Lifeboat Foundation

Uber has announced it’s developing a new drone it hopes to use for Uber Eats deliveries one day. Eric Allison, the head of Uber Elevate, talked about the new drone in Detroit yesterday at the Forbes Under 30 Summit. And while the mock-up design looks pretty cool, with rotating wings and six rotors, the details released so far raise some red flags.

According to Forbes (emphasis ours):

Continue reading “Uber’s New Delivery Drone Absolutely Reeks of Vaporware [Updated]” »

Hundreds of millions of people in India depend on farming for their livelihoods, but many of them struggle with losing crops to disease, getting them to market or achieving the right price when they do. Several startups are trying to change that.

Piggybacking on India’s mobile boom, these companies are using smartphones and the internet to help farmers grow, harvest and sell their crops more efficiently. India is self-sufficient in food staples, but faces a constant challenge to feed its population of 1.3 billion and rising. The country accounts for a quarter of the world’s hungry people and is home to over 190 million undernourished people, according to the latest estimates by the United Nations.

“There is a lot of financing and talent which is coming in this space,” says Rikin Gandhi, co-founder and executive director of Digital Green, a social enterprise that began as a research project backed by Microsoft ( MSFT ).

A new analysis using data from more than 1.4 million people concludes that eating an ample amount of fiber and yogurt may protect against lung cancer.

Our diets are overly refined. Eating more whole fruits, especially apples, pears and prunes, can help our digestive health.

A failing pipe can be tough to spot. It may cause a puddle, produce another sign of damage, or simply burst before detection. A flooded kitchen or laundry room is messy and inconvenient, but the stakes are much, much higher in nuclear power plants—which on average contain many miles of pipeline.

As concern about aging plants escalates, Vanderbilt engineers are working on an early warning system. They are using polymer coatings on the inside of the pipe and 3D-printed polymer devices infused with nanoparticles as sensors to signal the changes on the outside of the pipe. And, they hope, sound.

A huge challenge is to detect the changes in the polymer film occurring inside the pipe. To create a useful and proactive technique, the team wants to use sound, or vibrometry, to identify these internal changes from outside the pipe.

You can protest about the Environment all you want, while some of us actually plant trees to heal it. Kenya is one country that has been instrumental in planting trees. Wangari Maathai had a coffin made of hyacinth, showing how real she was even in death. Ethiopia recently set a record planting trees. Some people talk, while others do. One Kenyan woman’s organization planted over 51 million trees, and still counting. #BeTheDifference

Equity Group has announced plans to implement an ambitious project to plant 35 million trees across the country within a year.

In an effort to conserve the environment, Equity has partnered with Kenya Forest Service (KFS) to promote Farm Forestry Initiatives.

Continue reading “Equity Group kick starts a 35 million trees planting campaign” »

Gene-Edited Bulls

Although GMO wheat, corn, and other crops are frequently used in the US, scientists and farmers have begun shifting their focus to a far more accurate, cheaper, and potentially acceptable way of tinkering with the genome: genetic editing.

We’ve spilled plenty of ink on the merits of CRISPR and older-generation genetic editors such as TALEN. Rather than blindly sticking additional genes into a genome, these are guided approaches that surgically snip out or insert additional genetic material, and as such, are far more precise and predictable. Rather than inserting alien genes into our foods, scientists can now cut out genes detrimental to crop growth, or mimic mutations that provide advantages—a sort of “gene therapy” for food, but for enhancement rather than treatment.

People not washing their hands after going to the toilet, rather than undercooked meat, is behind the spread of a key strain of E. coli.

Experts looked at thousands of blood, faecal and food samples.

They found human-to-human transmission was responsible — “faecal particles from one person reaching the mouth of another”.

Lab-grown meat is coming to your plate, and thanks to a new breakthrough in its development, it may feel like traditional meat.

Researchers at Harvard University have discovered a way to use edible gelatin scaffolds to mimic real meat’s texture and consistency. The team used cow and rabbit muscle cells on the scaffolds to recreate the long, thin fibers that give meat its distinctive feel.

The research was published Monday in the journal NPJ Science of Food. Kit Parker, senior author of the study, said in a statement that he first started thinking about the idea after being a judge on the Food Network.