#Artificial food: Incredible or inedible? Pass the salt. And the pepper. And while you're at it, the ketchup too.
but these were among the reactions of the two expert"tasters#who earlier this month got the first taste of a potential food of the future#a burger grown in a laboratory.
Funded by Google cofounder Sergey Brin, the five-year project took cells from organic cows,
#Commercial cultured meat is at least a decade away, and with the backing of billionaire Brin and others, issues of taste and feel should be solvable.
My favourite remains Harry Harrison's 1966 Make Room! Make Room! set in 1999 in a horribly overpopulated
and underfed New york. Only the ultra-rich have access to meat or other fresh produce.
By the time the story was adapted loosely for the big screen in the 1973 film Soylent Green,
spoiler alert high-energy wafers secretly made of human corpses were on the menu. Less intellectually nourishing sci-fi food staples include the entire meal in a pill (or dollop or slab of gunk
which Leeloo puts chicken pills into a microwave and a second later pulls out a full roast with all the trimmings.
Nasa recently admitted that as part of a programme"to turn science fiction into fact#they are funding work to develop a 3d food printer.
but that's what some experts believe will be inevitable as conventional food sources run out. There may be plenty more fish in the sea
A recent report published UN's Food and Agricultural Organisation concludes that as the climate changes
#Its author Ferdinando Boero, Professor of Zoology at Salento University, Italy, concludes:""If you cannot fight them...
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#Organs on chips: How to make a microchip that breathes Drug testing is a costly business.
Before any candidate can be tested in humans it has to be tested on animals to see
if the active chemicals both work as intended and don't cause any side effects. There are efforts to reduce the number of animals used in drug testing,
but an accurate and reliable alternative would be far more desirable. One answer is being developed at the Wyss Institute at Harvard university.
Researchers are creating microchips that mimic the structure and function of living organs, such as the lung and heart.
Each so-called"organ-on-chip#is composed of a clear flexible polymer that contains hollow microfluidic channels lined by living human cells.
where Dumeetha Luthra is amazed by the team's cellular reconstruction of a human lung on a microchip.
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#Artificial leaf hopes to power the world Imagine if you could draw energy from almost unlimited sources found in nature#water and light.
That's one possibility if Harvard professor Daniel Nocera's idea for a device that can harness and store energy from the Sun comes to fruition.
Adam Shaw travels to Boston to meet Nocera who has developed an artificial leaf that replicates photosynthesis. Silicon wafers are coated on each side with a different catalyst#one side produces hydrogen,
and stored in a fuel cell that generates electricity. The catalysts are cheap, earth-abundant materials and form by self-assembly,
which should make manufacture cheaper. The challenge is overcoming the high engineering costs needed for the light-harvesting infrastructure to make it commercially scalable.
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#Berlin start-ups: Cool and commerce coming together? When new businesses based on the computer chip began to cluster in Santa clara Valley,
it did not take long for someone to come up with the name Silicon valley. That set a pattern,
meaning alley or avenue in German, is part of many street names in the city), which to some observers evokes the atmosphere of the early days in Northern California.
a gathering held earlier this month in a ramshackle complex of wooden and stone buildings in Kreuzberg, a trendy part of the city.
#Bernstam's cloud data service he co-founded, Parse, was bought recently by Facebook for $85 million.
Of course, Berlin is many leagues behind Silicon valley. From Adobe through to Yahoo, via Apple, Intel, Google and Oracle, the Valley,
as its occupants call it, has combined a wealth which most countries would envy. Exact figures are hard to come by,
or angel funding or institutional venture capital. The top three spots were occupied by San francisco-Silicon valley with 201 start-ups
Students were exempted from military service attracting a young, artistic and politically radical alternative scene. Since the fall of the Wall in 1989,
The average annual cost of a workstation in an office in Berlin including maintenance costs,
taxes and rent, was $8, 410 at the end of last year, compared with $14, 050 for New york and $14, 620 in the City of London,
Renting a 120 square metre apartment in Berlin costs around a third what it does in London
such as the social game developer Wooga or Research Gate, a networking website for scientists. The darling of the scene is Soundcloud
an audio sharing platform that has 200 million users every month. Alex Ljung, its cofounder and chief executive, moved the company from Stockholm to Berlin
In New york, London and Los angeles, he can meet plenty of people with money to invest in good ideas.
According to Bernstam, investors from the US are scared to invest in Germany because they don't understand the way companies are structured and corporate regulations."
if future investors tried to dilute us, #he says, "and investors from the States don't understand yet how that works abroad
#and are scared frankly of investing abroad.##All of which created a chicken-and-egg problem in Berlin.
Some entrepreneurs have stayed away because of the lack of investors, and those with the money have preferred to go elsewhere because of the greater number of companies to invest in.
But this resistance is beginning breaking down, on both sides, according to David Knight, editor-in-chief of Berlin tech scene blog Silicon Allee."
"There's been this streak of creativity and once you got a core of people, which started round 2009,
you started to get a lot of investors from the US and Europe looking to Berlin. It's still at a very early stage,
but there's a lot more money now than there was two years ago.##Districts such as Kreuzberg, Neukoelln and Prenzlauer Berg, where would-be entrepreneurs congregate in the bars
and cafes offering wi-fi, are now seeing the effect of this. In Prenzlauer Berg, Factory,
which received##1 million in funding from Google, has rented space to over 15 companies, including Soundcloud.
The city also now has a lot more of what might be called serious business people. Florian Lanzer is trying to build a website selling green products to people who are committed not necessarily environmentalists.
He said the project has attracted a lot of interest, including the involvement of a former CEO of Sony Germany."
"What Berlin gets right is that it attracts the right kind of people, #says Lanzer.""Young people with talent and people with long track records and massive experience are coming together.#
#Around a decade ago, Berlin was described famously as being"poor, but sexy#by its mayor, Klaus Wowereit.
The hope is that creativity and commerce is now beginning to combine in tech in such a way that it might finally shed its poor tag.
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#Maker Faire: How the DIY tech force has become strong DIY technology has taken traditionally place in a bedroom, garage or on a kitchen table.
But now a growing trend has emerged of hack days or DIY fairs offering enthusiasts advice on how to make their own technology.
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#Juicebox: Squeezing new life into old computers By supercharging PCS that seem past their sell-by date,
one company wants to put more working machines in classrooms and in developing world countries.
These days, virtually every new gadget we buy seems destined to become obsolete faster than we can tear it from its shiny packaging.
New smartphones and tablets are released barely months after their previous versions, and the hardware and software quickly become incompatible.
Tablets won allow you to swap out parts, new laptops won let you remove batteries,
and the whole lifecycle of technology is becoming shorter, less sustainable, and more expensive for consumers.
But what if you could help extend the lifespan of technology that already exists? Give it a little boost, perhaps?
That the solution a New york city-based startup called Neverware is proposing. Its Juicebox promises to make ld computers run like new Now,
I know what some early adopters may be thinking. For those who believe that the age of tablets, smartphones,
Google glass and the loudhas heralded the demise of desktop PCS, there still one place youe guaranteed to find a growing need for them.
Robert Hornik, Assistant Principal at East New york Family Academy in Brooklyn, remembers weekend trips to far-flung corners of New york city to hunt for old desktops from other city agencies like the Police
Pension fund that were giving them away for free. e had about 20 computers working at best, out of about 100, for a school with 450 students and 50 teachers, he recalls. hey were mostly the big, boxy computers,
like the Dell GX270, all about 8-10 years old. With an entire technology budget of just $12, 000 per year, including one part-time IT person (an undergraduate at a local university),
new desktops at around $500 a pop was not an option. chools usually acquire computers in big batches all at once in hope that they don have to get them anytime again soon, hich of course,
never happens, says Steven Hodas, Executive director of Innovate NYC Schools, part of a broader initiative by the NYC Department of education to adapt technologies in classrooms for learning.
Computers eventually breakdown, wear out, or become overloaded with junk and must be replaced over time with spare parts
and hardware on a limited budget resulting in a jigsaw puzzle of infrastructure, like at Hornik school.
Then, when the computers start to get sluggish, preventing even basic browsing and application use, getting them all back up to the same speed becomes practically impossible.
Power up Neverware Juicebox fixes this problem by turning school PCS into a hin client Inside the physical box is a server with virtual machines
and computing power that many computers share across a single network. So, instead of each computer being stuck with ageing components,
suddenly all the computers have access to this powerful central store that does all the eavy lifting allowing the computers to run like new.
The Juicebox can supercharge any PC or even laptop even if it missing a hard drive and the whole system is completely wireless.
Since Hornik installed Neverware Juicebox over a year ago, East New york Family Academy now has over 100 working computers almost four in every classroom,
with two fully functioning computer labs. They haven slowed down a bit. he Neverware system gave us a big break.
We were able to make all those old computers work Hornik says, adding nd lightning fast.
This idea of esktop virtualization has been around for over a decade, says Neverware 27-year-old founder Jonathan Hefter. his is something banks
and Fortune 500 companies around the world are using, he says, and something that cloud computing now offers. ut no one has created a simple cost-effective methodology,
and automated it, so that you can operate without expensive IT departments. Currently, Neverware is piloting their solution around New york city public school system,
which is one of the more autonomous and innovative school systems in the country. e planned to set up five schools in the first half of this year,
but we had such a huge demand, we quickly went into double digits, Hefter remarks, ow there is this incredible race on our part to scale up to meet the demand.
But, Neverware does not promise to improve education. It is simply a hardware solution. hat Jonathan is doing with Neverware is necessary,
but not necessarily sufficient, worries Steven Hodas. very school will be where it was 5 years ago
when it got that brand new shipment of computers. Basically, it a great point of departure, he explains. ut
Just because computers are working better and kids can browse, research, and use programs faster,
Recycled juice That doesn lessen its promise beyond New york city classrooms. Demand for desktop PCS may be declining in developed countries,
says Jim Lynch, Director of Green Tech at Techsoup Global. ith the growth of internet and electricity in Africa,
demand for PCS is going through the roof, he says. Believe it or not, the actual hardware lifespan of a PC is around fifteen years
because most of the weaker parts are interchangeable. In developed countries PCS often get tossed after a few years of use
or newer, better technology comes out creating a tremendous amount of e waste, and wasted opportunity. ife extension,
test it, put a new OS on it, and then it will run like it came out of the box.
Energy challenge International organisations, like World Computer Exchange and Techsoup Global, facilitate the refurbishing, but Neverware Juicebox could also play a new,
Africa has a paltry recycling rate for mobile phones (just 1%in Nigeria, for example), and a similar recycling rate for PCS, says Lynch.
The number of obsolete PCS generated in developing regions is expected to exceed that of developed regions by 2016#2018
according to recent research creating an enormous amount of wasted hardware. By boosting the performance and extending the lifespan of old PCS in developing countries,
especially in schools that spend loads of time, money, and effort in sourcing and shipping in new or donated PCS. ne of the problems with donated computers is that getting them through the port isn straightforward.
It makes it much more expensive, says James Tooley, an expert on education in developing countries,
and author of The Beautiful Tree, which explores how the world poorest people are educating themselves. f you can just bring in a Juicebox,
But, there are practical challenges. he biggest challenge is electricity, says Tooley. In off-grid areas with low power,
or even urban areas with unreliable power sources, the Juicebox which as the name might suggest,
requires a lot of energy would have a hard time. Jonathan Hefter agrees, but believes that down the road,
Wherever the potential impact of Neverware promise to make old computers run like new lies,
for Hefter the bottom line is clear. t seems silly that schools are replacing their computers every 4 years
the chemical sensors that allow us to identify smells. At first Pluznick didn't believe her eyes.
if we could believe the data, "she says.""It seemed really spurious.""Thinking there had to be a mistake, Pluznick, then a researcher at Yale School of medicine, in New haven,
Connecticut, carried out another experiment. She soaked a slice of kidney in a fluid that would make scent-system proteins glow fluorescently under a microscope.
like a key in a lock, this triggers changes in cells. In the case of scent receptors, specialised neurons send messages to the brain
The discovery, in 1991, of around 1, 000 genes involved in generating scent receptors was rewarded with the Nobel prize in Medicine over a decade later.
however, reports have trickled in from bemused biologists that these receptors, as well as similar ones usually found on taste buds,
The same year Pluznick came across scent receptors in the kidney, biologists at the University of California, San diego identified sour receptors in the spine.
researchers poured over genomic data and reported that low levels of these receptors occurred in almost every tissue in the body.
System sensor The kidney is made up of miles of minuscule tubes, twisted into an exquisite lacework.
nutrients and other molecules seep through the walls and pass between the two. What the blood doesn't need is passed off to the urine forming in the tubes,
and what it does have a use for keeping blood pressure stable, for instance goes back. If this process stops working the body will soon shut down,
and sending out alerts to adjust the blood filtration rate. he macula densa is the only cell type in the kidney that you would think of as being a chemical sensor,
which stimulates the constriction of blood vessels to increase blood pressure. Both of these are controlled by the macula densa.
In doing so, her work took her from one weird and wonderful discovery in biology to another:
such as breaking down certain foods into energy and useful nutrients, suppressing harmful microbes, preventing allergies and assisting the immune system in a number of other ways.
The evidence that the balance of different microbes we have inside us is important to our health has been growing rapidly in recent years.
People with irritable bowel syndrome, obesity, Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's and depression have been shown to have differences in gut bacteria
further work indicates another receptor that also binds to short-chain fatty acids has a greater and opposite effect.
However, she believes the work shows the scent receptors she accidentally discovered are a previously unknown means for bacteria to tell the kidney to make blood pressure changes that allow them to best carry out their health-related functions.
Yehuda Ben-Shahar, now a professor at Washington University in St louis, found cells in the human airway equipped with bitter receptors.
"In fact, work by Noam Cohen, an ear, nose and throat doctor at University of Pennsylvania Medical school,
when they are coming together to form biofilms, a manoeuvre that greatly strengthens their defences against immune-system attacks.
causing cells to release toxic gas and cilia to flap. If people have a genetic variant that produces a different form of this bitter receptor
and are more prone to severe sinus infections. Patients who regularly get serious sinus infections often opt for surgery.
However Cohen, who, along with Ben-Shahar, presented some of his findings at April's Association for Chemoreception Sciences meeting in Huntington beach,
There's no better place for a chemical sensor, he points out, as the blood is the highway by
since tissues are shot through with blood vessels bringing in nutrients and ferrying away waste. What's emerging is a picture of these receptors as a kind of general-purpose chemical sensor.
Consider a doorbell: the button next to your front door is hooked up to a little machine that can be programmed to play almost any kind of tune, a clock chime, a fire alarm,
"But if you say that chemical sensors are in the kidney, I think it makes a heck of a lot of sense.
"Pluznick is now a professor at Johns Hopkins School of medicine, in Baltimore, Maryland. It has been a long time since she studied kidney disease.
Her lab is focused on understanding how these receptors work, and how they contribute to kidney function.
She chuckles as she remembers how she complained to her academic supervisor about the"bad"data from her kidney gene experiments."
#Unmasking organised crime networks with data Military software engineers have developed a program that can predict the social structures of street gangs.
Philip Ball explains how it could help fight crime. One of the big challenges in fighting organised crime is precisely that it is organised.
It is run a bit like a business, with chains of command and responsibility, different specialised epartments recruitment initiatives and opportunities for collaboration and trade.
That why police forces are keen to discover how these organisations are arranged to map the networks that link individual members.
In fact, violent street gangs seem to be set up along similar lines to insurgent groups that stage armed resistance to political authority,
such as guerrilla forces in areas of civil war. These kinds of organisations tend to be composed of affiliated cells, each with its own leader.
A team at the West point Military academy in the US state of New york has released just details of a software package it has developed to aid intelligence gathering by police dealing with street gangs.
and Contact Analyzer), can use real-world data acquired from arrests and the questioning of suspected gang members to deduce the network structure of a gang.
There are many reasons why this sort of information would be important to the police. The ecosystem structure of a gang can reveal how it operates.
police will often monitor the rival gang more closely because of the likelihood of retaliation. But gangs know this,
Understanding such alliances helps the police stay a step ahead. Mapping highly influential members of a social network has been done many times before for example
in viral marketing and in studies of infectious diseases. Highly influential people typically have a larger than average number of social links,
which enables their choices and actions to be adopted quickly by others. An influential gang member who is prone to risky,
But if police can identify him, they can then monitor him more closely. Complex netherworld In developing Orca, Paulo Shakarian, a West point graduate and sometime adviser to the Iraqi National Police,
and his co-workers, have drawn on the large literature about mapping social networks. This body of work which has grown rapidly over the past decade,
has shown that the way a network operates how information and influence spread through it, for example depends crucially on what mathematicians call its topology:
the shape of the links between people. For example, information spreading happens quite differently on a grid (like the street network of Manhattan,
where there are many alternative routes between two points), a tree (where points are connected by the repeated splitting of branches),
One of the features of Orca is an algorithm a set of rules that assigns each member of the network a probability of belonging to a particular gang.
Shakarian and his colleagues tested Orca using police data on almost 1, 500 individuals belonging to 18 gangs, collected from 5, 418 arrests in an undisclosed district over three years.
and the police told the West point team that one racial group was known to form more centrally organised gang structures than the other.
they say that they are working with a ajor metropolitan police departmentto test their program
#The teenage scientist revolutionising cancer detection Pancreatic cancer is a killer and one that is very hard to detect.
16-year-old scientist and researcher Jack Andraka vowed to find a quick and cheap way to test for signs of the disease.
Andraka's research incuding writing to 200 science professors led to him developing a dipstick diagnostic test which searches for a biomarker for pancreatic cancer.
It can also be used to test for lung and ovarian cancer. He tells BBC Future about his quest s
Super-shrinking the city car Look around a city at peak traffic time and you'll probably notice that most gridlocked cars contain only one person,
despite having seating for four and space for their luggage. One option is ride sharing schemes,
which aim to have fewer cars and more people on the streets. There is a problem, according to Daniel Kim, Founder and CEO of Lit Motors:"
"Very few people actually like to carpool.##His company's approach is different: shrink the car.
Imagine if you could cut the size of a car in half, you could fit twice as many cars onto the streets, and into parking spaces."
"We want to put less car on the road, and more people,#he says. The solution that the San francisco-based company hopes to roll out looks like a hi-tech,
streamlined egg on two wheels. The C-1 is enclosed a fully, all-electric vehicle that is a motorcycle in all but name.
It has speed a top of over 100mph (160kph), and should be able to travel up to 200 miles between charges.
Acceleration should be respectable at 0-60mph (0-100kph) in less than 6 seconds#more than enough to beat most cars away from the lights."
"What we're doing is taking the safety and the comfort of a car, but integrating that with the romance, the efficiency,
and the thrill, of a bike,#says Kim.""That still preserves the elements of freedom and independence that commuters today demand.#
#The real innovation in the vehicle, though, is that it can stay upright, all by itself.
This is achieved with the use of two gyroscopes, underneath the seats. They contain heavy metal discs
which spin at over 10, 000rpm, and in doing so generate torque. A spinning disc has a tendency to stay upright, just like a child's spinning top.
such as keeping the vehicle upright, or leaning it in and out of corners. The gyroscopes are under full computer control;
no driver input required. The company says it is confident that the C-1 will stay upright
even if it is sideswiped by another vehicle at 30mph (50kph). Down-size desire? The prototype the company showed
with one seat and a large bank of computer processors taking up most of the internal space, but the final design calls for two seats, one behind the other."
"This would all be shrunk and nicely packaged for our production vehicle, #says Kim. I was told that at 6 foot 2 inches (1. 88m) I am at the upper end of the height range that it is designed for,
but a small steering wheel meant there was enough room for my knees. being surrounded by glass helps give the perception of space too,
but I am not sure how I would feel pulling alongside a truck or SUV at speed.
Lit Motors doesn't like to think of the C-1 as a motorbike as that could limit its market.
This the company believes, is a genuine car replacement for many people, but it remains to be seen
if that will translate into sales. In the US, pick-up trucks and SUVS are still big sellers.
Will their owners be persuaded to down-size to make their commutes easier? The Smart fortwo micro city car may be a good comparison.
It also cuts the amount of car on the roads by halving the length rather than the width,
and it was marketed on its ease of parking. Since its introduction 15 years ago it has become a common sight in European cities,
The market for cars is linked strongly to the price of fuel. If there is a sharp increase in gasoline prices in the future electric, efficient,
vehicles like the C-1 could see strong demand. In the US at least it will legally qualify as a motorcycle,
meaning it can split lanes and park in motorcycle specific spaces. Lit Motors also has big plans for the future,
which include new designs specifically for countries where the bike or scooter is already a dominant form of urban transport.
I will be looking at that prototype in my next column article. If you would like to comment on this article
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