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Flip-Flops Made From Plants And Algae Can Help Reduce Plastic Pollution

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Flip-Flops Made From Plants And Algae Can Help Reduce Plastic Pollution

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Flip-Flops Made From Plants And Algae Can Help Reduce Plastic Pollution | World Wide Waste

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A Genetically Modified Yeast Turns Sugar Into Painkillers

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A Genetically Modified Yeast Turns Sugar Into Painkillers

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Stanford scientists have engineered a strain of yeast that can produce opiates on its own

smithsonianmag.com

Since ancient times, winemakers, brewers and bakers have harnessed the fermentation properties of yeast to leaven bread and produce alcoholic libations. But now, a team of scientists at Stanford University has genetically modified this renaissance microbe for a unique purpose: pumping out opiate painkillers.

While you are unlikely to find any opiates at your local microbrewery anytime soon, the results show great promise in speeding up the manufacturing process for these drugs, as well as opening doors for the discovery of new medicines.

"Many of our medicines are being shifted to production by biotechnology," says study author Christina Smolke, an associate professor of bioengineering at Stanford. "Plants do really sophisticated biochemistry to make these compounds, but the challenge is that they don't necessarily do it efficiently."

Historically, all opiate painkillers have been derived from the opium poppy, which is legally grown in locations such as Australia, Europe and India and shipped to manufacturing centers. The plant compounds are then isolated, refined and converted into prescription drugs in a process that can take a year or more from farm to pharmacy.

Like any other crop-dependent product, opiates can be subject to pest infestation, drought, changes in climate and other variables capable of limiting the manufacture of familiar drugs such as morphine, codeine, oxycodone and hydrocodone (more commonly known by the brand name Vicodin). Given these restrictions, the researchers wanted to compress the entire farming and manufacturing process into a single bioreactor that could produce painkillers in a matter of days.

"We wanted to show that you could take a process that is traditionally distributed across both biological and chemical synthesis and integrate it entirely within a synthesis route in yeast," says Smolke.

Encouraging precedents existed for creating plant-based medicines using synthetic biology. In 2006, the anti-malarial drug artemisinin, derived from the sweet wormwood tree, was successfully produced from genetically altered yeast cells. This biosynthesis process expanded rapidly-yeast-made artemisinin currently accounts for approximately one-third of the world's supply. And earlier this year, a team at UC Berkeley engineered brewer's yeast to make one of the building blocks of morphine.

To coax their yeast down the biochemical pathway for opiates, the Stanford researchers first had to break down and genetically re-create each enzyme-enabled step in the synthesis chain that converts tyrosine, an amino acid the yeast makes from sugar, to thebaine, a precursor for many common opioid painkillers. The scientists could then insert the genes necessary to convert thebaine to hydrocodone. But after all this biochemical construction work, the team ran into a technical hurdle-they were unable to create a sufficient quantity of opioid product. They discovered that the yeast was misreading the directions for making the protein necessary to reach a key stage in the production line.

"We then had to rewrite the instructions for how yeast should make the protein so that it more closely modeled how the plant was doing it," says Smolke. By the end of the process, the researchers had reconstructed the yeast cells with 23 new genes from a variety of organisms, including several plant species, rats and bacteria. Even now, though, the overall process is too inefficient, requiring more than 4,400 gallons of yeast to produce a single dose of hydrocodone.

"By our estimates, we would need to improve the efficiency of the process by 100,000 times to be ready for commercial production," says Smolke, whose team reports the results this week in . "But we believe this is feasible and have already begun that work."

The authors point out several benefits that would result from optimizing their process. First, it would significantly reduce the manufacturing costs for opiates, creating opportunities to reach the estimated 5.5 billion people who have limited access to pain medications. And because this is an entirely self-contained process, it can take place anywhere-removing the dependency on geography and climate while enabling greater containment and quality control. The integrated yeast synthesis also frees up land for other types of farming-growing sugarcane to feed the yeast takes up far less land area than that required for poppy farming.

But perhaps the biggest benefit of this technology comes from its flexibility to explore new medicinal compounds that are more effective and have fewer side effects.

"People are working on all types of very interesting alternatives to conventional opiates," says Kenneth Oye, an associate professor of political science and engineering systems at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "The big advantage of moving from traditional production techniques to these pathways for synthesis in yeast is that the pathways are far more easily modified, allowing for easier synthesis of new compounds."

Still, making it easier to produce opiates carries important safety and abuse considerations.

"I don't think that the strain developed by Christina Smolke's lab poses a big threat to public health and safety as is," says Oye. Indeed, Smolke recently tested the viability of their strain under home-brew conditions and found that it didn't produce opiates. "But if someone were to develop a strain of yeast with a pathway that went from glucose to heroin with high efficiency, then you have a problem. Such a strain might have the potential for home-brew opiates."

Oye also points out that if such a strain of yeast were developed, control over distribution would be extremely difficult. "This is something that could be reproduced fairly easily and would be difficult to contain or recall," he says. He argues that early dialogue is essential to ensure safe technical and policy precautions, such as engineering yeast strains to be dependent on nutrients that are hard to obtain, inserting markers that could help with detection, and increasing lab security. "In many instances, your options for mitigating potential risk are limited once the work is complete," says Oye.

Smolke agrees, adding: "I believe there needs to be an open deliberative process to discuss the real concerns and how to develop strategies to mitigate these risks. It is not just dependent on the technology but also policy makers, law enforcement and the medical community. And if this research catalyzes a discussion around that, I think that is really important."

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A Genetically Modified Yeast Turns Sugar Into Painkillers

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smithsonianmag.com Since ancient times, winemakers, brewers and bakers have harnessed the fermentation properties of yeast to leaven bread and produce alcoholic libations. But now, a team of scientists at Stanford University has genetically modified this renaissance microbe for a unique purpose: pumping out opiate painkillers.

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Will Japanese Researchers Grow Human Organs Inside Pigs?

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Will Japanese Researchers Grow Human Organs Inside Pigs?

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A controversial technique to develop body parts from stem cells may someday save countless lives, but will society allow it?

smithsonianmag.com

If all goes according to plan, professor Hiroshi Nagashima's genetically-engineered pigs will grow up with functional organs. A few of those body parts, though, will have the genetic makeup of a human. In essence, they'll be mostly swine, partly human.

After successfully cloning pigs in 2007, the Tokyo-based geneticist has made steady progress on perfecting a technique to produce animals from multiple, genetically-different cells-scientifically referred to as chimeras. His latest achievement was to breed white pigs that possessed the pancreases of black pigs, a different breed, by injecting outside embryonic stem cells into their embryos. The procedure required that he first switch off the gene in the white pigs that instructs the embryo to develop its own pancreas before surgically implanting the modified embryos into the womb of a surrogate.

Now while all this sounds like the stuff of weird franken-science, keep in mind that the concept of chimeras, derived from the lion, snake and goat-mix of Greek mythology, occurs naturally as well. In extremely rare instances, non-identical twin zygotes somehow fuse together in the early phase of pregnancy. The babies are a combination of genetically distinct body parts. Some hermaphrodites, with both male and female sex organs, are the most apparent example of this phenomenon.

The chimeras Nagashima and his collaborator, biologist Hiromitsu Nakauchi, envision do, however, blur the line between distant species. The Japanese researchers aim to grow human pancreases in pigs, harvest them and then implant them in humans in need. Down the road, medical researchers may someday be able to harvest from animals other human organs grown from the donors' own DNA. A breakthrough of such magnitude has the potential to save many lives, particularly those on a growing waitlist for a suitable donor. It's estimated that 18 people in America die each day waiting for an organ. And even then, there's always a concern over the complications of the body rejecting it as nearly half of the people who receive transplanted kidneys experience a negative immune system response in the first few weeks.

So why pigs? Well, in an odd way, the size and function of their internal parts are quite similar to ours. In fact, one experiment showed that pigs raised from fetuses with injected human stem cells had a variation of pig cells, human cells and the hybrid cells in their blood and organs. The genetic "intimacy" between the two species allowed cells to fuse together with a fair degree of ease. It may also explain why they've long been thought of as ideal candidates for " xenografting," where tissues or organs are transferred from animals to humans. Heart valves are often grafted from pigs and implanted into humans, since the two species' hearts are similarly structured. In a report on WIBW.com, Nagashima stated that he chose to focus his cloning efforts on pigs because of the uncanny degree in which pigs and humans are anatomically alike.

Nakauchi has developed a separate method for growing a brown rat pancreas inside a white mouse. Though rodents are much more distant to humans than pigs, Nakauchi's technique uses induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) rather than embryonic, which sidesteps the thorny issue of destroying fertilized embryos. Taken from adult skin tissue or blood, iPSCs can be programmed to function just like embryonic stem cells, developing into any variety of building block found in the body. The real challenge, though, is whether he can develop this technology so that it'll work for cultivating human parts in pigs. When pressed on the prospect, Nakauchi that he was confident the day will come, though it is at least five years away, perhaps even longer.

However, controversy is simply unavoidable when you're talking about reducing an animal that some consider a beloved household pet into an organ factory. Discomfort ranges from the obvious concern over the inhumane treatment of animals to more perplexing dilemmas should the technology advance to the point where it's possible to nurture more sacred human parts, such as a homosapien brain.

Robert Streiffer, a bioethicist at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, points out that rearing bioengineered pigs specifically for the purpose of extracting an organ or two would mean they would be subject to pretty harsh interventions. They might undergo constant pumping of immune suppression drugs to prevent, for instance, a kidney from being rejected and be forced to live in confined spaces to minimize the risk of injury.

"You can't forget that pigs are smart, social animals that experience a wide range of emotions," he says. "In such austere isolated conditions, they'll be suffering for much of their lives. For sure, it would get a lot of attention from animal rights groups."

And then there are the more difficult philosophical questions. At what point would a pig be considered more than a pig? If so, what rights should such creatures be conferred? Streiffer sees the research being done in Japan is tailored narrowly enough that it's probably not going to be kicking open the door to any brave new worlds. "Anytime you entertain scenarios made possible by biotechnology you get into these conundrums, like where enhancing the brain a certain way can enhance an animal's status in a certain way and what kind of cognitive abilities [intelligence or awareness] are needed to attain the status of being human beings," Streiffer adds. "But I just don't see that as the outcome in this case."

The biggest obstacles at the moment are legal ones. While Japan allows the mixing of human and animal genetic material in vitro, it has banned the subsequent creation of actual living chimeras. Nakauchi, who's currently lobbying the government to reconsider the law, has recently flirted with the idea of moving his research to the United States where, in many states, no such ban exists.

"Even though he would probably still face opposition, at least on a societal level, it's not illegal here," Streiffer says. "He should get a pass."

About Tuan C. Nguyen

Tuan C. Nguyen is a Silicon Valley-based journalist specializing in technology, health, design and innovation. His work has appeared in ABCNews.com, NBCNews.com, FoxNews.com, CBS' SmartPlanet and LiveScience.

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Will Japanese Researchers Grow Human Organs Inside Pigs?

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smithsonianmag.com If all goes according to plan, professor Hiroshi Nagashima's genetically-engineered pigs will grow up with functional organs. A few of those body parts, though, will have the genetic makeup of a human. In essence, they'll be mostly swine, partly human.

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How Glowing Soil Can Help Find Land Mines

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How Glowing Soil Can Help Find Land Mines

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Using genetically engineered bacteria and lasers, Israeli scientists have devised a unique way to detect buried explosives

smithsonianmag.com

In a time when there is much talk of a "Mother of All Bombs" and the possibility of a conflict involving nuclear weapons, a land mine can seem an artifact of conflicts past, a weapon that has little to do with mass destruction.

And yet, the prosaic device continues to induce its own form of terror around the world, sometimes long after wars have ended. In 2015, the number of people killed or maimed by land mines and other explosive remnants of war rose to 6,461, an increase of 75 percent, according to the 2016 Landmine Monitor. The big jump was largely related to conflicts in Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Ukraine and Yemen.
When mines move
Almost 80 percent of the victims were civilians, and nearly 40 percent were children.

Since an international Mine Ban Treaty went into effect in 1999, tens of millions of anti-personnel mines have been destroyed. But almost 110 million remain buried in fields and forests, reports the Landmine Monitor, which also estimates the expense of removing a mine-one that might have cost as little as $3 to make-could be as high as $1,000.

As costly and methodical a process as it is to extract mines, it's even more challenging to find them. Reliable technology has been slow to evolve beyond the conventional metal detector, and in some places, giant rats are still the detection method of choice.

Engineers at the German Ruhr-Universität Bochum and Technical University Ilmenau are making progress in developing a ground-penetrating radar technology, with the goal of one day implementing it through a handheld device. Building a prototype could take several years, however.

In Israel, scientists at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have taken a very different approach-they're relying on genetically-engineered bacteria to do the job. In a study recently published in Nature Biotechnology, the team of researchers reported that they were able to create microbes that produce fluorescent molecules when they come into contact with vapors that leak from the explosive component in mines.

Along with nutrients and water, the engineered E. coli bacteria were encased in polymer beads only three millimeters in diameter. The beads were scattered over a test field where explosives were buried. Then 24 hours later, using a laser scanning system, the scientists were able to locate the mines based on where the soil was glowing.

"Once you know where a mine is, it's not that difficult to neutralize it," says Aharon Agranat, who oversaw the design and construction of the remote scanning system. "The problem is to know where it is. Things like weather conditions and mudslides can cause mines to move over the years. They're not always in the same place as where they were first buried."
Taking on challenges
In what he describes as "quintessential multidisciplinary research," Agranat, an applied physicist, worked closely with Shimshon Belkin, a microbiologist who created the bacterial sensors, and Amos Nussinovitch, a biochemist who encapsulated the microbes in the polymer beads. They loaded about 100,000 vapor-detecting cells inside each bead. The laser in Agranat's detection system was able to locate the explosives while mounted on a cart about 70 feet away.

"The advantage of fluorescence is that we can have the laser detect only that light," he explains, "and not any light reflected from the ground, or from the moon, or from lights nearby. That light doesn't respond to our laser beam. So, we can work outdoors. This proved to be very effective."

Their research at this point, Agranat acknowledges, is at the proof-of-concept stage. They've shown that their process can work, but both acknowledge there are challenges they still need to overcome before it could be used widely.

Belkin says they have to make the sensor bacteria even more sensitive and stable, and need to increase the scanning speed to deal with large areas that contain land mines.

"There are many assumptions that are involved in the success of this methodology," Agranat notes. "For starters, is it a given that the vapors released by the mine will reach the surface, or that enough will reach the surface that it can be detected?"

There are other questions. "We need to know what happens in different minefields," says Agranat. "The way they're in the ground varies from place to place, the climate conditions are different, the type of soil is different, the type of mines is different.

"What needs to be done now is to see how effective this is going to be in all those different situations."

One more challenge is to be able to shrink the size of the scanning equipment so that it can be carried by a light unmanned aircraft or a drone, allowing larger areas to be surveyed.

But they continue to make progress. Now, they say they can detect explosives only three hours after the bacteria-filled beads are spread across a field. They're also programming the bacteria to have a limited life span to ease any concerns about introducing genetically engineered microbes into the environment.

More research certainly needs to be done, but Agranat is encouraged by the results so far.

"As far as I know, this is the first case of remote sensing of buried land mines," he says. "Most of the questions relate to things like cost effectiveness. But there is no showstopper we can point to."

About Randy Rieland

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How Glowing Soil Can Help Find Land Mines

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smithsonianmag.com In a time when there is much talk of a "Mother of All Bombs" and the possibility of a conflict involving nuclear weapons, a land mine can seem an artifact of conflicts past, a weapon that has little to do with mass destruction.

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Chickens Might Lay Your Future Prescriptions

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Chickens Might Lay Your Future Prescriptions

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Tests show cancer-fighting and immune-boosting proteins can be produced in the egg whites of genetically-modified cluckers

smithsonianmag.com

Chickens are essentially little protein factories, producing a relatively large clump of pure protein in each egg they lay. Proteins are also the basis for many medicines, but synthesizing proteins commercially is difficult and expensive. That's why researchers in Scotland have genetically modified chickens to produce therapeutic proteins in their eggs, reports Pallab Ghosh at the BBC.

In many human diseases, the main culprit is a protein that is either missing, not produced in sufficient quantities or is manufactured incorrectly by the body. By inserting a protein-producing gene into a chicken, the scientists essentially create a genetically-modified, or transgenic, animal. Armed with this new gene, the chicken's body produces more of a type of protein it usually doesn't make, which accumulates in large quantities in the eggs it lays. The egg whites can then be purified to recover the protein, a technique that's 10 to 100 times cheaper than producing proteins in a factory, the team reports in the journal BMC Biotechnology.

So far, the researchers have used to the technique to produce two proteins, IFNalpha2a, which has strong cancer-fighting properties and macrophage-CSF, which stimulates tissues to repair themselves. Just three eggs are enough to produce a therapeutic dose of the proteins.

As for the chickens, they don't seem to know they are being used as medical bioreactors and lead relatively cushy lives.

"They live in very large pens. They are fed and watered and looked after on a daily basis by highly trained technicians, and live quite a comfortable life," lead author Lissa Herron of Roslin Technologies in Edinburgh tells Ghosh. "As far as the chicken knows, it's just laying a normal egg. It doesn't affect its health in any way, it's just chugging away, laying eggs as normal."

This is not the first time animals have been used to produce drugs. In fact, there is a whole biotech industry called biopharming, in which transgenic plants and animals are used to produce proteins, enzymes and other biological products. Researchers have produced enzymes and proteins in tobacco plants and cow's milk as well as a commercially available enzyme, Kanuma, that's produced in chicken eggs. Overall, however, the commercialization process has had technical and regulatory setbacks and has yet to become a major force in medicine.

Study co-author Helen Sang, a molecular biologist at the Roslin Institute, tells CBS New York that this latest method could change that.

"In the past, making these transgenic animals has been very inefficient, very expensive, and difficult. What we've done is found a method that makes it a lot faster a lot more efficient," she says.

But the chicken medicine won't make into the doctor's office for a while. It will take 10 to 20 years for the egg-based cures to make their way through the regulatory system and into the pharmacy. In the meantime, however, the research team hopes the technique can be used to make medication for animals, including immune-boosting proteins for farm animals that could help reduce the overuse of antibiotics.

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Chickens Might Lay Your Future Prescriptions

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smithsonianmag.com Chickens are essentially little protein factories, producing a relatively large clump of pure protein in each egg they lay. Proteins are also the basis for many medicines, but synthesizing proteins commercially is difficult and expensive. That's why researchers in Scotland have genetically modified chickens to produce therapeutic proteins in their eggs, reports Pallab Ghosh at the BBC.

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This mushroom brick could replace concrete

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This mushroom brick could replace concrete

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The world is addicted to concrete. And it is creating a climate crisis. But maybe mushrooms could change all of that.

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This mushroom brick could replace concrete

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Are You Ready For Protein Bars Made From Crickets?

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Are You Ready For Protein Bars Made From Crickets?

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They're good for you and the environment, but are they good enough to eat?

smithsonianmag.com

Nothing like chomping on crickets to give yourself a daily protein boost.

Or so say Greg Sewitz and Gabi Lewis, two young entrepreneurs who next month plan to begin selling energy bars containing ground-up chirping insects. They point out that crickets are loaded with protein, way more than an equal amount of chicken or cow, and that they provide more iron than beef does and almost as much calcium as milk. Plus, as food products go, they're far easier on the environment than cows, producing one-eightieth the amount of methane and requiring much less food and water.

Yes, that's all very sensible. But we are talking about insect parts.

Sewitz and Lewis certainly understand that for most Americans chowing on bugs is way up on the "ewww" scale. But they say that crickets don't actually taste like much when they're ground to the consistency of flour. Since tastelessness generally is not a good quality for food either, they have flavored up their bars in three versions--peanut butter and jelly, cacao nut and cashew ginger spice.
Eat like an Aztec
To be clear, these protein snacks, called Exo bars, are not little bricks of flavored cricket flour. There are 40 crickets in each bar, but they make up only 6 percent of its mass. The bars also include raw almonds, dates, honey, coconut and cacao.

Gregory Ferenstein, after a tasting for TechCrunch, described the Exo as having "the taste and texture of a mildly sweet protein bar" adding "No, you can't taste the crickets." Silvia Killingsworth, writing in The New Yorker, likewise found "no discernable cricket element" when she chewed on one.

The truth is Sewitz and Lewis weren't the first to come up with the idea of putting crickets in protein bars. A little more than a year ago, Patrick Crowley, a Utah hydrologist who saw the environmental and nutritional benefits of using cricket flour in food, began selling Chapul bars -"chapul" is Aztec for crickets-in health food and sporting goods stores.

Crowley points out that his creation is not such a novel idea-the Aztecs, he says, made a dense protein bread out of cricket flour 500 years ago. His inspiration came from a TED talk a few years ago by Dutch scientist Marcel Dicke, who has become an evangelist for making insects a food staple in Europe and North America.
Happy meals?
Like the Exo team, Crowley knows that bug food is not exactly going to sell like, well, hot cakes, but he figured that cricket flour would be a smarter way to ease Americans into the idea of insect dining than say, fried beetles. He thinks cricket protein bars could be to bugs what California rolls were to sushi-a palatable starter meal.

That said, he is not shy about promoting the Chapul bar's essential ingredient. There's a cricket on the wrapper, along with the tag line, "The Original Cricket Bar."

Here's other news from the food front:

· After two hours, even celery looked hot: Exercise may actually make your brain feel better about healthy food -at least that's what a team of researchers at the University of Birmingham in the U.K. found. They say that after young men jogged for an hour on a treadmill, the reward centers of their brains were more active when they were shown photos of low-fat food than when they looked at pictures of fast food.

· The last thing I remember was a giant pizza: Cramming for exams is usually not a good idea; eating junk food while you're cramming may be even worse. According to a recent study at the University of New South Wales in Australia, eating a particularly unhealthy diet for even just a week may be enough to impair your memory. Scientists discovered that rats fed a diet of cakes, cookies and fat for a week suffered memory impairment, particularly when it came to retaining new information.

· Nothing like Monster Thickburgers by candlelight: Even in a fast food restaurant, encouraging people to eat more slowly can cause them to consume less food. As part of their research, two scientists got a Hardee's restaurant in Champaign, Illinois, to class up a separate room with indirect lighting, tablecloths and soft jazz. The result: Diners who ate in the "nice" room consumed 18 percent less food than those who had their meals in the regular part of the restaurant.

· That smoothie went right to my head: Nestle has entered into a partnership with a biotechnology company that will allow it to obtain human brain and liver cells and then study how nutrients in food affects them. The thinking is that Nestle will use what it learns from that research to create drinks, smoothies and other products that, according to the Wall Street Journal, it "can market as having medical benefits."

· Have it our way: A new study published in JAMA Pediatrics says that not only do most American students have frequent exposure to fast food through their school's meals, but that 30 percent of high school cafeterias serve food promoted with a company's brand at least once a week. And that's not all. Almost two-thirds of the elementary schools surveyed in the study provided fast food coupons to students.
More on Smithsonian.com Insect Farming Kit Lets You Raise Edible Bugs Why Cockroaches Meticulously Groom Their Antennae
Video bonus: Here's the TED talk by Marcel Dicke that helped launch the cricket protein bar business.

Video bonus bonus: Let's take a moment to celebrate crickets, in all their swarming glory, last fall in Oklahoma.

About Randy Rieland

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Are You Ready For Protein Bars Made From Crickets?

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smithsonianmag.com Nothing like chomping on crickets to give yourself a daily protein boost. Or so say Greg Sewitz and Gabi Lewis, two young entrepreneurs who next month plan to begin selling energy bars containing ground-up chirping insects.

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How Insect Poop Could Solve All Our Problems

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How Insect Poop Could Solve All Our Problems

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Bugs use their feces for weapons, navigation and gardening. Can we tap into this poop party?

smithsonianmag.com

Insect defecation may not seem like one of the pressing scientific inquiries of our time, but in fact the feces of these wee creatures serves an extraordinary variety of functions in bug and human life.

Unlike most animals, many insect species actually use their excrement. They utilize it as their home, for feeding, in predator-prey interactions, for hygiene, habitat location, shelter construction, for reproduction and physical or chemical defence against natural enemies. (Kids: don't try this at home.)

For members of our own species, insect feces may even have important and largely unlocked medicinal properties. Let's take a look.

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For some bugs, their excrement provides a home. Larvae of Chelymorpha alternans, commonly known as tortoise beetles, shroud themselves for protection with fecal coverings in the form of coatings, fecal cases or fecal shields.

For others, it's a deterrent to enemies. The pine weevil ( Hylobius abietis) actually deposit feces adjacent to each of its egg as anti-feedants.

Insect waste also plays an important role in species reproduction, as it may affect mate attraction, parental care and even paternity assurance. For example, virgin boring beetles, Hylotrupes bajulus, use fecal volatiles to meet their partners, increasing the opportunity to mate.

Cockroaches, bugs notorious for their chutzpah and for thriving in dirty environments, use the personal scent of their feces to locate and return to resting sites.

This is actually useful news for citydwellers trying to keep their houses cockroach free: track down roach droppings (little black or brown specs that look like a pepper flake), and you'll find out where the roaches are congregating.

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Just as farmers use cow manure as fertilizer, ants spread their feces around to cultivate a garden of fungi for munching on. Fungi evidently thrive on the chewed-up leaves that ants defecate. It's the circle of life in action.

Insects aren't the only ones who use bug excrement - we humans do, too. The feces of silkworm ( Bombyx mori) have pharmacological properties that give it analgesic, anti-pyretic and anti-inflammatory applications in herbal medicine.

Termites, Coptotermes formosanus, employ feces to build secure homes by mixing poop into the wall of the nest. These wood-eaters harbour a diverse gut microbiome that assists in digestion of cellulose in their diet, and a 2013 study showed that this bacterial community provides the termites with a natural antimicrobial that averts pathogens.

A prior study, from 2000, had previously showed that the bacteria isolated from the termites, Neotermes castaneus and Kalotermes flavicollis, produces centrin, a protein linked to cell division. This protein can aid researchers in understanding its role in the runaway cell division that occurs in cancers, leading some scientists to believe the centrin could be a target for anticancer drugs.

A number of studies have also observed that the black garden ant, Lasius niger, creates unique defecation zone within their nests. The ants keep most waste - such as dead members of the colony, debris from nest material and food scraps outside - but defecate inside, usually in the corner of their chamber.

You may prefer a bathroom with a flush toilet, but some insects can thrive in noisome environments where the pathogen load in the surrounding is relatively high. No pathogens can harm them. Indeed, the indigenous microorganisms associated with insect faeces may actually defend some species against potential new pathogens.

A recent study shows that the larval feces of the Mediterranean flour moth, Ephestia kuehniella, for example, exhibits antimicrobial activity against a broad spectrum of bacteria.

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This has potentially interesting consequences for medicine. The lack of new antibiotics and multi-drug resistant infections are making doctors and patients anxious, and there's some fear of an antibiotic apocalypse. The anti-pathogenic properties of insect faeces may prove useful to discover new antimicrobials and probiotics.

But don't start adding bug-poo powder to your morning smoothie just yet. Compounds found in the feces of some bugs - including roaches like Periplaneta americana and silverfishes like Lepisma saccharina - can produce allergic reactions in some people, and even cause asthma.

Given that bug feces can serve as everything from a bug babysitter to a human allergen, the realm of bacterial community of insect is an important area of study by entomologists, evolutionary and molecular biologists. Their research may even lead to innovations in antimicrobial properties that can succor in the imminent fearsome post-antibiotic era.

Reports say antimicrobial resistance will kill 300 million people and cost the global economy of $100 trillion by 2050. Perhaps a little defecation could help?
Prayan Pokharel, Doctoral Student in Institute for Insect Biotechnology, University of Giessen

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

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How Insect Poop Could Solve All Our Problems

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smithsonianmag.com Insect defecation may not seem like one of the pressing scientific inquiries of our time, but in fact the feces of these wee creatures serves an extraordinary variety of functions in bug and human life. Unlike most animals, many insect species actually use their excrement.

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A Colorado company is working to genetically engineer petunias that change colors throughout the day

smithsonianmag.com

In 1887, a 21-year-old Rudyard Kipling wrote a poem called "Blue Roses." The four stanzas describe a woman, presumably a past love of the poet's, who demanded blue roses, as opposed to the conventional red or white. Kipling says:

"Half the world I wandered through,

Seeking where such flowers grew.

Half the world unto my quest

Answered me with laugh and jest."

But the plant biotechnology community today isn't laughing. While blue roses do not occur naturally, the Japanese company, Suntory, and its Australian subsidiary, Florigene, released a genetically modified blue rose six years ago. The researchers inserted a gene from a pansy that is responsible for producing a blue pigment called Delphinidin into a white Old Garden 'Cardinal de Richelieu' rose.

Nikolai Braun and Keira Havens, the two entrepreneurial scientists behind the Fort Collins, Colorado-based company Revolution Bioengineering, are now in pursuit of a new flower-one that changes color, from pink to blue and back again. While it does not exist yet, they are calling the bloom "Petunia Circadia," because they intend to link the expression of pigment molecules called anthocyanins to the plant's circadian rhythm. This way, the flower will change color every 12 hours.

So far, the duo has successfully engineered a petunia that changes color on demand. Instead of transforming on its own, this early version is activated by ethanol. "The petunia typically produces white blooms, but if you water it with the ethanol solution, the existing flowers will go from white to red and new flowers will bloom a purplish red," says Braun, who received his doctorate in plant biophysics at University of California, Davis in 2007. (Watch the video, above.)

The color change happens over the course of 24 hours. "The flowers are typically all white because the enzymatic pathway to produce anthocyanins is broken at an early step," explains Braun. By tinkering with the plant's genetic makeup, he has wired it to repair this pathway in the presence of ethanol. "When elements in the cell come in contact with ethanol, they will cause the missing enzyme in the anthocyanin pathway to be produced, and the flower will turn that purple color," he adds. Sprinkle the flowers with water, and they will become white again.

The flowers are meant to be a cool, harmless addition to your garden, but environmental groups and others could have their concerns about releasing such synthetic organisms into the wild, as was seen when a San Francisco team raised funds to grow glow-in-the-dark plants on Kickstarter in 2013. This previous foray into synthetic biology ignited a debate about how to regulate the spread of genetically engineered plants, when the researchers promised to distribute seeds to thousands of the project's backers. Ultimately, Kickstarter amended its rules, allowing genetic projects, but not the gifting of genetically modified organisms that come from them to donors.

Braun and Havens have their own message in mind. "For almost everyone outside of the farming world, it will be the first time they will have interacted with a genetically modified organism, and by engineering traits for consumers-flower colors, shapes, smells-we hope to normalize that technology to eventually fully realize the promise of plant biotech to provide food, fuels, and fibers in a sustainable way," says Braun. The two imagine that in the future they might be able to create flowers of different colors on a single plant, flowers with polka dots and novel scents.

"It can be hard to connect to the reality of people struggling in far-away places," plant geneticist Pam Ronald told UC Davis Today. "So when you tell people that genetic engineering can be used to fight hunger by increasing vitamin content and reducing crop loss to insects, sometimes it just doesn't register. Maybe seeing this technology at work in your own backyard can make the science more accessible."

As a way to introduce their color-changing flowers to the world, Revolution Bioengineering is teaming up with Helen Storey, a fashion professor at the University College of the Arts, London, to create "A Living Dress," incorporating their petunias, to be on display in London in the summer of 2016.

About Megan Gambino

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Would You Like to Grow Color-Changing Flowers?

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smithsonianmag.com In 1887, a 21-year-old Rudyard Kipling wrote a poem called "Blue Roses." The four stanzas describe a woman, presumably a past love of the poet's, who demanded blue roses, as opposed to the conventional red or white. Kipling says: "Half the world I wandered through, Seeking where such flowers grew.

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Five Things to Know About the Genetically Engineered Salmon Approved by the FDA

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Five Things to Know About the Genetically Engineered Salmon Approved by the FDA

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Sustainable seafood or "Frankenfish"?

smithsonianmag.com

This Isn't Just Any Salmon
Is AquAdvantage a super salmon or a "Frankenfish"? For years, controversy has swirled around a new, fast-growing fish, which has been engineered with chromosomes from an Atlantic salmon, a growth hormone from Chinook salmon, and a gene from the eel-like ocean pout.

Today, questions about whether the fish will ever make it to American plates were answered when the FDA announced that it has approved the fish for consumption and sale in the United States. Here's what you should know about the fish:
There Is a Lot in a Name-and a Label
What's the big deal about the salmon? The key word here is "big"-this fish grows more quickly and to a larger size than conventional salmon. Proponents claim that since the salmon can be raised indoors, it will have a smaller environmental footprint and save carbon due to lower transportation costs.

For now, writes Bloomberg's Benjamin Borrell, the salmon is being grown in Panama, and eggs are produced in Canada. But AquaBound, which produces the salmon, says in a release that the fish could help establish "a continuous supply of fresh, safe, traceable and sustainable" fish to communities in the United States using local production.

The FDA calls the salmon "genetically engineered," while its producer prefers calling it "genetically enhanced." However, the salmon is being portrayed in many news outlets as a genetically modified organism, or GMO.

There's a difference, says Ryan Haas of Oregon Public Broadcasting: The terms are not interchangeable. Haas writes that GMO is too broad of a category for such foods, since even Mother Nature can genetically modify an organism. The FDA claims that the term "genetically engineered" is more precise since it refers to "genetic modification practices that utilize modern biotechnology."
The Salmon Is the United States' First Genetically Engineered Animal Approved by the FDA-but There May Be More to Come
It's likely that the words "genetically engineered" will be used on labels for the fish-that is, if they are labeled at all.
It Took 20 Years to Gain FDA Approval for the Salmon
The Washington Post's Tamar Haspel reports that the FDA will not require labeling. This position is consistent with their stance on other genetically engineered foods, such as corn and soybeans. However, in its release about the fish, the FDA also states that it is seeking comment on voluntary labeling guidelines for food from genetically engineered sources.

This approval is the first of its kind in the United States, but other genetically modified animals may follow. The FDA is currently reviewing genetically engineered mosquitoes produced by Oxitec. Millions of the mosquitoes, which were designed to combat illnesses such as dengue and chikungunya, are already in the Cayman Islands, Panama, Malaysia and Brazil. A proposed field trial in Key Haven, Florida is the subject of intense debate.
The Food's Safety Isn't Being Widely Contested-but Its Environmental Impact Is
Haspel writes that the approval process for the salmon was long and arduous, and that it indicates "many political and scientific obstacles" that went into its approval. In a release about the approval, the FDA characterizes the process as an "exhaustive and rigorous scientific review" that included evaluating both existing studies and data from AquaBounty Technologies, the company that developed the fish.

After clearing so many regulatory hurdles, AquaBounty must still wait before their salmon hits store shelves. The New York Times' Andrew Pollack writes that it could take years to raise enough fish to bring the salmon to market.

"The food is safe to eat," said the director of the FDA's Center for Veterinary Medicine in the agency's release. As SmartNews reported in 2012, public health experts seem to agree. But the jury's out when it comes to the impact that the new Frankenfish may have on the environment.

The salmon is currently at the center of a court battle related to its egg production facility in Canada. VICE's Wyatt Marshall reports that the lawsuit has been brought by environmental groups who worry that if the salmon escape the Prince Edward Island facility, they could become an invasive species and breed with other species. Similar concerns have also been expressed about the Panama facility.

Yet AquaBounty maintains that safeguards like contained facilities and the fact that the consumable fish are all sterile females will prevent these environmental impacts. And the FDA agrees: It calls both worst-case scenarios "unlikely."

With today's news, the public will doubtless continue to express its concerns about the salmon. But perhaps the biggest doubt of all is whether it will be widely available: Retailers like Whole Foods and Trader Joes have already announced that they won't be carrying the fish.

About Erin Blakemore

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Five Things to Know About the Genetically Engineered Salmon Approved by the FDA

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smithsonianmag.com This Isn't Just Any Salmon Is AquAdvantage a super salmon or a "Frankenfish"? For years, controversy has swirled around a new, fast-growing fish, which has been engineered with chromosomes from an Atlantic salmon, a growth hormone from Chinook salmon, and a gene from the eel-like ocean pout.

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To Fight Deadly Dengue Fever in Humans, Create Dengue-Resistant Mosquitoes

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To Fight Deadly Dengue Fever in Humans, Create Dengue-Resistant Mosquitoes

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How manipulating the immune systems of mosquitoes can halt the spread of dengue virus

smithsonianmag.com

There's a reason this tropical disease is known as "breakbone fever": To its victims, that's how it feels. Dengue fever can cause such severe muscle and joint pain that it can be excruciating for an infected person to even move. It can also cause burning fever, delirium, internal bleeding and even death as the body attempts to fight off the disease. There is no effective treatment, and won't be anytime soon.

Nevertheless, new research identifies a hope for stemming the epidemic-and it lies in genetic engineering.

Dengue virus, which is passed on by the same Aedes Aegypti mosquito that spreads Zika, has been plaguing humans since at least the late 1700s. But in the past few decades, skyrocketing human population and increased urbanization-particularly in warm, moist regions like South America, Southeast Asia and West Africa-have fueled a growing number of cases. Like the Zika virus, dengue has no symptoms for the majority of those who contract it (roughly three-quarters). But nearly 100 million people annually do develop at least some of its dangerous and excruciating symptoms-and roughly 20,000 of those die each year.

Even if you do survive dengue fever, you aren't out of the woods yet. In fact, overcoming the disease once actually makes you more likely to die if you contract a different strain later. That's because the various types of the virus appear so similar on the surface, that the immune system will often respond using the same antibodies it developed to fight the last bout. But these are ineffective against the new strain. Moreover, the immune system's efforts to fight the virus can attack the body instead -causing hemorrhaging, seizures and even death.

So far, preventing the spread of dengue has mostly taken the form of old-fashioned mosquito warfare: nets, insecticide and draining still water, where mosquitoes like to breed. In 2015, researchers finally developed a partially effective dengue virus vaccine, which was green-lighted in three countries. But the vaccine only reduced chances of getting the virus by 60 percent in clinical trials, and because of the risk of developing antibodies, some experts think it may only be safe for people who have already survived an infection.

Today the vaccine is only being used in limited quantities in the Philippines. "There is really an urgent need for developing new methods for control," says George Dimopoulos, a John Hopkins University entomologist who studies mosquito-borne diseases like malaria and dengue.

Instead of focusing on how people get infected with dengue, Dimopoulos has turned his efforts to how mosquitoes themselves contract the virus. Usually, the virus makes its home in a mosquito after the insect bites an infected human; it rarely passes between mosquitoes. So theoretically, by figuring out how to block that infection from ever occurring, you could effectively eliminate dengue virus, Dimopoulos says.

In a study published today in the journal PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases, lead author Dimopoulos explained how that would work. Using genetic engineering, he and his team manipulated two genes that help control the immune system of the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which most commonly spreads dengue. The manipulated genes caused the mosquitoes' immune systems to become more active when the bugs fed on blood, which is when they contract dengue virus. This stimulation made the mosquitos significantly more resistant to the different types of dengue virus.

"This impressive body of work is an important step forward in understanding mosquito-[dengue virus] immunology," says University of Melbourne dengue researcher Lauren Carrington, who was not involved in the study.

However, Dimopoulos says this breakthrough is just the first step. While the mosquitoes in his study became roughly 85 percent more resistant to some types of dengue virus, other types were much less affected by the genetic engineering. Furthermore, the manipulation didn't seem to create any significant resistance to the related Zika and Chikungunya viruses that Aedes aegypti also spread.

Dimopoulos hopes to fine-tune the method to make it more effective. While genetic engineering comes laden with controversy, he points out that his technique doesn't introduce any foreign genes into the mosquitoes; it simply manipulates the ones they already have. Eventually, he hopes to create mosquitoes that will be resistant to multiple tropical diseases. He also wants to take advantage of " gene drive" technology, which enhances the chances of a certain gene to be passed to offspring, to allow the genetically modified mosquitoes to quickly become dominant in any environment they're released into.

This isn't the first time researchers have played with mosquitoes' genes in an attempt to halt the spread of disease. The British biotechnology company Oxitec has worked to modify the genome of the Aedes aegypti mosquitoes to make males that produce dead offspring after mating. Brazil has already partnered with the company to release billions of these mosquitoes into the country, in hopes of suppressing the population of disease-spreading mosquitoes. The company has also worked to get approval to release its mosquitoes in other places, including India, the Cayman Islands and the Florida Keys, where Zika fears drove voters to approve a trial in a ballot measure last year.

Oxitec's methods are effective in the short term, Dimopoulos says. But eliminating the mosquito population from an area will not make it mosquito-free permanently, because mosquitoes from other areas will eventually fill the empty niche left behind. Authorities will be forced to regularly release more genetically modified mosquitoes to keep their population numbers suppressed, Dimopoulos notes-a costly method that would appeal to biotech companies like Oxitec.

Replacing the wild mosquitoes with live but resistant mosquitoes, however, will act as a lasting barrier to spreading tropical diseases, Dimopoulos says. Before we get there, though, he says he wants to work on upping the resistance of the mosquitoes to dengue, as well as making them resistant to other types of tropical diseases. Then, he'll need to do trials in greenhouses and on islands to see if the resistance works outside the lab.

He doesn't expect any widespread releases of mosquitoes for another decade, but points out that 10 years is a small wait overall. "It's not going to happen quickly," Dimopoulos says, "but we have to remember that these diseases have been with us for a very long time."

There's no humane way to test in the lab whether or not humans will contract dengue less often from these mosquitoes, Dimopoulos says. As a result, we'll only know for sure how effective the gene manipulation is once the mosquitoes have been released. But even if they don't work as well outside the lab, Dimopoulos has no regrets about blazing new trails to combat tropical illnesses.

"The fight against these diseases is like a war," Dimopoulos says. "You can't win it with one weapon."

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To Fight Deadly Dengue Fever in Humans, Create Dengue-Resistant Mosquitoes

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smithsonianmag.com There's a reason this tropical disease is known as "breakbone fever": To its victims, that's how it feels. Dengue fever can cause such severe muscle and joint pain that it can be excruciating for an infected person to even move.

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Is Mycelium Fungus the Plastic of the Future?

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Is Mycelium Fungus the Plastic of the Future?

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Plastics have always been a problem for the environment. But what if we turned fungi into plastics?

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Is Mycelium Fungus the Plastic of the Future?

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This Biofabric From MIT Uses Bacteria to Automatically Ventilate Workout Clothes

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This Biofabric From MIT Uses Bacteria to Automatically Ventilate Workout Clothes

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Would you wear microbes on your back?

smithsonianmag.com

Most of the things we encounter in daily life are extremely static, or at least unresponsive, compared to the way living things work. That's true for clothes: You put them on, they stay on, and if you want them to change you unzip zippers or undo buttons.

But a new class of workout clothing leverages living bacteria, which expand when exposed to moisture and contract when dehydrated. Developed by a multidisciplinary team at MIT in collaboration with athletic-wear company New Balance, the clothes have vents that open automatically as the wearer starts to sweat.

The clothes, and the technology used to produce them, are described in a paper published in Science Advances, which also discusses several other new techniques that could expand potential uses for the technology, by introducing new microbes or genetically altering them.

Wen Wang, an MIT bioengineer, headed up the biotechnology and materials science for the study. (Other collaborators included designers and architects, engineers, and industry experts from New Balance.) Wang and her team explored a number of different applications before focusing on clothing. ( Another paper by the team described similar technology used to fold flat pasta-like food into three-dimensional shapes when it is dunked in hot broth, like a self-assembling IKEA flat-pack meal.)

With textiles, Wang and her team found the optimal construction was a layer of latex sandwiched by two thin layers of bacterial cells, each 1 to 5 microns thick, around the diameter of a red blood cell and 1/15 th the width of a human hair. These were formed into flaps, and attached to the back of a workout garment. When the wearer sweats, the cells on the outside remain the same, but the cells on the side facing the body absorb moisture and expand, forcing the flaps open.

The MIT Media Lab's bioLogic group, which Wang and her collaborators are part of, has been building this sort of clothing for a couple of years. But Wang felt there was room for improvement; initially, they used a bacteria called Bacillus subtilis natto, better known as the main component of the gooey, stringy, pungent Japanese food called nattō. Ozgur Sahin, an associate professor of biological sciences and physics at Columbia University, has been using B. subtilis natto in his (unrelated) research into bacteria-using materials because of its tough, strong spores. Wang adopted it because she saw it worked, and because it's safe enough to be used in food. But still, she thinks potential users might be turned off by having bacteria in their clothing.

"Some people might be afraid that the bacteria may contaminate my home, or my kids," says Wang, though she emphasizes the microbe's safety. "Our skin is not a vacuum. If you have no bacteria on it, it will have some bad bacteria on it. So in the future, we also want to combine microbiome technology with our current design to make a microbiome-carrying garment."

The paper also describes using other microbes, including yeast and smaller cellular components like proteins, to perform similar functions that might not carry the stigma of bacteria. All of the microbes, points out Wang, are in a vegetative state where they are not growing or dividing, and thus require no food or sustenance.

Finally, the team introduced fluorescence into the bacteria to prove that they could genetically modify it, to expand potential future applications, including microbes that emit a pleasant smell. "It would be easy to incorporate other genetically engineered microbes into this garment as well," says Wang.

Don't expect to see these garments in the New Balance store soon. Although the team has applied for a patent for the technology, they have yet to demonstrate its durability through wash cycles.

"Longer term studies could be necessary to find out what might go wrong. I don't see that being a fundamental challenge, but once you identify them you can spend time addressing it," says Sahin, who was not involved in the study. "If this is a wearable material, then it should resist friction, for example, with the skin. It should resist washing, maybe the chemicals that are used in washing detergents, for example. Sweat itself might have effects beyond opening and closing the vents.

"This kind of thinking, that cloth can actually be dynamic and responsive, and that response is better for its functions, is generally an exciting aspect of the work, and it can potentially be applied in many other areas."

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This Biofabric From MIT Uses Bacteria to Automatically Ventilate Workout Clothes

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smithsonianmag.com Most of the things we encounter in daily life are extremely static, or at least unresponsive, compared to the way living things work. That's true for clothes: You put them on, they stay on, and if you want them to change you unzip zippers or undo buttons.

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Gene-Edited Tomatoes Grow in Bunches Like Grapes

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Gene-Edited Tomatoes Grow in Bunches Like Grapes

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Growing food in urban environments could have important implications for sustainability-if we can produce crops that thrive in tight spaces

smithsonianmag.com

Tomatoes are a versatile veggie (or fruit, botanically speaking), and scientists have long been tinkering to improve their nutritional value and flavor. Now, a team of researchers has created a crop of cherry tomatoes that was gene edited to grow in a grape-like bunch, tailor-made for confined urban environments.

As Jennifer Leman writes in Popular Mechanics, tomatoes are not a particularly easy crop to cultivate-not least because they take up a fair amount of space with their long vines. Today, arable land is at a premium. Due to climate change, a quarter of the land that humans occupy is degraded, and more than 500 million people live in areas affected by soil erosion. One way to alleviate this problem, according to the authors of a new study in Nature Biotechnology, is to "grow more food in urban environments." But to date, the benefits of urban agriculture have been limited by the small number of crops that can thrive in restricted conditions.

Hoping to produce a more compact tomato plant, the researchers tweaked three genes that influence the growth patterns of cherry tomatoes. The first two, known as the SELF PRUNING and SP5G genes, caused the tomato plant to stop growing sooner and produce flowers and fruits earlier. But altering these two genes alone reduced the tomatoes' yield and sacrificed their flavor.

"When you're playing with plant maturation, you're playing with the whole system," explains study co-author Zach Lippman, a plant biologist at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York State, "and that system includes the sugars, where they're made-which is the leaves-and how they're distributed, which is to the fruits."

A breakthrough came when Lippman and his colleagues identified a third gene, SIER, which controls the lengths of plant stems. According to Kat Eschner of Popular Science, the team used the CRISPR gene-editing tool to "turn off" all three genes-which in turn led to short stems and a compact bouquet of cherry tomatoes.

"They have a great small shape and size, [and] they taste good," Lippman says, though he notes that the tomatoes' flavor appeal "all depends on personal preference."

The tomatoes weren't just tightly bunched; they also matured quickly, producing ready-to-harvest fruit in less than 40 days. This fruitfulness is another boon for urban farming, which can operate year-round in climate-controlled conditions. "More harvests per year results in more food, even if the space used is very small," as the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory points out.

Urban farms, though not without their drawbacks, have been touted for their environmental benefits, like reducing transportation distances-and the associated fossil fuel consumption-and stormwater runoff. One recent analysis found that urban agriculture has the potential to yield 10 percent of the global output of legumes, vegetables, roots and tubers if it is fully implemented in cities around the world.

Lippman tells Eschner that tomatoes seemed like a good place to start for his team's experimentation because the plants are often grown in warm climates and shipped to the United States. Reducing their transportation distance could have an important environmental impact. Tomatoes also pair well, taste-wise, with leafy greens, which are the only plants currently being cultivated in vertical farms -crops that are grown on stacked shelves to maximize available space.

Urban farms aren't the only institutions that stand to benefit from the new research. Figuring out how to successfully grow crops in tight areas is important for future missions to Mars, where astronauts will likely have to cultivate their own food during lengthy stays on the red planet .

"I can tell you that NASA scientists have expressed some interest in our new tomatoes," Lippman says.

The researchers' genetic-tweaking focused on tomatoes, but they say that similar strategies could be used on other plants. Perhaps, in the future, we'll be munching on kiwis and cucumbers that grow in little bunches, too.

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Gene-Edited Tomatoes Grow in Bunches Like Grapes, Making Them Ideal for Urban Farming

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smithsonianmag.com Tomatoes are a versatile veggie (or fruit, botanically speaking), and scientists have long been tinkering to improve their nutritional value and flavor. Now, a team of researchers has created a crop of cherry tomatoes that was gene edited to grow in a grape-like bunch, tailor-made for confined urban environments.

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Purple Rain: Tomatoes Get New Color Scheme

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Purple Rain: Tomatoes Get New Color Scheme

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Ah, the last of the summer tomatoes. Plump, sun-warm, and soft. Sometimes I like to just eat them over the sink and let the rich purple juice run down my chin.

What's that? You were expecting rich red juice? But purple could be so much healthier, according to this week's Nature Biotechnology online. Scientists from England's John Innes Centre succeeded in transferring two genes from snapdragons into tomatoes, boosting the fruits' ability to produce pigments called anthocyanins. The resulting deeply purple fruit promoted longer lives when fed to laboratory mice.

This is one of those technological feats that makes you think "wow," "ew," and "the end of the world is nigh" all at once. I mean, I know this is done routinely nowadays, but just the thought that we know that somewhere inside a snapdragon is a gene that can persuade a tomato to change color is kind of amazing. Let alone that we can essentially cut and paste it into another plant without so much as a hiccup.

And it's all because you haven't been eating your vegetables. Fruits and veggies are high in a class of pigments called flavonoids that would be so good for you - if only you would eat them. But since only about 23 percent of Americans do eat enough veggies, Innes Centre scientists set out to invent a tomato with sky-high flavonoid levels. The idea being that instead of changing your eating habits, you can get healthy by squeezing ketchup over fries, eating pizza, and drinking bloody marys. Kind of neat thinking, really.

Enter the snapdragon: not popular on menus, but great at producing flavonoids. In particular, purple varieties called anthocyanins - the same stuff that makes blueberries blue and companies like Jamba Juice so eager to tell you about their smoothies. The list of health benefits the researchers provide includes

protection against certain cancers, cardiovascular disease and age-related degenerative diseases. There is evidence that anthocyanins also have anti-inflammatory activity, promote visual acuity, and hinder obesity and diabetes.

Sounds good, but I'm still not convinced purple tomatoes are the best way to get my anthocyanins. I'm not a raving opponent of transgenic crops (though I disagree with patenting them). I just think I'd rather have blueberries on my cereal than eat purple spaghetti. Heck, I'd probably rather have blueberry spaghetti.
(Image: John Innes Centre)
Fad dieters take note: The Innes Centre website takes care to point out in bold type that seeds are not available for sale.

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Purple Rain: Tomatoes Get New Color Scheme

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Ah, the last of the summer tomatoes. Plump, sun-warm, and soft. Sometimes I like to just eat them over the sink and let the rich purple juice run down my chin. What's that? You were expecting rich red juice? But purple could be so much healthier, according to this week's Nature Biotechnology online.

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The scientific breakthrough is more than a creepy experiment-one day, it could save lives

smithsonianmag.com

The word "printer" evokes images of office supplies, paper jams and reams of paper. But add "3D" and the image changes: a device that's inspired everything from tools for use in space to bacteria-fighting replacement teeth. But what if 3D-printed devices could come to actual life? That's no longer just speculation with reports that an attempt to 3D print human tissue into lifelike body parts has succeeded.

Last year, Smithsonian.com reported on the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine 's ambitious bid to 3D print everything from skin to organs. At the time, the team's attempt to print lifelike body parts was still in its early stages. Though their dreams of printing things like kidneys have yet to be realized, the team has taken an impressive first step, creating a unique printer that can fabricate human tissue and mold it into any shape.

A new paper published in the journal Nature Biotechnology describes the printer, which the team calls an integrated tissue-organ printer, or ITOP for short. The printer solves two big problems for scientists who have been frustrated by past attempts to print with living tissue. Not only does it print structures that are strong and large enough to be implanted, but it also helps cells live long enough to be integrated into a body.

The secret of the printer's success is hydrogel, which is made of water, gelatin and other substances that support cell growth. The printer lays down that substance along with biodegradable structural materials that eventually dissolve once the tissue is strong enough to support itself. When fully printed tissues were implanted into animals, they matured and even developed their own blood vessels.

In a release, researchers note that once they figured out how to make sure cells live while they're being printed, they ensured the cells' viability by building "a lattice of micro-channels" in the structures. These tiny chambers enable the printed cells to get essential nutrients and oxygen and stay alive long enough for blood vessels to develop.

The 3D-printed tissue does have a rather creepy look-especially when it's in a Petri dish filled with a pink substance. However, the advance could one day allow patients with diseases or missing body parts to become whole again with tissue generated from their own bodies. Perhaps one day, tissue-printing 3D devices will be a common sight in hospitals and doctors' offices. For now, though, the Wake Forest prototype signals a medical miracle in the making.

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About Erin Blakemore

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smithsonianmag.com The word "printer" evokes images of office supplies, paper jams and reams of paper. But add "3D" and the image changes: a device that's inspired everything from tools for use in space to bacteria-fighting replacement teeth. But what if 3D-printed devices could come to actual life?

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Celiac Sufferers May Soon Have Better Bread Options 

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Celiac Sufferers May Soon Have Better Bread Options 

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Researchers successfully removed 90 percent of the genes that code for the gluten proteins that trigger adverse symptoms

smithsonianmag.com

You can find plenty of tasty gluten-free products on supermarket shelves, but when it comes to bread, there's no substitute for the real thing. Gluten, the naturally occurring proteins found in wheat, rye and barley, affect the elasticity of dough and help give bread the chewy, delicious texture that is hard to find in gluten-free alternatives.

Fortunately for people with celiac disease, who experience severe immune reactions to gluten, a better bread option may be on the horizon. As Michael Le Page reports for New Scientist, researchers have genetically engineered a strain of wheat that is free of 90 percent of the types of gluten protein that triggers most adverse symptoms.

Not all types of gluten proteins cause problems for people with celiac. Most symptoms-which can include abdominal pain, vomiting, fatigue, malnutrition and joint pain-are triggered by a gluten protein called gliadin. So scientists at the Institute for Sustainable Agriculture in Cordoba, Spain set out to extract the genes that code for gliadin proteins from wheat using the CRISPR-Cas9 gene modification technology-a powerful tool that works like a pair of " molecular scissors," snipping away at DNA sequences.

But getting rid of of the genes has been a hefty task. There are 45 copies of the gene for the main gliadin protein that causes symptoms in people with celiac disease; as Kristen V. Brown reports for the team has been able to remove 35 of them thus far.

More gliadin genes will need to be removed before the modified wheat is ready for testing. But according to the study, published in the journal Plant Biotechnology, the findings show "gluten immunoreactivity can be significantly reduced" using CRISPR.

The proof of the experiment's success is in the (bread) pudding. Jan Chojecki of the UK company PBL-Ventures, which is working to market products made with the new strain of wheat, told Le Page that while the modified wheat can't be used to make big, sliced loaves of goodness, it does produce decent baguettes and rolls.

"It's regarded as being pretty good, certainly better than anything on the gluten-free shelves," Chojecki said.

Celiac disease affects as many as 1 in 100 people worldwide, and medical researchers are not entirely sure what causes it. Those who suffer from the condition usually have to cut gluten out of their diet entirely. If the CRISPR-modified wheat proves successful in trials, adhering to a strict gluten-free diet may eventually be a little bit easier.

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Celiac Sufferers May Soon Have Better Bread Options Thanks to Genetically Modified Wheat

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smithsonianmag.com You can find plenty of tasty gluten-free products on supermarket shelves, but when it comes to bread, there's no substitute for the real thing. Gluten, the naturally occurring proteins found in wheat, rye and barley, affect the elasticity of dough and help give bread the chewy, delicious texture that is hard to find in gluten-free alternatives.

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Need a New Organ? Surgeon Sees a Future Where You Can Simply Print It Out

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Need a New Organ? Surgeon Sees a Future Where You Can Simply Print It Out

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When you can order a new body part online, you'll have this doctor to thank

Smithsonian Magazine |

In a harshly lit laboratory in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, there sits a machine that is, in many ways, similar to a standard-issue desktop printer. It has ink reservoirs and nozzles, an internal fan to keep it cool, and a set of input jacks that can be used to connect it to a nearby computer. It is subject to the occasional jam. And yet the 800-pound steel and plastic device is unlike anything you've ever encountered, because what it prints is alive- millions and millions of living human cells, contained in a viscous gel and woven through delicate biodegradable supports in a quivering simulacrum of human tissue.

It took a decade for numerous scientists and engineers to build and refine the Integrated Tissue and Organ Printing System, or ITOP. Ultimately, though, it's the brainchild of a single man: a tousle-haired 59-year-old doctor named Anthony Atala. Born in Peru, and raised outside of Miami, Atala-today the director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine-has spent the past decade attempting to print living organs.

"For me, it all started back in Boston, in the early 1990s," recalls the urologic surgeon and biotechnologist. "Because that's when I really came face to face with the transplant organ shortage." At the time, Atala was working his first post-medical school gig, as a research fellow at Harvard Medical School. Every week, during his rounds at Boston Children's Hospital, he met another young patient who had spent months or even years waiting for a replacement organ. Some died before a replacement kidney or liver could be found. Others had severe immunological responses to the transplanted organs. Atala believed that the solution was clear, if far-fetched: lab-grown organs cultivated out of a patient's own cells and surgically implanted into the body.

"It sounded very science-fictiony at the time," Atala recalled, "but I was certain that it was the future." In 1999, in a landmark experiment, Atala and a team of researchers at the Laboratory for Tissue Engineering and Cellular Therapeutics at Children's Hospital built replacement bladders for seven children with a severe form of spina bifida, a debilitating disease that can affect the urinary tract and bowels. To construct the organs, the researchers first hand-built scaffolding, or foundations, of collagen and synthetic polymer. They took tissue samples from the patients and cultured the cells from that tissue in liquid. Then they coated the foundations with the cells of the relevant patient-muscle cells on the outside and bladder cells on the inside-and allowed the cells to "cook," or grow, on the scaffolding.

Seven years after the first of the custom-made bladders were implanted into patients, Atala and Alan Retik, a urologist at Children's Hospital, announced that all seven patients were in good health. It was the first time lab-cultivated organs had been successfully used as replacements for their ailing biological counterparts. One newspaper hailed the results as "a Holy Grail of medicine."

Atala was pleased. But he knew that building organs by hand involved too much time and effort to meet demand. What was really needed was a bit of Henry Ford-style automation. In 2004, Atala agreed to spearhead such an initiative at Wake Forest, which is not far from North Carolina's Research Triangle, a biotech hub and home base for a handful of 3-D-printing companies.

When you can order a new body part online, youll have this doctor to thank.

Originally developed for manufacturing, 3-D printers had by the mid-2000s moved far beyond plastics. Think of a material, and chances are, someone was printing it: nylon, stainless steel, chocolate. "I saw an alignment between the institution and the state to really focus on biotechnology," Atala says. "I knew that if we were going to push these technologies to patients, we needed that infrastructure and support in place."

Over the years, Atala and his staff have been able to develop printers capable of printing customized scaffolding of human organs, which could be manually coated with human or animal cells. Then they constructed a printer that could print skin cells directly onto a patient, albeit in extremely small amounts. But printing of tissue turned out to be a big challenge, partly because the expanding tissue also requires a steady flow of blood and nutrients. They could print the cells for an organ, or they could print blood vessels and other supporting tissue, but they couldn't manage to print both at the same time in such a way that the organ would survive.

Then came the ITOP, with its essential breakthrough technologies. Unique reservoirs keep human and animal cells alive for longer than earlier printer models; and extremely precise needles, or jets, print a latticework of "microchannels," measuring 200 microns each, into the biomaterial. These vessels allow nutrients to flow through the tissue. In a paper published earlier this year in Nature Biotechnology, Atala and five Wake Forest researchers revealed that cartilage, bone and muscle tissue printed on the ITOP had been successfully implanted in rodents and that, two months later, the tissue had developed a system of blood vessels and nerves. Tests on human patients will likely follow in the next year or so, pending government approval.

It does not take a committed futurist to grasp the implications. If and when a machine such as the ITOP does go into commercial production, it might one day be possible to "order" a piece of replacement skin. As the machines improve, they might evolve from printing skin to printing extremely complex organs such as kidneys. Hospitals worldwide would be equipped with the descendants of the ITOP. Organ shortages would be a thing of the past.

That's the dream that brought Atala to biotechnology, and it continues to keep him going. But Atala counsels patience: Tests of bioprinted material on humans could take years. In the meantime, he has maintained his urology practice, and still sees numerous patients a week, in addition to stints in the operating theater. "That's important to me," he says, "because it's a reminder of who you're serving-who you're doing this for. The aim of this technology is to make patients' lives better. Full stop."

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Need a New Organ? Surgeon Anthony Atala Sees a Future Where You Can Simply Print It Out

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Smithsonian Magazine | In a harshly lit laboratory in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, there sits a machine that is, in many ways, similar to a standard-issue desktop printer. It has ink reservoirs and nozzles, an internal fan to keep it cool, and a set of input jacks that can be used to connect it to a nearby computer.

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As a media producer, one of the great things about my career is I'm always learning. That is definitely the case with this "Growing Skin" story. Wound healing and tissue regeneration is not something I've thought a lot about before. Research occurring in this field is high-tech and to me, at least, approaches a science fiction feeling.

When we interviewed Dr. Mark Carlson about the research he's conducting to develop a liquid bandage, he had some interesting things to say about tissue regeneration. As we all know, humans and other mammals don't 're-grow' skin or other parts of the body, but other creatures can.

"If you get a burn and the skin is burned away, your body cannot regenerate that lost skin. You get a scar instead," said Carlson. "There are a lot of lower animals, salamanders, for instance, that can regenerate lost body parts. So elsewhere in the animal kingdom, the ability to regenerate does exist. But in the mammals and in humans, the ability to regenerate lost tissue, whether from an injury trauma or a cancer or loss of blood supply, whatever the mechanism of tissue injury is, a human cannot replace, except in a very small number of cases, lost tissue."

So why is that? I'd think we 'advanced' creatures would be the ones that would regenerate tissue, while the 'lower' ones like a salamander would be the ones running around without a leg or tail after losing it. Carlson explains that it might be an evolutionary sort of thing.

"When you get an injury, typically the quickest way to cover that injury up to get it to seal from the environment is by healing with a scar. And this is very important in the wild because you have to have that wound covered quickly or else it'll get infected. So in nature, a large animal like a wolf or something gets an injury, they heal quickly with scar and that protects them in the short run. Smaller animals like salamanders etc., they've maintained this ability to regenerate possibly because the need to get the wound covered right away isn't as great. This is a theory. This is not fact. But, when people try to piece together why large mammals like us don't regenerate and small animals can, this is one of the things that commonly comes up is that there were evolutionary pressures on the large animals to recover from a wound as fast as possible, so that they would survive. So somewhere, we've lost the ability to regenerate."

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As a media producer, one of the great things about my career is I'm always learning. That is definitely the case with this "Growing Skin" story. Wound healing and tissue regeneration is not something I've thought a lot about before. Research occurring in this field is high-tech and to me, at least, approaches a science fiction feeling.

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http://www.kqed.org/.stream/anon/radio/quest/2010/01/2010-01-18-quest.mp3

Ever thought about using medicine from the ocean floor? Well, scientists are using robots to sort through millions of marine chemicals in hopes of finding a cure to all kinds of diseases from cholera to breast cancer. Amy Standen has more.

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Ever thought about using medicine from the ocean floor? Well, scientists are using robots to sort through millions of marine chemicals in hopes of finding a cure to all kinds of diseases from cholera to breast cancer. Amy Standen has more.

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Rhino Embryos Created in Lab, Offering Hope for Nearly Extinct Species

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Rhino Embryos Created in Lab, Offering Hope for Nearly Extinct Species

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Rhino Embryos Made in Lab to Save Nearly Extinct Subspecies (Published 2018)

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The development is an early step toward the much more distant goal of resurrecting the northern white rhinoceros, whose last male died this year.

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Fluorescent fish, cloned cats, dolphins with prosthetic tails - these are just a few of the many oddball creatures you'll read about in Frankenstein's Cat: Cuddling Up to Biotech's Brave New Beasts,a new book by science journalist Emily Anthes.

In it, Emily describes her tour through unconventional animal facilities across the country, from a barn of transgenic goats in California to a lab that's cloning endangered species in a forest outside of New Orleans. Emily somehow manages to tell a fun story without glossing over complex scientific concepts and thorny ethical issues. The book comes out officially on March 12, but you can pre-order a copy now.

Emily and I worked together at SEED Magazine (back when there was a SEED Magazine ...), and we both love Brooklyn and dogs. I learned a lot from her book, and she kindly agreed to answer some of my questions about its content and her writing experience.

VH: I want to start with the AquAdvantage salmon, the genetically modified fish that grow super fast. When you wrote about them in the book, the FDA was still - after 17 years! - making up its mind about whether it would allow the fish to be sold as food. Finally, at the end of December, the agency issued a draft document declaring AquAdvantage safe, and we're now nearing the end of the 60-day public comment period.

So, if the approval happens, what would it mean for the U.S. biotech industry? Why is this fish such a big deal?

EA: The short answer is that this fish is much more than just a fish - it's a test case. If the fish are approved, they'll be the first transgenic animals approved as consumer products in the U.S. (The FDA has approved a pharmaceutical that is extracted from the milk of genetically modified goats, but the AquAdvantage salmon would be the first whole GE animals cleared for human consumption.)

Many, many researchers and entrepreneurs who are interested in animal biotechnology are watching this case very closely. If the fish, which have been politically controversial, are approved, it means that good science can still triumph over politics. If they're not approved, it will send the opposite message, discouraging further research and innovation in all sorts of promising biotech applications.

VH: I think you and I have a similar attitude toward the unnecessary fear (and sometimes, excessive regulation) that seems to swirl around new technologies, whether that's these new salmon and other GMOs or personal genetics. I loved your quote: "It's easy to oppose biotechnology in the abstract, but when that technology can save your life, grand pronouncements about scientific evils tend to dissolve."

Your book is full of life-saving, useful, compelling, and delightful applications of biotechnology. But was there anything you came across in your reporting that you think is really, really worrisome? What's worthy (if anything) of intense regulatory scrutiny, or even an outright ban?

EA: Well, the practice that most unsettled me was the emerging business of cloning pets. It's not the cloning itself that bothers me - I have no philosophical problem with making genetic copies of animals, and I firmly believe that cloning, like other biotechnologies, is value neutral, that whether it's good or bad depends on how we're using it. But the problem is that right now, cloning remains a highly experimental technology. Clones of some species suffer from health problems at elevated rates, and the cloning process itself is extremely inefficient. To make a single cloned dog, you need lots of dog eggs and lots of cloned embryos. That means that you're putting a lot of female dogs through unnecessary surgeries and surrogate pregnancies all so one pet owner can get a duplicate of a beloved pet. To me, that's not an acceptable trade-off.

But if scientists can improve cloning's efficiency - or figure out how to reduce the health problems among clones - my objections would begin to fade away. As they would if the benefits were higher - if the fate of the world somehow rested upon creating a cloned dog. (That's why I'm less willing to condemn research projects in which scientists are doing seemingly more useful things, such as cloning disease-resistant animals or endangered species.)

VH: Human cloning - ever gonna happen? Yes or no.

EA: Honestly, I doubt it. Not because scientists won't be able to do it, but because society won't accept it. I think people will push to ban human cloning before scientists manage to pull it off. Or scientists will do it once and then politicians and the public will immediately push for legislation to prevent anyone from ever doing the same thing again. (But then again, predictions about the future of technology are notoriously easy to botch. Maybe human cloning will one day become as safe and routine as IVF. That's not what my gut tells me, but who knows?)

VH: On to some fun stuff now, because your book is chock-full of colorful stories and a lot of Anthes wit. Of all of the famous Franken-critters you met - CC the cat, Winter the dolphin, and your very own GloFish, just to name a few - which was your favorite?

EA: Oh man - that's an unfair question! It doesn't seem quite right to choose. But meeting CC, the world's first cloned cat, was probably the most fun. I'm not sure what I expected, but I definitely did not expect to discover that the scientist who helped create her would have built her her very own, two-story, air-conditioned house in his backyard. Or that she'd live there with her cat "husband" and their three kids. CC is a very cute cat, but it was a little surreal to be a guest in her "home."

VH: Yeah, that was crazy! I laughed out loud. Did visiting all these animals change the way you interact with your dog, Milo? Or vice-versa: Did your experience as a dog owner change the way you approached these visits?

EA: I'm not sure that having a dog changed how I approached the visits, but they definitely gave me perspective on some of the drivers behind these biotechnological interventions. I certainly understand how strong the bond between humans and animals can be, and I also understand the urge to create or acquire a pet that fits a long list of exact specifications. I spent a long time trying to pick out the "perfect" dog for me, and even now, there are tweaks I'd make to Milo if I could. For instance, he's very sweet but pretty skittish. If it were possible to give him a strong dose of courage with, say, a round of gene therapy, I'd be all for it.

VH: Your book talks a bit about genetic testing for dogs. From the little I had read about it before, I thought most people were interested in these tests in order to figure out the dog's pedigree. But you describe how they might be used for medical purposes, too. For example, a breeder could avoid mating two dogs that are both carriers of the same genetic disease. So how common is the use of dog genetic tests for medical purposes? Is it pricey? Do you think it will become a more routine thing?

EA: I don't think canine genetic testing - for either pedigree or medical purposes - is super common yet. But it has huge potential. There are a variety of commercial labs that offer owners the chance to see whether their dogs have certain disease-causing mutations. Many of these tests cost less than $100, and they're simple to do - just swab the inside of your dog's cheek and mail the swabs into the company, which will process the samples and deliver the results. I think this kind of testing is bound to become more common, especially as the price drops and researchers uncover more and more disease-linked genetic mutations.

My last question is about bioethics. Strachan Donnelley, a philosopher, apparently coined this concept of the " troubled middle " to describe people who love animals and care about their welfare, and yet don't have a moral problem with eating them or having scientists do research on them. I'm probably in that muddled middle somewhere, and you write that you are, too. Are there any guiding principles in that middle that we can turn to in sticky situations? I guess another way to ask this is, what is at the heart of animal welfare?

EA: Well, the first thing to note is that if you're in the troubled middle - and I really think that the vast majority of us are - then overly broad, blanket ethical statements don't work very well. Most of us don't want to ban all use of animals in research, nor do we want to allow scientists to use as many animals as they want for anything they want anytime they want. So we need to think about each proposed use of animals on a case-by-case basis. In doing that, we should be evaluating the cost to animals against the potential gain. So I don't mind sacrificing some mice in order to study Alzheimer's, for instance, but I'm not so willing to sanction animal experimentation in the search of, say, a better treatment for wrinkles.

And the second point that I think is important is that even in those instances in which we decide animal use is justified, we should still take welfare seriously. So just because a mouse is destined for Alzheimer's research doesn't mean that we can shrug off our ethical obligations to treat that mouse well during its scientific service. (That means providing anesthesia and pain control, when necessary, as well as comfortable living conditions, physical and mental stimulation, etc.) Even experimental animals deserve the best quality of life we can give them.

The cover art for Frankenstein's Cat, featured at the top of this post, was done by Diego Patino. Nina Subin took the photo of Milo and Emily.

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Fluorescent fish, cloned cats, dolphins with prosthetic tails - these are just a few of the many oddball creatures you'll read about in Frankenstein's Cat: Cuddling Up to Biotech's Brave New Beasts,a new book by science journalist Emily Anthes.

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Why this crab’s blood could save your life

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Why this crab’s blood could save your life

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Why this crab's blood could save your life

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New Coke bottle made entirely from plants

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New Coke bottle made entirely from plants

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The new Coke bottle looks so good, you could eat it. That's because it's made entirely of plant materials.

Coca-Cola showed off its new bottle at the Expo Milano food technology conference on Wednesday. The bottle is plastic (don't actually try to eat it), but instead of using petroleum, the bottle's plastic is derived from sugar cane.

The new Coke bottle is part of the company's efforts to make its containers from renewable ingredients. Coca-Cola debuted "PlantBottle" packaging in 2009, which is 30% comprised of plant materials. The new PlantBottle that Coke debuted this week is its first to be made 100% from sugar cane plastic.

Coca-Cola said the sugar cane used in the PlantBottles comes from Brazil. They also contain waste products from India that are left over from processing sugar cane. Though those are currently the only two sources of materials for its PlantBottles, Coke said it it also looking at converting fruit stems, peels and bark into plastic in the future.

The soda company didn't say when it would start shipping Coke in the new bottles, but Coca-Cola noted that it is partnering with biotechnology firms "to move from lab to commercial scale in producing a 100% plant-based plastic bottle." The ultimate goal, Coke said, is "a 100% renewable, responsibly sourced bottle that is fully recyclable."

Since 2009, Coca-Cola says it has distributed more than 35 billion plant bottle packages in more than 40 countries. The company estimates that it has eliminated 319,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere as a result -- the equivalent of CO ₂ emissions from burning 743,000 barrels of oil or 36 million gallons of gasoline.

About 30% of Coke bottles in North America are PlantBottles, but just 7% of Coke bottles around the world are made from plant materials. The company says its goal is to exclusively use PlantBottles in place of petroleum-based plastic bottles by 2020.

"We believe we have a responsibility to produce these packages more sustainably," the company said in a statement. "Environmental stewardship is not something new for us; it's part of our heritage."

Coke said it is working with Ford , Heinz, Nike , Procter & Gamble and SeaWorld to help those companies use more plant materials in their plastics as well. Heinz ketchup bottles, plastic cups at SeaWorld and certain test models of the Fusion Energi hybrid sedan use PlantBottle plastic.

"The Coca-Cola company is determined to lead the consumer packaged goods industry away from its dependence on non-renewable fossil fuels and towards using renewable plant-based alternatives," the company said. "It hasn't been an easy task, but it shows our commitment to doing the right thing in the right way."

CNNMoney (New York) First published June 4, 2015: 8:42 AM ET

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New Coke bottle made entirely from plants

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Coca-Cola showed off its new bottle at the Expo Milano food technology conference on Wednesday. The bottle is plastic (don't actually try to eat it), but instead of using petroleum, the bottle's plastic is derived from sugar cane. The new Coke bottle is part of the company's efforts to make its containers from renewable ingredients.

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Human ‘mini brains’ grown in labs may help solve cancer, autism, Alzheimer’s

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Human ‘mini brains’ grown in labs may help solve cancer, autism, Alzheimer’s

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See More Videos

A Harvard medical pioneer calls it "astounding" - an "incredible achievement" and a "quantum leap forward" in the battle against cancer, autism, Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.

What's going on? Scientists at Ohio State University say they've figured out a way to grow the genetic equivalent of a nearly complete embryonic human brain.

Technically, they're not quite "brains." They're called brain organoids - pieces of human tissue grown in petri dishes from skin cells.

These little blobs of tissue, 2-3 millimeters long, could help researchers test drugs and other treatments that may help prevent, fight and maybe even cure some of the most devastating disorders and diseases of our time.

In addition to Parkinson's disease, autism and Alzheimer's disease, they could also lead to unlocking the mysteries of schizophrenia, epilepsy, traumatic brain injuries and post-traumatic stress disorder. Millions of people suffer from all these disorders and diseases worldwide.

"The idea of taking skin cells, reverting them back to a basic stage of development and then teaching them how to turn into the cells that make up the brain is something we have been dreaming about for some time," said CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta. "It is exponentially closer to reality now. Furthermore, the idea of using these 'mini brains' as a testing ground for therapies could help doctors figure out the best treatments for individual patients as opposed to the 'one size fits all' approach that is often used nowadays."

Scientists have been making brain tissue organoids in the lab for less than a decade.

Japanese scientists were among the first to prompt cells from mice and humans to form "layered balls reminiscent" of a part of the brain called the cerebral cortex, according to the science journal, Nature. In 2011, Madeline Lancaster, a scientist a the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology in Vienna, was able to grow an embryonic brain.

Ohio State biomedical researcher Rene Anand said his team's work is different because "our organoids have most of the brain parts."

"I'll give you one example: If you want to study Parkinson's, you need the mid-brain. The best I can tell from all published research on organoids is they don't have the mid-brain. We have the mid-brain we are already moving toward trying to study them."

Anand said he has grown organoids that include 98% of cells that exist in a brain of a human fetus at five weeks.

"I think it took all of us by surprise," Dr. Rudolph Tanzi - an Alzheimer's research pioneer at Harvard told CNN. "The results were absolutely astounding ... it's an incredible achievement."

Creating a fetal brain that includes so many different types of brain cells amounts to a "quantum leap forward," he said. Tanzi co-discovered all three genes that cause early-onset familial Alzheimer's, according to his Harvard biography.

Anand said using the breakthrough to learn more about Alzheimer's is a "high priority" for his team.

Despite all the excitement, Anand is quick to point out that the project is still at a very early stage. "The sooner we commercialize it and make a model available, the sooner everybody else can jump in and use it to solve these problems." Brain organoids may help researchers find key solutions to some sub-types of autism within 10 years, Anand said.

"Right now, it's like we're climbing Mount Everest and we're at Base Camp One," Anand said. "You know, you have to stop, get your oxygen together, then move up to the next step. So, we've still got a ways to go."

As you might expect, growing human brain organoids poses a lot of head-scratching questions.

Here are five big ones:

1. Does this mean scientists could grow a miniature version of your "brain?"

Sort of. If a lab technician used some of your skin cells, they could grow an embryonic brain organic that would have your genetic material. Could that brain organoid be developed into a fully grown brain? No, that's not possible yet. A fully grown brain would need a vascular system and other parts before it could meet the official definition of a brain. "They are not capable of growing beyond where they are," said Anand. "We have no intention of going beyond that."

2. Exactly how would brain organoids contribute to new treatments?

Scientists would use them to mimic human brains deteriorating from Alzheimer's or Parkinson's and then study how they react to innovative treatments or newly developed drugs. "You still have to find a way to accelerate the aging of that brain, the pathology, to mimic a disease like Alzheimer's or Parkinson's," said Tanzi.

3. Is it possible that brain organoids are conscious?

No, said Tanzi. Because these tissues don't have any input. "The brain doesn't work alone. The brain needs sensory input. The brain in a dish is not getting sensory input. We depend on our limited sensory system - our five senses - to provide input to the brain. The brain interprets that information and integrates it. And then we're putting everything we experience in context based on the information that's already stored in our brains through synapse."

4. Theoretically, could this research lead to a future with artificially intelligent machines that have humanlike brains?

It's not out of the realm of possibility, Tanzi said. "If somebody someday figures out how to put a brain into an AI that has sensory input - now you're creating AI hybrids with organic brains. Then, that's a whole different story. Then, you're talking about what's been covered in science fiction movies. But I would say it's very far away, if at all."

5. How long will it take for brain organoid research to lead to breakthroughs?

"You need to get this system into hundreds of labs studying these different brain diseases and let everybody take a shot at it. No one lab's gonna do it," said Tanzi. "We can say 10 years, but if you put that brain system and replicate it in the right lab, that could come down to five years. You need experts who know each disease, working in that system."

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Human 'mini brains' grown in labs may help solve cancer, autism, Alzheimer's | CNN

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See More Videos A Harvard medical pioneer calls it "astounding" - an "incredible achievement" and a "quantum leap forward" in the battle against cancer, autism, Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. What's going on? Scientists at Ohio State University say they've figured out a way to grow the genetic equivalent of a nearly complete embryonic human brain.

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Genetically engineered ‘Frankenfish’ salmon wins FDA approval

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Genetically engineered ‘Frankenfish’ salmon wins FDA approval

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Story highlights

Genetically engineered salmon are the first such animal approved for consumption

The FDA first held a hearing on this salmon in 2010

Labeling food items as genetically engineered is voluntary

Genetically engineered salmon, called "Frankenfish" by some, won FDA approval Thursday. AquaAdvantage salmon, produced by AquaBounty, are genetically modified to grow faster than farm-raised Atlantic salmon so they can get to consumers faster. This is the first approval of a genetically engineered animal intended for food.

"The FDA has thoroughly analyzed and evaluated the data and information submitted by AquaBounty Technologies regarding AquAdvantage salmon and determined that they have met the regulatory requirements for approval, including that food from the fish is safe to eat," said Dr. Bernadette Dunham, director of the FDA's Center for Veterinary Medicine.

The agency deemed them safe to eat, determined that the claim of faster growth is true and that there is no biological difference between these salmon and nongenetically engineered salmon. Because there is no difference, the company is not required to identify its salmon as genetically modified with a label or in any other way. (The FDA did publish draft guidance for companies that want to voluntarily label their foods as genetically engineered.)

The FDA's Veterinary Medicine Advisory Committee took up the issue in 2010. The genetic engineering for these salmon is a combination of a growth gene from Pacific chinook salmon (to accelerate growth) and genetic material from an eel-like fish called "ocean pout" (which allow the fish to grow year round). This results in a recombinant DNA (considered a drug by FDA definition) that is injected into the eggs of Atlantic salmon. The new genetically altered salmon are also reproductively sterile, a comforting detail to those worried about mutant offspring.

Related: Keeping your diet GMO free

The approval specifically states that these salmon can only be raised on land-based, contained hatchery tanks at two specific facilities in Canada and Panama and no other locations in the United States or elsewhere. The approved locations have met the criteria required to properly contain the fish and prohibit any eggs or fish from escaping. These facilities will be subject to regulation and inspection from the FDA as well as from the Canadian and Panamanian governments.

This is good news for proponents like Yonathan Zohar, chairman of the department of marine biotechnology at the University of Maryland Institute of Marine and Environmental Technology. He testified before the FDA in support of approval at a 2010 hearing, warning demand is greater than supply when it comes to consuming fish. He believes the science endorsed by the FDA on Thursday should be accepted as long as we want to continue eating fish. He said the decision is just the start, and suggested that other genetic engineering of fish in the future could help stave off disease.

Wenonah Hunter, executive director of the advocacy group Food and Water Watch, issued a statement calling the FDA decisionunfortunate and accusing the agency of disregarding scientists, salmon growers, consumers and Congress, who have all strongly opposed the approval. The group also said the optional labeling "ignores consumers' fundamental right to know how our food is produced" and called it bad for business. Hunter said she worries consumers will stop buying fish out of fear that it may be unknowingly genetically engineered. The group said it is exploring all options to prevent the modified salmon from getting to store shelves.

Related: Genetically modified apples don't turn brown

Zohar said he agrees on the labeling, saying it should be done so consumers know and won't stay away from salmon altogether, adding that there is no reason to avoid the new fish. He said he recognizes the resistance but noted that people have been consuming genetically engineered crops (which are not labeled) for years without thinking twice. He was referring to corn, soybeans, watermelon, tomatoes and the like.

As far as when the salmon will be in a store near you, AquaBounty said, "It is too early to discuss commercialization plans but there are several paths to market that are being considered."

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Genetically engineered 'Frankenfish' salmon wins FDA approval

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Genetically engineered salmon are the first such animal approved for consumption The FDA first held a hearing on this salmon in 2010 Labeling food items as genetically engineered is voluntary Genetically engineered salmon, called "Frankenfish" by some, won FDA approval Thursday.

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Stopping Zika: The GMO mosquito that kills his own offspring

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Stopping Zika: The GMO mosquito that kills his own offspring

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Story highlights

A male GMO mosquito passes along a lethal gene that kills his offspring

Field trials in Central and South America show promising results

Anti-GMO reaction in Key West, Florida, stopped a field trial there

Editor's Note: This is part three in a four-part series about the efforts to stop or slow the spread of Zika virus though the use of modified and engineered mosquitoes. See all four pieces here.

OX513A may soon be a household name in the fight against Zika in Florida.

No, he's not a new member of the Star Wars cast. OX513A is a male Aedes aegypti mosquito, genetically engineered to pass along a lethal gene to wild females that makes the females' offspring die. He's the product of Oxitec, a small biotechnology company launched by Oxford University professors in 2002, now owned by global biotech giant Intrexon.

And depending on the outcome of public comments to the FDA, OX513A could make his first appearance in Florida later this year as part of a trial, testing his ability to fight Zika-carrying mosquitos in Florida.

OX513A is a mutated version of a "sterile" mosquito. Other sterile insects are created by a method called SIT, short for sterile insect technique, where the males are sterilized by gamma rays before being introduced into the wild to interfere with mosquito baby-making.

But not OX513A. This male is created by injecting very small amounts of synthetic DNA into thousands of mosquito eggs until finally one of the eggs accepts the DNA into its genome, creating two genes. One is a lethal gene, synthesized from E. coli and the herpes simplex virus. It's lethal because it creates a protein called tTAV which interferes with a cell's activity, killing the infected mosquito before it can reach adulthood.

But wait - if OX513A is infected with a lethal gene, how can he grow up to mate with wild females? Because he's also fed an antidote, tetracycline, as he's being raised.

"Every single one of these mosquitoes is going to die as larvae unless you go out of your way to save it," explained Oxitec CEO Hadyn Parry. "So you use tetracycline in the water to rescue that generation. Then that generation will grow to adults, they'll lay more eggs, and the larvae would die, except you'll feed them with some antidote, in which case they live again. So this is a fail-safe system for every generation."

The second synthetic gene, based on DNA from coral, implants a fluorescent red marker in OX513A so researchers can more easily track him.

"The color marker is absolutely essential," said Parry. "And that's because you want to know how many males you need to release in a town. By looking at the red color in the larvae, you can see how you're doing in controlling the population, which areas need more males, which areas need less males."

Oxitec has field tested OX513A in the Cayman Islands, Panama and Brazil, and claims a large success rate with each release. For example, in the Cayman Islands in 2010, said Parry, a small release of males created an 80% reduction in the disease-carrying population. Another trial in an urban area of Brazil reduced the Aedes aegypti by 95%. Oxitec recently announced an agreement with Brazilian officials to build a mosquito-breeding factory in Piracicaba, which they say will protect more than 300,000 people.

Newsflash! Mutant mosquitoes threaten the Conch Republic!

But in the United States, OX513A had another hurdle to overcome: public concern about genetically modified creatures. Here's what happened in Key West, Florida, also known as the Conch Republic.

In 2009 and 2010, local outbreaks of dengue fever (which, like Zika, is spread by the Aedes aegypti) left the Florida Keys Mosquito Control District desperate for new options. Despite an avalanche of effort - from aerial, truck and backpack spraying to the use of mosquito-eating fish - local control efforts to contain the Aedes aegypti with larvicide and pesticide had been largely ineffective. Costly too. Even though Aedes aegypti is only 1% of its mosquito population, Florida Keys Mosquito Control budgets more than $1 million a year, a full tenth of its total funding, to fighting it.

So in 2012, the district reached out to Oxitec for help. But when word spread, public backlash was swift: More than 100,000 people signed a Change.org petition against the proposal; that number has grown to more than 160,000 today. Public relations campaigns reminding Floridians that OX513A doesn't bite because he's male and feeds only on nectar didn't completely solve the problem. Media reports quoted angry residents refusing to be treated as "guinea pigs" for the "superbug" or "Robo-Frankenstein" mosquito.

But Oxitec's Parry feels that Zika could be a game changer. "The threat of Zika is so great, I think that it will change the paradigm here," Parry said. "I do think you can always get the people who are against genetic engineering for whatever reason. But I think the big majority of people will want to go ahead."

A recent national survey by Purdue University proves his point. Researchers found 78% of respondents would support the introduction of genetically modified mosquitoes into the United States to curb the spread of Zika.

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Parry's belief will soon be put to the test. The FDA has released the results of their environmental assessment of OX513A: there is negligible risk that this GMO mosquito will do anything other than what he was created to do: mate with wild females and pass on his lethal gene. There is a thirty day period for public comment.

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Stopping Zika: The GMO mosquito that kills his own offspring

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A male GMO mosquito passes along a lethal gene that kills his offspring Field trials in Central and South America show promising results Anti-GMO reaction in Key West, Florida, stopped a field trial there Editor's Note: This is part three in a four-part series about the efforts to stop or slow the spread of Zika virus though the use of modified and engineered mosquitoes.

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Stopping Zika: Here come the mutant mosquitoes!

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Stopping Zika: Here come the mutant mosquitoes!

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Story highlights

Using bacteria that keep Zika from replicating inside the mosquito is one approach

Sterilizing males with gamma radiation and releasing them in the millions is another

GMO mosquitoes with lethal genes that kill their young could soon be used in Florida

Imagine a hairy, bug-eyed monster that hides under your bed, in your closet and in your shower, waiting for just the right moment to attack. Her belly grows, glowing bright red, as she sucks your blood to create her babies - which she produces by the thousands - leaving a virus to grow inside of you that could harm your babies if you are pregnant.

No, this is not a B-rated horror movie. It's a Hollywood-style description of one of the craftiest little creatures on the planet, the female Aedes aegypti mosquito. (All male mosquitoes are exonerated because they don't bite.)

Over the centuries, she has adapted to live as close as she can to her favorite prey - us - and can breed in receptacles as small as flower vases and shower drains. Forgotten tires and discarded plastics? Even better. In other words, she's perfect for spreading disease in any bustling, overpopulated, tropical city or slum.

While the aegypti transmits the viruses that cause yellow fever, dengue, chikungunya and now Zika, her sister species, the Culex quinquefasciatus, carries West Nile and encephalitis. Another 40 species of mosquitoes, in the genus Anopheles, spread the malaria parasite. The Anopheles is such an efficient bloodsucker that a single female can infect more than 100 people. Together, these ladies have killed and maimed more humans than any other animal on earth, even mankind with all of its wars.

If this was a traditional Hollywood horror flick, there would be a happy ending: All the monsters would be exterminated. But history shows man has tried that again and again with these mosquitoes, often using dangerous pesticides. And like every great villain, they always return.

"And of course in today's world, you and I, along with any mosquito or virus, can hop a plane and get anywhere within less than 24 hours," said Uriel Kitron, chairman of Emory University's Department of Environmental Studies. "I always say the mosquito is not a great flier, but it's a wonderful hitchhiker. So it's very easy to reintroduce."

Which is why a growing number of scientists are touting the need for a "mutant mosquito," a helpful Frankenstein designed to win the fight against these deadly females.

The 'Alien' within: Wolbachia

Remember the movie "Alien," where the creature grows in the crewman's belly until it finally rips through his stomach to the outside world? Now imagine a kinder, gentler creature living inside the cells of up to 60% of the insects around us. This creature, a genus of bacteria called Wolbachia, manages to live off its hosts and transform them, but doesn't have to kill them to survive. A nonprofit group out of Australia discovered this helpful alien stops the growth of viruses inside the Aedes aegypti, keeping her from transmitting disease.

Read more about this method of stopping Zika.

Not the Hulk: The gamma-irradiated male

The International Atomic Energy Agency recently announced a plan to help Brazil and other countries hard hit by Zika produce sterile "gamma-irradiated" Aedes aegypti mosquitoes for mass release in those countries. Within the next few months, the agency says it will send a cobalt-60 gamma cell irradiator to Brazil in order to create billions of sterilized male mosquitoes that researchers hope will mate with wild females to keep them from reproducing. But unlike their famous gamma-radiated movie cousin, the Hulk, these guys may not have the strength or stamina to do their jobs.

Read more about this method of stopping Zika.

'Frankenstein': The GMO mosquito

Meet OX513A, a male Aedes aegypti mosquito genetically engineered to pass along a lethal gene to wild females that makes her offspring die. He's the product of Oxitec, a small biotechnology company launched by Oxford University professors in 2002, now owned by biotech giant Intrexon.

This male is created by injecting very small amounts of synthetically made DNA into thousands of mosquito eggs until finally one of the eggs accepts the DNA into its genome, creating two genes. One gene, based on DNA from coral, is used to implant a fluorescent red marker in OX513A so researchers can more easily find and track him. The other gene, artificially modeled after E. coli and the herpes simplex virus, is lethal because it creates a protein called tTAV which interferes with a cell's activity, killing the infected mosquito before it can reach adulthood.

Read more about this method of stopping Zika.

Forget Frankenstein - this monster's a Chimera

Gene drives are considered the cutting edge of genetics. In labs around the world, enterprising researchers are using new tools such as CRISPR's Cas9 to splice a helpful gene into a mosquito's bloodline, "driving" it into the entire population, at a much higher rate than the standard genetics you learned in school.

"It's forcing those genes into the population," explained molecular biologist Omar S. Akbari. "Instead of a gene being transferred to 50% of the offspring, now it can transfer to 99%, maybe even 100% of their progeny."

Before you can "drive" a beneficial gene into a population, you have to create it. That's where genetic engineers can get really clever. Take what University of California-Irvine microbiologist Anthony James and his team did to create a drive against one strain of malaria.

"Frankenstein's not a fair comparison," explains James, "because Frankenstein was made of all human parts. We're making what's called a Chimera, an animal that is made from parts of several creatures."

Read more about this method of stopping Zika.

Will the mutants really succeed?

From Wolbachia to radiated males, from OX513A to gene drives, all of these solutions have significant issues, say critics: expense, proof of disease reduction, environmental impact studies, community support, and especially the need for mosquito control during any outbreak. After all, officials aren't going to let Zika-carrying mosquitoes continue to spread disease while we wait for a takeover by mutants.

"If you're releasing mosquitoes for doing control and on top of that you have to do mosquito spraying, then in a way you're killing your investment," said Emory University ecologist Gonzalo Vazquez Prokopec. "You're releasing mosquitoes that cost money but at the same time you cannot stop helping people. So how this integration of genetically modified mosquitoes works in the context of ongoing control activity, I think it's still an open question."

Oxitec CEO Hadyn Parry disagrees. What's needed, he says, is coordination with local authorities.

"It's a very sensible, logical strategy to go into a town, carry out an insecticide-based campaign and then use our approach," explained Parry. "The only thing you can't do in the same street at the same time is release our mosquitoes with fogging. Because our guys are completely susceptible and they'd all fall down dead. Whereas ironically, the wild ones have quite high levels of insecticide resistance."

"The key is to mobilize the community," agreed Emory's Kitron. "The challenge is that often the community is not into it, or they do not like some of the measures that were applied, or they did not feel that the disease was that important. Zika is different because the potential complication is so severe that I think that on its own will be a major mobilizing force for the community."

But, he adds, it's too soon to determine if the mutant mosquito can truly win the war against man's deadliest enemy.

"I think that the jury is still out on all of these techniques," said Kitron. "I think they will play a role, and I think they will add to the many tools that we already have. But none of them, I don't think, will be a silver bullet."

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Stopping Zika: Here come the mutant mosquitoes!

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Using bacteria that keep Zika from replicating inside the mosquito is one approach Sterilizing males with gamma radiation and releasing them in the millions is another GMO mosquitoes with lethal genes that kill their young could soon be used in Florida Imagine a hairy, bug-eyed monster that hides under your bed, in your closet and in your shower, waiting for just the right moment to attack.

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This liquid could let torn clothes repair themselves

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This liquid could let torn clothes repair themselves

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What happens when you accidentally tear a favorite T-shirt or pair of jeans? Sure, some of us will repair it, but most people will just throw it out.

Imagine if there was a way for torn fabric to repair itself.

It's an idea that researchers at Pennsylvania State University have been working on for a few years--and it's now come to fruition.

The team used bacteria and yeast to create a biodegradable liquid material that can help fabric to quickly bind to itself.

It's a simple process. You put a few drops of the liquid on the tear, apply warm water and press the edges together for a minute. The fabric reattaches and essentially self repairs, said Melik Demirel, a professor of engineering science and mechanics at Penn State.

The liquid can work with fabric in a couple different ways.

Textile manufacturers can coat already-made fabric with the liquid. The coated fabric then has a self-repair ability automatically built into it, said Demirel, who led the research.

Additionally, cloth can be made using fiber that's actually produced with the protein. This way the cloth will inherently have the ability to self-repair with the application of pressure and water.

Related: Yes, you can 3D print with beer, coffee and hemp

The liquid, which Demirel still hasn't named, has similar properties and structure to protein found in human hair, nails and squid tentacles.

Yes, squid tentacles. Demirel said they were surprised to discover that the protein from squid had self-repairing qualities.

"Squid is a limited resource. So we needed to replicate this unique property found in squid protein using biotechnology and other substances," he said.

Over the last year, Demirel's group developed the liquid and tested it on commonly worn fabrics like cotton, wool and polyester.

Related: We buy too many clothes and we pay too little for them

He found that the liquid didn't alter the quality of the fabric, and that it withstood a wash in a machine.

"Science happens in small steps," said Demirel. "The next step would be to see if clothes can self-repair when we pour the liquid into a washing machine, like you would a detergent, and apply water and heat."

How IBM is making plastic less toxic

Demirel said he's excited about the commercial application of the liquid.

"It could help improve protective clothing worn by soldiers, medical staff, even farmers," he said. Demirel's research was partly funded by the Office of Naval Research and the Army Research Office.

It could also change consumer habits and help reduce clothing waste.

"Discarded clothing is a major global problem," he said. "Maybe this is a way to improve the longevity of clothes we wear."

CNNMoney (New York) First published August 10, 2016: 3:52 PM ET

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This liquid could let torn clothes repair themselves

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Imagine if there was a way for torn fabric to repair itself. It's an idea that researchers at Pennsylvania State University have been working on for a few years--and it's now come to fruition. The team used bacteria and yeast to create a biodegradable liquid material that can help fabric to quickly bind to itself.

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Inside China's 'mosquito factory' fighting Zika and dengue

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Inside China's 'mosquito factory' fighting Zika and dengue

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inside china's 'mosquito factory' fighting zika and dengue - cnn

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China's 'mosquito factory' fighting Zika and dengue

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Zhiyong Xi wants to rid China -- and potentially the world -- of mosquitoes, specifically the ones carrying diseases like Zika and dengue, and he's using "good mosquitoes" to do it.

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Fungi could solve world's plastic crisis, scientists say

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Fungi could solve world's plastic crisis, scientists say

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Scientists believe they may have found an unlikely ally in the fight against plastic pollution - fungi.

A report published by London's Kew Gardens claims to have found a fungus that can break down plastics "in weeks rather than years."

Experts say the fungus, known as Aspergillus tubingensis, which was found in Pakistan, is capable of eroding plastics such as polyester polyurethane, which is often used in refrigerator insulation and synthetic leather.

"This is incredibly exciting because it is such a big environmental challenge. If this can be the solution, that would be great," senior scientist Ilia Leitch told a news conference Tuesday.

"We are in the early days of research but I would hope to see the benefits of fungi that can eat plastic in five to 10 years."

The report, which involved 100 scientists from across 18 countries, found that 2,189 new species of fungi were found during 2017, while an estimated 2.2 million to 3.8 million species are yet to be described.

There have been growing calls to eliminate single-use plastics across the business world, with ocean plastic waste predicted to triple by 2050.

Plastic has been found to choke marine wildlife, and has also entered the ocean food chain - exposing marine life to toxic chemicals that can end up in the food on our plates.

Around 150 million tons of plastic are already floating in our oceans - with an additional eight million tons entering the water each year, according to the World Economic Forum. By 2050, there will be more plastic than fish in our oceans by weight if current rates of plastic dumping continue.

As well as potentially being deployed to tackle the plastic crisis, fungi are already contributing to biotechnology, medicine and food.

Scientists believe about 350 species of fungi are eaten as food, with the market for edible mushrooms estimated to be worth around £32.5 billion (about $42.3 billion) per year.

Fungi are used in a number of cheeses, alcohol, bread and UK meat substitute Quorn as well as medicines such as penicillin and statins.

"It has been a real eye-opener drilling into the data on the fungal kingdom," Kathy Willis, director of science at Kew, said in a statement.

She added: "Their ability to play both Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde roles within their environments is unparalleled. For example the fungal kingdom includes yeast, which been used for over 9,000 years to ferment food and drink, but also includes some of the most economically damaging pathogens threatening food security and natural ecosystems."

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Fungi could solve world's plastic crisis, scientists say

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Scientists believe they may have found an unlikely ally in the fight against plastic pollution - fungi. A report published by London's Kew Gardens claims to have found a fungus that can break down plastics "in weeks rather than years."

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Gene editing could eliminate mosquitoes, but is it a good idea?

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Gene editing could eliminate mosquitoes, but is it a good idea?

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Story highlights

Researchers used a gene editing tool, CRISPR, to wipe out a population of malaria-carrying mosquitoes in the lab

Questions remain about how releasing this technology into the wild would impact the environment

Researchers have rendered a population of mosquitoes in a lab sterile using the gene-editing tool CRISPR-Cas9 by homing in on a specific target in insect DNA - the doublesex gene - raising the possibility of eradicating disease-carrying species of the insect entirely, according to a new studypublished Monday in Nature Biotechnology.

In the study, scientists at Imperial College London used the technology to wipe out a population of caged mosquitoes that are able to transmit malaria, targeting a genetic sequence that leads to male and female traits. After a number of generations, they found that 100% of these mosquitoes were affected.

"The difference in the gene content between male and female is very, very minimal" in mosquitoes and humans alike, said study author Andrea Crisanti, professor of molecular parasitology and microbiology at Imperial College London.

Doublesex, as the name implies, controls how mosquitoes differentiate into male and female. Females with two copies of the mutated gene didn't develop properly and couldn't reproduce, while males developed normally and continued spreading the mutation. Mutant females also failed to develop the long, needly proboscis they need to bite humans and suck blood.

What's more, the experiment seemed to succeed where others have failed - the spread of these mutant genes was not thwarted by the mosquitoes developing resistance.

"We have selected a target site that cannot be mutated or changed by the mosquito without paying a high price," Crisanti said.

The researchers note this doesn't necessarily prove their methods are "resistance proof." Experts say this could play out very differently outside small, confined spaces and among many other species of mosquitoes - only some of which carry the parasite that causes malaria.

But even when it comes to suppressing or extinguishing a species of mosquito, are we opening Pandora's Box and releasing something into the world we don't fully understand? Or will the only major impact be a positive one for humans while other organisms - less harmful ones, ideally - take these bugs' place in the ecosystem?

"That's an open question," said Catherine Hill, professor in the department of entomology at Purdue University. "We're very interested in protecting human health, but at the same time protecting the environment."

Hill said we're still untangling how mosquitoes fit into the food web and environment at large. Larvae, for example, are sources of food for some fish - including the mosquitofish. "I don't believe that we know the answers to these questions yet," Hill said. "We try to anticipate unintended consequences."

But a gene like doublesex, while ubiquitous among insects, has evolved differently across species, so it may be possible to launch a genetic attack on one species without affecting another. Experts say the focus, then, is not on swatting down all mosquitoes - just the small fraction that pester humans and transmit debilitating and deadly diseases.

"There are more than 3,000 species of mosquitoes in the world, most of which do not feed on people," Bob Peterson, professor of entomology at Montana State University and vice president of the Entomological Society of America, said in an email. "It is not practical or desirable - indeed it's not even possible - to wipe out all populations of all mosquito species. No one is seriously contemplating that."

"The African malaria mosquito is the most dangerous animal on earth," said Conor McMeniman, assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins Malaria Research Institute. "New technology that could help to specifically and efficiently control this plague on humanity is welcomed, but I would caution that we need to carefully test this and also engage communities at risk to see what their attitudes are."

The World Health Organization estimates 216 million cases of malaria in 2016 and 445,000 deaths, with children under age 5 among the most susceptible.

Health experts and entomologists have long been focused on fighting disease-causing mosquitoes, but "insect pests have the uncanny ability to adapt to and overcome our best efforts to manage them and the harm they cause," Peterson said.

In recent years, scientists have infected another mosquito species with Wolbachia bacteria, sterilizing them. Many efforts have traditionally involved insecticides, which are far less targeted and can have detrimental impacts on surroundings and species nearby, McMeniman noted.

While experts are calling the new study a big leap in a positive direction, some anticipate "growing pains and unexpected results," in the words of medical entomologist Donald Yee, associate professor at the University of Southern Mississippi.

"It's going to be nearly impossible to eliminate mosquitoes of any species, given that doing so requires coordinated efforts of governments, scientists, and the public," Yee told CNN in an email. "With very few exceptions in human history, humans just have not been very good at eliminating mosquitoes, even for short periods of time."

Yee said that the mosquitoes we're really concerned about - the major vectors for diseases such as yellow fever and dengue - aren't native to many places where they spread disease to humans. While few studies have held a magnifying glass to mosquitoes' importance to their habitats, he doesn't expect that eliminating them would hugely affect those environments.

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Crisanti said he's part of upcoming research on where mosquitoes sit in the food web, as well as how this gene-editing technology will work in spaces that better mimic tropical conditions - though it could be years before this is ever brought to market.

And time is of the essence, Hill said. In the next five to 10 years, she says scientists "absolutely have to come up with new technologies that are replacements for those earlier conventional strategies" and that work in concert with each other.

With climate change and a growing human population, "I think we are going to see more epidemics" of mosquito-borne illness, Hill said. "And we will see those diseases in places where we haven't seen it before."

"It is a constant arms race between us and the mosquito and the pathogens it transmits," she added. "I don't think it's ever going to go away, and I don't see one magic bullet."

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Gene editing could eliminate mosquitoes, but is it a good idea?

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Researchers used a gene editing tool, CRISPR, to wipe out a population of malaria-carrying mosquitoes in the lab Questions remain about how releasing this technology into the wild would impact the environment Researchers have rendered a population of mosquitoes in a lab sterile using the gene-editing tool CRISPR-Cas9 by homing in on a specific target in insect DNA - the doublesex gene - raising the possibility of eradicating disease-carrying species of the insect entirely, according to a new studypublished Monday in Nature Biotechnology.

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Military research raises concerns about bioterror attack ... by insects

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Military research raises concerns about bioterror attack ... by insects

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Story highlights

The Insect Allies Program is funded by DARPA

The project explores the use of a new biotechnology to gene-edit mature plants

An ongoing US military research project that is exploring a new biotechnology to genetically modify mature crops has some scientists worried. The program is intended to ensure the safety of the nation's food supply, according to its benefactor, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as DARPA.

However, the project may be "widely perceived as an effort to develop biological agents for hostile purposes and their means of delivery, which - if true - would constitute a breach of the Biological Weapons Convention," writes Guy Reeves, a geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology, and his co-authors in an editorial published Thursday in the journal Science.

So what exactly is this controversial "means of delivery"?

Insects. Specifically, bugs infected with engineered viruses capable of gene-editing crops.

Paradigm shift

In essence, the Insect Allies Program seeks to speed the genetic modification process.

Typically, when creating genetically modified foods, agricultural scientists introduce DNA alterations into the chromosomes of plant seeds within a lab. The modified genes then show themselves as new traits in the grown plant. This is known as vertical gene transfer because the new traits may then be inherited from one generation to the next.

By contrast, the DARPA project uses "horizontal environmental genetic alteration agents," in which common pests are the agents of genetic modification. The insects deliver engineered viruses that can gene-edit the chromosomes of mature plants for the purpose of making them more resistant to disease and drought.

Seen through the eyes of Reeves and his co-authors, the biological, economic and societal implications of dispersing horizontal genetic alteration agents into ecosystems are "profound," especially in light of the insect delivery system.

"It will not always be possible to confidently identify which plants or fields have been infected by the genetically modified virus (due to inevitable uncertainty about insect movements and the susceptibility of crops to viral infection)," they wrote. Additionally, "easy simplifications" of the biotechnology could be used to generate "a new class of biological weapon," one that is "extremely transmissible to susceptible crop species" - in other words, an attack to wipe out crops, for example.

"It is our opinion that the knowledge to be gained from this program appears very limited in its capacity to enhance U.S. agriculture or respond to national emergencies," the authors wrote. And so they call for more transparency from DARPA in addition to more opportunities for public discussion of this new strategy.

'Dual use'

Jared B. Adams, chief of communications at DARPA, says the defense agency - which does not conduct research itself but instead provides financing - does not agree with some of the claims in the editorial.

"That said, we do accept and agree with concerns about potential dual use of technology, an issue that comes up with virtually every new powerful technology," Adams said. Dual use, as defined by the US government, describes items or technologies that have "both commercial and military or proliferation applications."

Concerns about possible dual use led DARPA to structure the Insect Allies Program as "a transparent, university-led, fundamental research effort that benefits from the active participation of regulators and ethicists," Adams wrote in an email. "We also have numerous, layered safeguards in place to maintain biosecurity and ensure the systems we're developing function only as intended." Safeguards include conducting all of the work for the program inside contained, biosecure facilities.

Blake Bextine, who acts as program manager for DARPA's Insect Allies project, wrote in a statement that the current "state-of-the-art methods and technologies for protecting staple crops, and especially mature plants," are not up to the challenge of responding quickly to the most severe threats that could put the nation's food security in jeopardy. Potential hazards include drought, flooding and "intentional attack by an adversary," he noted.

"Sprayed treatments are impractical for introducing genetic modifications on a large scale and potentially infeasible," Bextine wrote. "Meanwhile, traditional selective breeding methods for introducing protective traits into plants require years to propagate, nowhere near the speed required to prevent a fast-moving threat from developing into a crisis."

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Adams noted that if, by chance, the Insect Allies technology is successful, "it will be entities other than DARPA that determine if and how the technology is used."

"If our Insect allies research institutions succeed and move to apply their work in the future, they will need to go through the standard regulatory process for approval," he said.

In the meantime, Reeves and his co-authors remain concerned.

Even if DARPA's funding for this project were withdrawn, it would not close the "Pandora's box" that this new technology represents, they wrote.

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Military research raises concerns about bioterror attack ... by insects

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An ongoing US military research project that is exploring a new biotechnology to genetically modify mature crops has some scientists worried. The program is intended to ensure the safety of the nation's food supply, according to its benefactor, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as DARPA.

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China begins training first cloned police dog

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China begins training first cloned police dog

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One Chinese police force has a new asset this month: its first cloned police dog.

The puppy, a Kunming wolfdog called Kunxun, was created using cells from what police described as the "Sherlock Holmes" of canine law enforcement, as part of a program they hope will reduce the training time and cost of police dogs in future.

Kunxun was born on December 19 last year at a healthy 1.19 pounds (540 grams) and 9 inches (23 centimeters) in length, according to Beijing-based Sinogene Biotechnology.

The genetic material used to create Kunxun was taken from a 7-year-old female police sniffer named Huahuangma who has helped bust 12 murder cases and participated in more than 20 other criminal cases. In 2016, she was given the first-class meritorious dog award by China's Ministry of Public Security.

Sinogene hopes cloning of Huahuangma's "excellent genes" can protect the breed and be "passed down from generation to generation." The company is conducting the project along with Yunnan Agricultural University and the Ministry of Public Security, according to Chinese state media.

In September 2018, scientists began cultivating Huahuangma's cells from a few millimeters of skin samples. The contents of the somatic cell were then implanted into an egg cell that had its nucleus removed. This embryo was then transferred to a surrogate beagle.

Kunxun's DNA is 99% the same as Huahuangma's, the state-run Global Times reported.

On March 5, 3-month-old Kunxun flew to the Kunming Police Dog Base in China's Yunnan province to begin training. She is showing "a better potential" than non-cloned Kuming wolfdogs already, the base's leading researcher Wan Jiusheng told the Science and Technology Daily.

If Kunxun passes training, she will officially become a police dog at 10-months-old.

China isn't the first country to enlist cloned police dogs. In 2007, South Korea cloned the country's first canine and since 2011 has been using an elite army of highly-trained golden Labrador retrievers to search out contraband at Seoul's Incheon airport.

Serenitie Wang reported from Beijing. Alex Stambaugh reported and wrote from Hong Kong.

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China begins training first cloned police dog

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One Chinese police force has a new asset this month: its first cloned police dog. The puppy, a Kunming wolfdog called Kunxun, was created using cells from what police described as the "Sherlock Holmes" of canine law enforcement, as part of a program they hope will reduce the training time and cost of police dogs in future.

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On the hunt for 'zombie fungi' that could save lives -- and the planet

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On the hunt for 'zombie fungi' that could save lives -- and the planet

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It's a sunny morning, and Sara Landvik is foraging in the wild parts of Hampstead Heath, one of London's iconic parks.

She studies the soil, the trees and their roots in search of fungi, because long walks like these are actually part of her job. She regularly ventures out in hope of discovering new fungal species hidden deep in the dirt or high among the trees.

"We want to collect as many diverse species of fungi as possible," said Landvik, a mycologist - a fungi scientist - at the biotech company Novozymes. "Diversity is really the key word for everything that we do."

The organisms have a plethora of applications that can benefit humankind in the production of food and alcohol, drugs, biofuels, washing detergents and even a famous childhood toy: LEGO.

Their nutritional value shouldn't be overlooked, however. There are about 350 species of edible fungi. With vitamin D, glutathione and ergothioneine, they can reduce oxidative stress linked to diseases such as cancer, heart disease and dementia.

Fungi are unique beings, Landvik explained. "They're so different from plants, and they're so different from animals. They are their own kingdom. The evolution of fungi has radiated into so many different directions. They are really, really, amazing."

The best estimate is that there are as many as 3.8 million species of fungi worldwide - though only about 144,000 have been discovered, according to this year's State of the World's Fungi report, compiled by staff members at Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew, and several others.

New ones are found by searching forested areas, collecting soil samples and bringing the samples back to the lab to be studied, Landvik says.

But the real skill is understanding how they work.

In the wild, fungi are not able to move, so they compete against other fungi or bacteria for resources and, in doing so, produce toxic chemicals. In some cases, these chemicals have been useful to humans.

Once samples reach the laboratory, Landvik says, they are grown inside a Petri dish and cut into pieces, which are then put into a flask with a liquid of nutrients such as minerals and vitamins and a carbon source to help the fungi grow.

Fungi grow by secreting enzymes - proteins that catalyze or speed up chemical reactions - which are captured by the liquid inside the flask, allowing them to be studied in-depth.

Thousands of fungi are studied before researchers stumble upon one that could have an application, Landvik said.

It's like a "lottery ticket," she says, as each discovery could turn up "something that can make a difference in the world, something that we can make a greener industry possible, and so on."

For example, one of Landvik's colleagues came across an enzyme that can be used to reduce the formation of the chemical acrylamide, which forms when starchy food is baked or fried and can be carcinogenic. By searching a database for homologous gene sequences she found sequences for asparaginase, also the name of the enzyme, and soon saw that many fungi contain this enzyme. One of them went on to become Acrylaway, a solution that reduces acrylamide formation in food products processed at high temperatures, which the company say can cut acrylamide formation by up to 95%.

More famous is the discovery of penicillin in 1928, discovered when Alexander Fleming was sorting out his Petri dishes after a holiday and saw a blob of mold had grown with a clear zone surrounding it, later found to be a strain of Penicillium notatum.

How we search for useful enzymes 90 years later is still down to serendipity.

'Evil puppetmaster'

Tom Prescott, a research leader at Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew, in the UK, also notes the many useful applications of fungi.

"Broadly speaking, the three big topics are perhaps medicines, biotechnology and, in the broadest sense ... fungi are really good for eating," he explained, standing in Kew's fungarium, a large room filled with rows of boxes housing 1.25 million specimens of fungi from all around the world, including specimens collected by John Ray, Charles Darwin and Alexander von Humboldt.

People are discovering fungi on a yearly basis, Prescott told CNN. "This is everything from fungi that you could see with the naked eye all the way down to microscopic fungi that you perhaps wouldn't know they were there but we detect them using DNA."

Some famous examples of medical applications are the cholesterol-lowering drug lovastatin, produced by the Aspergillus terreus fungus, or a hepatitis B vaccine that is made using yeast.

The drug fingolimod - used to treat the autoimmune disease multiple sclerosis - is derived from an eye-catching "zombie" fungus, Isaria sinclairii, that invades an insect, takes it over and eventually acts like an "evil puppetmaster," controlling the insect's body and behavior to perform tasksthat are advantageous for the fungus, Prescott said, holding a a boxed sample of the fungus in action.

Meanwhile, the insect is kept alive, "so it's really gruesome," he said. "It's crucial that the fungus doesn't kill the insect initially but does keep it alive, so that's why it produces an immunosuppressant chemical." This chemical is myriocin, which also suppresses the human immune system.

"A lot of fundamental biochemistry and even immunology is shared, surprisingly, even between insects and humans," he explained.

Fungi are also useful in converting one chemical into another, such as in the production of vitamin B tablets.

There has been competition between human chemists and fungi over which is better at producing these pills, and the fungi turned out to be a more cost-effective option, Prescott said.

Saving the environment

About half of all commercially used enzymes are derived from fungi, Shauna M. McKelvey and Richard A. Murphy write in " Fungi: Biology and Applications." The bookcites the enzymes proteases and amylases, used in detergent preparations, as the most significant industrial application of enzymes.

Enzymes' use in detergents dates to 1988. Lipase, derived from the fungus Thermomyces lanuginosus, is effective at removing fat stains from clothes.

Most detergents contain several enzymes, such as proteases, amylases, cellulases and lipases, to enhance effectiveness and allow washing at lower temperatures.

Fungi are also used to keep clothing looking fresh.

Fungi are natural degraders of waste material, Prescott said. In forests, they break down leaf material by making enzymes called cellulases. "It happens that if you add cellulases to washing powders, it nibbles at the tiny cotton threads of cotton fabrics, and it kind of nibbles them off, and it gives the appearance of cotton looking newer than it perhaps actually is."

In September, the fungus Aspergillus tubingensis was discovered in Pakistan. A team of 100 scientists reported that it could break down plastics such as polyester polyurethane, often used in refrigerator insulation, possibly in weeks rather than years, potentially making it a key player in the fight against the world's plastic waste problem.

Prescott believes the ultimate goal would be to create plastic-like materials from fungi - that can then be broken down by fungi. It is not clear whether that might be possible, but "that's what makes it really exciting," he added.

Fungus in farming

Another way to reduce pollution is by adding enzymes to animal feed, helping animals break down nutrients such as phosphates, which farmers add to enhance animal bone health and growth.

One fungal enzyme, phytase, breaks down such difficult chemicals and is especially helpful for somephosphate-containing molecules that can't be digested by animals. When excreted, phosphates can get into waterways, where they cause bacterial growth. This also consumes oxygen in water, harming the ecosystem of the aquatic environment, saidPrescott.

Landvik explained that the addition of phytase to release phosphates from feed and help animals absorb this essential nutrient also reduces costs for farmers and environmental pollution.

She believes enzymes in fungi are the key to making a number of industries more sustainable by replacing some industrial steps.

"And if you do have a mechanical or a chemical step in the industry that can often be replaced by an enzyme that can do the same. But with less impact on the environment."

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On the hunt for 'zombie fungi' that could save lives -- and the planet

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
It's a sunny morning, and Sara Landvik is foraging in the wild parts of Hampstead Heath, one of London's iconic parks. She studies the soil, the trees and their roots in search of fungi, because long walks like these are actually part of her job.

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Researchers 3D-print heart from human patient's cells

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Researchers 3D-print heart from human patient's cells

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Researchers have 3D-printed a heart using a patient's cells, providing hope that the technique could be used to heal hearts or engineer new ones for transplants.

"This is the first time anyone anywhere has successfully engineered and printed an entire heart replete with cells, blood vessels, ventricles and chambers," Professor Tal Dvir of Tel Aviv University's School of Molecular Cell Biology and Biotechnology said in a statement. Dvir is senior author of the research, published Monday in the journal Advanced Science.

The process of printing the heart involved a biopsy of the fatty tissue that surrounds abdominal organs. Researchers separated the cells in the tissue from the rest of the contents, namely the extracellular matrix linking the cells. The cells were reprogrammed to become stem cells with the ability to differentiate into heart cells; the matrix was processed into a personalized hydrogel that served as the printing "ink."

The cells and hydrogel were first used to create heart patches with blood vessels and, from there, an entire heart.

"At this stage, our 3D heart is small, the size of a rabbit's heart," Dvir said. "But larger human hearts require the same technology."

Previously, scientists had been able to print only simple tissues without blood vessels.

Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death in the developing world. Heart transplantation is the only way to treat end-stage heart failure, highlighting the importance of developing techniques such as 3D printing, according to the authors.

Dvir also explained that using the patient's own cells is key to engineering the tissues and organs.

"The biocompatibility of engineered materials is crucial to eliminating the risk of implant rejection, which jeopardizes the success of such treatments," he said.

Next, the researchers plan to train the hearts to behave like hearts, Dvir explained. "The cells need to form a pumping ability; they can currently contract, but we need them to work together."

If researchers are successful, they plan to transplant the 3D-printed heart in animal models and, after that, humans.

"Maybe, in ten years, there will be organ printers in the finest hospitals around the world, and these procedures will be conducted routinely," Dvir said.

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computer science and information technology

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Researchers 3D-print heart from human patient's cells | CNN

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Researchers have 3D-printed a heart using a patient's cells, providing hope that the technique could be used to heal hearts or engineer new ones for transplants. "This is the first time anyone anywhere has successfully engineered and printed an entire heart replete with cells, blood vessels, ventricles and chambers," Professor Tal Dvir of Tel Aviv University's School of Molecular Cell Biology and Biotechnology said in a statement.

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A capsule tricks your stomach into feeling full; could it treat obesity?

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A capsule tricks your stomach into feeling full; could it treat obesity?

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A new capsule was recently cleared by the US Food and Drug Administration to help adults who are overweight or obese shed some pounds when used along with diet and exercise, according to the biotechnology company Gelesis, which developed the product.

Research finding that this weight management approach has a "strong safety and efficacy profile" was presented Monday at the 26th European Congress on Obesity in Glasgow, Scotland. The research was funded by Gelesis.

The company announced FDA clearance this month and noted that the product, called Plenity, is the only prescription weight management product cleared for use by overweight adults with a body mass index of 25 or higher.

Body mass index, or BMI, is a person's weight in kilograms divided by the square of their height in meters, and the measurement is used to screen for obesity. A BMI of 25 to 29.9 is considered overweight, and a BMI of 30 or greater is considered obese.

Nearly 40% of people 20 and older in the United States are living with obesity.

Gelesis said Plenity will be broadly available by prescription in the United States in 2020. No cost for the product has been announced.

How it works

Even though it looks like a pill, Plenity is considered a medical device.

The hydrogel capsule can be taken with water before lunch and dinner. In the stomach, the capsule releases thousands of particles that absorb water and swell to create small individual gel pieces. Those gel pieces increase the volume and elasticity of the stomach and small intestine, helping to make you feel full, which then could lead to weight loss.

Once in the large intestine, the hydrogel is partially broken down by enzymes, loses its three-dimensional structure, releases the water that was absorbed and then gets expelled in feces.

"The most compelling aspects of this approach are its effectiveness, novel mechanism of action and impressive safety data," Dr. Ken Fujioka, a weight loss expert, endocrinology researcher at Scripps Clinic and scientific advisor to Gelesis, said in the company's announcement.

"This approach creates another arm in the treatment algorithm of weight management and could be used by an overwhelming majority of people struggling with weight issues," he said.

Data from a study on Plenity, published in the journal Obesity in February, found that the treatment resulted in 6.4% weight loss in a group of 223 patients using the product compared with 4.4% in 213 patients using a placebo. The study was funded by Gelesis.

The device should be used with caution in patients with gastrointestinal conditions, such as gastroesophageal reflux disease, ulcers or heartburn, according to Gelesis. The most common adverse events relating to the treatment are gastrointestinal disorders, including gastrointestinal discomfort.

Plenity isn't the only weight loss aid that has emerged in recent years; several interventions are on the market.

Yet "for the first time in a long time, it's a new treatment for obesity that doesn't affect the central nervous system," said Dr. Dyan Hes, medical director of Gramercy Pediatrics in New York, who sits on the board of the American Board of Obesity Medicine.

"So most of the drugs on the market that are appetite suppressants or work on the appetite regulatory system have some kind of central nervous system side effect, because any time you affect any neurotransmitter in the brain regarding appetite, there's always going to be another systemic effect of some system, whether it's moodiness or it can affect depression or it can affect headaches," said Hes, who has no relation to Plenity but is board-certified in both pediatrics and obesity medicine.

"This is really, clearly just focused on the physicality of being more full," she said. "Your stomach is going to be more full, and it's excreted, and it's really not affecting your central nervous system in that sense."

'The wave of the future'

In general, a medication can be considered effective for weight management if, after one year of treatment, at least 35% of those in the drug group (and about double the proportion of people of the placebo group) lose at least 5% of their weight in a study or trial.

Weight loss drugs approved for long-term use include orlistat (brand name Xenical), lorcaserin ( Belviq) and liraglutide (Saxenda) as well as the combination drugs naltrexone-bupropion (Contrave) and phentermine-topiramate (Qsymia).

In one recent study, these drugs helped overweight or obese people lose at least 5% of their body weight at the end of a year - that's at least 10 pounds if you weigh 200 - compared with a placebo. Qsymia and Saxenda were associated with the highest odds of achieving that amount of weight loss.

For many, losing 5% to 10% of your body weightis associated with improved blood pressure, triglycerides and blood sugar, factors that lower the risk for heart disease and diabetes.

Hes called weight loss interventions like Plenity "the wave of the future," and she hopes the product soon might be approved for use in children.

"I see so many obese patients, and I really don't have options for them," she said. "And then we have something like this, which is literally just a cellulose that you swallow and you excrete. I think the biggest problem for me in pediatrics is going to be able to get the younger kids to be able to swallow the pills."

CNN's Lisa Drayer contributed to this report.

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A capsule tricks your stomach into feeling full; could it treat obesity?

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A new weight loss capsule has been cleared by the US Food and Drug Administration to help adults who are either overweight or obese shed some pounds, when used along with diet and exercise, according to the biotechnology company Gelesis, which developed the product.

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Genetically modified virus saves teen's life, offers hope in fight against antibiotic resistance

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Genetically modified virus saves teen's life, offers hope in fight against antibiotic resistance

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genetically modified virus saves teen's life

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offers hope in fight against antibiotic resistance - cnn

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Genetically modified virus saves teen's life, offers hope in fight against antibiotic resistance

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A teen recovered from an antibiotic-resistant bacterial infection after treatment with an experimental cocktail of genetically engineered viruses. The researchers call it a medical first.

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These plastic-chomping caterpillars can help fight pollution

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These plastic-chomping caterpillars can help fight pollution

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these plastic-chomping caterpillars can help fight pollution - cnn

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These plastic-chomping caterpillars can help fight pollution

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The tiny waxworm's plastic-eating skills are a result of its unique gut bacteria, which could guide efforts to find an effective biodegradation system to tackle plastic waste.

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Genetically engineered moths have been released into the wild to wipe out pests

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Genetically engineered moths have been released into the wild to wipe out pests

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genetically engineered moths could be crop protection solution - cnn

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Sterilizing male moths could lead to sustainable crop protection, study finds

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Genetically modified diamondback moths designed to wipe out wild pest populations were released in fields for the first time in New York state.

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Allbirds’ new clothing line includes t-shirts made from discarded crab shells

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Allbirds’ new clothing line includes t-shirts made from discarded crab shells

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Today, the four-year-old company launches its debut apparel collection with a line of t-shirts, sweaters, cardigans, and a puffer jacket for men and women. In keeping with Allbirds' commitment to sustainability, all of these garments are made with more eco-friendly materials that have a low carbon footprint. Some of the fibers will be familiar to fans of the brand, like its responsibly sourced tencel and wool. But the company has also launched an entirely new material for the t-shirts, which are made from discarded crab shells.

Jad Finck, Allbirds head of innovation and sustainability, says the company spent several years perfecting this fiber. In 2016, a Japanese scientist first developed a fiber from crab shells and highlighted the material's inherent antimicrobial properties. Finck says that the first manufacturers of the material ground the shells into powder, then coated fabrics in a kind of natural alternative to the chemical anti-microbial finishes on the market. But now, it is possible to extrude the powder into a fiber, which can be woven into fabric. Allbirds has partnered with a mill to create its own version, which it is calling XO, a play on the word "exoskeleton". "Discarded material is the holy grail when it comes to sustainable fibers," says Finck. "It's far better for the environment that getting raw materials from scratch."

Finck says that Allbirds is working with the Marine Stewardship Council to certify the sustainability of these clothes. This would be the first time the Council has certified clothes, rather than seafood. Allbirds was also the first brand to receive a certification from the Forestry Stewardship Council for its eucalyptus fiber tree runner shoes.

While fashion brands can work to make their products and manufacturing processes more eco-friendly, a garment's impact on the planet is also determined by the consumer, such as how frequently they launder it and how long they wear it for before throwing it out. Finck says that Allbirds' team has kept this in mind in the design process. The antimicrobial properties, for instance, will mean that customers can wait longer between washes. The clothes are also deliberately designed to be classic, rather than fashion forward, to make it more likely that customers will wear them for years to come.

With this clothing line, Allbirds is defining its aesthetic, which verges on normcore. The pieces are genderless and come in neutral, earthy colors like cream, pine green, and navy. The silhouettes are loose fitting and the materials look cosy to the touch. The puffer jacket, for instance, has a wool and tencel exterior that has a soft hand feel. The brand's simple, streamlined sneakers have become iconic and ubiquitous in cities like San Francisco and New York. Now, we may begin to see people walking wearing Allbirds head-to-toe.

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Allbirds' new clothing line includes t-shirts made from discarded crab shells

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Today, the four-year-old company launches its debut apparel collection with a line of t-shirts, sweaters, cardigans, and a puffer jacket for men and women. In keeping with Allbirds' commitment to sustainability, all of these garments are made with more eco-friendly materials that have a low carbon footprint.

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scientists create glow-in-the-dark plants - cnn

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Fans of the "Avatar" movie will have long dreamed of lush jungles teeming with glowing plants.

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The technology designed to make airports safer

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The technology designed to make airports safer

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the technology designed to make airports safer

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The technology designed to make airports safer

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Airports and airlines are looking to new technologies to enhance travel and security.

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Future design: What 'living' clothes can do to absorb carbon emissions

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Future design: What 'living' clothes can do to absorb carbon emissions

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This company thinks bacteria can help fix fashion's water pollution problem

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This company thinks bacteria can help fix fashion's water pollution problem

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In 2013, a team of Cambridge University scientists were in Nepal's Kathmandu Valley, developing a device to measure pollution in the region's waters.

The scientists spoke to local people, who relied on the filthy streams and rivers for their water supply, and learned that waste from textile factories was contaminating the waterways.

"We were shocked," says Orr Yarkoni, one of the researchers on the expedition.

The scientists analyzed the water and their findings aligned with what the locals said -- most of the hazardous chemicals came from the textile industry.

Nepal is one of the most water-abundant countries in the world, but water pollution is a major problem. More than 85% of the population doesn't have access to safe drinking water.

"That feeling of 'I have no safe water to drink' is something that no human should have to feel in this day and age," says Yarkoni.

"When we realized that so much of the pollution comes from something as simple as putting color into our clothes, we thought 'there has to be a better way,'" he says.

Three years later, that thinking spurred Yarkoni and two Cambridge University colleagues, Jim Ajioka and David Nugent, to co-found Colorifix and develop a new way to dye clothes that won't harm the planet. Yarkoni claims the technology they have developed eliminates the need for toxic chemicals. It also uses up to 90% less water and up to 40% less energy than the conventional dyeing process, he says.

The color purple

For millennia, people used natural dyes to color fabrics.

Then in 1856, chemist William Henry Perkin had a serendipitous accident.

Perkin was trying to produce quinine, a substance used to treat malaria, when he inadvertently created the first synthetic dye -- a vivid purple substance which easily transferred onto cloth.

The purple dye opened a floodgate of synthetic color possibilities that revolutionized the world of fashion. But with it came a torrent of environmental problems.

Today, the dyeing industry uses more than 8,000 chemicals. Many, including sulfur, arsenic and formaldehyde, are harmful to wildlife and human health.

In less developed Asian countries, which produce a large share of the world's clothes, weak regulation enforcement means that many textile manufacturers dump toxic substances directly into local waterways. And it's happening on a massive scale -- the dyeing process uses enough water to fill 2 million Olympic-sized swimming pools each year. This makes the dyeing industry one of the most environmentally harmful in the world, responsible for up to one fifth of industrial water pollution.

Finding microscopic solutions

The device Orr and his team developed to test water pollution in Nepal used genetically modified bacteria that changed color when exposed to hazardous chemicals.

He and his business partners decided to harness the bacteria's color-changing ability to develop their dyeing innovation.

Colorifix -- based in Norwich, in the east of England -- produces dyes that are inspired by "nature's blueprints." But the technology doesn't derive pigments straight from plants or animals, like traditional natural dyeing methods. Instead, it copies nature's processes in a lab setting, by replicating the "DNA message" that codes for color in an organism.

Yarkoni says Colorifix has made pigments using genetic code taken from plants, dragonflies and gorillas, among others, using DNA information sourced from scientific studies. "We don't like bothering animals," he adds.

Colorifix inserts the genetic information that directs the color-making process into a bacterial cell, which copies itself every 25 minutes. The bacteria are fed with sugar molasses and nitrogen -- by-products of the agricultural industry -- in a fermenting machine, where the cells multiply in number, each making more pigment.

Yarkoni likens the fermentation process to making beer, "but instead of making alcohol, we're making the pigments."

A growing movement

Colorifix isn't the only company using biotechnology to create sustainable shades. German-Israeli firm Algalife is growing non-toxic dyes with algae. French startup Pili uses a similar fermentation process to Colorifix to make color. CEO Jeremie Blache says that Pili's process, though still at the trial stage, is projected to use 80% less water and produce 90% less carbon emissions, than conventional dye-making methods.

However, Yarkoni claims Colorifix is the only biotechnology startup that aims to transform dye production and application.

While other bacteria-based dye innovations rely on vast amounts of water and chemicals to isolate pigments from bacteria, and make and apply the dye, Colorifix puts the bacteria straight onto the fabric to color it. The fabric is heated, causing the microorganisms' membranes to burst and release the color, which chemically attaches to the fiber. The remnants of bacteria cells are then washed off -- but the color remains.

Flying colors

Yarkoni says that an added benefit of his technology is that it cuts down on transport pollution -- one factor behind the fashion industry's huge carbon footprint.

Rather than transporting large quantities of dye, Colorifix can send just five grams of color-packed bacteria to a dyehouse. Orr claims the microorganism will multiply and that after 10 days, the factory will be able to produce 50 tonnes of dye solution a day.

But this "grow your own" approach has drawbacks; dyehouses will need to buy fermenting equipment and receive training from Colorifix to adopt the process in-house.

Pili's Blache argues that if dyehouses can simply buy ready-to-use pigments, they are more likely to make the switch to sustainable dyes.

Georgia Parker, Innovation Manager at startup accelerator Fashion for Good, says that transporting live microbes safely is another hurdle.

"There is specific legislation around the transportation of living organisms across different geographies," Parker says. "As a dyehouse, you would need to get government signoff to import these organisms."

Despite the barriers, Parker anticipates that bacteria-based dyes will become cost effective in the long run and will be used more widely in the industry "in the next couple years."

Beyond greenwashing

Colorifix is already in high demand: Yarkoni says the startup has more customers than it can handle, and has attracted support from brands including H&M. The Swedish fashion giant invested in the company in 2018 and continues to pilot the technology within its supply chain.

H&M is one of a number of fast fashion brands adopting ambitious goals to reduce their environmental and chemical footprint. Francois Souchet, who leads the Ellen Macarthur Foundation's Make Fashion Circular initiative, says that "increased scrutiny from policymakers" and "expectations from the consumer for better solutions" are pushing the industry to become more sustainable.

While it's early days for Colorifix -- the company launched its first industrial trial at a dyehouse in Portugal last month -- Yarkoni says he is confident that bioengineering solutions will help set the fashion industry on a greener path.

"I truly believe that in the future, a very large proportion of our industry -- if not all of it -- will be based on these biological principles."

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colorifix thinks bacteria can fix fashion's water pollution problem - cnn

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This company thinks bacteria can help fix fashion's water pollution problem

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In 2013, a team of Cambridge University scientists were in Nepal's Kathmandu Valley, developing a device to measure pollution in the region's waters. The scientists spoke to local people, who relied on the filthy streams and rivers for their water supply, and learned that waste from textile factories was contaminating the waterways.

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5 wild organic materials that could transform the fashion industry

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5 wild organic materials that could transform the fashion industry

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One of the greatest challenges faced by the textiles and fashion industry is to make itself more sustainable, not just in terms of economic and labor-force issues but in the face of ecological necessity. The production of textiles involves a long chain of complex processes to convert raw materials such as fibers or petroleum into finished fabrics or fashion products.

These processes are typically resource-intensive, requiring high concentrations of chemicals, large amounts of water, high temperatures, and long processing times. This commonly results in high energy consumption and waste. A transition toward a more sustainable textiles and fashion sector requires approaches that can minimize its environmental and social impacts-cleaner manufacturing processes, which can dramatically reduce carbon emissions and water use and eliminate the use of harmful chemicals.

Here are five ways nature is being explored by individuals, research teams, and industry to help make fashion more sustainable. Scientists are uncovering and exploiting underlying mechanisms and models found in nature to design new materials, processes, and products as well as systems of production for the future. These range from traditional to contemporary processes that use low- or high-tech methods, practiced by artists in their studios, scientists in labs, or artists and scientists working together collaboratively.

Enzymes as new design tools

Enzymes are highly specific biocatalysts found within the cells of all living organisms. They offer the possibility of manufacturing textiles using simpler and less severe processing conditions, which can reduce the consumption of chemicals, energy, and water and the generation of waste. As a result, enzymes have successfully replaced a range of industrial textile processes, since they started being used in the early part of the 20th century.

Cellulases and another group of enzymes called laccases are used in the production of stonewashed denim fabrics and garments. Stonewashed effects on indigo-dyed cotton denim used to be created by pumice stones-but the use of pumice stones caused damage to both fibers and machines.

Working with colleagues from De Montfort University, I have been investigating the possibilities of using laccase and protease as creative design tools to make industrial textile processes more sustainable.

In our research we used enzymes to synthesize textile dyes and pattern fabrics using ambient processing conditions, such as temperatures as low as 50°C at atmospheric pressure. We now have ways to create many different colors with just a slight alteration of processing conditions, reacting enzymes and compounds together in various different conditions in a technique that eliminates the need to use manufactured dyes.

New ways to make leather

From collagen: The area of synthetic biology is growing at a rapid rate, and as a result many companies such as New York-based Modern Meadow are exploring the possibilities this area of modern science offers. The company has successfully bio-fabricated a leather alternative called Zoa.

Visited the Beazly Design of the Year Awards today @DesignMuseum , fascinating projects featuring a jacket made from spiders silk, Zoa collagen leather, a boot for Mars grown from human sweat & fabric transformed by rain water. Last day is tomorrow, don't miss it ???? pic.twitter.com/IVsFVacgtF

- Anna (@annavmmarks) January 5, 2019

The advanced material is constructed from collagen (a protein)-the main component of natural leather-but Zoa is designed and grown in a lab from animal-free collagen derived from yeast.

The material is capable of replicating the qualities of leather and offers new design aesthetics and performance properties not previously possible-while also eliminating the high environmental impact of raising cows and tanning their hides (which is often a toxic process).

From fungi: Similarly, San Francisco-based MycoWorks-among others-has been exploring the possibilities of creating sustainable materials using fungi. Mycelium (a mushroom root material), which is grown from fungi and agricultural byproducts, is custom-engineered in a lab using a carbon-negative process.

It is easy to cultivate, fast-growing, and can be easily manipulated to adopt properties similar to leather and many other mainstream materials such as wood and polystyrene.

Fieldwork

Grass roots: An interesting project by the artist Diana Scherer called Interwoven explores the fabrication of materials using living plant networks, which could be used to construct garments of the future. She has developed a process which manipulates oat and wheat plant roots to grow intricate lace-like textile materials.

She buries templates in the soil that act as molds, which manipulate and channel the plants' root systems to reveal woven structures constructed from geometrics and delicate motifs once the fabric is excavated.

Cow manure: In a circular economy model, nothing is considered waste. In the Netherlands, a company called Inspidere has developed a method it calls Mestic that uses cow manure to produce new textiles. The processing method enables cellulose to be extracted from manure to produce two materials, viscose and cellulose acetate.

This dress is made of mestic, a new fabric made from cow manure https://t.co/Bz38cSASnR pic.twitter.com/IVVXEastZ0

- CNN (@CNN) April 18, 2017

The manure is separated and processed in a lab to extract pure cellulose, which is further processed to create viscose (regenerated cellulose) and cellulose acetate (bio-plastic), both of which can be turned into textiles. The group has achieved lab-scale success; the challenge remains to scale this process up commercially.

These are just a few of the ways in which nature is being harnessed to provide the textile and fashion industry with realistic and viable options to move towards sustainability.
Chetna Prajapati is lecturer in textiles at Loughborough University. This post originally appeared on The Conversation.

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5 wild organic materials that could transform the fashion industry

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One of the greatest challenges faced by the textiles and fashion industry is to make itself more sustainable, not just in terms of economic and labor-force issues but in the face of ecological necessity. The production of textiles involves a long chain of complex processes to convert raw materials such as fibers or petroleum into finished fabrics or fashion products.

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Bioplastics continue to blossom—are they really better for the environment?

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Bioplastics continue to blossom—are they really better for the environment?

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The English metallurgist Alexander Parkes never saw the widespread realization of his spectacular 19th-century invention, celluloid, the first plastic. While a revolutionary breakthrough, Parkesine, as it was called, was expensive and brittle. It was used in objects like buttons and combs, but ultimately quality control issues led Parkes' company to bankruptcy in 1868 just 12 years after the discovery.

Parkesine, however, was also the first bio plastic-a plastic made from renewable plant material instead of fossil fuels. And today with the environmental impact of plastics increasingly on the public mind, bioplastics are making a big comeback. They're proposed by some as the solution to beaches deluged with plastic and fish bellies stuffed with bottle caps. And perhaps bioplastics can replace oil-based polymers that commonly trash oceans with materials that can break down more easily and would protect a planet already smothered in these resilient substances.

Bioplastic items already exist, of course, but whether they're actually better for the environment or can truly compete with traditional plastics is complicated. Some bioplastics aren't much better than fossil fuel-based polymers. And for the few that are less injurious to the planet, cost and social acceptance may stand in the way. Even if widespread adoption of bioplastics occurs down the line, it won't be a quick or cheap fix. In the meantime, there is also some pollution caused by bioplastics themselves to consider. Even if bioplastics are often less damaging than the status quo, they aren't a flawless solution.

So, could saving the planet simply come down to some design decisions? We may soon find out. Market demand for bioplastics is ballooning, with global industrial output predicted to reach 2.62 million tonnes annually by 2023, according to the Berlin-based trade association European Bioplastics. Currently, that's only one percent of the 335 million tonnes of conventional plastics produced every year. But the European Commission, in its 2018 Circular Economy Action Plan, detailed bioplastics research as part of their strategy to drive investment in a climate-neutral economy.

"Sometimes we like to see the word 'green,' but we always should have appropriate awareness about the material we are dealing with," says Federica Ruggero, an environmental engineer at the University of Florence, Italy. "It's a very good starting point in the production chain to have these new materials that can substitute plastics ... but it's also important to consider the waste that comes from this material."

To put it plainly: not all bioplastics are created equal. So which ones may be key to a genuinely "greener" future? In 2020, five candidates seem to be rising to the eco-friendly top.

Bioplastic basics

Bioplastics have come a long way since the days of Alexander Parkes. Today, these materials can be made from many renewable resources: cornstarch, beet sugar, kiwi skins, shrimp shells, wood pulp, even mangos and seaweed. They can function approximately the same as materials like vinyl or PET, the plastic most commonly used in drink bottles.

But if these polymers don't actually have a smaller carbon footprint than plastics refined from petroleum, they may only be another example of greenwashing, a misleading marketing tactic more about image than outcomes. That's one of the problems with the fact that there isn't yet a universal definition of "bioplastic."

"Bioplastic is basically anything that people like to call bioplastic," says Dr. Frederik Wurm, a chemist at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research in Mainz, Germany. The term can currently mean a material made from fossil fuels that can biodegrade, such as PCL, a plastic used in packaging and drug delivery.

Bioplastics can also be biobased and not biodegradable, like the PET bottles Coca-Cola made entirely from plants. But their end product is chemically identical to PET made from oil, so it can still take centuries to fully break down. In 2013, the Coca-Cola Company (considered by one environmental advocacy group as the " most polluting brand") pledged to make all their bottles this way by 2020, but it later backpedaled to focus more on recycling, according to the The W all Street Journal. Greenpeace, the pro-environment non-profit, has said, "Plant bottles are not the answer."

Additives mixed with conventional plastics to speed up biodegradation don't seem to help either. Oxo-degradable products are standard plastics that are chemically treated to quickly fragment when exposed to sunlight and oxygen-but they don't break down entirely. And because these plastics are otherwise no different from untreated versions, the microplastics they produce can still pose environmental hazards. The European Union is currently working to ban oxo-degradable plastics.

Generally, it appears the starting material is less important than what it's turned into, making the ideal plastic both biobased and biodegradable. A few of these polymers do exist, but they disintegrate only under certain conditions.

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Bioplastics continue to blossom-are they really better for the environment?

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The English metallurgist Alexander Parkes never saw the widespread realization of his spectacular 19th-century invention, celluloid, the first plastic. While a revolutionary breakthrough, Parkesine, as it was called, was expensive and brittle. It was used in objects like buttons and combs, but ultimately quality control issues led Parkes' company to bankruptcy in 1868 just 12 years after the discovery.

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Kombucha Slime Is an Edible Solution to the World’s Plastic Problem

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Kombucha Slime Is an Edible Solution to the World’s Plastic Problem

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Produce can be wrapped in biodegradable 'Scoby' sheets, then tossed or eaten

Photos courtesy of Rosa Janusz/MakeGrowLab

K ombucha, the hip health drink with a vinegary sweetness, has taken the wellness world by storm, but its slimy byproduct may soon transform sustainability. The fermentation process used to brew kombucha yields a "symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast" - Scoby for short - that's actually a living film on top of the liquid, like a mushroom cap. To Polish designer Roza Janusz, Scoby was an inspiration to develop a material that could close the loop on the world's single-use plastic packaging problem.

Hundreds of millions of tons of plastic are produced each year, much of which is created for single use. The impact of discarded plastic on the environment has been catastrophic: It can take hundreds of years to degrade, if it degrades at all; clogs oceans and rivers; and breaks down into microplastics, which make their way into food and our own bodies. The rising global awareness of the damage plastic is causing has created an opportunity for Janusz's ingenious alternative to thrive.

While Janusz was a student at the School of Form in Poznań, Poland, she developed a method to turn Scobys into usable, edible packaging for dry or semi-dry food. Her packaging prototypes were created by making kombucha: allowing bacteria to eat the available sugars in a liquid, producing strands of insoluble cellulose as a byproduct. Over time, the Scoby grows into a waxy, pancake-like membrane atop the liquid, protecting the kombucha underneath.

Scoby packaging can be used to wrap dry and semi-dry food. It takes on the flavor of whatever it is used to wrap.

When Janusz realized that the traditional pint-size kombucha method was unsuitable for scaling up, she began to look for alternatives. In 2018, she founded the biodesign studio MakeGrowLab with environmental scientist Josh Brito, initially to research the qualities of her material. But as they worked, she says, "we saw the huge need for a commercial development of Scoby."

Scoby packaging material is neither plastic nor bioplastic, it's pure cellulose.

After a lot of trial and error, Janusz finalized her scalable, film-like membrane by adding vegetable-based agricultural waste to the bacteria and yeast. This improved the fermentation process, while also ensuring her product was zero-waste.

"We had to find a solution to keep the material home-compostable but make it scalable," says Janusz.

The packaging has all the benefits of plastic, but none of its downsides: The durable, malleable texture acts as an oxygen barrier and is anti-bacterial, with a six-month shelf life - which can even be extended when used in conjunction with certain acidic foodstuffs, like nuts, owing to the material's low pH. And though it might look, unappealingly, like a pig's bladder, when it has served its purpose, the packaging can also be consumed. It takes on the flavor of the food it is used to wrap, and eating it is nutritious for the gut because it's made of healthy bacteria. If it seems too unappetizing to eat, it can be completely composted and used to enrich soil.

"Scoby packaging material is neither plastic nor bioplastic, it's pure cellulose - just like paper - but super paper that we can heat-seal like plastic," says Janusz.

Janusz hopes farms will begin producing their own Scoby packaging, helping eliminate agricultural waste and reducing transmissions from transportation.

Despite Janusz's customized process, scaling up has not been easy. Industrialization has been slow; Scobys are made of living microorganisms, after all. Even now, the average growth time per sheet is two weeks, with high production costs.

The team, however, has plans to move to a new, larger-scale facility to begin mass production. In the meantime, their experimentation continues. They sell samples of the packaging online to support their research and development teams.

This year, Janusz plans to release the first Scoby products developed with clients from different industries, including textiles, to demonstrate the sustainability of her idea. Ultimately, she intends for Scoby to replace plastic packaging, beginning on farms: She believes farmers could produce their own Scoby packaging on a large scale. Doing so, she hopes, will also limit the need to transport Scoby packaging, and the environmental impact that comes with it.

The "perfect future," says Janusz, is one where it becomes the norm for all companies to grow their own packaging.

"But as we know, sometimes perfect is hard to achieve," she continues. "We feel that the norm will be decentralized production. It can be the heart of every industry area and work with other companies and producers just like organisms - exchange resources to keep itself efficient and good for the environment."

Because Scoby can be grown anywhere, and then fed back into the circular production cycle, it could prove a packaging dream. Other sustainable packaging initiatives include Mushroom Packaging by Evocative Designs, which is made from an agricultural byproduct of hemp, and the startup E6PR, which creates biodegradable and compostable six-pack rings out of wheat and barley waste from beer breweries.

Janusz's Scobys can be customized to create films of different thicknesses, expanding their utility. A thicker film, for example, might be used for catering; an even sturdier one might even be treated as a fashion textile. MakeGrowLab has recently released "transleather," an alternative leather fabric made using a similar process to Scoby packaging, and has plans to launch their first wallets soon.

"The increase in popularity of Kombucha is just the first step of a bigger movement," says Janusz. "As a society, we start to see that by cooperating with biology we will easily make not only fermented and health-benefiting drinks but much more."

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Kombucha Slime Is an Edible Solution to the World's Plastic Problem

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K ombucha, the hip health drink with a vinegary sweetness, has taken the wellness world by storm, but its slimy byproduct may soon transform sustainability. The fermentation process used to brew kombucha yields a "symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast" - Scoby for short - that's actually a living film on top of the liquid, like a mushroom cap.

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The end of plastic? New plant-based bottles will degrade in a year

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The end of plastic? New plant-based bottles will degrade in a year

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Beer and soft drinks could soon be sipped from "all-plant" bottles under new plans to turn sustainably grown crops into plastic in partnership with major beverage makers.

A biochemicals company in the Netherlands hopes to kickstart investment in a pioneering project that hopes to make plastics from plant sugars rather than fossil fuels.

The plans, devised by renewable chemicals company Avantium, have already won the support of beer-maker Carlsberg, which hopes to sell its pilsner in a cardboard bottle lined with an inner layer of plant plastic.

Avantium's chief executive, Tom van Aken, says he hopes to greenlight a major investment in the world-leading bioplastics plant in the Netherlands by the end of the year. The project, which remains on track despite the coronavirus lockdown, is set to reveal partnerships with other food and drink companies later in the summer.

Sugars extracted from wheat, along with corn and beets, will be used to produce the plant plastic. Photograph: Images of Kent/Alamy

The project has the backing of Coca-Cola and Danone, which hope to secure the future of their bottled products by tackling the environmental damage caused by plastic pollution and a reliance on fossil fuels.

Globally around 300 million tonnes of plastic is made from fossil fuels every year, which is a major contributor to the climate crisis. Most of this is not recycled and contributes to the scourge of microplastics in the world's oceans. Microplastics can take hundreds of years to decompose completely.

"This plastic has very attractive sustainability credentials because it uses no fossil fuels, and can be recycled - but would also degrade in nature much faster than normal plastics do," says Van Aken.

Avantium's plant plastic is designed to be resilient enough to contain carbonate drinks. Trials have shown that the plant plastic would decompose in one year using a composter, and a few years longer if left in normal outdoor conditions. But ideally, it should be recycled, said Van Aken.

The bio-refinery plans to break down sustainable plant sugars into simple chemical structures that can then be rearranged to form a new plant-based plastic - which could appear on supermarket shelves by 2023.

The path-finder project will initially make a modest 5,000 tonnes of plastic every year using sugars from corn, wheat or beets. However, Avantium expects its production to grow as demand for renewable plastics climbs.

In time, Avantium plans to use plant sugars from sustainable sourced biowaste so that the rise of plant plastic does not affect the global food supply chain.

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The end of plastic? New plant-based bottles will degrade in a year

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Beer and soft drinks could soon be sipped from "all-plant" bottles under new plans to turn sustainably grown crops into plastic in partnership with major beverage makers. A biochemicals company in the Netherlands hopes to kickstart investment in a pioneering project that hopes to make plastics from plant sugars rather than fossil fuels.

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Researchers create eco-friendly, biodegradable flip flops made from algae

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Researchers create eco-friendly, biodegradable flip flops made from algae

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biodegradable flip flops made from algae - cnn

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Researchers create eco-friendly, biodegradable flip flops made from algae

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Researchers at the University of California San Diego have developed flip flops made from algae-based, polyurethane materials to help fight plastic pollution around the world.

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FDA approves new genetically modified pig for allergy-free medical and food products

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FDA approves new genetically modified pig for allergy-free medical and food products

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genetically modified pig for allergy-free medical and food products approved by fda - cnn

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FDA approves new genetically modified pig for allergy-free medical and food products

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The FDA has approved genetic modifications to a pig whose body doesn't make a component that can trigger allergies in people.

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Pigs

Last week, scientists from the University of Edinburgh's Roslin Institute announced they had deleted the section of DNA that leaves pigs vulnerable to porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome, which is estimated to cost European farmers £1.5bn a year in loss of livestock and decreased productivity. Genetically modified animals are banned from the EU food chain, but since this is a new and different technique it's possible they'll be appearing in bacon sandwiches in a few years.

Mosquitoes

British company Oxitec has created genetically modified male mosquitoes that carry a "self-limiting gene". When they are released into the wild and mate with females their offspring do not reach adulthood, so crucially do not contribute to the spread of the Zika virus. Other researchers are looking at using genetic modification to curb the spread of malaria.

Cows

Scientists in both China and Argentina have genetically engineered cows to produce milk similar in composition to that made by humans. After modifying embryos, an Argentinian cow - Rosita Isa - was born that expressed milk containing proteins present in human milk but lacking in cow milk. However, there are a number of scientific, safety and taste issues that would have to be overcome before this replaces "mother's milk" for infants.

Chickens

The Roslin Institute is working on GM chickens that contain an extra gene that interrupts the transmission of avian flu. Unlike a vaccination, the modification still protects the bird if the virus mutates. However, some farmers argue it is better to enforce good farming practices than create disease-free animals.

Salmon

Last year, the Canadian authorities allowed a GM salmon designed by US company AquaBounty to be sold to consumers. It is engineered to reach market size in 18 months, half the time of its natural counterpart. However, the fish is not labelled GM in shops.A recent survey found 90% of Canadians are in favour of clearer food labelling.

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Despite its potential to battle disease and hunger, genetically engineered food is still controversial

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11 Real Examples of Genetically Modified Organisms: Marvels or Monsters

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11 Real Examples of Genetically Modified Organisms: Marvels or Monsters

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7. The glow-in-the-dark pet Glofish

The Glofish goes down in history as the first-ever genetically created designer pet. It was first engineered as a proof of concept for gene splicing, by Dr. Zhiyuan Gong at the National University of Singapore. In 1999, Gong and his team extracted the green fluorescent protein (GFP) from a jellyfish and inserted it into a zebrafish.

The glow-in-the-dark, and now trademark branded, Glofish goldfish were actually inspired by real-life fish and marine life that glows for biological purposes, such as catching prey.

8. Featherless chickens

Featherless chickens were engineered to make the lives of farmers easier - de-feathering a chicken is no easy task.

Unfortunately, as New Scientist points out, many critics of the GM feather-free chickens say that they suffer more than normal birds. Males are unable to mate, as they cannot flap their wings, and "naked" chickens also lose a protective layer of plumage that helps keep away parasites, mosquito bites, and sunburn.

9. See-through frogs for more humane research

Scientists at Hiroshima University genetically engineered a see-through frog. The development paves the way for dissection-free research on animals, reported in 2007.

At the time, Professor Masayuki Sumida of Hiroshima University said the new line of frogs were the world's first transparent four-legged animals. Though it opens up a new intriguing line of research the scientists behind it to do stress that we won't be seeing any see-through mammals any time soon, as mammals typically have a much thicker skin.

10. Monkey-pig chimera

Just last year, scientists in China created pig-primate chimeras. The two piglets looked like normal baby pigs but had primate cells. They died within a week.

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11 Real Examples of Genetically Modified Organisms: Marvels or Monsters

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The Glofish goes down in history as the first-ever genetically created designer pet. It was first engineered as a proof of concept for gene splicing, by Dr. Zhiyuan Gong at the National University of Singapore. In 1999, Gong and his team extracted the green fluorescent protein (GFP) from a jellyfish and inserted it into a zebrafish.

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China Is Genetically Engineering Mini Pigs To Sell As Pets

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China Is Genetically Engineering Mini Pigs To Sell As Pets

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We'd all like our baby pets to stay perpetually tiny, but scientists in China are taking that desire to a whole new level.

BGI, a genomics institute located in Shenzhen, announced in late September that it is genetically engineering miniature pigs to sell as pets for $1,600 each.

The institute creates the micropigs by using a gene-editing technique that alters the genomes of a Bama -- an already small breed of pig -- to make it even smaller. BGI uses TALENs ( an enzyme) to disable one of two copies of the growth hormone receptor gene in a Bama's fetal cells.

BGI then clones pigs from the fetus, which produces stunted male Bama clones that are, in turn, naturally bred with normal females. Half of the resulting offspring are micropigs.

Unlike normal Bamas -- which can weigh up to 100 pounds -- these lab-created pigs only grow up to 30 pounds when mature, around the same weight as a medium-sized dog.

The micropigs were originally used as lab animals that acted as models for human disease, according to Nature magazine. Pigs, specifically smaller breeds of pig, are commonly used as model organisms in biomedical research because they " closely [resemble] man in anatomy, physiology and genetics," according to the National Center for Biotechnology Information.

According to Yong Li, technical director of BGI's animal-science platform, BGI has not observed any health problems associated with cloning in any of the gene-edited pigs they've produced.

In the future, the institute promises to offer miniature pigs in a variety of coat colors and patterns, which will be achieved through further gene editing.

While BGI feels confident about bringing genetically modified micropigs to the public, other experts remain skeptical.

"Obviously, this has to be regulated," Yusuff Abdu, a researcher at New York University's School of Medicine, told Inverse.com. "You can't let lab-engineered animals out into the public. There is a high chance they could get into the wild and offset an ecosystem if they happen to have an advantageous trait. Lab rats and mice are kept out of pet stores for this reason."

For its part, BGI says that the profits made from selling the micropigs as pets will be invested in research that explores how gene editing in pets and in medical research can be regulated.

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China Is Genetically Engineering Mini Pigs To Sell As Pets

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We'd all like our baby pets to stay perpetually tiny, but scientists in China are taking that desire to a whole new level. BGI, a genomics institute located in Shenzhen, announced in late September that it is genetically engineering miniature pigs to sell as pets for $1,600 each.