Lifeboat Foundation

The robots will be self-driving.

Estonian ride-hailing firm Bolt has revealed it will soon begin delivering food to people’s doors using a fleet of autonomous robots. The move hails from a partnership with robotics firm Starship Technologies.

The company will first trial its online food deliveries in its home city of Tallinn, Estonia later this year.

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To survive long-term in deep space? The answer is a lukewarm maybe, according to a new theory that outlines the intricate challenges of maintaining gravity and oxygen, securing water, cultivating food, and managing waste while being distant from Earth.

Dubbed the Pancosmorio theory – a word coined to mean “all world limit” – it was described in a paper published in Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Sciences.

“For humans to sustain themselves and all of their technology, infrastructure, and society in space, they need a self-restoring, Earth-like, natural ecosystem to back them up,” said co-author Morgan Irons, a doctoral student conducting research with Johannes Lehmann, professor in the School of Integrative Plant Science at Cornell University. Her work focuses on soil organic carbon persistence under Earth’s gravity and varying gravity conditions. “Without these kinds of systems, the mission fails.”

Suseela Santhosh, director of Vishwa Vidyapeeth school in Bengaluru started an organic farm in her school that feeds its 1,400 students and staff for free.

As the world gets warmer, the use of power-hungry air conditioning systems is projected to increase significantly, putting a strain on existing power grids and bypassing many locations with little or no reliable electric power. Now, an innovative system developed at MIT offers a way to use passive cooling to preserve food crops and supplement conventional air conditioners in buildings, with no need for power and only a small need for water.

The system, which combines radiative cooling, evaporative cooling, and thermal insulation in a slim package that could resemble existing solar panels, can provide up to about 19 degrees Fahrenheit (9.3 degrees Celsius) of cooling from the ambient temperature, enough to permit safe food storage for about 40 percent longer under very humid conditions. It could triple the safe storage time under dryer conditions.

The findings are reported today in the journal Cell Reports Physical Science, in a paper by MIT postdoc Zhengmao Lu, Arny Leroy PhD ’21, professors Jeffrey Grossman and Evelyn Wang, and two others. While more research is needed in order to bring down the cost of one key component of the system, the researchers say that eventually such a system could play a significant role in meeting the cooling needs of many parts of the world where a lack of electricity or water limits the use of conventional cooling systems.

Cotton is the primary source of natural fiber on Earth, yet only four of 50 known species are suitable for textile production. Computer scientists at DePaul University applied a bioinformatics workflow to reconstruct one of the most complete genomes of a top cotton species, African domesticated Gossypium herbaceum cultivar Wagad. Experts say the results give scientists a more complete picture of how wild cotton was domesticated over time and may help to strengthen and protect the crop for farmers in the U.S., Africa and beyond.

The findings are published in the journal G3 Genes|Genomes|Genetics. Thiru Ramaraj, assistant professor of computer science in DePaul’s Jarvis College of Computing and Digital Media, is lead author on the publication. Leaps in technological advancement in the past decade made it possible for Ramaraj to analyze the genome in his Chicago lab.

“The power of this technology is it allows us to create high-quality genomes that supply a level of detail that simply wasn’t possible before,” says Ramaraj, who specializes in bioinformatics. “This opens up the possibility for more researchers to sequence many crops that are important to the global economy and to feeding the population.”

A Cleveland Clinic research team has published an “atlas” of metabolites associated with cardiovascular disease in the European Heart Journal. The novel findings provide key details about the routes and potential branching paths taken by bacteria and metabolic by-products, metabolites.

The study mapped out the multiple by-products of bacteria-processing amino acids associated with cardiovascular disease and then compared that to patient data to assess disease risk in two large cohorts—one in the US and another in Europe.

Bacteria in and on our bodies produce metabolites through processing certain molecules, referred to as precursors. Precursors can come in components of our diet, like protein, or as other metabolized substances. Probiotics (living organisms) and prebiotics (fiber, starch) have increasingly been introduced in foods or supplements as possible clinical interventions.

Debris field found — the crew perished in a catastrophic implosion. What are the lessons to be learned from this? How does this apply to future space, stratospheric, and oceanic tourism?

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Making the yogurt of the future requires a cast of 21st-century helpers: machine learning, gut science and even a mysterious artificial stomach.

At a new Danone facility near Paris, researchers feed dollops of yogurt into globular glass vessels and plastic tubes designed to mimic the human gut. Once the bacteria inside show they can survive the digestive juices, artificial intelligence is put to work to probe their potential health benefits.

To consumers bombarded with claims about the supposed power of probiotics, the goal may sound familiar: souped-up yogurt. But the owner of Activia and Actimel is betting technology can yield answers on which friendly bacteria work best and why, giving its products a scientific edge at a time when revenue is lagging and consumers are growing wary of processed food.

Scheele said that most of the dogs are rescues coming from the Atlanta area, which is near the USDA National Detector Dog Training Center.

Before they can be trained, the dogs are tested for temperament and to make sure they can detect five basic scents. Scheele said the detector dogs have to be food-driven animals, which he said (suprisingly) all dogs are not.

“That’s pork, beef, citrus, mango and apple,” Scheele said. “That’s to prove that the dog has the capability to do it and has the temperament to work in an environment like an airport or at a cargo facility, around the darkness or chaos that goes with imported goods or that sort of thing.”