Lifeboat Foundation

By 2050, the world will need to feed an additional 2.5 billion people living in cities. Yet as the demand for food rises, the amount of land available for agriculture in developed countries is expected to decline. In Japan, at the Fujitsu factory of Aizu-Wakamatsu which still manufactures semiconductor chips for computers, a different project is underway which may offer a solution to this problem. The company has converted an unused part of the factory into a farm to grow food — and more specifically, to grow lettuce. Fujitsu has focused on growing a low-potassium variety, which is sold to people with kidney problems who cannot process the mineral properly. Join Rachel Mealey in Japan’s Fukushima Prefecture to visit the sun-free and soil-free urban farms of the future.

Food deserts, lack of arable land, and the frozen months of winter are all obstacles we face in our mission to keep people fed. Urban Produce is excelling in this mission by licensing its patented indoor vertical farming technology, which can produce 16 acres of organic, leafy greens in just 1/8 acre of space.

The age of the restaurant self-service kiosks has dawned, and it’s the end of fast food as we know it.

McDonald’s is striding into the 21st century with the rollout of the “Create Your Taste” touchscreen kiosks, on which custom burgers can be built as well as full-menu ordering.

The kiosks are incredibly convenient and improve order accuracy, to which I can personally attest.

Continue reading “Fast food workers are becoming obsolete” »

Plug & Plant.

Healthy Food Fridge.

You are really starting to see the shape of the Singularity, ever more clearly, in the convergence of so many engineering and scientific discoveries, inventions, and philosophical musings.

I can say, without a doubt, that we are all living in truly extraordinary times!

Continue reading “This five-fingered robot hand is close to human in functionality” »

Google and Amazon were quick to put drones to use delivering orders.

But new research suggests delivery is just one small way drones are going to replace humans. The tiny airborne vessels will soon clean windows on skyscrapers, verify insurance claims and spray pesticide on crops.

The global market for drones, valued at around $2 billion today, will replace up to $127 billion worth of business services and human labour over the next four years, according to a new research by consulting firm PwC.

Continue reading “Drones will take $127bn worth of human work by 2020, PwC says” »

A nanoparticle commonly used in food, cosmetics, sunscreen and other products can have subtle effects on the activity of genes expressing enzymes that address oxidative stress inside two types of cells. While the titanium dioxide (TiO2) nanoparticles are considered non-toxic because they don’t kill cells at low concentrations, these cellular effects could add to concerns about long-term exposure to the nanomaterial.

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology used high-throughput screening techniques to study the effects of titanium dioxide nanoparticles on the expression of 84 genes related to cellular oxidative stress. Their work found that six genes, four of them from a single gene family, were affected by a 24-hour exposure to the nanoparticles.

The effect was seen in two different kinds of cells exposed to the nanoparticles: human HeLa cancer cells commonly used in research, and a line of monkey kidney cells. Polystyrene nanoparticles similar in size and surface electrical charge to the titanium dioxide nanoparticles did not produce a similar effect on gene expression.

Recognizing the importance of biofuels to energy and climate security, the U.S. Department of Energy has announced up to $90 million in project funding focused on designing, constructing and operating integrated biorefinery facilities. The production of biofuels from sustainable, non-food, domestic biomass resources is an important strategy to meet the Administration’s goals to reduce carbon emissions and our dependence on imported oil.

Project Development for Pilot and Demonstration Scale Manufacturing of Biofuels, Bioproducts, and Biopower is a funding opportunity meant to assist in the construction of bioenergy infrastructure to integrate cutting-edge pretreatment, process, and convergence technologies. Biorefineries are modeled after petroleum refineries, but use domestic biomass sources instead of crude oil, or other fossil fuels to produce biofuels, bioproducts, and biopower. They convert biomass feedstocks—the plant and algal materials used to derive fuels like ethanol, butanol, biodiesel and other hydrocarbon fuels—to another form of fuel or energy product. This funding will support efforts to improve and demonstrate processes that break down complex biomass feedstocks and convert them to gasoline, diesel and jet fuel, as well as plastics and chemicals.

“The domestic bio-industry could play an important part in the growing clean energy economy and in reducing American dependence on imported oil,” said Lynn Orr, DOE’s under secretary for science and energy. “This funding opportunity will support companies that are working to advance current technologies and help them overcome existing challenges in bioenergy so the industry can meet its full potential.”

Continue reading “DOE opens funding opportunity for biofuels, bioproducts, biopower” »

Samsung get into the cancer treatment space with their own Q-Dot technology? Another reason for the FDA to show up in tech’s backyard; lookout for all those future federal and state regs & compliance training that will be coming that eats up 20 hours each month of your scientists and engineering talent’s time.

For a lot of users, Samsung might be known best for their smartphones and other mobile devices, but the company is so much more than that. Many of you reading this might have one of Samsung’s Super HD TV sets, a curved Samsung TV or some other model of theirs. Next to smartphones one of their more popular consumer electronics is of course of TVs, and with the advent of new technology such as Quantum Dot, Samsung is getting even better at producing a great image. One area that you might expect to find this Quantum Dot technology being used is for medical uses, but that’s just what researchers have been exploring recently.

Explaining a Quantum Dot can become quite tricky, but to cut a long story short, they are semiconductors that are so small they register at the nanoscale side of things. In terms of Quantum Dots used in television displays, it’s their ability to precisely tune to a specific and exact part of the color spectrum that makes them so attractive, not to mention their much lower power draw. Now, Kim Sung-jee, a professor of the Chemistry department at Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH), has said that “when combining protein which clings to cancer cells and quantum dots, it can be used to seek out cancer cells in the body”. It’s reasoned that the potential for these Quantum Dots to be so precise in terms of color reproduction can help physicians track down certain cancer cells.

Continue reading “Samsung’s Quantum Dot TV Tech to Find Medical Applications” »