Group items tagged

... better food?

I thought insects and bugs would be our (food) future, but maybe it's plants grown via vertical farming...

I doubt that the associated homogenization of food will turn out to be "better" ....

"Roughly one quarter of all the water that humans take from the planet goes into food that nobody eats"... and such

Asimov's Foundation meets ACT's Tipping Point Prediction?

still, some interesting thoughts in there ... "Then you have the 50-year cycles of violence. Turchin describes these as the building up and then the release of pressure. Each time, social inequality creeps up over the decades, then reaches a breaking point. Reforms are made, but over time, those reforms are reversed, leading back to a state of increasing social inequality. The graph above shows how regular these spikes are - though there's one missing in the early 19th century, which Turchin attributes to the relative prosperity that characterized the time. He also notes that the severity of the spikes can vary depending on how governments respond to the problem. Turchin says that the United States was in a pre-revolutionary state in the 1910s, but there was a steep drop-off in violence after the 1920s because of the progressive era. The governing class made decisions to reign in corporations and allowed workers to air grievances. These policies reduced the pressure, he says, and prevented revolution. The United Kingdom was also able to avoid revolution through reforms in the 19th century, according to Turchin. But the most common way for these things to resolve themselves is through violence. Turchin takes pains to emphasize that the cycles are not the result of iron-clad rules of history, but of feedback loops - just like in ecology. "In a predator-prey cycle, such as mice and weasels or hares and lynx, the reason why populations go through periodic booms and busts has nothing to do with any external clocks," he writes. "As mice become abundant, weasels breed like crazy and multiply. Then they eat down most of the mice and starve to death themselves, at which point the few surviving mice begin breeding like crazy and the cycle repeats." There are competing theories as well. A group of researchers at the New England Complex Systems Institute - who practice a discipline called econophysics - have built their own model of political violence and

It's not the scientific activity described in the article that is uninteresting, on the contrary! But the way it is described is just a bad joke. Once again the results itself are seemingly not sexy enough and thus something is sold as the big revolution, though it's just the application of the oldest scientific principles in a slightly different way than used before.

"Ants is a multi-player strategy game set on a plot of dirt with water for obstacles and food that randomly drops. Each player has one or more hills where ants will spawn. The objective is for players to seek and destroy the most enemy ant hills while defending their own hills. Players must also gather food to spawn more ants, however, if all of a player's hills are destroyed they can't spawn any more ants."

a bunch of ideas, iinitiatives, and good points about upcoming changes in space ...

Tea, Earl Grey, hot...

Lets see what part of the replicator will work first: the actual 3D-printing of the tea or the language recognition software...

Oh yes, I forgot about the language recognition... The abominations it might produce... :-[]

Update on the post-food man who lives solely on powder cocktails and turned it into a business.

Maybe this can be used for a newcomer's joke.

This December, NASA plans to launch a set of packs, filled with a material akin to kitty litter, functioning as planters for six romaine lettuce plants. The lettuce will be grown under bright-pink LED lights, ready to harvest after just 28 days. Once harvested, it will be frozen and stored away for testing back on Earth. No one is allowed to eat anything before the plants are thoroughly vetted for cosmic microbes.

Song birds don't eat in the morning because the added weight makes them slow and easy prey for other birds. They look for good food places during the early day and come back to eat as late as possible. Correlation of this behavior with the number of predators has been found as well...

YEEHA! looks like there is hope for me after all! :)

> looks like there is hope for me after all! Not really, if you believe ScienceDaily headlines...

Could be fun actually... I liked most the part: "They were asked to (...) find food: meaning fishing, trapping animals, preparing food and cooking with primitive tools.". Roasted squirrel anyone?

So much for dutch food!!!

this is the type of really important research !!

bon appetit ....

Our entry may not have made it to the publication but perhaps the other opinions will give some food for thought

"Application of scientific principals for improvement of quality of reduced-fat, reduced-salt cheese" As far as I know, fat and salt content in food correlates *positively* with the taste, so the project is against food quality...

Regarding our discussion on resource self-sufficiency of a Mars colony. Would it ever be possible (from a resource perspective that is..) A NASA report on availability of resources. A self-sufficiency trade study described in Boston (1996) identifies the mission duration at which the development of local life support resources becomes advantageous. Within 30 days, without recycling, or with the equivalent leakage, it becomes advantageous to derive oxygen from local resources. The time constants for water and food are about 6 months and 3 years, respectively.

I guess it depends on the number of astronauts that have to be supporte ... 3 years for food looks like a lot