Biohackers are developing a vegan cheese

Many people say they can’t go vegan because of their addiction to dairy. But that excuse could soon be past its sell-by date if a team of biohackers in California succeeds in scaling up production of a cheese that contains no animal by-products. They call it Real Vegan Cheese. Their aim is to offer a sustainable food alternative with the same nutritional value – and taste – as non-vegan cheese.

The collective, open-source effort is made of members of two biohacker collectives called Counter Culture Labs (Oakland) and BioCurious (Sunnyvale). The research group is using synthetic biology to engineer brewer’s yeast into a casein (milk protein) production unit.

The process starts with yeast being grown in a bioreactor, followed by the purification of the protein that the yeast produces. The casein is then combined with oil, vegan sugar (refined sugar may contain cow bone) to feed the ripening bacteria, and water to produce a sort of vegan milk. This milky mix is the raw material for the vegan cheese, which is then processed using a traditional cheese-making technique.

In order to turn the yeast into an efficient casein production unit, the researchers have studied animal genomes to create their own casein genetic sequences, which are optimized for use with the yeast. There are difficulties in using yeast as a protein production unit, because the proteins the researchers want are designed by nature for animal systems. Yeast’s cellular machinery is less efficient compared with that of some milk-producing animals. To solve that problem, the researchers intend to incorporate kinase enzymes that could make yeast-derived milk proteins perform like animal milk proteins.

Another aspect of the project is that, being in total control over the DNA sequences, the researchers can play around with the variants of the four main proteins found in cheese, and design the product according to the health needs of consumers. One of the possibilities the researchers are contemplating is narwhal cheese, presumably mostly for the novelty factor. The genome of this type of whale has not been sequenced yet, but the University of California at Santa Cruz has sent an expedition to the Arctic to do just that. The real vegan cheese teams hopes to work with the narwhal researchers and study the mammal’s casein genes.

The reference to animals does not mean the cheese is not 100 percent vegan, though. The genes are inspired by mammals, but the organisms and growth mediums are completely animal-free.

For those who worry about safety issues and who are averse to the idea of genetically modified organisms (GMO), the researchers say they have taken those concerns into account. They explain that no GMO goes into the cheese, as the milk protein is separated from the GM yeast.

Besides those concerns and technological hurdles to produce the right type of milk to make the cheese, there are several regulatory requirements that the researchers will have to deal with before they deliver any vegan cheese to the world, which is their ultimate goal.

Right now they are in Phase I, working on the production of an initial cheese sample. Next they will take their project to the International Genetically Engineered Machine competition (iGEM) taking place in October.

They hope to brew a big batch of yeast at the end of the project, and have enough cheese protein for one small cheese, which they will send to supporters of their current Indiegogo campaign. Funding packages offer a range of perks from T-shirts (US$35) to a biohacker lab coat ($100) as well as a nut-based vegan cheese-tasting session ($300 for two), among others.

The research is being made available on a wiki as it happens and licensed under free and open licenses. Any patents will be released into the public domain. The researchers are volunteers and proceeds from the funding campaign cover material costs and work space.

Besides ethical vegans, animal-free cheese is good news for people who suffer from lactose intolerance but appreciate cheese. Also, plant-based cheese is more sustainable than its animal equivalent as animal agriculture is cited by the UN as a major source of greenhouse gas emissions.

The vegan cheese team explain their plans in the video below.

Sources: Real Vegan Cheese, Indiegogo

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Chicken could make you resistant to antibiotics, finds new study

Chicken for medicine 

The Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) has found antibiotics in 40% of the 70 chicken samples it tested from Delhi and the NCR.

Seventeen per cent of the samples tested had more than one drug, found the CSE study, Antibiotics in Chicken: From Farm to Fork, which was released on Wednesday.

Animals are fed antibiotics to add to growth and bulk, which causes resistance in bacteria in animals, which then gets transferred to humans through food. Annual healthcare cost due to antibiotic resistance is estimated to be US $20 billion.

Cooking chicken at temperatures between 70° and 100°C for at least two minutes at the centre kills most bacteria, says the World Health Organisation. Some bacteria, however, can survive on kitchen surfaces or in storage areas where the temperatures is below 60°C.

Thirty-six chicken samples from Delhi, 12 from Noida, eight from Gurgaon and seven each from Faridabad and Ghaziabad were tested by the CSE lab for the presence of six commonly-used antibiotics, including tetracycline and ciprofloxacin.

The medicines found are used to treat various infections including that of the urinary tract, eye and ear, blood stream, diarrhoea, pneumonia and other respiratory tract infections. 

Residues were found from three parts per billion to 31 parts per billion per kg. “The safe limit is zero,” said Chandra Bhushan, deputy director general, CSE.

“Adding antibiotic to chicken feed of one chicken saves a poultry farm Rs. 25 per kg of chicken meat,” he said. India’s poultry industry is estimated to be Rs. 50,000 crore, growing at 10% per year. Thirty-five lakh tonnes of chicken meat is produced each year.

Unlike in Europe, use of antibiotics in the meat and poultry in India is totally unregulated as the government has adopted the US model of self-regulation. “Denmark reduced use of antibiotics for chickens by 90%, but it did not impact broiler death and productivity,” said Bhushan.

The spread of drug resistance from animals to humans can be compared to a nuclear chain reaction that is uncontrollable. “The gain that we have made in modern medicine over the years is at risk,” said Sunita Narain, director general, CSE.

Antibiotics were used as growth promoters that made chicks fat without feeding them much. “The samples analysed show antibiotics are fed in low doses over a prolonged period of time, without any disease,” says Bhushan.

Prescription antibiotics are freely available in India. “My team bought antibiotics imported from China without a manufacturing date at Bhagirath Place in Delhi, and a dealer in Karnal (Haryana) assured him of an unlimited supply of any antibiotic he wanted,” said Bhushan.

Source: Hindustan Times

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Stanford researchers develop self-cooling solar cells

Photovoltaic cells are one of the more promising alternative energy sources. Mechanically they are very simple, with no moving parts, and are clean and emission-free. Unfortunately they are also inefficient. One of the reasons for this is that they overheat, a problem that a Stanford University team under electrical engineering professor Shanhui Fan is addressing with the development of a thin glass layer that makes solar cells self-cooling.

Despite many advances in recent decades, solar cells suffer from efficiency problems. Only a small amount of the energy from sunlight that falls on solar cells is converted to electricity, peaking at below 20 percent for most cells on the market today. Overheating is a constant problem because the sunlight used to generate electricity routinely heats up the panels to 130⁰ F (55⁰ C) or higher.

This heating causes all sorts of problems – not the least of which is a dramatic drop in efficiency. According to the Stanford team, each degree Celsius (1.8⁰ F) heating results in an efficiency drop of 0.5 percent. Equally unpleasant, with each increase in temperature of 10⁰ C (18⁰ F) the deterioration rate of the cells doubles.

Cooling is an obvious step, but the question is, how to do it? Active systems, such as coolant pumps or ventilation, consume power, and passive systems aren’t very effective and can interfere with the the panel’s operation. The solution developed by Shanhui Fan, who has previously applied similar principles to passive cooling for buildings, is a system where ordinary solar cells are given an extremely thin layer of specially patterned silica glass that is designed to draw heat away from the cells in a manner that requires no energy and exploits the atmosphere’s infrared window to shed the heat.

The pattern consists of micro-pyramids and cones measuring only microns in thickness, which are sized and shaped to draw away heat in the form of infrared radiation to the top of the layer, where it radiates and disperses into the atmosphere. It’s based on the fact that different wavelengths of light have different properties and refract differently. The Stanford team tailored the silica glass layer to allow visible light in and heat in the form of infrared light out.

“Silica is transparent to visible light, but it is also possible to fine-tune how it bends and refracts light of very specific wavelengths,” says Fan. “A carefully designed layer of silica would not degrade the performance of the solar cell but it would enhance radiation at the predetermined thermal wavelengths to send the solar cell’s heat away more effectively.”

The Stanford team is testing and fine tuning the cooling layer with the aim of lowering the solar panel’s operating temperature in order to make the more efficient and with a longer operating life.

The team’s results were published in Optica.

Source: The Optical Society

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Fly-inspired tech could find use in better hearing aids

When it comes to animals with good hearing, flies might not be the first one you’d think of. The Ormia ochracea fly, however, has a unique hearing mechanism that allows it to precisely determine the location of a cricket based on its chirps … it then deposits its larvae on the cricket, which ultimately consume the poor insect. Scientists at the University of Texas Austin have now duplicated that mechanism, with hopes that it could find use in applications such as next-generation hearing aids.

In the case of larger animals such as humans, the brain is able to ascertain the source of a sound based on the split-second delay between its being detected by the left and right ears. Insects, on the other hand, are so tiny that sounds register on both sides of their body almost simultaneously. Although they’re still able to “hear” by sensing vibrations made by sounds, they generally can’t tell where those sounds are coming from.

Ormia ochracea is different from other insects, however, in that it has a miniscule seesaw-like structure in the sub-2-mm space between its ears. Even in the four millionths of a second that it takes for a sound to pass through that space, it still causes the structure to vibrate, plus the sound undergoes a slight phase shift.

Like a full-size seesaw (or teeter-totter, if you prefer), any movements the structure makes are amplified by the fact that its two ends simultaneously move in opposite directions. This means that the phase shift will cause one side of the mechanism to dip noticeably lower than the other, thus letting the fly know the sound’s direction of travel. According to UT Austin’s assistant professor Neal Hall, it’s roughly equivalent to a person being able to locate the direction of the epicenter of an earthquake, by analyzing the delay between the tremors being felt by their left and right feet.

Hall and his team built a similar structure (seen above) that incorporates a flexible silicon beam suspended on two pivots. Integrated piezoelectric materials in four sensing ports convert mechanical strain in that beam into electrical pulses, allowing the device to simultaneously measure both the amount and direction of sound-induced flexing.

Additionally, at 2.5 mm, the device is only about one millimeter longer than its natural counterpart.

The scientists hope that once developed further, the technology could be used in compact low-power hearing aids that are are better able to discern conversations from background noise, along with possible military applications.

A paper on the research was recently published in the journal Applied Physics Letters.

Sources: American Institute of Physics, University of Texas Austin

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New device generates electricity from condensation

 

MIT researchers have found a way to generate small amounts of electricity from condensation, by having electrically-charged droplets jump between superhydrophobic (water-repelling) and hydrophilic (water-attracting) metal plates. The advance could be especially useful in remote areas or developing countries, not least because it produces clean water as a side product.

While pulling electricity out of thin air is a physical impossibility, producing it from water droplets in the atmosphere is very much within our reach. We have known for years that droplets are capable of carrying an electric charge, so properly harnessing this phenomenon under controlled conditions could lead to an exciting new source of renewable energy.

Now, a team led by Nenad Miljkovic at MIT seem to have done just that, by finding a way to generate electricity simply by harnessing the humidity in the air.

Last year, Miljkovic and colleagues found that droplets on a superhydrophobic surface will on occasion spontaneously jump away of their own accord and, in the process, gain a small electric charge.

The researchers have used this phenomenon to generate electricity. To do so, they have used a series of conductive plates, alternating between water-repelling copper oxide and water-attracting copper. As droplets spontaneously separate from one plate, they gain a charge and travel all the way to the other plate. The moving charges generate electricity.

During initial testing, the device only produced a very modest 15 picowatts per square centimeter of metal plate. However, according to the scientists, the process could easily be improved almost 70-fold to achieve at least one microwatt per square centimeter. At that rate, a generator about the size of a camping cooler could fully charge your phone in approximately 12 hours.

For the system to work, the crucial factor is a temperature differential between the device itself and the surrounding air, which will allow condensation to form. According to the researchers, any area where dew forms would be enough to generate power for at least a few hours in the morning.

Though the device only has the potential to produce a relatively modest amount of power, it should still find use with people living in the developing world, or perhaps to power remote automated environmental sensors. Moreover, a generator that uses this principle should be quite cheap to produce, since the plates can be made out of any conductive metal.

A paper on the advance appears in the journal Applied Physics Letters.

Source: MIT

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BMW developing wireless inductive charging system for electric vehicles

Electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids may be green and sustainable, but that doesn’t mean much if you forget to plug them in the night before. To overcome this frustrating morning surprise, BMW Group is developing a new generation of wireless inductive charger technology that’s comparable in speed to cables, but requires no more effort than parking and pressing a button.

BMW sees premium market electric cars as a major part of the automotive future. The company already has its all-electric i3 and i8 plug-in hybrid sports car, both of which are designed for quick charging using the BMW i Wallbox. Now the company wants to take this a step further with an induction charging system as a way to make electric cars more attractive to the public.

The new induction system is designed to work with the BMW i car batteries and those under development by the company. In addition, Daimler and BMW have entered into joint development of standardized inductive chargers with the aim of making electric cars more mainstream. Inductive charging has the advantages of being user friendly and there’s no need for connectors, which BMW sees as the crucial advantage of the new charger.

Not having connectors means one less thing to remember and one less thing to suffer from mechanical wear. Without the need for a connection, the driver has only to drive over the charge station, activate it with a press of a dashboard button. The system then does the rest while keeping the driver updated on charge status and time remaining by means of a Wi-Fi connection between charger and car and a smartphone app. BMW says the app can even help the driver park the car properly over the charger.

How it works

The system consists of two components – a primary coil that is installed in a base plate on the floor of a garage or car port, and a secondary coil that is installed in the floor of the car. Both coils are circular to keep them compact, lightweight, and the magnetic field confined to a small area for safety. An alternating magnetic field in the primary coil transmits power to the secondary coil at a rate of 3.6 kW, which is enough to fully charge the high-voltage batteries in many plug-in hybrids in under three hours.

BMW says that the prototype system has an efficiency of 90 percent and can charge the BMW i8 in less than two hours. To make the charger suitable for all electric cars instead of hybrids, the company is working on boosting the charge rate to 7 kW, which would charge a BMW i3 overnight.

Since all the system’s conductive components are protected, weather conditions don’t have an effect on the power feed, meaning it can be installed indoors or out. The system continually monitors the space between th primary and secondary coils, so that If a foreign object enters the field, the system cuts out automatically.

BMW says its medium term goal is to put into production a user-friendly inductive charging system that is reliable and non-wearing that will be compatible with the batteries in its existing i cars, as well as the high-voltage batteries in future plug-in hybrid models.

Source: BMW

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Polymer-based graphene substitute is easy to mass-produce

For all the attention graphene gets thanks to its impressive list of properties, how many of us have actually encountered it in anything other than its raw graphite form? Show of hands. No-one? That’s because it is still difficult to mass-produce without introducing defects. Now a team at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) has developed a graphene substitute from plastic that offers the benefits of graphene for use in solar cells and semiconductor chips, but is easy to mass-produce.

The technique that currently shows the greatest potential for producing high quality graphene at large scales is chemical vapor deposition (CVD). This is a complicated eight-step process whereby gaseous reactants are deposited onto a metal film substrate that acts as a catalyst. Once the graphene is formed, it needs to be removed from the metal substrate and transferred to another board, such as a solar cell substrate, which runs the risk of wrinkling or cracking the graphene.

The KIST team claims the process used to produce its new synthesized carbon nanosheets is much simpler, involving a two-steps that are catalyst- and transfer-free. Based on the same continuous process used to mass-produce carbon fiber, the researchers say it also faces a much easier transition to full-scale commercialization. Furthermore, the team was able to show that the nanosheets can be used directly as transparent electrodes for organic solar cells without requiring any additional processing.

Put (very) simply, to produce carbon nanosheets with properties similar to graphene, the researchers spin-coated a polymer solution onto a quartz substrate and heat-treated it at 1,200° C (2,192° F). They claim that by eliminating the need for a metal substrate or for transferring the nanosheets to another board, they bypass the steps that are likely to lead to defects in the material.

“[The process] is expected to be applied for commercialization of transparent and conductive 2D carbon materials without difficulty since this process is based on the continuous and mass-produced process of carbon fiber,” said Dr. Han Ik Joh who led the research team.

The team’s work is detailed in a paper published in the journal Nanoscale.

Source: KIST

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Bamboo inspires new process for making metals tougher

Steel is a common benchmark against which the strength of materials is measured, with “stronger than steel” a familiar catch cry for those touting the properties of some new space-age material. But now researchers at North Carolina State University have created steel that is stronger than steelusing a process that increases the toughness of various metals by altering the microstructures within them.

Inspired by the internal structure of bones and bamboo, which both boast impressive strength-to-weight ratios, the researchers were able to increase the strength and toughness of metals by giving them what the researchers refer to as a “gradient structure.” This is a structure where the size of the millions of tightly-packed grains that make up the metal are gradually increased further down into the material.

“Having small grains on the surface makes the metal harder, but also makes it less ductile – meaning it can’t be stretched very far without breaking,” says Xiaolei Wu, a professor of materials science at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Mechanics who collaborated with Yuntian Zhu from NC State on the work.

“But if we gradually increase the size of the grains lower down in the material, we can make the metal more ductile,” continues Wu. “You see similar variation in the size and distribution of structures in a cross-section of bone or a bamboo stalk. In short, the gradual interface of the large and small grains makes the overall material stronger and more ductile, which is a combination of characteristics that is unattainable in conventional materials.”

In testing the gradient structure approach in a variety of metals, the researchers were able to improve the properties of copper, iron, nickel and stainless steel.

They also tested the technique in interstitial free (IF) steel, which when made to withstand 450 megapascals (MPa) of stress has very low ductility, meaning it can only be stretched to less than 5 percent of its length before breaking. By giving it a gradient structure, the team was able to create IF steel that was strong enough to withstand 500 MPa of stress while being ductile enough to stretch to 20 percent of its length before breaking.

“We think this is an exciting new area for materials research because it has a host of applications and it can be easily and inexpensively incorporated into industrial processes,” says Wu, with the team also looking to study whether the gradient structure approach could also result in materials that are more resistant to corrosion, wear and fatigue.

The team’s work is two papers, the first published in the journal Material Research Letters, and the second appearing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Source: NC State

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Squid sucker teeth could advance human technology

There seems to be no end to the proposed human technologies based on attributes of the squid. The animals’ beaks have inspired a material that could be used for medical implants, their muscles may lead us to color-changing clothing, the chitosan in their “pens” has been used to create aproton-conducting transistor, and their movements served as the inspiration for a soft-bodied robot. Now, it turns out that the teeth inside the suckers on their tentacles might be the basis for materials that could be used in fields such as reconstructive surgery.

Although the tentacles of smaller squids may go down our gullets pretty easily in the form of calamari, the sucker discs on them are actually each lined with a ring of sharp teeth. These help the animals latch onto prey – so no, they don’t hold on purely by suction power.

What makes those sucker ring teeth (SRTs) particularly special, however, is the fact that they’re made entirely of proteins. Most other natural hard materials, such as bone or mollusk shells, also contain minerals such as calcium chloride.

An international group of scientists, mainly from Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University, have so far identified 38 of these proteins. The components of them form into what are known as “ß-sheet” polymer networks. These same structures also give spider silk its high strength.

The hope is that these proteins could be made in a lab setting, and then used to create synthetic SRT material. That material could in turn be molded into artificial ligaments, scaffolds used to grow bone, fossil fuel-free foam packaging, and other strong-but-malleable items. Synthetic spider silk offers similar functionality, although the SRT material should reportedly be easier and more eco-friendly to produce.

A paper on the research was recently published in the journal ACS Nano.

Source: American Chemical Society

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Separating finely mixed oil and water

Membrane developed by MIT researchers can separate even highly mixed fine oil-spill residues.

Whenever there is a major spill of oil into water, the two tend to mix into a suspension of tiny droplets, called an emulsion, that is extremely hard to separate — and that can cause severe damage to ecosystems. But MIT researchers have discovered a new, inexpensive way of getting the two fluids apart again.

Their newly developed membrane could be manufactured at industrial scale, and could process large quantities of the finely mixed materials back into pure oil and water. The process is described in the journal Scientific Reports by MIT professor Kripa Varanasi, graduate student Brian Solomon, and postdoc M. Nasim Hyder.

In addition to its possible role in cleaning up spills, the new method could also be used for routine drilling, such as in the deep ocean as well as on land, where water is injected into wells to help force oil out of deep rock formations. Typically, Varanasi explains, the mixed oil and water that’s extracted is put in large tanks to allow separation by gravity; the oil gradually floats to the top, where it can be skimmed off.

That works well when the oil and water are “already large globs of stuff, already partly separated,” Varanasi says. “The difficulty comes when you have what is called an emulsion, with very tiny droplets of oil stabilized in a water background, or water in an oil background. The difficulty significantly increases for nanoemulsions, where the drop sizes are below a micron.”

To break down those emulsions, crews use de-emulsifiers, which can themselves be environmentally damaging. In the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, for example, large amounts of dispersants and de-emulsifiers were dumped into the sea.

“After a while, [the oil] just disappeared,” Varanasi says, “but people know it’s hidden in the water, in these fine emulsions.” In the case of land-based drilling, where so-called “produced water” from wells contains fine emulsions of oil, companies sometimes simply dilute the water until it meets regulatory standards for being discharged into waterways.

“It’s a problem that’s very challenging to the industry,” Varanasi says, “both in terms of recovering the oil, and more importantly, not discharging the produced water into the environment.”

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