C16 Biosciences uses yeast to convert food waste and industrial byproducts into a sustainable alternative.
The fact that self-driving trucks did not initially capture the public imagination is perhaps not entirely shocking. After all, most people have never been inside a truck, let alone a self-driving one, and don’t give them more than a passing thought. But just because trucks aren’t foremost in most people’s thoughts, doesn’t mean trucks don’t impact everyone’s lives day in and day out. Trucking is an $800 billion industry in the US. Virtually everything we buy — from our food to our phones to our furniture — reaches us via truck. Automating the movement of goods could, therefore, have at least as profound an impact on our lives as automating how we move ourselves. And people are starting to take notice.
As self-driving industry pioneers, we’re not surprised: we have been saying this for years. We founded Kodiak Robotics in 2018 with the vision of launching a freight carrier that would drive autonomously on highways, while continuing to use traditional human drivers for first- and last-mile pickup and delivery. We developed this model because our experience in the industry convinced us that today’s self-driving technology is best-suited for highway driving. While training self-driving vehicles to drive on interstate highways is complicated, hard work, it’s a much simpler, more constrained problem than driving on city streets, which have pedestrians, public transportation, bikes, pets, and other things that make cities great to live in but difficult for autonomous technology to understand and navigate.
A quiet revolution is reshaping the agricultural world, with farmers like Danie Slabbert saying that if we want to save the planet, it’s not so much about what we eat, but how we farm. CNN’s David McKenzie reports.
CropBox is a shipping container farm system featuring the latest technology in precision farming.
Nearly every day, new discoveries are pushing the genetics revolution ever-forward. It’s hard to imagine it’s been only a century and a half since Gregor Mendl experimented with his peas, six decades since Watson and Crick identified the double helix, fourteen years since the completion of the human genome project, and five years since scientists began using CRISPR-cas9 for precision gene editing. Today, these tools are being used in ways that will transform agriculture, animal breeding, healthcare, and ultimately human evolution.
Common practices like in vitro fertilization (IVF) and preimplantation embryo selection make human genetic enhancement possible today. But as we learn more and more about what the genome does, we will be able to make increasingly more informed decisions about which embryos to implant in IVF in the near term and how to manipulate pre-implanted embryos in the longer-term. In our world of exponential scientific advancement, the genetic future will arrive far faster than most people currently understand or are prepared for.
Continue reading “Building a Positive Genetic Future for All” »
Circa 2017
Hunting for meat was a critical step in all animal and human evolution. A key brain-trophic element in meat is vitamin B3 / nicotinamide. The supply of meat and nicotinamide steadily increased from the Cambrian origin of animal predators ratcheting ever larger brains. This culminated in the 3-million-year evolution of Homo sapiens and our overall demographic success. We view human evolution, recent history, and agricultural and demographic transitions in the light of meat and nicotinamide intake. A biochemical and immunological switch is highlighted that affects fertility in the ‘de novo’ tryptophan-to-kynurenine-nicotinamide ‘immune tolerance’ pathway. Longevity relates to nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide consumer pathways. High meat intake correlates with moderate fertility, high intelligence, good health, and longevity with consequent population stability, whereas low meat/high cereal intake (short of starvation) correlates with high fertility, disease, and population booms and busts. Too high a meat intake and fertility falls below replacement levels. Reducing variances in meat consumption might help stabilise population growth and improve human capital.
Keywords: Meat, nicotinamide, evolution, NAD(H), vitamin B3, Malthus, fertility, immunological tolerance, longevity.
How is a pharmaceutical giant using a food & snack manufacturing process to speed up the making of medicine?
Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have made a surprising discovery that could help explain our risk for developing chronic diseases or cancers as we get older, and how our food decomposes over time.
What’s more, their findings, which were reported recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), point to an unexpected link between the ozone chemistry in our atmosphere and our cells’ hardwired ability to ward off disease.
“The beauty of nature is that it often decides to use similar chemistries throughout a system, but we never thought that we would find a common link between atmospheric chemistry, and the chemistry of our bodies and food,” said Kevin Wilson, the deputy director of Berkeley Lab’s Chemical Sciences Division who led the study. “Our study is the first to explore another chemical pathway that might affect how well the cells in our bodies — and even our food — can respond to oxidative stress, such as pollution, over time.”
That bees are downright awesome is not up for debate. After all, they pollinate about a third of all the crops that we consume and help to support ecosystems worldwide. Yet the bees are in trouble, with a phenomenon known as colony collapse disorder (CCD) causing an alarming drop in numbers. Fortunately, a solution may be on the horizon in the form of genetically modified bacteria.
One thing that is a topic of great debate is the cause of CCD. Some studies point the finger at a particular class of pesticides called neonicotinoids, although many within the scientific community agree that multiple factors are probably at play.
What we do know is that CCD first became an issue once the Varroa mite became widespread, largely thanks to a global trade in European honeybees that brought them into contact with Asian parasites. At first, it was assumed that the mites were simply killing bees by sucking on their blood, although it later transpired that they also carried the lethal deformed wing virus (DWV), transmitting it into the bloodstream of the bees they feasted on.
