Lifeboat Foundation

Burial sites in the Eastern Mediterranean from the period around 2000 BCE show evidence of outbreaks of disease that likely contributed to the fall of three great civilizations: the Minoan on the island of Crete, the Akkadian in what is Turkey today, and Egypt’s Old Kingdom.

The pathogens found in the DNA of old bones indicate significant outbreaks of typhoid fever and the plague. The emergence of widespread disease in this area of the world at that time may be related to climate change, or pressures from new waves of human migration coming from outside the region. But a paper published in Current Biology on July 25, 2022, shows widespread infections involving the bacterium Yersinia pestis, responsible for the many incidents of plague that occurred in ancient civilizations all the way to the era of Justinian 1st in the 6th century CE Eastern Roman Empire which modern scholars labelled Byzantine. Also found in burial sites is widespread evidence of Salmonella Enterica the cause of typhoid/enteric fever.

This evidence coincides with a period of major geopolitical transformation from 2,290 to 1909 BCE. During this time the Old Kingdom, the Akkadian Empire, and the Middle Minoan civilization were all disrupted. The periods are associated with societal and population declines throughout much of the Eastern Mediterranean. Did these depopulating diseases come from elsewhere brought in by migration and invasion? Were there environmental factors such as a change in the climate? Was there degradation of agricultural lands leading to famine, and a general weakening of the local population?

Researchers have succeeded in making photosynthesis more efficient in soybean plants, in a major breakthrough that will mean less forest has to be cut down to make way for farms.

Nuclear winter visualizations made by Prof. Max Tegmark using state-of-the-art simulation data from these science papers:
* Lili Xia, Alan Robock, Kim Scherrer, Cheryl Harrison, Benjamin Bodirsky, Isabelle Weindl, Jonas Jägermeyr, Charles Bardeen, Owen Toon & Ryan Heneghan, 2022, published in Nature Food.
* Joshua Coupe, Charles Bardeen, Alan Robock & Owen Toon 2019, J. of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, 124, 8522–8543
* Owen Toon, Charles Bardeen, Alan Robock, Lili Xia, Hans Kristensen, Matthew McKinzie, R. Peterson, Cheryl Harrison, Nicole Lovenduski & Richard P. Turco 2019, Sci. Adv. 5: eaay5478
* Alan Robock, Luke Oman & Georgiy L. Stenchikov 2007, J. Geophys. Research 112, D13107.

Special thanks to Chuck Bardeen for data and Meia Chita-Tegmark for editing!

These autonomous robotic pickers can harvest precisely and gently without tiring or needing a break.

Researchers from North Carolina State University have developed a wireless system that uses radio transmitters and receivers to estimate soil moisture in agricultural fields at multiple depths in real time, improving on existing technologies that can be used to inform irrigation practices that both improve crop yield and reduce water consumption.

“Estimating soil moisture is important because it can be used by growers to irrigate their fields more efficiently—only irrigating fields when and where the water is needed,” says Usman Mahmood Khan, first author of a paper on the work and a Ph.D. student at NC State. “This both conserves water resources and supports things like smart agriculture technologies, such as automated irrigation systems. What’s more, conserving water resources can also help reduce carbon emissions, because less energy is used to pump water through the irrigation system.”

The new technology, called Contactless Moisture Estimation (CoMEt), does not require any in-ground sensors. Instead, CoMEt assesses soil moisture using something called “phase,” which is a characteristic of radio waves that is affected by both the wavelength of the radio waves and the distance between the radio wave’s transmitter and the wave’s receiver.

Somerville and John Gibbons, a genomicist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, independently focused on food fermentation, which helped early farmers and herders transform fresh produce and milk into products that can last months or years. Gibbons took a close look at the genome of Aspergillus oryzae, the fungus that jump-starts production of sake from rice and soy sauce and miso from soybeans.

When farmers cultivate A. oryzae, the fungus—a eukaryote, with its DNA enclosed in a nucleus—reproduces on its own. But when humans take a little finished sake and transfer it to a rice mash to begin fermentation anew, they also transfer cells of the fungal strains that evolved and survived best during the first round of fermentation.

Gibbons compared the genomes of scores of A. oryzae strains with those of their wild ancestor, A. flavus. Over time, he found, selection by humans had boosted A. oryzae’s ability to break down starches and to tolerate the alcohol produced by fermentation. “The restructuring of metabolism appears to be a hallmark of domestication in fungi,” he reported last week at Microbe 2022, the annual meeting of the American Society for Microbiology. For example, domesticated Aspergillus strains may have up to five times more copies of a gene for metabolizing starches as their ancestor—“a brilliant way for evolution to turn up this enzyme,” Wolfe says.

The seven Expedition 67 residents kicked off a busy week of critical research benefitting humans living on and off the Earth. The orbital residents also continued supporting the International Space Station’s vast array of flight, research, and life support systems.

Astronauts Bob Hines of NASA and Samantha Cristoforetti of ESA (European Space Agency) took turns on Monday cleaning hardware and supporting samples for a biology study that is exploring skin healing in space. Observations may provide insights improving wound healing therapies for astronauts and Earthlings. Hines then spent the afternoon installing seed cartridges and root modules for the XROOTS space agriculture investigation to begin a 30-day growth period of radishes and mizuna greens. The research uses hydroponics and aeroponics techniques to learn how to produce crops on a larger scale on future missions to the Moon, Mars, and beyond.

NASA Flight Engineer Kjell Lindgren opened up the Kibo laboratory module’s airlock and retrieved an external science platform and installed a small satellite deployer on the research gear. The deployer will be placed outside Kibo in the vacuum of space before deploying a set of CubeSats into low-Earth orbit for a variety of research and education programs.

A new study says that changing guidelines for forever chemicals have made rainwater all around the world unsafe to drink.

Rainwater is an important part of our planet’s ecosystem, and it helps fuel access to drinking water in many places. However, a new study suggests that rainwater is now unsafe to drink. The study says that “forever chemicals” have reached unsafe levels. These forever chemicals are scientifically known as per-and poly-fluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), and they don’t break down in the environment.

You can find PFAS chemicals in non-stick and stain-repellent properties. As such, they’re found in a lot of household food packages, electronics, and even cosmetics and cookware. However, it seems that these chemicals are now mixing with our rainwater. As a result, it has made rainwater unsafe to drink. And researchers say they can’t tie this issue to just one location. It’s everywhere in the world, even in Antarctica.

Continue reading “New study says rainwater is now unsafe to drink” »

Water is the most essential resource for life, for both humans and the crops we consume. Around the world, agriculture accounts for 70% of all freshwater use.

I study computers and information technology in the Purdue Polytechnic Institute and direct Purdue’s Environmental Networking Technology (ENT) Laboratory, where we tackle sustainability and environmental challenges with interdisciplinary research into the Agricultural Internet of Things, or Ag-IoT.

Continue reading “Saving water with wireless technologies is possible — but there are challenges” »