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A pyramid-styled housing complex was built in China’s eastern Jiangsu province. With a spacious balcony on each apartment, residents have found it difficult to cook inside the kitchen, because vent hoods cannot be installed in the flat.
Continue reading “Houses built like pyramids go viral in China” »
In a world’s first, US-based company Eat Just’s lab-grown meat just went on sale in Singapore following regulatory approval.
US-based company Eat Just’s lab-grown meat is going for sale in Singapore following regulatory approval, The Guardian reports, marking the first time such a product has been authorized for sale in a yet-unidentified restaurant.
The company is also going through regulatory processes to eventually get their product approved in the United States.
Continue reading “Lab-Grown Meat Is Officially Going on Sale, for the First Time Ever” »
“The newest term — Universal Basic Means of Production — helps someone unfamiliar with the concepts to better imagine that world without clouding the idea with negative connotations from the past. So, what if instead of focusing so heavily on the idea of passing out money to individuals, we shift our focus to subsidizing 3D printers, local recycling centers for collecting plastic to make 3D printing filament when possible, and vertical gardens in homes and communities.”
Imagine a carbon nanotube replicator and garden in every home. It’s not sci-fi and will soon be possible. How fast we make the transition is entirely up to us.
This term refers to the idea of providing every household with technology that allows people to produce things they need at home. This includes consumer goods such as clothes, food, building materials, etc. and refers to the idea of getting everyone producing as many of their consumable materials as possible.
Continue reading “Universal Basic Means of Production: Can It Make UBI Obsolete?” »
Yummy?
Eat Just Inc., a maker of meat and egg substitutes, has been approved to sell its laboratory-created chicken in Singapore, which becomes the first government to allow the sale of cultured meat.
Welcome back to our series on Martian colonization! In Part I, we looked at the challenges and benefits of colonization. In Part II, we looked at what it would take to transport people to and from Mars. In Part III, we looked at how people could live there. Today, we will address the question of how people could establish an industrial base there.
If we intend to “go interplanetary” and establish a colony on Mars, we need to know how to address the long-term needs of the colonists. In addition to shelter, air, water, food security, and radiation shielding, the people will need to create an economy of sorts. The question is, what kind of industry would Mars support?
Continue reading “Making the First Martians: Building an Economy on Mars” »
From a pile of seaweed to a packet of soy sauce.
The London startup Notpla has created a plastic alternative from seaweed that’s biodegradable — and even edible. And it’s hoping it could put a dent in the 300 million tons of plastic waste humans generate each year.
Notpla’s natural plastic-like casing is biodegradable within four to six weeks, the company says, compared to the several hundred years it takes synthetic plastics to biodegrade.
The technology doesn’t seem to be here yet; obviously, the ice on Mars will be harvested to provide drinking and irrigation water.
If we ever intend to send crewed missions to deep-space locations, then we need to come up with solutions for keeping the crews supplied. For astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS), who regularly receive resupply missions from Earth, this is not an issue. But for missions traveling to destinations like Mars and beyond, self-sufficiency is the name of the game.
A video on lab grown meat. Meat grown from cells taken from animals. 😃
How do you like your beef, the traditional way or 3D-printed? 🍖 🤔
Find out more at https://bit.ly/39kIeCN # engineering.
With fall and winter holidays coming up, many will be pondering the relationship between food and sleep. Researchers led by Professor Masashi Yanagisawa at the University of Tsukuba in Japan hope they can focus people on the important middlemen in the equation: bacterial microbes in the gut. Their detailed study in mice revealed the extent to which bacteria can change the environment and contents of the intestines, which ultimately impacts behaviors like sleep.
The experiment itself was fairly simple. The researchers gave a group of mice a powerful cocktail of antibiotics for four weeks, which depleted them of intestinal microorganisms. Then, they compared intestinal contents between these mice and control mice who had the same diet. Digestion breaks food down into bits and pieces called metabolites. The research team found significant differences between metabolites in the microbiota-depleted mice and the control mice. As Professor Yanagisawa explains, “we found more than 200 metabolite differences between mouse groups. About 60 normal metabolites were missing in the microbiota-depleted mice, and the others differed in the amount, some more and some less than in the control mice.”
The team next set out to determine what these metabolites normally do. Using metabolome set enrichment analysis, they found that the biological pathways most affected by the antibiotic treatment were those involved in making neurotransmitters, the molecules that cells in the brain use to communicate with each other. For example, the tryptophan–serotonin pathway was almost totally shut down; the microbiota-depleted mice had more tryptophan than controls, but almost zero serotonin. This shows that without important gut microbes, the mice could not make any serotonin from the tryptophan they were eating. The team also found that the mice were deficient in vitamin B6 metabolites, which accelerate production of the neurotransmitters serotonin and dopamine.
