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Category: food – Page 228

Plastic Eating Plants: Will they Save our Environment?

Circa 2016 o.o

Americans dump 251 million tons of trash annually into landfills. Bike seat ripped? Toss it. Hole in the old garden hose? Get rid of it. Spandex not tucking in your tummy? Loose it and replace it. This linear process of extracting a resource, processing it, selling it than discarding it is creating a mound of trash dangerously equivocal to the ball of trash in Futurama episode 8 season 1.

Why Plastic Sucks

Bike seats, garden hoses and spandex are all comprised of polyurethane, the most common and environmentally destructive plastic. The Newsweek article, Plastic-Eating Fungi That Could Solve Our Garbage Problem, notes that the only way to get rid of polyurethane is incarceration, which releases harmful gases into our ecosystem. If plastic is left abandoned in the landfill or ocean, Ultraviolet light from the sun or waves break down the material into harmful microplastic particles. In the ocean, this broken down plastic first poisons the marine life then the people who consumed it. The process of breaking down such materials in landfills emits methane, a green house gas 23 times more potent than CO2, according to the Modern Farm article, Plastic-Eating Mushrooms Could Save the World. Additionally, per the Newsweek article, David Schwatzman, Proffessor of Biology at Howard University remarks,” Landfills are sources of serious problems.

Sharks Have a Secret Buried in Their DNA That Could Help Humans Fight Cancer

Sharks are at the top of the marine food chain for a reason. Their massive size along with a dazzling row of extra-sharp teeth make them the fiercest hunters in our oceans. But it turns out that the shark’s aquatic dominance reaches down into its very DNA, and through its mutations, sharks could teach us how to fight our most deadly affliction—cancer.

This isn’t the first evidence that mutations can prove beneficial for disease resistance and long-term survival. High bone density, a hemoglobin that boosts malaria resistance, and a third retinal cone that improves color vision are some human examples. But new gene mapping conducted by scientists at the Save Our Seas Foundation Shark Research Center at Florida’s Nova Southeastern University, the Guy Harvey Research Institute, and the Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine shows that sharks have developed genomic adaptations that repair damaged DNA, effectively protecting them against cancer and other diseases.

Cuba’s rivers run clean after decades of sustainable farming

Thoughts?

Despite centuries of colonization and agriculture, Cuba’s rivers are in good health.

Sugarcane and cattle farming on the island date back to the late fifteenth century. To measure water quality in Cuba’s rivers today, Paul Bierman at the University of Vermont in Burlington, Rita Hernández at the Cienfuegos Center for Environmental Studies in Cuba and their colleagues sampled water in 25 river basins in central Cuba. This is the first time in more than 60 years that scientists from Cuba and the United States have joined forces to study the island’s hydrology.

More than 80% of the samples had levels of Escherichia coli bacteria that exceeded international standards for recreational use. The bacteria are indicators of faecal contamination, and probably came from the cattle that graze on many riverbanks.

Next Gen Farming Without Soil and 90% Less Water | GRATEFUL

Aeroponics grows fruits and vegetables faster, cheaper and better. RELATED: Making superfood chocolate from raw cacao: https://youtu.be/SrQlCI3Tq58

Vertical farming with Tower Gardens is on the ‘rise’ and rightfully so. You can grow a variety of plants without ANY soil and 90% LESS water. It also requires 10x less space so you can do a lot more in a smaller area. That means easily growing fresh herbs, fruits, vegetables, and flowers both indoors and out. And because everything is grown and picked fresh, the flavor is unbelievable!

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Scientists Release Genetically Engineered Moths for First Time

The diamondback moth is a huge pest. It eats a variety of crops, but is largely resistant to insecticides, resulting in upwards of $5 billion in losses every year.

That could soon change, though, as an international team of researchers has created a strain of genetically engineered diamondback moths that could suppress the pest population in a sustainable way — and they just released them into the wild for the first time.

For the study, published Wednesday in the journal Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology, the researchers engineered the moths so that when the males of the strain mated with wild females, the female offspring would die during the caterpillar life stage.

Breakthrough creates tough material able to stretch, heal and defend itself

O.o.

While eating takeout one day, University of Chicago scientists Bozhi Tian and Yin Fang started thinking about the noodles—specifically, their elasticity. A specialty of Xi’an, Tian’s hometown in China, is wheat noodles stretched by hand until they become chewy—strong and elastic. Why, the two materials scientists wondered, didn’t they get thin and weak instead?

They started experimenting, ordering pounds and pounds of noodles from the restaurant. “They got very suspicious,” Fang said. “I think they thought we wanted to steal their secrets to open a rival restaurant.”

But what they were preparing was a recipe for —that could much more closely mimic biological skin and than existing technology.

Scientists have built the world’s first living, self-healing robots

Do you think Xenobots is the early stage of nanobots, which could repair our body to achieve longevity escape velocity?

Scientists have created the world’s first living, self-healing robots using stem cells from frogs.

Named xenobots after the African clawed frog (Xenopus laevis) from which they take their stem cells, the machines are less than a millimeter (0.04 inches) wide — small enough to travel inside human bodies. They can walk and swim, survive for weeks without food, and work together in groups.

These are “entirely new life-forms,” said the University of Vermont, which conducted the research with Tufts University’s Allen Discovery Center.

Lab-grown meat could be in restaurants by 2021

We do have to grow meat in the labs!

Maastricht-based Mosa Meat, which has in the past received more than $1m from Google cofounder Sergey Brin, said it hopes to sell its first products — most likely ground beef for burgers — in the next three years.

The aim is to achieve industrial-scale production two to three years later, with a typical hamburger patty costing about $1.

Several companies are looking into cultured meat or meat substitute products aimed at consumers concerned about the environmental and ethical effect of raising and slaughtering animals.