Food – Lifeboat News: The Blog

Mar 16
2020

Woolworth’s Launches ‘Elderly-Only’ Shopping Hour To Ensure Seniors Get Supplies

Australian supermarket giant Woolworths is introducing a dedicated shopping hour that will only allow elderly and disabled people to purchase items.

Starting tomorrow (March 17) shopping between 7 am and 8 am will be exclusive to elderly and disabled people with government-issued disability and pension cards.

These actions are a direct response to the chaotic panic buying and hoarding of essential items by other greedy shoppers which has left older people struggling to get their hands on food and toiletries.

Mar 15
2020

Fusion Energy Solution May Come From Permanent Magnets Like Those on Refrigerator Doors – But Far Stronger

Permanent magnets akin to those used on refrigerators could speed the development of fusion energy – the same energy produced by the sun and stars.

In principle, such magnets can greatly simplify the design and production of twisty fusion facilities called stellarators, according to scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) and the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Greifswald, Germany. PPPL founder Lyman Spitzer Jr. invented the stellarator in the early 1950s.

Most stellarators use a set of complex twisted coils that spiral like stripes on a candy cane to produce magnetic fields that shape and control the plasma that fuels fusion reactions. Refrigerator-like permanent magnets could produce the hard part of these essential fields, the researchers say, allowing simple, non-twisted coils to produce the remaining part in place of the complex coils.

Mar 15
2020

Whole Foods Suggests That Workers Share Paid Time Off During Coronavirus

Whole Foods could afford to offer employees unlimited paid sick time during the Coronavirus outbreak. Instead, they have suggested that employees donate their accumulated paid time off to their coworkers.

Mar 14
2020

Expert: Chinese Scientists Sell Lab Animals as Meat on the Black Market

Population Research Institute President Steven W. Mosher wrote at the New York Post on Saturday that China’s coronavirus epidemic could have been unleashed by researchers who sold laboratory animals to the notorious “wet markets” of Wuhan for extra cash.

Mosher is not the first skeptic of Beijing’s official coronavirus narrative to note the presence of an advanced microbiology lab near Wuhan, the city where the epidemic originated. Since the early days of the crisis, theories have suggested everything from the lab accidentally releasing the virus to speculation that the virus might have been deliberately designed as a biological weapon.

His theory cited as evidence the release of new guidelines from the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology calling for “strengthening biosecurity management in microbiology labs that handle advanced viruses like the novel coronavirus.”

Mar 14
2020

Lab-grown meat? Dutch start-up keeps pork on your plate without wrecking the planet

ROME – A Dutch start-up may have found a workaround for eco-conscious consumers struggling to give up meat: pork grown in a laboratory that doesn’t harm animals or damage the planet.

Meatable will this summer unveil its first pork prototype made entirely from cultured animal cells instead of from slaughtered animals, according to its CEO.

Mar 13
2020

‘Smart’ wound-healing patch: DARPA awards $22 million grant

Jeff Falk Rice University 713−348−6775 [email protected]

Jade Boyd Rice University 713−348−6778 [email protected]

Erin Hare University of Pittsburgh 412−864−7194 [email protected]

Mar 13
2020

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez demands the government distribute a universal basic income and implement ‘Medicare for all’ to fight the coronavirus

The House is preparing to vote on Thursday on a coronavirus-relief bill that would provide Americans with paid sick leave, food assistance, free coronavirus testing, and more substantial unemployment benefits.

But Ocasio-Cortez pushed for a more sweeping response, including expanding Medicare or Medicaid to cover all Americans, a freeze on evictions, a universal basic income, ending work requirements for food-assistance programs, criminal-justice reform, and freezing student-debt collection.

“This is not the time for half measures,” she tweeted on Thursday. “We need to take dramatic action now to stave off the worst public health & economic affects. That includes making moves on paid leave, debt relief, waiving work req’s, guaranteeing healthcare, UBI, detention relief (pretrial, elderly, imm).”

Mar 12
2020

If this era of automation mirrors the past, we’re in trouble

“In the case of the Industrial Revolution, people’s lives didn’t improve for seven decades,” Frey says. “That’s two generations. I think we need to be very concerned about some of these short-term effects on people.”

Frey says for seven decades wages were stagnant, food consumption decreased and “people’s living standards deteriorated.” The economy was doing quite well, but most of the workers weren’t seeing the benefits of that economy.

“Because people’s living standards deteriorated, people rioted against mechanized factories. The Luddites are often portrayed as these irrational enemies of progress, and to some extent, that’s right if you take a very long term view,””

The case against the flawed argument that automation won’t be so bad.

Mar 11
2020

Bees: how important are they and what would happen if they became extinct?

40% of the world’s insect species are in decline, and scientists believe that a third are threatened with extinction. From pesticides to invasive species, there are various reasons, but any losses could have a major impact on our food systems.

Mar 11
2020

Chemists create new artificial enzyme

Enzymes are nature’s powerhouses. Found in the cells of all animals, plants, and every other living organism, they accelerate the chemical reactions that trigger thousands of biological functions—from forming neurons to digesting food.