Tag: science

MOLD WILL BE THE FOOD OF OUR DYSTOPIAN FUTURE: NEW RESEARCH EXAMINES THE FUTURE OF FUNGI AS FOOD

In the ongoing search for sustainable and environmentally friendly alternatives to meat and other animal proteins, researchers have settled on a new product that only solidifies our descent into a dystopian science fiction story. Published in Nature Communications, this could be humanity’s new favorite food; genetically engineered mold. 

The study, led by researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, demonstrates how the edible fungus, Aspergillus oryzae, can be bioengineered to enhance its nutritional value and sensory appeal as a meat substitute. By modifying the fungus’s genome using cutting-edge synthetic biology tools, the researchers were able to elevate the production of key nutrients and flavor molecules, bringing it closer to mimicking the taste and texture of real meat.

A. oryzae, also known as koji mold, has a long history of safe use in fermented foods and has recently gained attention as a potential scaffold for cellular agriculture and alternative protein production. However, like many other fungi used in food applications, it has inherent limitations in nutrition and taste. To overcome the reality that this mold basically tastes like crap, the research team developed a comprehensive synthetic biology toolkit for A. oryzae. 

Using the CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing system, which allows for precise genomic modifications, the researchers first set out to enhance the production of ergothioneine, a potent antioxidant with potential health benefits, in the fungal mycelium. By overexpressing the fungus’s native ergothioneine biosynthetic genes, they were able to achieve levels much higher than those found in oyster mushrooms, currently the top dietary source of ergothioneine.

Next, with every dystopian science fiction trope imaginable, the team tackled the challenge of creating a more meat-like flavor and appearance. 

They engineered the fungus to overproduce heme, the iron-containing molecule responsible for the characteristic taste and color of red meat. By modulating the expression of key enzymes in the heme biosynthetic pathway and introducing a heme-binding protein, they elevated intracellular heme levels to 40% of those found in leading plant-based meats that incorporate heme for flavor and color.

Remarkably, the heme-overproducing strain exhibited a distinct red color and could be readily formulated into realistic meat alternatives with minimal processing, setting it apart from plant-based proteins that often require extensive purification and additives.

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U.S. NAVAL RESEARCH LAB INVESTIGATING UNEXPLAINED ARCTIC PHENOMENA THAT EVADES CONVENTIONAL THEORIES

The U.S. Naval Research Lab (NRL) is assisting an investigation into unexplained arctic phenomena associated with the sudden formation of intense “polar lows” that are known to lead to hazardous conditions at sea.

Since late February, a field campaign, the Cold-Air outbreak Experiment in the Sub-Arctic Region, or CAESAR, has been collecting data on the phenomenon underlying these potentially dangerous arctic events by observing cloud formations and other Arctic meteorological conditions.

“These subjectively beautiful clouds serve as a natural lab to study cloud dynamics at a wide range of scales,” said Bart Geerts, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Wyoming and a CAESAR principal investigator, last month.

Based in Kiruna, Sweden, CAESAR is comprised of an international team of scientists and is attempting to determine the meteorological processes underlying Arctic cold-air outbreaks (CAOs), events that pose a threat to sailing vessels and can potentially cause disruptions to Arctic weather systems.

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Climate Change Data is Based On Fraud, And Scientists Around The World Are Pushing Back Against The Narrative

In an attempt to save the world from “climate change,” the United States government is spending trillions of dollars on multiple projects that rely on dishonest marketing tactics, money laundering schemes, insider trading and crony capitalism. At the root of the climate crisis hysteria is data FRAUD, and scientists around the world are pushing back against the climate change narrative.

Scientists detect flaws in the collection of global temperature data

Governments around the world are combating a fictional problem that is blown completely out of proportion when compared to actual issues that people face. To make matters worse, the Biden regime adheres to dogma and relies on its most recent National Climate Assessment report to argue that human activities are accelerating global warming. The policies coming out of D.C seek to restrict, control or modulate human activities at scale to save the planet from temperatures changes that are out of our control anyway.

The National Climate Assessment report (based on a biased agenda and fueled by multinational business interests) uses data fraud to drive climate change hysteria. The report states that man-made emissions of “greenhouse gases” like carbon dioxide are causing the Earth to become dangerously hot. The U.S. EPA and the UN Intergovernmental Panel (IPCC) share this view, and their leaders are pushing for major global policy changes to combat it. But scientists from all over the world in a range of disciplines are fighting back. These scientists point to peer reviewed studies that show flaws in the global temperature data. Some of the issues with temperature data include the lack of geographic and historical data, heat from urban areas contaminating the records and the corruption of the data due to a process known as “homogenization.”

According to three independent scientists with the Center for Environmental Research and Earth Sciences, (CERES) these data flaws are so severe that they render the temperature data — and the models that rely on it — useless. When data corruption is considered, the alleged “climate crisis” disappears. Alex Newman from the Epoch Times covers this corruption in great detail. Man-made activities are not to blame for these temperature changes. Policies that seek to control human activity are totalitarian in nature and based on fraud and hysteria.

“Climate activism has become the new religion of the 21st century — heretics are not welcome and not allowed to ask questions,” said CERES founder and astrophysicist Willie Soon. “But good science demands that scientists are encouraged to question the IPCC’s dogma. The supposed purity of the global temperature record is one of the most sacred dogmas of the IPCC.”

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NIST staffers revolt against expected appointment of ‘effective altruist’ AI researcher to US AI Safety Institute

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is facing an internal crisis as staff members and scientists have threatened to resign over the anticipated appointment of Paul Christiano to a crucial, though non-political, position at the agency’s newly-formed US AI Safety Institute (AISI), according to at least two sources with direct knowledge of the situation, who asked to remain anonymous.

NIST is an agency of the US Department of Commerce whose mission is “to promote US innovation and industrial competitiveness by advancing measurement science, standards, and technology in ways that enhance economic security and improve our quality of life.” According to the agency’s website, its core competencies are “measurement science,” “rigorous traceability” and “development and use of standards.” NIST also develops cybersecurity standards, guidelines and best practices, and released an AI security framework in January 2023.

Christiano, who is known for his ties to the effective altruism (EA) movement and its offshoot, longtermism (a view that prioritizes the long-term future of humanity, popularized by philosopher William MacAskill), was allegedly rushed through the hiring process without anyone knowing until today, one of the sources said.

The appointment of Christiano, which was said to come directly from Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, has sparked outrage among NIST employees who fear that Christiano’s association with EA and longtermism could compromise the institute’s objectivity and integrity.

However, Divyansh Kaushik, associate director for emerging technologies and national security at the Federation of American Scientists, told VentureBeat that President Biden’s AI Executive Order, introduced in November 2023, specifically asks NIST and the AISI to focus on certain tasks — including CBRN (chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear materials) — for which Paul Christiano is “extremely qualified.”

Many say EA — defined by the Center for Effective Altruism as an “intellectual project using evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible” — has turned into a cult-like group of highly influential and wealthy adherents (made famous by FTX founder and jailbird Sam Bankman-Fried) whose paramount concern revolves around preventing a future AI catastrophe from destroying humanity. Critics of the EA focus on this existential risk, or “x-risk,” say it is happening to the detriment of a necessary focus on current, measurable AI risks — including bias, misinformation, high-risk applications and traditional cybersecurity. 

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Climate Change Committee’s Net Zero Plan Involves Pumping Compressed CO2 With Energy of 500 Hiroshima Bombs into Ground Every Year. Are They Mad?

In the last few weeks a number of serious errors have come to light in the Climate Change Committee’s (CCC) plan for Net Zero. The CCC plan was published mid-2019 in a document titled ‘Net Zero Technical Report’.

In summary, the CCCs plan for Net Zero is to shift transport and heating from using petrol, diesel and gas to using electricity and then to decarbonise the electricity grid.

To decarbonise the grid, it is assumed that electricity will be generated using nuclear and renewables. During periods when nuclear, wind and solar cannot meet demand, Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) will be deployed to remove CO2 emissions as the electricity must be generated using gas.

Carbon Capture and Storage is a new and untested technology that has never been deployed at scale anywhere on earth. However, it is clear from the CCC’s report that CCS plays a major roll in achieving Net Zero. As I reported in a previous article, regardless of this being an untested technology, the U.K. only plans to build a quarter of the required capacity to hit Net Zero by 2050 (the plan requires the U.K. to capture and store 176Mt of CO2 annually).

Nevertheless, our Government envisages significant CCS capacity at 50Mt annually. Carbon Capture and Storage involves filtering CO2 from the exhaust produced from gas turbines used to generate electricity, then piping the captured CO2 to plants that compress the gas into a liquid before it is then injected into underground storage areas around the U.K.

Compressed CO2 is currently being commercialised as a way to store energy for use in periods when nuclear and renewables are unavailable. The company Energy Dome has developed a working 4MWh system in Sardinia, Italy. The company says its technology has an energy storage density 10-20 times higher than other compressed air energy storage (CAES) solutions and two-thirds that of liquid air energy storage (LAES).

The CCC’s plan requires vast quantities of CO2 to be compressed and stored under the U.K. Given this potential energy could be released at any time should something go wrong, it seems sensible to consider the safety implications of Carbon Capture and Storage.

Energy Dome has recently raised $11m and is building a larger 100MWh system. Its 100MWh store requires about 2,000 tonnes of CO2. This means the company is expecting to store 0.05MWh of energy per tonne of compressed CO2. Using this energy density, the CCC’s plan to store 176Mt per year will mean 8.8TWh of potential energy is being trapped beneath the U.K. annually. The bomb dropped on Hiroshima exploded with an energy of about 15 kilotons of TNT or 0.0174TWh. Therefore the energy we will be storing under our feet is equivalent to 505 Hiroshima bombs every year or the energy released by 16 magnitude seven earthquakes per year.

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GLOWING PLANTS THAT TURN ENERGY INTO LIGHT ARE ABOUT TO BE COMMERCIALLY AVAILABLE FOR THE FIRST TIME

Tapping into the magic of bioluminescence, Light Bio is preparing to ship its first orders for glowing plants this spring. The company provides flora that converts energy into light, making their offerings the first commercially available plants that glow in the dark.

After scaling up production to meet excessive demands, Light Bio says it will finally begin shipping orders for their glowing “Firefly Petunia,” which was so named because its glowing leaves resemble fireflies, next month.

Some plant and animal species in nature convert chemical energy into visible light, causing them to glow. While the majority of these seemingly magical lifeforms are aquatic, some take the form of glowing plants. Among the most studied are bioluminescent mushrooms that glow in the dark.

Some laboratories have been able to combine the genes responsible for these glowing fungi into more aesthetically pleasing plants, including flowers. However, genetic engineering is complicated, and the most common process involves incorporating five different genes into the target plant to generate light. The science is also highly regulated, meaning glowing plants have thus far existed as a laboratory curiosity and nothing more.

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FOR HALF A CENTURY, OUR CALCULATIONS ON NUCLEAR EXPLOSIONS IN SPACE HAVE BEEN WRONG, LOS ALAMOS SCIENTIST REVEALS

On July 9, 1962, the largest in a series of tests involving nuclear explosions in space was conducted by the United States. Dubbed Starfish Prime, the test involved the launch of a W49 thermonuclear warhead developed at Los Alamos from Johnston Atoll in the Pacific Ocean.

The warhead detonated approximately 250 miles above the Earth, producing belts of radiation as high-energy electrons became trapped, amplifying the magnitude of the natural Van Allen radiation belt and increasing the potential adverse effects of the trapped radiation.

Now, a scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory has found a novel means of offering better protection for space technologies: by fixing mistakes in mathematical calculations related to the effects of nuclear explosions in space that have gone undetected for close to half a century.

The errors relate to our understanding of the influence electromagnetic waves exert on the dispersal of electrons that become trapped in the planet’s magnetic fields when nuclear explosions in space occur.

According to Greg Cunningham, a space scientist with Los Alamos National Laboratory, the discovery and resolution of these longstanding errors in past mathematical calculations will offer scientists an opportunity to improve protections for space technologies, particularly involving models governing the effects of radiation resulting from the detonation of nuclear devices at high altitudes.

“This allows us to make better predictions of what that threat could be and the efficacy of radiation belt remediation strategies,” Cunningham said in a recent statement.

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Almost Half Of UK University Scientists Refuse To Say Sex Is Binary

A survey highlighted by The Telegraph has found that only 58 percent of scientists at British universities believe that sex is binary.

The poll also found that most of the 200 scientists surveyed believe that gender is fluid.

Twenty-nine percent of respondents to the survey agreed with the statement that “sex is not binary,” while 13 percent of respondents did not share a view on the question or preferred not to give an opinion.

That means that 42 percent of the scientists would not classify sex as binary.

The poll, conducted by Censuswide, a market research consultancy, also found that 64 percent of scientists said gender is fluid, with only 22 percent saying the believe gender is binary, and a further 14 percent not providing an answer.

Commenting on the findings, Dr. Wolfgang Goymann, a professor of behavioral biology at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Intelligence, said “To me this just means that at least 29% of the academics that filled out this questionnaire do not understand the biological concept of sex, and at least 22% of them do not know what gender means.”

Goymann has noted that some scientists are now positing that sex is a graded spectrum rather than a binary trait.

“Leading science journals have been adopting this relativist view, thereby opposing fundamental biological facts,” he urged.

“While we fully endorse efforts to create a more inclusive environment for gender-diverse people, this does not require denying biological sex,” Goymann continued.

He added, “On the contrary, the rejection of biological sex seems to be based on a lack of knowledge about evolution and it champions species chauvinism, inasmuch as it imposes human identity notions on millions of other species.”

Helen Joyce, director of advocacy at Sex Matters, told The Telegraph “This survey has two remarkable findings. The first is that 29 per cent of academics are apparently unaware of the obvious fact that sex is binary. The second is that nearly two-thirds of academics say that ‘gender is fluid’. That is a strikingly confident statement about a nebulous concept.”

“This muddle feeds through into academic research and public policy. It’s concerning that people supposedly among our best and brightest are seemingly blind to this confusion,” Joyce further noted.

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Drastic and Irreversible Climate Geoengineering Worries Scientists

The Earth is too hot and only getting hotter, according to governments and global bodies such as the United Nations; and the efforts to reduce carbon dioxide aren’t having enough of an effect.

“The world is passing through the 1.5°C ceiling and is headed much higher unless steps are taken to affect Earth’s energy imbalance,” James Hansen, previous director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said in January.

Thus, to buy more time, on Feb. 28, scientists from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released a report detailing a solution called “intentional stratospheric dehydration,” or in layman’s terms, flying planeloads of ice to 58,000 feet and spraying ice particles into the upper atmosphere.

“It’s a very small effect,” said lead author Joshua Schwarz, a research physicist at NOAA’s chemical sciences laboratory. “Pure water vapor doesn’t readily form ice crystals. It helps to have a seed, a dust particle, for example, for ice to form around.”

The researchers report that by dispersing small particles, or what it calls ice nuclei, into areas of the atmosphere that are both “very cold and super-saturated with water vapor,” water vapor in the atmosphere will “freeze-dry” and rain out of the atmosphere as ice crystals, cooling the planet.

The proposal is known as geoengineering—and NASA and NOAA’s joint plan is far from the only idea that’s jumped from the pages of science fiction, à la the 2013 Hollywood film “Snowpiercer,” to mainstream science.

István Szapudi, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy, has turned to essentially geoengineering a giant parasol, or what he calls, a “tethered solar shield” to shield the Earth from a portion of the sun’s energy.

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‘Very Bizarre’: Scientists Expose Major Problems With Climate Change Data

Temperature records used by climate scientists and governments to build models that then forecast dangerous manmade global warming repercussions have serious problems and even corruption in the data, multiple scientists who have published recent studies on the issue told The Epoch Times.

The Biden administration leans on its latest National Climate Assessment report as evidence that global warming is accelerating because of human activities. The document states that human emissions of “greenhouse gases” such as carbon dioxide are dangerously warming the Earth.

The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) holds the same view, and its leaders are pushing major global policy changes in response.

But scientific experts from around the world in a variety of fields are pushing back. In peer-reviewed studies, they cite a wide range of flaws with the global temperature data used to reach the dire conclusions; they say it’s time to reexamine the whole narrative.

Problems with temperature data include a lack of geographically and historically representative data, contamination of the records by heat from urban areas, and corruption of the data introduced by a process known as “homogenization.”

The flaws are so significant that they make the temperature data—and the models based on it—essentially useless or worse, three independent scientists with the Center for Environmental Research and Earth Sciences (CERES) explained.

The experts said that when data corruption is considered, the alleged “climate crisis” supposedly caused by human activities disappears.

Instead, natural climate variability offers a much better explanation for what is being observed, they said.

Some experts told The Epoch Times that deliberate fraud appeared to be at work, while others suggested more innocent explanations.

But regardless of why the problems exist, the implications of the findings are hard to overstate.

With no climate crisis, the justification for trillions of dollars in government spending and costly changes in public policy to restrict carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions collapses, the scientists explained in a series of interviews about their research.

“For the last 35 years, the words of the IPCC have been taken to be gospel,” according to astrophysicist and CERES founder Willie Soon. Until recently, he was a researcher working with the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian.

“And indeed, climate activism has become the new religion of the 21st century—heretics are not welcome and not allowed to ask questions,” Mr. Soon told The Epoch Times.

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