one staff member to grill burgers.”

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“We need to be prepared for and reduce risks in space for those living now on the International Space Station and for those who might live there in the future,” said Dr. Kali Kniel. “It is important to better understand how bacterial pathogens react to microgravity in order to develop appropriate mitigation strategies.”

As human spaceflight has advanced, so has the food that astronauts eat during their respective missions. This has evolved from dehydrated food during the Apollo missions to regular food that astronauts can get shipped from Earth. But an astronaut’s diet expanded thanks to a 2020 study published in Frontiers in Plant Science that evaluated space-grown lettuce in the International Space Station (ISS) with promising results. While that study exhibited “negative results” for human pathogens, a recent study published in Scientific Reports has demonstrated that human pathogens could infect space-grown lettuce, specifically leafy green vegetables, that could lead to food safety concerns during spaceflight from the microgravity conditions where the plants are grown.

For the study, the researchers simulated microgravity conditions by rotating plants at 2 rotations per minute (RPM), 4 RPM, and unrotated and with and without S. enterica Typhimurium, which is a known salmonella bacterium, and later with Bacillus subtilis strain UD1022. The team analyzed changes in how much each bacteria invaded the plant’s pores, which function as the primary mechanism during photosynthesis for discharging oxygen and taking in carbon dioxide.

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A team of MIT researchers has found that in many instances, replacing human workers with AI is still more expensive than sticking with the people, a conclusion that flies in the face of current fears over the technology taking our jobs.

As detailed in a new paper, the team examined the cost-effectiveness of 1,000 “visual inspection” tasks across 800 occupations, such as inspecting food to see whether it’s gone bad. They discovered that just 23 percent of workers’ total wages “would be attractive to automate,” mainly because of the “large upfront costs of AI systems” — and that’s if the automatable tasks could even “be separated from other parts” of the jobs.

That said, they admit, those economics may well change over time.

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The study hypothesizes that ‘pre-digested’ foods contributed to the development of larger brains. The large, capable human brain is a marvel of evolution, but how it evolved from a smaller primate brain into the creative, complex organ of today is a mystery. Scientists can pinpoint when our evolutionary ancestors evolved larger brains, which roughly tripled in size as human ancestors evolved from the bipedal primates known as Australopithecines.

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Japan’s Moon Snipper Landed on the Moon making Japan the fifth nation to accomplish a lunar landing and Astrobiotic’s Peregrine lunar lander reenters Earth’s atmosphere.

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Continue reading “Japan Lands on the Moon Peregrine Reenters Earth’s Atmosphere” | >

Innovative! Drought resistant and doesn’t need a lot of fertilizer. And it smells like bread. Especially good for Africa which was mentioned.

This fruit curiously smells like baking bread and tastes like potatoes – and it might also provide a means to help feed communities amid drought and famine.

Breadfruit, despite its name, is not made of bread. It’s a tall tree native to islands in the Pacific that produces a starchy fruit, similar to a jackfruit.

Researchers at Northwestern University have been studying breadfruit because they believe it could help feed the world as our more vulnerable crops are plunged into jeopardy due to rising global temperatures.

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Jeff Desjardins, Editor-in-Chief of Visual Capitalist, joins OPTO Sessions to discuss the profound and far-reaching potential of CRISPR and gene editing technology, which he believes could impact fields as diverse as oncology, agriculture and materials science.

On 8 December, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved two cell-based gene therapies for the treatment of sickle cell disease. The decision marked a watershed moment in the history of healthcare, being the first time that gene therapies have won FDA approval.

One of the treatments, Casgevy, is the result of a collaboration between CRISPR Therapeutics [CRSP] and Vertex Pharmaceuticals [VRTX]. The other, Lyfgenia, was developed by bluebird bio [BLUE].

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CNS News– A dispute over a McDonald’s food order in Atlanta, Georgia, escalated to a tragic conclusion when Tamanika Woods, a mother of four, was fatally shot. The incident, which took place two days after Christmas, involved 19-year-old T’Niya Evans, who has since been charged with murder and aggravated assault.

This altercation represents a stark example of how quickly conflicts can escalate to violence. According to reports, the argument began over missing food items from an order placed by Evans and her sister. Woods, who was defending a McDonald’s employee and friend, became inadvertently involved.

The dispute tragically ended when Evans allegedly pulled out a gun and shot Woods at point-blank range inside the restaurant. The event was captured on surveillance video, showing Evans confronting and shooting Woods. In a swift response, another patron apprehended Evans, preventing her escape until police arrived.

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