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Old-time solutions are reappearing as we seek to become a zero-emissions society.


How can the agriculture industry reduce the amount of methane released when cows burp? It’s been a struggle for scientists and policymakers. A new method in which farmers feed seaweed to cows — needing to incorporate only about 0.2% of the total feed intake — indicates that methane levels can be reduced by 98%. It’s a real breakthrough, as most existing solutions cut methane only by about 20% to 30%.

Rusted iron pipes can react with residual disinfectants in drinking water distribution systems to produce carcinogenic hexavalent chromium in drinking water, reports a study by engineers at UC Riverside.

Chromium is a metal that occurs naturally in the soil and groundwater. Trace amounts of trivalent eventually appear in the and food supply and are thought to have neutral effects on health. Chromium is often added to iron to make it more resistant to corrosion.

Certain can change chromium atoms into a hexavalent form that creates cancer-causing genetic mutations in cells. This carcinogenic form of chromium was at the heart of a lawsuit in California’s Central Valley by Erin Brockovich, which became the subject of an Oscar-winning movie.

Um wtf o.o


Denmark culled 17 million minks in November in response to Covid-19 outbreaks at more than 200 mink farms. Now the country plans to dig up the dead animals after they started to rise out of their shallow graves.

Circa 2018


Californian robotics company Iron Ox claims to be ‘reinventing farming from the ground up’, as it unveils an autonomous indoor farm that leverages the latest advancements in arable science, machine learning, and robotics.

Indoor farms see harvesting, seeding and plant inspections occur thousands of times a day – tasks perfectly suited to robots. Iron Ox is using the latest in machine learning and computer vision to enable its robots to respond to the needs of individual plants.

The farm is now in full production, thanks to its two key proprietary robotics systems – a robotic arm and a mobile transport. They work cohesively, with the latter using sensors and computer vision technology more typically seen in a self-driving car. The robotic arm, meanwhile, can analyse each plant at sub-millimetre scale.

Electric vehicle start-up Canoo unveiled a new delivery van Thursday ahead of its public debut on the Nasdaq next week.

The futuristic-looking van — known as a multi-purpose delivery vehicle, or MPDV, because of the ways it can be upfitted — is designed for everything from last-mile deliveries to food trucks, according to the California company. It is expected to start at around $33, 000.

“There are many use cases that this vehicle can do,” Canoo Chairman Tony Aquila, a major investor in the company, said during a video unveiling of the MPDV. “We wanted it to look very smart, very modern but at the same time be very affordable.”

“The research was conducted by overexpressing two different genes, the AVP1 and OsSIZ1.”

😯😯😯


One group of Texas Tech University researchers has found a way to double fiber yield for cotton in semi-arid areas like that of West Texas, where drought, heat and salinity are working against farmers.

Hong Zhang is a professor of Plant Molecular Biology and Plant Biotechnology at Texas Tech. A few years ago, his group published a paper showing that he could increase cotton yield by 35%-40% in dryland conditions.

But he has continued to work on different genetic changes to cotton that could lead to even better results, and a new paper published in “Plant Biotechnology Journal” in September details those results. During Zhang’s first year of experimenting with a new set of genetic modifications, the fiber yield from cotton crops was up 133%.

All hail the powerful One climbed my wood structure that went straight up then went to the roof o.o. Also their hands make them like chimps.


How does intelligence ofs compare with other species? That was a topic of heated debate between 1905 and 1915 within the then-nascent field of comparative psychology.

In 1907, psychologist Lawrence W. Cole, who had established a colony ofs at the University of Oklahoma, and Herbert Burnham Davis, a doctoral student at Clark University, each published the results of nearly identical experiments on the processes of learning, association and memory ins. They relied on E.L. Thorndike’s puzzle-box methodology, which involved placing animals in wooden crates from which the animal had to escape by opening the latch or sequence of latches. They observed the number of trials required for successful completion and the extent to which the animal retained the ability to solve the same problem more quickly when confronted again with it. Using this method, they sought what Davis called “a tolerable basis” for ranking the intelligence ofs on the phylogenetic scale of evolutionary development. They independently concluded thats bested the abilities of cats and dogs, most closely approximating the mental attributes of monkeys.

Raccoons had attracted interest because they flourished, rather than receded, in the face of human expansion. Over the centuries, people had hunteds for food and fur, decried them as agricultural pests and urban bandits, and kept them as household pets. This latter role brought the species to psychologists’ attention. Cole reported that he got the idea to work withs from observing the behavior of a pet kept at a local market. At the time, most animal experiments being conducted occurred on the borderlands of academic research, nature study and domestic life. Scientists such as Charles Darwin, William James and James Mark Baldwin all developed psychological theories based upon observations of their own children and pets. Cole’ss, for example, lived simultaneously as research objects and amusing pets, a relationship that shaped how these experiments were presented to and perceived by the public. Despite Davis’s protests, a widely printed newspaper story depicted his puzzle-box experiments as an example of teaching “tricks” to one’s pets.

Ultra-low-energy electronics ‘straight out of the fridge’? Could a stack of 2D materials allow for supercurrents at ground-breakingly warm temperatures, easily achievable in the household kitchen? An international study published in August opens a new route to high-temperature supercurrents at t.

““Green tea has five tested chemical compounds that bind to different sites in the pocket on Mpro, essentially overwhelming it to inhibit its function,” Xie said. “Muscadine grapes contain these inhibitory chemicals in their skins and seeds. Plants use these compounds to protect themselves, so it is not surprising that plant leaves and skins contain these beneficial compounds.””

Glad I picked up a refill on my resveratrol this week!


Green tea, muscadine grape and dark chocolate chemical compounds inhibit an important SARS-CoV-2 enzyme.