Giving a new meaning to fast food.
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Category: food
Jeff Bezos, the worldâs richest man, is cutting health benefits for part-time workers at Whole Foods. The move will leave 1,900 people without health insurance.
The cuts donât affect full-time employees, but will hurt those who work around 20 hours a week.
âI am in shock,â said one employee, according to Salon. âIâve worked here 15 years. This is why I keep the job â because of my benefits.â
Rural communities are often built on agriculture and livestock. That means theyâre also dependent upon a strong irrigation system â a potential weakness as the global water crisis grows. To more efficiently manage and coordinate the use of a scarce water supply in agricultural communities, a team from the Polytechnic University of Madrid proposed a blockchain-based automatic water control system.
âWe investigated how blockchain technologies can be used to solve the problem of user competition for scarce resources in communities,â said Borja Bordel, the projectâs lead investigator. âWe particularize the problem to the irrigation communities, where independent users must trust a system that automates a fair and trustworthy distribution of the available water resources, according to an individual quota set by the community and the consumption forecasts of its users.â
Rules are paramount for the proposed system and must be established upfront by the community of users. In a prosumer environment, users establish regulations for their individual and community water quotas. Those regulations are then taken by a transformation engine and are built, compiled, and deployed. A simple infrastructure of common valves and pumps are complemented by interactive electronic devices and allow a SmartContract to oversee decision-making and control algorithms, as well as the state of the water sources.
Weâve all heard that the future menu may involve less meat and dairy. But donât worry, we could have customised diets, outlandish vegetables, robot chefs and guilt-free gorging to look forward to instead. And we reckon that makes up for missing out on the odd sausage.
Humans choose food based on the way it looks, smells, and tastes. But the microbes in our guts use a different classification system â one that is based on the molecular components that make up different fibers. In a study published September 19 in the journal Cell, investigators found particular components of dietary fiber that encourage growth and metabolic action of beneficial microbes in the mouse gut.
The research aims to develop ways to identify compounds that can enhance the representation of health-promoting members of the gut microbial community. The goal is to identify sustainable, affordable dietary fiber sources for incorporation into next-generation, more nutritious food products.
âFiber is understood to be beneficial. But fiber is actually a very complicated mixture of many different components,â says senior author Jeffrey Gordon, a microbiologist at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. âMoreover, fibers from different plant sources that are processed in different ways during food manufacturing have different constituents. Unfortunately, we lack detailed knowledge of these differences and their biological significance. We do know that modern Western diets have low levels of fiber; this lack of fiber has been linked to loss of important members of the gut community and deleterious health effects.â
Of the major food crops, only rice is currently able to survive flooding. Thanks to new research, that could soon changeâgood news for a world in which rains are increasing in both frequency and intensity.
The research, newly published in Science, studied how other crops compare to rice when submerged in water. It found that the plantsâa wild-growing tomato, a tomato used for farming and a plant similar to alfalfaâall share at least 68 families of genes in common that are activated in response to flooding.
Rice was domesticated from wild species that grew in tropical regions, where it adapted to endure monsoons and waterlogging. Some of the genes involved in that adaptation exist in the other plants but have not evolved to switch on when the roots are being flooded.
What might it take to feed a million people on Mars? Lab-grown meat, tunnel-grown crops and cricket farms, a new study finds.
When it comes to plans for crewed missions to Mars, NASA typically assumes round trips with only brief stopovers on the Red Planet. However, commercial space companies have emerged with the goal of colonizing outer space, with SpaceX specifically aiming to develop a civilization on Mars.
Cellular senescence, discovered in 1961 by Leonard Hayflick and Paul Moorhead, is a state in which cells no longer perform their functions, instead emitting harmful chemicals that turn other cells senescent. Senescence is primarily caused by telomere shortening and DNA damage, and senescent cells are known to contribute to multiple diseases, such as Alzheimerâs, Parkinsonâs, and dementia.
One method of removing senescent cells is caloric restriction, which is a temporary reduction of food calories. This has been shown to be one of the most effective methods to decrease and slow the onset of aging phenotypes [1].
This is related to autophagy, which is the cellâs natural method of breaking down parts of itself when it doesnât have immediate access to food [2]. Autophagy has been shown to both promote and prevent senescence. It removes damaged macromolecules or organelles, such as mitochondria, which would otherwise cause cellular senescence. However, some of the processes that cause autophagy cause cellular senescence as well [3].
Summary In this open-ended design/build project, students learn about the unique challenges astronauts face while eating in outer space. They explore different food choices and food packaging, learning about the seven different forms of food that are available to astronauts. Students learn about the steps of the engineering design process, and then, as if they are NASA engineering teams, they design and build original model devices to help astronauts eat in a microgravity environmentâtheir own creative devices for food storage and meal preparation. A guiding design worksheet is provided in English and Spanish.