Economist
To feed billions more people in coming decades, bugs will likely be on the global menu
Filling in the gaps in the world’s food web requires unlearning some tastes and preferences. Consider the insect. Around 1,900 ...
What’s on the menu in a climate-sensitive diet — and will we eat it?
What if people who shared the distaste for today’s food system could encourage the building, seed by seed and cell ...
Genetics and chemistry could make cow meat and milk extinct
Henry Ford, an early industrialiser of plant-based milks as well as a carmaker, production-system innovator and anti-Semite, saw animals as ...
Vertical farming and sustainability: We can now grow fruits and vegetables in urban areas without soil or sunlight
Most vertical farms share a few attributes. One is a lack of soil. Their stacked rows of crops are grown ...
Precision fermentation: How humans harness microbe-based biochemistry to make food more delicious
Humans have been harnessing microbe-based biochemistry for food preservation since before history began. Without lactic-acid fermentation a bumper crop of ...
When will we reach a future in which meat no longer requires animal slaughter? There are still some barriers to that goal
Nearly 100 firms are vying to be the first to bring cultured meat to market. Select locations—including a private club ...
CRISPR gene editing on the cusp of adding new gene drive tools to control disease-carrying mosquitoes
[D]espite decades of effort, vaccines have, for many [diseases like malaria and dengue], proved tricky to develop. Better, then, to ...
RNA technology brought us effective COVID vaccines. Next up: ‘Precisely targeted, environmentally-friendly’ techniques that dramatically reduce use of problematic chemicals
[RNA-based COVID vaccines let] a vaccine-recipient’s immune system learn to recognise a crucial part of the enemy before the real ...
Will we ever reach COVID ‘herd immunity’? ¾ of the population of the Brazilian Amazon capital Manaus has been infected but the coronavirus marches on
In September, a preprint appeared online with the startling results from a study of covid-19 antibodies in blood-bank samples from ...
A world without aches: First inklings of a drug that could eradicate chronic pain
After decades of research into the cellular basis of chronic pain, [pharmacologist Peter] McNaughton believes he has discovered the fundamentals ...
Gut bacteria transfers could help relieve autism symptoms, research shows
What causes ASD has baffled psychiatrists and neurologists since the syndrome was first described, in the mid-20th century, by Hans Asperger and ...
Does a future with genetic enhancements undermine ‘the idea that we are all equal’?
Sex is how humans propagate. But developments in genetic engineering might change this one day. “We are, in the future, ...
Key to treating autism could be hiding in the gut
Autism affects people’s social behaviour and communication, and may impair their ability to learn things. All this is well known. Less ...
Downside to ‘real AI’: Who wants to talk to a smart robot?
[On June 19, IBM] announced that it had brought us one step closer to “real AI” (an intelligence as smart as ...
