Lifeboat Foundation

The price of eggs has more than doubled in the last year due to inflation, avian flu outbreaks, and the war in Ukraine. But demand for the breakfast and baking staple hasn’t gone down much; people like eggs, and there aren’t many viable substitutes that truly taste, look, and perform like the real thing.

An Israeli startup called Yo Egg thinks it has a solution in the form of vegan eggs. The product doesn’t share much with real eggs in terms of composition, but the company says it’s achieved a near-exact match in taste and texture.

Continue reading “This Vegan Egg Makes Its Debut in US Restaurants This Week” »

Just when we are getting accustomed to artificial intelligence in our daily lives, get ready for a new disruptor: synthetic biology, or syn-bio, the design and engineering of biological systems to create and improve processes and products. It promises to become a manufacturing paradigm of the future.

Recent advances in molecular, cell, and systems biology have enabled scientists to shift their focus from research of syn-bio to design and engineering, creating some truly mind blowing applications. By using microorganisms, for example, companies can now manufacture an infinite number of things, cell by cell, from scratch. This offers new ways of producing almost everything that humans consume, from flavors and fabrics to foods and fuels.

By the end of the decade, syn-bio may be used extensively in manufacturing industries that account for more than a third of global output, according to BCG Henderson Institute, Boston Consulting Group’s strategy think tank. Various sources estimate that the syn-bio market today is about $10 billion and is expected to reach $30 billion in the next five years.

I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.

After a long day, you are finally at your favorite restaurant and you order the burger you have been dreaming of the whole time. The burger is gone within minutes, or seconds depending on your appetite. You call the waiter to send compliments to the chef for that delicious burger but are surprised to learn that your burger’s meat has been grown in a laboratory. How would you feel about eating lab-grown meat? Would you even care or does this scenario not make sense because you would have understood in the first bite that you are not eating “real meat”? What is lab-grown meat, anyway?

Continue reading “How Lab-grown meat is made” »

How do you feed 8 billion people, all of whom want access to higher-quality, more nutritious and lower-cost protein?

Do we raise more cows, pigs, and chicken? Will we be forced to clear-cut more rainforest to raise grains?

Over the next decade, we are reinventing how we feed a hungry planet, transforming what we eat and how we grow it.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=SIwcB56x2ek

He has never been on a leash and eats only human food.

Bobi, aged 30 years and 268 days, was crowned as the world’s oldest living dog by the Guinness World Records last week. Bobi also holds the enviable record of being officially the oldest dog to have lived on the planet.

Continue reading “A 30-year-old canine in Portugal is officially the world’s oldest dog” »

The loss of pollinators, such as bees, is a huge challenge for global biodiversity and affects humanity by causing problems in food production. At Tampere University, researchers have now developed the first passively flying robot equipped with artificial muscle. Could this artificial fairy be utilized in pollination?

The development of stimuli-responsive polymers has brought about a wealth of material-related opportunities for next-generation small-scale, wirelessly controlled soft-bodied robots. For some time now, engineers have known how to use these materials to make small robots that can walk, swim and jump. So far, no one has been able to make them fly.

Researchers of the Light Robots group at Tampere University are now researching how to make smart material fly. Hao Zeng, Academy Research Fellow and the group leader, and Jianfeng Yang, a doctoral researcher, have come up with a new design for their project called FAIRY – Flying Aero-robots based on Light Responsive Materials Assembly. They have developed a polymer-assembly robot that flies by wind and is controlled by light.

It sounds like the start of a Southern gothic horror thriller. Auburn University scientists have been putting alligator DNA in catfish. It’s delicious, but with less chance for infection. Don’t worry, it won’t bite back. MIT Technology Review recently highlighted the work of Rex Dunham, Baofeng Su and their colleagues at Auburn University, who have used genetic modification to reduce problems of disease in catfish farming.

The Hell Pig or Entelodont was definitely one of the ugliest creatures ever to have lived, at least by human standards.

Nevertheless, this petrifying pig was an evolutionary success surviving for nearly 20 million years in eat-or-be-eaten prehistoric North America.

Illustrating images.

Food from thin air?

Food production, as we know it, is entirely dependent on land and weather conditions. Protein production is a massively disproportionate squanderer of the Earth’s resources. It’s time to enter the era of sustainable food production to liberate our planet from the burdens of agriculture.