Algae as a Surprising Meat Alternative and Source of Environmentally Friendly Protein

Photo by Laker

With more of us looking for alternatives to eating animals, new research has found a surprising environmentally friendly source of protein – algae.

The University of Exeter study has been published in The Journal of Nutrition and is the first of its kind to demonstrate that the ingestion of two of the most commercially available algal species are rich in protein which supports muscle remodeling in young healthy adults. Their findings suggest that algae may be an interesting and sustainable alternative to animal-derived protein with respect to maintaining and building muscle.

Researcher Ino Van Der Heijden from the University of Exeter said: “Our work has shown algae could become part of a secure and sustainable food future...

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Researchers develop ‘Electronic Soil’ that Enhances Crop Growth

Electronic
Eleni Stavrinidou, associate professor, and supervisor of the study and Alexandra Sandéhn, Ph.D. student, one of the lead authors, connect the eSoil to a low power source for stimulating plant growth. Credit: Thor Balkhed

Barley seedlings grow on average 50% more when their root system is stimulated electrically through a new cultivation substrate. In a study published in the journal PNAS, researchers from Linköping University have developed an electrically conductive “soil” for soilless cultivation, known as hydroponics.

“The world population is increasing, and we also have climate change. So it’s clear that we won’t be able to cover the food demands of the planet with only the already existing agricultural methods...

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Why the Universe might be a Hologram

Why the universe might be a hologram
The colored circle represents the hologram, out of which the knotted optical vortex emerges.
Credit: University of Bristol

A quarter century ago, physicist Juan Maldacena proposed the AdS/CFT correspondence, an intriguing holographic connection between gravity in a three-dimensional universe and quantum physics on the universe’s two-dimensional boundary. This correspondence is at this stage, even a quarter century after Maldacena’s discovery, just a conjecture.

A statement about the nature of the universe that seems to be true, but one that has not yet been proven to actually reflect the reality that we live in. And what’s more, it only has limited utility and application to the real universe.

Still, even the mere appearance of the correspondence is more than suggestive...

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New AI Model can Predict Human Lifespan, researchers say. They want to make sure it’s used for good

Hand pointing to lines of code on a black screen.
Photo by Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University

Researchers have created an Artificial Intelligence tool that uses sequences of life events—such as health history, education, job and income—to predict everything from a person’s personality to their mortality.

Built using transformer models, which power large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, the new tool, life2vec, is trained on a data set pulled from the entire population of Denmark—6 million people. The data set was made available only to the researchers by the Danish government.

The tool the researchers built based on this complex set of data is capable of predicting the future, including the lifespan of individuals, with an accuracy that exceeds state-of-the-art models...

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