World leaders will convene to monitor the Millennium Development Goals on September 20 in New York. With only five years left until the 2015 deadline to achieve the Millennium Development Goals, UN Secretary-GeneralBan Ki-moon has called on world leaders to attend.
“The summit will be a crucially important opportunity to redouble our efforts to meet the Goals,” he said, referring to the target to slash poverty, hunger, disease, maternal and child deaths by 2015.
Currently, progress to reduce the proportion of people who are undernourished has been a challenge. Hunger spiked in 2009 due to higher food prices and reduced employment and incomes.
The notion of grow local, buy local is becoming more of a reality for megacities, as a project called “Food for Cities” recently demonstrated that we will be able to grow all our vegetables in a box barely larger than a refrigerator.
The project was a result of a Singularity University challenge to come up with solutions that can positively affect the lives of a billion people. Taking into account the various constraints within the current system of food production, team members Derek Jacoby and Maggie Jack focused on the centralized nature of current food production.
What they were up against: Today, in good growing conditions, it takes an estimated 16 square feet of garden space to provide just a single person with vegetables — and that’s more than exists in most city environments. Drawing on the controlled-agriculture experience of their advisors, they determined that the best technique to personalize food production without the use of large tracts of farmland was aeroponics. Aeroponics is different than hydroponics,where the roots of the plant rest in a liquid nutrient bath. With aeroponics, the nutrient solution is vaporized into a fine mist. Aeroponic gardens can save 90% of the water used in a conventional garden, and the growth rate can be 25% higher than in soil gardens.
The team drew inspiration from John Hogan and Chris McKay from NASA Ames programs in planetary science and bioengineering advanced life support systems, and Dickson Despommier, of Columbia University, and his vertical farming initiative. In collaboration with NASA, the team instrumented their prototype gardens with sensors to measure nutrient levels, temperature, humidity, and pH.
The technology breakthroughs making this possible:
- Light: Organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs) are approaching the 30% efficiency range, on par with the high-pressure sodium lamps used in greenhouses today. OLEDs can provide light in a spectrum ideally suited to plant growth, and can be placed much closer to the plant because they produce less excess heat while saving electricity.
- Biotechnology: Species of plants have recently been discovered that create a chlorophyll that is sensitive to low-energy red light. If this were introduced into food species, the lighting requirements could be dramatically lowered. We now have the technology to optimize plants for human nutrition. With biotechnology, our food can grow precise quantities of our medicines, and produce nutrient profiles specifically tailored to our personal needs.
These advances, combined with the automation afforded by sensors and a well-designed control system, led the team to a relatively conservative reduction in the space required for one person’s vegetables: from 16 square feet down to five—no larger than the size of an average refrigerator.
Luc Montagnier, the French virologist who won a Nobel prize in 2008 for linking HIV with AIDS, has made controversial claims that highly dilute solutions of harmful viruses and bacteria emit low-frequency radio waves from watery nanostructures formed around the pathogens, suggesting a firm scientific foundation for homeopathy.
At the Lindau Nobel laureate meeting in Germany where 60 Nobel prize winners were gathered, along with 700 other scientists to discuss the latest breakthroughs in medicine, chemistry and physicist, Montagnier presented a new method for detecting viral infections.
Montagnier told the conference that solutions containing DNA of pathogenic bacteria and viruses, including HIV, “could emit low frequency radio waves” that induced surrounding water molecules to become arranged into “nanostructures.” These water molecules, he said, could also emit radio waves. Montagnier suggested that water could retain such properties even after the original solutions were massively diluted to the point where the original DNA had effectively vanished. In this way, water would retain the “memory” of substance with which it had been in contact and doctors could use the emissions to detect disease.
For most scientists, Montagnier’s remarks are highly provocative due to its similarity to the principles that underpin homeopathy. Homeopathic medicines work on the principle that a toxic substance taken in minute amounts will cure the same symptoms that it would cause if it were taken in large amounts. Traditional scientists completely reject this, claiming there is no evidence to show that water can retain or transmit information.
Montagnier’s claims come at a particularly sensitive time, with the British Medical Association calling for the National Health Service to stop spending 4 million pounds on homeopathy. But to the burgeoning believers of homeopathy and the explosion of alternative medicine in celebrity and mainstream culture, Montagnier’s claims have been eagerly embraced.
Moreover, in the area of cutting-edge science, other brilliant renegade thinkers that have embraced the scientific foundation for homeopathy for detection and diagnostics include:
As Jacques Benveniste so efficiently remarked to SPTNK:
“It’s not the memory of water that is interesting. It is what water remembers. And water is a tape that is able to record anything from one discrete sound to a symphony. For example, we can record a whole serum that contains hundreds and hundreds and thousands of compounds. So we are interested in what and how these signals are recorded by water.”
Beat Poet Allen Ginsberg’s apartment at 437 East 12th Street rented for $1,700 a month. Ginsberg spent 21 years living in this fourth-floor rental. Although the apartment has been gut renovated, it’s likely that the resonance of lingering poetic genius is still floating around. Plus, if you would look through the window you would experience his famous 1984 description of the view: “Manhattan back-yard, wet brick-walled Atlantis sea garden’s Alianthus…boughs waiving in rainy breeze, Stuyvesant Town’s roof two blocks north on 14th Street – I focused on the raindrops on the clothesline.”
Note: A new film about Allen Ginsberg and the obscenity trial that followed the 1957 publication of his poem ‘Howl’ is set to release September 24th.
Filling up at the pump in the near future may offer another biofuel alternative—whiskey. Scottish scientists recently announced a biofuel made with by-products from the distillation process of Scottish whiskey.
The Scottish £4bn whiskey industry seemed a ripe resource for developing biobutanol – the next generation of biofuel which gives 30% more output power than ethanol—to the team at Edinburgh Napier University, who have a patent on the product. Martin Tangney, who is leading the research, said that five or 10 percent of the biofuel could be blended with petrol or diesel, and could be used to fuel ordinary cars without any type of special adaptations.
The ‘whiskey’ biofuel uses the two main by-products of the whisky production process – ‘pot ale’, the liquid from the copper stills, and ‘draff’, the spent grains, as the basis for producing the butanol that can then be used as fuel.
With 1,600 million litres of pot ale and 187,000 tonnes of draff produced by the malt whiskey industry annually, there is real potential for biofuel to be available at local stations alongside traditional fuels, one step closer to the EU goal of making biofuels account for 10% of total fuel sales by 2020.
The technology for developing bio-fuel from whisky was inspired from a 100 year old process, created by Chaim Weizmann, a Jewish refugee chemist in Manchester who studied the butanol fermentation initially as part of a programme to produce rubber synthetically.
Global plant productivity that once was on the rise with warming temperatures and a lengthened growing season is now on the decline because of regional drought according to a new study of NASA satellite data.
Plant productivity measures the rate of the photosynthesis, the process in which green plants use to convert solar energy, carbon dioxide and water to sugar, oxygen and eventually plant tissue.
Compared with a 6 percent increase in plant productivity during the 1980s and 1990s, the decline observed over the last decade is only 1 percent. This shift could impact food security, biofuels and the global carbon cycle.
Researchers Maosheng Zhao and Steven Running of the University of Montana in Missoula discovered the shift based on the analysis of plant productivity data from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer on NASA’s Terra satellite, combined with other growing season climate data, including temperature, solar radiation and water.
“This is a pretty serious warning that warmer temperatures are not going to endlessly improve plant growth,” Running said.
Researchers want to continue monitoring these trends in the future because plant productivity is linked to shifting levels of greenhouse gas carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and stresses on plant growth that could challenge food production.
SPTNK’s conversation with biologist Donald Ingber on the topic of tensegrity is now included in Tensegrity Wiki, and featured on the Vimeo channel, Tensegrity.
According to Ingber, head of Ingber Laboratories at the Harvard Medical School Children’s Hospital in Boston, tensegrity, the shape-stabilizing structures made famous by Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome that balances compression with tension and yields to forces without breaking, is the guiding force of evolution, the architecture of life. Moreover, Ingber’s research has shown that tensegrity gives cells their shape with each cell having an inner-scaffolding or cytoskeleton, and if you change the shape of the cell, you also change its biochemistry and genetic expression. This discovery is fundamental to the future of medicine as it may cure diseases such as cancer.
For more SPTNK conversations with Don Ingber on tensegrity and mechanbiology, click here.
To learn more about the SPTNK cultural theme of mechanobiology, click here.
Sorting through 20 years of orangutan behavior observed in Indonesia, two researchers have discovered in 18 occasions what they interpret as orangutans acting out a request or other communication in elaborated gestures of pantomime, beyond their demonstrated miming used to communicate. The observations may offer insight into what orangutans understand about the minds of others and also shed light on the ancient gestural roots of human language.
On four of the occasions, one orangutan mimed for another, and 14 instances an orangutan mimed to a human, according to a paper released online the week of August 9 in Biology Letters.
One example of miming a need to a human occurred in a free-living forest facility on Borneo, where orangutans sometimes get dirt scrubbed off their faces by a person with a leaf. According to study coauthor and cognitive ecologist Anne Russon of York University in Toronto, a young male called Cecep plopped down in front of her and handed her a leaf.
“I played dumb,” she remembers. “He waited a respectable few seconds, then — all the while looking me in the eye — he took back the leaf, rubbed it on his own forehead….” Again he handed it to her. “Then I did as I was told,” she says, and wiped away the dirt.
Orangutan-to-human pantomimes may be the easiest to observe, Russon says, but these occasions may also present special challenges to communication, and possibly to patience. “The orangutans get a look on their faces like ‘Are you stupid?’” she says.
In another occasion caught on video (see below), Russon says a young female orangutan called Siti swiftly punched though one of a coconut’s three eyelike depressions and broke off a leaf stem to fish out the sweet innards. When Siti had exhausted what she could reach through that opening, she took her coconut to one of the men at the rehabilitation forest who did whack open coconuts with his big parang knife, but he handed the nut back to Siti.
She “briefly and weakly poked into the coconut opening” and then handed it back to the human. When the man again did nothing, Siti took her leaf stem and made chopping-style slashes against the coconut, in what looked to Russon like mimicry of a person using a parang.
One of the themes in 13 of Russon’s examples is the mimer’s elaboration of a breakdown in communications. This “suggests they understand something about what their partner didn’t understand,” she says.
Studying mime offers a way to look at long-standing issues of nonhuman species’ theories of mind. Pantomime gestures also present a way to look at the deep evolutionary origins of human language, Russon says. Recent thinking has raised the possibility that language sprouted from gestural communication.
A controversial new theory states that our emotions may have evolved as tools to manipulate others into cooperating with us.
Certain emotions have traditionally been viewed by psychologists as short-term reactions to an immediate benefit or cost. For example, gratitude has been seen as a signal of pleasure when someone does you a favor and anger as a way to signal your displeasure when another person does you harm. However, John Tooby, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and his colleagues think that our anger or gratitude reflect our judgement of how much the other person is sacrificing enough for us— and whether they will continue to do so in future. In other words, anger has as much to do with cooperation as with conflict, and emotions are used to coerce others into cooperating in the long term.
For example, an unpublished study by Tooby’s colleague Julian Lim found that 296 student volunteers were more willing to cooperate with an unseen partner when that partner had forgone a profit to give them money. This gratitude was absent when the partner gave them the same amount of money not as a favor but to avoid paying a penalty.
This suggests that anger and gratitude—and perhaps other emotions, too—may be tools for turning up a partner’s mental cooperation control dial says Tooby’s colleague Aaron Sell. You get angry not when someone hurts you, but when their actions betray a setting of their cooperation dial that is lower than you expect, and your anger is both a threat to turn down your own dial and an inducement to them to turn theirs up. You show gratitude not when someone benefits you, but when their dial is set higher than you expect, and this signals that you plan to turn yours up in response.
Drawing from evidence presented at the meeting of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society in Eugene, Oregon, and some still unpublished, Tooby suggests that the cooperation control dial, or ‘welfare trade-off ratio,’ is a real part of our mental make-up.
Academics say they are close to developing the first vaccine for stress. After 30 years of research into cures for stress, Dr Robert Sapolsky, professor of neuroscience at Stanford University in California, believes it is possible to alter brain chemistry to create a state of ‘focused calm’.
Professor Sapolsky claims he is on the path to a genetically engineered formula that would remove the need for relaxation therapies or prescription drugs.
Chronic stress, as opposed to everyday worries, is linked to illnesses ranging from diabetes to heart attacks. Professor Sapolsky, who first observed the damage caused by stress on animals in Kenya, has been studying hormones called glucocorticoids, which are part of the body’s immune system and help fight cancer and inflammation.
All mammals produce these hormones, which help them deal with a threat - often by running away.
But Professor Sapolsky has observed that, while a zebra will turn off the stress chemicals after escaping from a lion, modern man not only produces too many glucocorticoids in response to everyday alarms but cannot turn them off afterwards.
He says the hormone becomes toxic both biologically, by destroying brain cells and weakening the immune system, and socially, when people continue to snap at their friends or family hours after the original cause of tension has vanished.
After early setbacks, the Stanford team has adapted a herpes virus to carry engineered ‘neuroprotective’ genes deep into the brain to neutralise the rogue hormones before they can cause damage. The virus is now shown to work on rats.
He warned that human trials are years away, but added: “We have proved that it’s possible. We can reduce the neural damage caused by stress.”
Last week, a Stanford University colleague, who called the potential vaccine ‘the Sapolsky shot’, said: “In humans this engineered virus would short-circuit the neural feedback caused by stress, that lingering feeling of tension after a crisis has passed. It would leave you fresher and ready to deal with another threat, so you can maintain your drive, but with more focused calm rather than bad temper and digestion.”
“This could change society.” Professor Sapolsky’s preparatory work was published last October by the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
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