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Category: food

The novel its a bit older, but it‘s an incredible vision!

When Star Trek’s Scotty warns the Captain that the engines can’t “take it”, he might just be best off switching fuel — a new book claims that humanity could reach the stars using vast spacecraft harnessing the energy of black holes with the power to “eat planets”.

Inside would be an artificial black hole — created by spheres of generators firing “gravitons”- and, claims author Dr Roger Hoskins, Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, would curve space-time — and would be “faster than anti matter drives.”

Captain Kirk would be jealous of the speeds offered by a black hole powered craft — which displaces or curves space time, like a warp drive, thus appearing to go faster than light.

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“While exploring the coldest parts of the planet, even the smallest snacks can be a lifesaver. In case of emergencies (or sometimes to for a future treat), polar explorers will leave caches of food and supplies along their return route. … Recently, a teams of researchers camped out in Greenland’s arctic desert discovered one such cache—ration tins left behind by an expedition about 60 years ago.”

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The $1.7 billion investment has finally opened its doors to the public, and the robots are ready to provide patients with a medical experience that’s truly revolutionary.

Hailed as the first fully digital hospital in North America, the Humber River Hospital in Toronto, CA finally opened its doors to the public on October 18. In addition to being equipped with the most advanced technologies, robots currently man several areas of the facility. This includes the radiology area where they facilitate the X-Ray procedure and the chemotherapy area where they mix, prepare, and monitor the drugs being administered to the patients. Before the drugs get to the patients, each package is checked and scanned thoroughly through an information management system to make sure that the patients get the correct treatment. These automated robots will also be assisting the health care staff by carrying and delivering medical supplies and food for patients.

Here’s a video of one of the automated robots in action:

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As long as they don’t enter the food supply.

First micropigs, now dogs: Scientists in China have used a gene-editing technique to produce the world’s first genetically engineered pooches. Although these two endeavors share scientific roots, with their production aimed at assisting medical research, unlike the teeny tiny pigs, the researchers behind this latest project are not intending to sell their customized animals as pets.

So it probably won’t come as a surprise that the dogs weren’t engineered to be cuter, fluffier or more pocket-sized: they had their DNA tweaked to make them more muscly. The first of many potential edits the team would like to carry out, this was done with the forces in mind.

With greater muscle mass, the dogs “are expected to have a stronger running ability, which is good for hunting, police (military) applications,” researcher Liangxue Lai from the Guangzhou Institutes of Biomedicine and Health told MIT Technology Review. Later on down the line, the scientists would like to manipulate the dog genome in order to mimic human diseases, which could better our understanding and treatment of certain conditions.

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When a team of Dutch scientists unveiled the world’s first stem cell beef burger in 2013, it carried a $300,000 price tag. Worse, it was dry and tasteless. But since the initial lackluster reviews, Mark Post and his colleagues have been hard at work. Now, they say they hope to have a commercially saleable cow-less patty on the market in five years.

Until very recently, lab-grown beef sounded like science fiction. But rapid advances in molecular biology and stem cell technology have placed the futuristic concept within reach. And the arguments for removing animals from the meat equation are practically endless: The meat industry as it exists today swallows an enormous fraction of our land and natural resources, produces vast quantities of greenhouse gases, has contributed to the rise of antibiotic resistant infections, and in many cases, is downright cruel. If test tube burgers can eliminate or diminish even a fraction of these problems, then this seems like one crazy idea worth pursuing.

And pursue it scientists have. In addition to Mark Post’s stem cell burger effort, a team of Israeli researchers under the banner Future Meat are now trying to grow whole chicken breasts in the lab. Meanwhile, efforts to culture fish protein have cropped up intermittently over the years.

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Our bodies aren’t meant for space. We require too much maintenance to speed through the stars. We need a steady supply of things absent from space — namely water, food and oxygen. We crave warmth but won’t find it in deep space, where the average temperature is −455 degrees Fahrenheit. Even if we could survive in an icy vacuum without sustenance, we’d probably go insane without distractions and room to move.

But aeronautic engineers believe they have found the key to solving that puzzle: put your space travelers to sleep. Long-term cryogenic and hibernative sleep may be the key to getting humans to Mars, and beyond. But it may first come to a spa near you.

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“Solve is a cross-disciplinary program led by MIT to convene the people and organizations that are addressing the world’s most pressing challenges in healthcare, energy, the environment, education, food & water, civil infrastructure and the economy.”

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The future of Eco conservation?

Deforestation downs 10 billion trees around the globe annually. Replanting trees by hand is slow, expensive, and barely puts a dent in reversing the damage. But one startup wants to use drones that can reforest our increasingly tree-strapped Earth, on a big enough scale to replace slow and expensive hired humans.

The small company, called BioCarbon Engineering, says unmanned aerial vehicles are a great way of covering ravaged woodlands with seedlings that can repopulate the area’s tree population. Around the world, forests and jungles are still being leveled due to lumber overproduction, strip surface mining, urban expansion, and land use for agriculture.

But UK-based BioCarbon, founded by former NASA engineer Lauren Fletcher, has a plan: Use fixed-wing drones to map the topography of the land, as well as the nutrients and biodiversity. That info is put into a machine-learning algorithm to generate a “precision planting platform,” says Susan Graham, head of engineering at BioCarbon.

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Sabine Dziemian, a postgraduate in Faisal’s research group, says, “If I want to draw a straight line, I look at the start point and the end point, and the robot moves the brush across that line.”

Blinking three times puts the robot in color selection mode, in which it moves the brush over to a variety of pre-dispensed colors. At that point, the user only needs to look at the color he or she wants to use next, and the arm applies the color to the brush.

“Since time immemorial, human imagination has sparked the idea of having additional arms,” says Faisal. He invokes the multiarmed Hindu goddess Shiva, often a symbol of transformation, to suggest we might one day “do the dishes while taking a phone call or [holding] your baby and [preparing] the food at the same time, because you have just that extra pair of hands attached to you.”

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