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Category: biotech/medical

Other companies, including BlueNalu Inc., Upside Foods Inc. and Eat Just, have expressed an intention to sell cell-based products in the U.S. Like them, Future Meat must get approval from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration before offering its products to the public. Kshuk is optimistic, though reaching price parity with conventional meat will probably take the nascent industry a few years.

An Israeli startup wants to replace chicken coops, barns and slaughterhouses with bioreactors to churn out cell-based meat for American diners.

Future Meat Technologies Ltd. is in talks with U.S. regulators to start offering its products in restaurants by the end of next year. The company has just opened what it calls the world’s first industrial cellular meat facility, which will be able to produce 500 kilograms (1102 pounds) a day.

“From the get-go, our main focus was around scaling up and reducing cost in order to have a commercially viable product,” Chief Executive Officer Rom Kshuk said in an interview.

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Two teams of researchers took part in the dramatic discovery, published in the prestigious Science journal: an anthropology team from Tel Aviv University headed by Prof. Israel Hershkovitz, Dr. Hila May and Dr. Rachel Sarig from the Sackler Faculty of Medicine and the Dan David Center for Human Evolution and Biohistory Research and the Shmunis Family Anthropology Institute, situated in the Steinhardt Museum at Tel Aviv University; and an archaeological team headed by Dr. Yossi Zaidner from the Institute of Archaeology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Timeline: The Nesher Ramla Homo type was an ancestor of both the Neanderthals in Europe and the archaic Homo populations of Asia.

Prof. Israel Hershkovitz: “The discovery of a new type of Homo” is of great scientific importance. It enables us to make new sense of previously found human fossils, add another piece to the puzzle of human evolution, and understand the migrations of humans in the old world. Even though they lived so long ago, in the late middle Pleistocene (474000−130000 years ago), the Nesher Ramla people can tell us a fascinating tale, revealing a great deal about their descendants’ evolution and way of life.”

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Over the past few decades, roboticists and computer scientists have developed artificial systems that replicate biological functions and human abilities in increasingly realistic ways. This includes artificial intelligence systems, as well as sensors that can capture various types of sensory data.

When trying to understand properties of objects and how to grasp them or handle them, humans often rely on their sense of touch. Artificial sensing systems that replicate human touch can thus be of great value, as they could enable the development of better performing and more responsive robots or prosthetic limbs.

Researchers at Sungkyunkwan University and Hanyang University in South Korea have recently created an artificial tactile sensing system that mimics the way in which humans recognize objects in their surroundings via their sense of touch. This system, presented in a paper published in Nature Electronics, uses to capture data associated with the tactile properties of objects.

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To better understand the role of bacteria in health and disease, National Institutes of Health researchers fed fruit flies antibiotics and monitored the lifetime activity of hundreds of genes that scientists have traditionally thought control aging. To their surprise, the antibiotics not only extended the lives of the flies but also dramatically changed the activity of many of these genes. Their results suggested that only about 30% of the genes traditionally associated with aging set an animal’s internal clock while the rest reflect the body’s response to bacteria.

“For decades scientists have been developing a hit list of common aging . These genes are thought to control the aging process throughout the , from worms to mice to humans,” said Edward Giniger, Ph.D., senior investigator, at the NIH’s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) and the senior author of the study published in iScience. “We were shocked to find that only about 30% of these genes may be directly involved in the aging process. We hope that these results will help medical researchers better understand the forces that underlie several age-related disorders.”

The results happened by accident. Dr. Giniger’s team studies the genetics of aging in a type of fruit fly called Drosophila. Previously, the team showed how a hyperactive immune system may play a critical role in the neural damage that underlies several aging brain disorders. However, that study did not examine the role that bacteria may have in this process.

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These results suggest that IL-12 and IFN-γ could one day be measured along with other biomarkers to predict future brain health in cognitively normal people–a tool that doesn’t yet exist in medicine.

Summary: Higher levels of two cytokines were associated with slower cognitive decline in aging adults, a new study reports.

Source: Mass General

Research has previously linked inflammation to Alzheimer’s disease (AD), yet scientists from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and the Harvard Aging Brain Study (HABS) have made a surprising discovery about that relationship.

In a new study published in Alzheimer’s & Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer’s Association, they report that elevated levels of two chemical mediators of inflammation, known as cytokines, are associated with slower cognitive decline in aging adults.

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The same bacteria that cause inflammation also trigger weight loss.

A new study investigating how a low-calorie diet alters gut microbial populations is reporting unexpected results. The findings reveal a strange relationship between extreme caloric restriction and increased levels of a pathogenic bacteria linked to inflammatory bowel disease.

The research began by recruiting 80 overweight or obese subjects. Half the cohort were directed to maintain a stable weight for 16 weeks, while the other half completed a medically supervised weight-loss program including eight weeks of a very low calorie diet (800 kcal per day).

At the end of the study period the researchers took fecal samples from the participants and found those in the diet cohort showed substantial gut microbiome alterations, including generally reduced bacterial diversity. Reiner Jumpertz von Schwartzenberg, first author on the new study, says that alongside reducing the overall numbers of gut bacteria present, the dieting seemed to distinctly alter the behavior of the remaining microbes.

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A team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Plant Physiology, the University of Naples Federico II, the Weizmann Institute of Science and the Porter School of the Environment and Earth Sciences has found that making food from air would be far more efficient than growing crops. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the group describes their analysis and comparison of the efficiency of growing crops (soybeans) and using a food-from-air technique.

For several years, researchers around the world have been looking into the idea of growing “ from air,” combining a renewable fuel resource with carbon from the air to create food for a type of bacteria that create edible protein. One such project is Solar Foods in Finland, where researchers have the goal of building a demonstration plant by 2023. In this new effort, the researchers sought to compare the efficiency of growing a staple crop, soybeans, with growing food from air.

To make their comparisons, the researchers used a food-from-air system that uses solar energy panels to make electricity, which is combined with from the air to produce food for microbes grown in a bioreactor. The protein the microbes produce is then treated to remove and then dried to produce a powder suitable for consumption by humans and animals.

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While chlorine and ultraviolet light are the standard means of disinfecting water, ozone is equally effective in killing germs. To date, ozone has only been used as an oxidation agent for treating water in large plants. Now, however, a project consortium from Schleswig-Holstein is developing a miniaturized ozone generator for use in smaller applications such as water dispensers or small domestic appliances. The Fraunhofer Institute for Silicon Technology ISIT has provided the sensor chip and electrode substrates for the electrolysis cell.

Compared to conventional means of disinfection such as chlorine or ultraviolet, ozone dissolved in water has a number of advantages: it is environmentally friendly, remains active beyond its immediate place of origin, has only a short retention time in water and is subsequently tasteless. Due to its high oxidation potential, ozone is very effective at combating germs. It breaks down the cell membrane of common pathogens. In Germany, ozone is chiefly used to disinfect swimming pools and drinking water and to purify wastewater. Yet it is rarely used to disinfect water in domestic appliances such as ice machines and beverage dispensers or in other fixtures such as shower-toilets. MIKROOZON, a project funded by the State of Schleswig-Holstein and the EU, aims to change this.

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As COVID-19 continues to ravage global populations, the world is singularly focused on finding ways to battle the novel coronavirus. That includes the UC Santa Barbara’s Solid State Lighting & Energy Electronics Center (SSLEEC) and member companies. Researchers there are developing ultraviolet LEDs that have the ability to decontaminate surfaces — and potentially air and water — that have come in contact with the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

“One major application is in medical situations — the disinfection of personal protective equipment, surfaces, floors, within the HVAC systems, et cetera,” said materials doctoral researcher Christian Zollner, whose work centers on advancing deep ultraviolet light LED technology for sanitation and purification purposes. He added that a small market already exists for UV-C disinfection products in medical contexts.

Indeed, much attention of late has turned to the power of ultraviolet light to inactivate the novel coronavirus. As a technology, ultraviolet light disinfection has been around for a while. And while practical, large-scale efficacy against the spread of SARS-CoV-2 has yet to be shown. UV light shows a lot of promise: SSLEEC member company Seoul Semiconductor in early April reported a “99.9% sterilization of coronavirus (COVID-19) in 30 seconds” with their UV LED products. Their technology currently is being adopted for automotive use, in UV LED lamps that sterilize the interior of unoccupied vehicles.

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