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Humans have relied on cotton’s textile fiber for nearly seven millennia. However, utilizing cottonseed as food has been a long and unfulfilled goal of many plant breeders. Along with its abundant, high-quality protein, cottonseed also contains gossypol – a toxic chemical that renders the seed inedible. Cottonseed’s fate as a mostly unusable by-product seemed sealed …
Continue reading “Bioengineered Cotton Could Help Solve World Hunger”
Researchers from the Big Data Institute at the University of Oxford in England used DNA analysis to create the largest human family tree ever, dating back 100,000 years. They published their study titled “A unified genealogy of modern and ancient genomes” in the journal Science.
Food waste has reached colossal proportions and the magnitude of the problem requires equally massive resources with the potential to supply sustainable answers. What better than the dynamic digital databases and advanced analytics we literally have access to “at our fingertips”. By Susan Langthorp
The future may seem dystopian since there are many problems in the world: global warming, environmental problems, biodiversity loss, pandemics, etc… But we can still be hopeful for the future thanks to these three key statistics.
A significant proportion of the world’s population has little to no access to clean water, and the water consumed by industrial activities continues to grow. Researchers from the Nanotechnology Enabled Water Treatment (NEWT) Center, which is headquartered at Rice University, are developing cutting-edge water purification technologies that can provide communities with access to clean and …
Continue reading “Developing Sustainable Water Purification Technologies using Nanotechnology”
Common medicines that have passed through patients’ bodies are ending up in the environment, but the threat many of them pose to wildlife and human health still needs to be determined. It may even be possible to recover some of these life-saving compounds so they can be reused. By Vittoria D’Alessio
When the coronavirus burst onto the scene, healthcare professionals and robotics experts partnered to implement out-of-the-box solutions to pressing needs. In Wuhan, China, a test run of a field hospital staffed by robots took place. The machines, provided by tech company CloudMinds, delivered necessities and medicines and even entertained patients.
Ocean pollution is widespread, worsening, and poses a clear and present danger to human health and wellbeing. But the extent of this danger has not been widely comprehended – until now. Our recent study provides the first comprehensive assessment of the impacts of ocean pollution on human health.
Science is both invaluable and imperfect. In managing cures to all kinds of diseases and ailments, these competing values offer mixed healthcare results. When medical science goes right, it enables protection and prevention, thereby saving lives. When it goes wrong, however, curative science can create more problems for the population.
Will our species go extinct? The short answer is yes. The fossil record shows everything goes extinct, eventually. Almost all species that ever lived, over 99.9%, are extinct. Some left descendants. Most – plesiosaurs, trilobites, Brontosaurus – didn’t. That’s also true of other human species. Neanderthals, Denisovans, H. erectus all vanished, leaving just H. sapiens. …
