Lifeboat Foundation

Words and promises of action in some far off future election will not save the once great natural wonder of the Great Barrier Reef from death.

If most of the world’s coral reefs die, as scientists fear is increasingly likely, some of the richest and most colorful life in the ocean could be lost, along with huge sums from reef tourism. In poorer countries, lives are at stake: Hundreds of millions of people get their protein primarily from reef fish, and the loss of that food supply could become a humanitarian crisis.

“For lasting results you need to create a lifestyle change.”

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A big fan of robo-burgers 😊.

Would your burger taste as delicious if it was made by a robot?

You’ll soon be able to find out at CaliBurger restaurants in the US and worldwide.

Continue reading “New Burger Robot Will Take Command of the Grill in 50 Fast Food Restaurants” »

Plenty of desert for this sort of thing.

Sundrop Farms grows tomatoes in the Australia desert using solely sunlight and seawater, which is desalinized with solar power.

In Brief

• Your thoughts are your own, right? Perhaps not. New technology is bringing that day closer when the unscrupulous may actually be able to hack human thoughts.
• It raises a number of new ethical concerns for this brave new world we’re entering with each rotation of the Earth.

Everyone is familiar with the concept of hacking. It is why we all strive to protect our computers and smartphones from nefarious outside sources trying to break in to steal information, implant malware, etc. Hackers pose a threat to everyone from teenage smartphone users to the computer databases of government organizations. Hacking is a threat that we are all familiar with, and something that many know how to protect against. But, as the line between science and science fiction blurs, even hacking is getting a futuristic upgrade. Recently, at the Enigma Security Conference, University of Washington researcher and lecturer Tamara Bonaci revealed technology that could be used to essentially “hack” into people’s brains.

She created this technology around a game called Flappy Whale. While people played the game, the technology was able to covertly extract neural responses to subliminal imagery in the game like logos, restaurants, cars, etc. Now, hacking into people’s underlying feelings and thoughts about seeing a fast food restaurant doesn’t seem like it could cause much harm, but this technology has the potential to gather much more intimate information about a person like their religion, fears, prejudices, health, etc. This technology could evolve from an interesting way to understand human response to a military device. The possibilities range from an incredibly useful research tool to a potentially frightening interrogation device.

Continue reading “Hacking the Human Brain—New Tech Could Make It a Reality” »

A burger-flipping robot has just completed its first day on the job at a restaurant in California, replacing humans at the grill.

Flippy has mastered the art of cooking the perfect burger and has just started work at CaliBurger, a fast-food chain.

The robotic kitchen assistant, which its makers say can be installed in just five minutes, is the brainchild of Miso Robotics.

Continue reading “Burger-flipping robot replaces humans on first day at work” »

Newly developed technology will determine the sex of each fertilized egg before the chick inside develops – enabling the removal of all male-identified eggs from the hatchery. This will eliminate the industry’s need to heartlessly grind male chicks once hatched.

Did you know? Every year, millions of tiny male chicks are ground up alive or suffocated because they don’t lay eggs. The little guys aren’t considered ‘commercially viable’ to even be raised for meat and, therefore, are brutally killed shortly after hatching.

It’s an unfortunate side effect of the commercial egg industry which few producers are open to talking about. One can understand why, as half of all chicks born into the egg industry are male – creating an enormous ethical issue.

Continue reading “Germany Becomes The First Nation To Ban ‘Chick Shredding’” »

The more crops we cultivate, the less chance our food supply wil get wiped out by a disease.

Out of the more than 300,000 plant species in existence, only three species—rice, wheat, and maize—account for most of the plant matter that humans consume, partly because in the history of agriculture, mutations arose that made these crops the easiest to harvest. But with CRISPR technology, we don’t have to wait for nature to help us domesticate plants, argue researchers at the University of Copenhagen. In a Review published March 2 in Trends in Plant Science, they describe how gene editing could make, for example, wild legumes, quinoa, or amaranth, which are already sustainable and nutritious, more farmable.

“In theory, you can now take those traits that have been selected for over thousands of years of crop domestication—such as reduced bitterness and those that facilitate easy harvest—and induce those mutations in plants that have never been cultivated,” says senior author Michael Palmgren, a botanist who heads an interdisciplinary think tank called “Plants for a Changing World” at the University of Copenhagen.

Continue reading “Want more crop variety? Researchers propose using CRISPR to accelerate plant domestication” »

Meat production gobbles up more than half of all land in use by agriculture. Shrinking this will allow us to restore nature and open up land for recreation and living. Also, the pressure on the tropical rainforests will diminish.

Silicon Valley plant-based beef from Impossible Foods is now in Bareburger at 535 LaGuardia Place in New York, its first chain restaurant.