Lifeboat Foundation

In its Series E financing round, Plenty Unlimited secured $400 million – the largest investment to date for an indoor farming company. In addition to Walmart and existing investor SoftBank, new partners One Madison Group and JS Capital also participated in the round.

Plenty Unlimited will use this funding to support its growth strategy, including leveraging its technology platform to sell multi-crop farms directly to partners.

“The indoor farming sector is at an exciting inflection point, poised to reach its full potential as a new asset class that addresses the significant need to provide access to fresh, nutritious food year-round, even in geographies where traditional farming is difficult,” said Omar Asali, Chairman and CEO of One Madison Group. “Plenty has truly ‘cracked the code’ on the technology and economics of indoor farming. It has developed an innovative and scalable model that can deliver fresh, sustainable produce to retailers, growers and governments anywhere in the world.”

Pioneering global generic medicine access to improve and extend people’s lives — keren haruvi snir-president, sandoz US, head of north america.

Keren Haruvi is President of Sandoz US and Head of their North America business (https://www.novartis.us/about-us/our-leadership/us-country-l…n-haruvi).

Continue reading “Keren Haruvi — President, Sandoz US, Head Of North America — Global Generic Medicine Access For All” »

An international study involving researchers from CNRS and CEA as well as the company Kayrros reveals hundreds of major methane leaks linked to the global exploitation of oil and gas. Scientists show that their mitigation would lead to climatic and economic benefits amounting to billions of dollars for the main hydrocarbon producing countries. This work is published on February 4, 2022 in the journal Science.

Original press release published on CEA.

A major contributor to climate change, methane (CH ₄) has a warming potential over 100 years approximately 30 times greater than that of CO ₂. A quarter of anthropogenic emissions of this greenhouse gas come from the global exploitation of coal, oil and natural gas, of which CH₄ is the main component. In 2018, a study had already exposed, based on the case of the United States, the vast underestimation in official inventories of emissions related to the extraction and distribution of oil and gas. A discrepancy which could be explained by sporadic undeclared releases of large quantities of methane by operators in the sector.

In collaboration with a team at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, MIT experts have begun designing and testing technical research through which further examination of a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) can be performed in the U.S.

The effort, known as Project Hamilton, is in an exploratory phase, and the research is not intended as a pilot or for public deployment. Instead, the researchers have explored two different approaches that could be used to process transactions, and thus could indicate the technical feasibility of a potential CBDC model. In a process involving significant design flexibility, the MIT group tested factors such as the volume and speed of transactions, and the resilience of the systems in general, among other requirements for a viable digital currency.

“The core of what we built is a high-speed transaction processor for a centralized digital currency, to demonstrate the throughput, latency, and resilience of a system that could support a payment economy at the scale of the United States,” says Neha Narula, director of MIT’s Digital Currency Initiative and a research scientist at the MIT Media Lab, who led the effort with the Boston Fed. “It is important to note that this project is not a comment on whether or not the U.S. should issue a CBDC—but work like this is vital to help determine the answer to that question. This project serves as a platform for creating and comparing more viable designs, and provides a place to experiment and collaborate on more advanced digital currency functionality.”

NASA said it hoped to create a “robust, American-led commercial economy in low-Earth orbit”.

NASA says the ISS will operate until 2030 before the agency hands over to commercial companies.

It is the latest major economy to announce its own virtual currency, as China trials the digital yuan.

Ford Motor Co. is working with Israeli startup Electreon to construct a mile-long road near Detroit’s Michigan Central Terminal that will charge electric vehicles as they travel on it. The pilot program will deploy an inductive in-road charging system in partnership with the Michigan Department of Transportation, the Michigan Office of Future Mobility and Electrification and the Michigan Economic Development Corp. “As we aim to lead the future of mobility and electrification by boosting electric vehicle production and lowering consumer costs, a wireless in-road charging system is the next piece to the puzzle for sustainability,” Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer said in a statement. Also supporting the project, which is expected to be operational in 2023, are Next Energy and the Jacobs Engineering Group. Ford purchased the long-abandoned train station and is converting it to be the hub of what it calls its “mobility innovation district,” where software developers and others will focus on making electrified and autonomous transportation more practical.

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Yanis Varoufakis also discussed “pay-to-earn” and the blockchain’s long-term consequences.

Former Greek Finance Minister and one-time in-house economist at Valve, Yanis Varoufakis, gave a long and freewheeling interview to the website, the Crypto Syllabus, focusing on the blockchain, its potential and disappointments, and where it sits in the larger context of politics, surveillance, and economics.

Of particular note to PC Gamer readers is his description of his time with Valve. Varoufakis had access to Valve’s data on Steam’s nascent player-to-player marketplace in the early 2010s, which he used to advise the company and his own economics research. Describing Valve’s initial pitch to him, Varoufakis said:

Continue reading “Former Valve economist calls Facebook’s metaverse ‘a Steam-like digital economy’ with Zuckerberg as its ‘techno-lord’” »