Lifeboat Foundation

Evidence has been accumulating for almost a decade that the microbiome composition changes with age. In 2,012 research by my colleagues at University College Cork showed that diversity in the microbiome was linked to health outcomes in later life, including frailty.

In 1,895 on turning 50 Elie Metchnikoff became increasingly anxious about aging. As a result, the Russian Nobel prize-winning scientist, and one of the founders of immunology, turned his attention away from immunology and towards gerontology – a term that he coined.

He was fascinated by the role that intestinal bacteria play in health and disease and suggested that people from parts of eastern Europe lived longer because they ate a lot of fermented foods containing lactic acid bacteria.

Continue reading “Scientists Reversed Aging in Mouse Brains With Poo Transplants From Young Mice” »

Discussions about how and where we produce food are set to continue for a long time to come as businesses, governments and citizens try to find ways to create a sustainable system that meets the needs of everyone.

It’s perhaps no surprise then that some of the topics covered above are starting to generate interest among the investment community.

Speaking to CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” in June, Morgan Stanley’s global head of sustainability research, Jessica Alsford, highlighted this shift.

Drones are neat and fun and all that good stuff (I should probably add the caveat here that I’m obviously not referring to the big, terrible military variety), but when it comes to quadcopters, there’s always been the looming question of general usefulness. The consumer-facing variety are pretty much the exclusive realm of hobbyists and imaging.

We’ve seen a number of interesting applications for things like agricultural surveillance, real estate and the like, all of which are effectively extensions of that imaging capability. But a lot can be done with a camera and the right processing. One of the more interesting applications I’ve seen cropping up here and there is the warehouse drone — something perhaps a bit counterintuitive, as you likely (and understandably) associate drones with the outdoors.

Looking back, it seems we’ve actually had two separate warehouse drone companies compete in Disrupt Battlefield. There was IFM (Intelligent Flying Machines) in 2016 and Vtrus two years later. That’s really the tip of the iceberg for a big list of startups effectively pushing to bring drones to warehouses and factory floors.

Upon an otherwise unruly landscape of choppy sea and craggy peaks, the salmon farms that dot many of Norway’s remote fjords impose a neat geometry. The circular pens are placid on the surface, but hold thousands of churning fish, separated by only a net from their wild counterparts. And that is precisely the conundrum. Although the pens help ensure the salmon’s welfare by mimicking the fish’s natural habitat, they also sometimes allow fish to escape, a problem for both the farm and the environment.

In an attempt to prevent escaped fish from interbreeding with their wild counterparts and threatening the latter’s genetic diversity, molecular biologist Anna Wargelius and her team at the Institute of Marine Research in Norway have spent years working on ways to induce sterility in Atlantic salmon. Farmed salmon that cannot reproduce, after all, pose no threat to the gene pool of wild stocks, and Wargelius has successfully developed a technique that uses the gene-editing technology Crispr to prevent the development of the cells that would otherwise generate functioning sex organs.

Continue reading “A sterile solution: How Crispr could protect wild salmon” »

Shells of tamarind, a tropical fruit consumed worldwide, are discarded during food production. As they are bulky, tamarind shells take up a considerable amount of space in landfills where they are disposed as agricultural waste.

However, a team of international scientists led by Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) has found a way to deal with the problem. By processing the tamarind shells which are rich in carbon, the scientists converted the waste material into carbon nanosheets, which are a key component of supercapacitors — energy storage devices that are used in automobiles, buses, electric vehicles, trains, and elevators.

The study reflects NTU’s commitment to address humanity’s grand challenges on sustainability as part of its 2025 strategic plan, which seeks to accelerate the translation of research discoveries into innovations that mitigate our impact on the environment.

Electric tractor developer Solectrac has announced that its e70N tractor is now available for sale. Solectrac recently delivered the 70-horsepower, diesel-equivalent tractors to three farms in Northern California as part of a grant from the Bay Area Air Quality Management District’s Funding Agriculture Replacement Measures for Emission Reductions Demonstration Program (FARMER).

Solectrac is an electric tractor developer founded in Northern California with the goal of offering farmers independence from the pollution, infrastructure, and price volatility associated with fossil fuels.

Electrek first reported on Solectrac after it donated a Compact Electric Tractor (CET) to Jack Johnson’s nonprofit organization in Oahu, Hawaii.

A great beginning, but more research is needed.

While there are treatments for temporarily alleviating the symptoms of dementia, there is currently no cure available. The search is therefore on to identify lifestyle factors, such as diet, that can reduce individuals’ risk of developing the condition.

Previous research into possible links between eating foods rich in flavonoids and reduced risk of cognitive decline later in life has been inconclusive, however.

Continue reading “Cognitive decline: Investigating dietary factors” »

The applications claimed Dabus, which is made up of artificial neural networks, invented an emergency warning light and a type of food container, among other inventions.

Several countries, including Australia, had rejected the applications, stating a human must be named the inventor. The decision by the Australian deputy commissioner of patents in February this year found that although “inventor” was not defined in the Patents Act when it was written in 1991 it would have been understood to mean natural persons – with machines being tools that could be used by inventors.

But in a federal court judgment on Friday, justice Jonathan Beach overturned the decision, and sent the matter back to the commission for reconsideration.

Apigenin, quercetin, luteolin data: USDA Database for the Flavonoid.
Content of Selected Foods.
https://www.ars.usda.gov/arsuserfiles/80400525/data/flav/flav_r03-1.pdf.

Kuromanin data: http://phenol-explorer.eu/contents/polyphenol/9

Continue reading “Dietary CD38 Inhibitors: Are They Correlated With Biological Age?” »