Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: food

Cockroach farming is practiced in China on a massive scale. At present, there are hundreds of cockroach farms in China, with the total number of cockroaches produced annually exceeding the global human population. The insects produced in these unique farms are mostly used in the production of cosmetics and medicines, or for animal feed.

In 2018, Chinese pharmaceutical company Gooddoctor claims that it has earned US$684 million in revenue through selling a “healing potion” made from cockroaches that is used annually by thousands of hospitals and millions of Chinese patients to treat respiratory, gastric, and other diseases.

However, the use of cockroaches in China is not just limited to the pharmaceutical and beauty industries. The protein-rich insects are also processed and fed as an organic meal to poultry farm animals, used to deal with food waste, and are often served in special recipes in some Chinese restaurants.

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Papers referenced in the video:
Polyamine-rich food decreases age-associated pathology and mortality in aged mice.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19735716/

Long-term treatment with spermidine increases health span of middle-aged Sprague-Dawley male rats.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32285289/

Cardioprotection and lifespan extension by the natural polyamine spermidine.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27841876/

Spermidine Prolongs Lifespan and Prevents Liver Fibrosis and Hepatocellular Carcinoma by Activating MAP1S-Mediated Autophagy.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28386016/

Higher spermidine intake is linked to lower mortality: a prospective population-based study.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29955838/

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12:10 minutes.

But United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) food scientists, working with a team at the University of California-Berkeley, have a method that could help solve this problem. Normal food freezing, called isobaric, keeps food at whatever pressure the surrounding air is. But what if you change that? Isochoric freezing, the new method, adds pressure to the food while lowering temperature, so the food becomes cold enough to preserve without its moisture turning into ice. No ice means no freezer burn. And, potentially, a much lower energy footprint for the commercial food industry: up to billions fewer kilowatt-hours, according to recent research.

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Astronauts on the International Space Station plan a “turkey trot” and some special food in honor of U.S. Thanksgiving on Thursday (Nov. 25).

Five astronauts of the seven-person Expedition 66 crew gathered to film a YouTube video released Monday (Nov. 22) by NASA’s Johnson Space Center about how they will celebrate the holiday while in orbit.

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Tesla CEO Elon Musk vended about$1.05 billion in stock on Tuesday evening, according to fiscal forms posted this week. The deals were listed in September to exercise options that were set to expire in 2022.Musk has vended a aggregate of$9.85 billion in Tesla stock this month including the$6.9 billion he vended the week ofNov.10 and another$1.9 billion he vended onNov. 15 andNov. 16. Some of the shares were vended in part to satisfy duty scores related to an exercise of stock options. Musk and his trust still hold further than 169 million shares in the company.

Tesla shares fell15.4 the week endedNov.12 marking the worst week for Tesla stock in 20 months after Musk began dealing shares. Shares of Tesla were over about 1 on Wednesday autumn. Musk ran an informal Twitter bean onNov.6 asking his further than 60 million Twitter followers whether or not he should vend 10 of his Tesla stock. The bean eventually ended with druggies telling Musk to vend.

But Musk had formerly indicated before this time he was likely to vend a huge block of his options in the fourth quarter. During an appearance at the Code Conference in September he said when his stock options expire at Tesla his borderline duty rate would be over 50.

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In this DNA factory, organism engineers are using robots and automation to build completely new forms of life.
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Ginkgo Bioworks, a Boston company specializing in “engineering custom organisms,” aims to reinvent manufacturing, agriculture, biodesign, and more.

Biologists, software engineers, and automated robots are working side by side to accelerate the speed of nature by taking synthetic DNA, remixing it, and programming microbes, turning custom organisms into mini-factories that could one day pump out new foods, fuels, and medicines.

While there are possibly numerous positive and exciting outcomes from this research, like engineering gut bacteria to produce drugs inside the human body on demand or building self-fertilizing plants, the threat of potential DNA sequences harnessing a pathological function still exists.

That’s why Ginkgo Bioworks is developing a malware software to effectively stomp out the global threat of biological weapons, ensuring that synthetic biology can’t be used for evil.

Learn more about synthetic DNA and this biological assembly line on this episode of Focal Point.

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Since artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky patented the principle of confocal microscopy in 1957, it has become the workhorse standard in life science laboratories worldwide, due to its superior contrast over traditional wide-field microscopy. Yet confocal microscopes aren’t perfect. They boost resolution by imaging just one, single, in-focus point at a time, so it can take quite a while to scan an entire, delicate biological sample, exposing it light dosages that can be toxic.

To push confocal imaging to an unprecedented level of performance, a collaboration at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) has invented a “kitchen sink” confocal platform that borrows solutions from other high-powered imaging systems, adds a unifying thread of “Deep Learning” artificial intelligence algorithms, and successfully improves the confocal’s volumetric resolution by more than 10-fold while simultaneously reducing phototoxicity. Their report on the technology, called “Multiview Confocal Super-Resolution Microscopy,” is published online this week in Nature.

“Many labs have confocals, and if they can eke more performance out of them using these artificial intelligence algorithms, then they don’t have to invest in a whole new microscope. To me, that’s one of the best and most exciting reasons to adopt these AI methods,” said senior author and MBL Fellow Hari Shroff of the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering.

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Neuroscience biweekly vol. 46, 10th November — 24th November.

“It’s amazing that you can still find areas of the brain that are important for basic survival behaviors that we had never before implicated,” Betley says. “And these brain regions are important in robust ways.” The work, shared in the journal Nature, suggests that neurons in the cerebellum’s anterior deep cerebellar nuclei (aDCN) are involved in helping animals regulate their meal size. Since its start, Betley’s lab has unraveled a variety of neural circuits related to how the brain regulates food intake. That work as well as other research has implicated areas of the hindbrain and hypothalmus in this control.

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