Month: November 2021

Casein Fermentation

Vegan cheese has been quite disgusting to date. But not the mozzarella that I tasted. The missing ingredient has been the casein protein of milk (and until now, it could only be had from milk). Melding innovative microbial fermentation science and traditional cheesemaking, New Culture’s mozzarella is the first animal-free cheese to melt and stretch. When I tasted it, it tasted, smelled, and stretched like milk cheese. The cheese is healthier (cholesterol and lactose-free) and better for the environment: of all food products, cheese requires the most water and is 3rd in greenhouse gas emissions and land use. Producing cheese from casein fermentation rather than animal milk reduces greenhouse gas emissions, and land and water usage by orders of magnitude, making the New Culture approach radically more climate-friendly than animal farming.

2023-03-13: A bit more progress

28 companies have sprouted up to develop milk proteins made by yeasts or fungi. The companies’ products are already on store shelves in the form of yogurt, cheese and ice cream, often labeled “animal-free.” The burgeoning industry, which calls itself “precision fermentation,” has its own trade organization, and big-name food manufacturers such as Nestlé, Starbucks and General Mills have already signed on as customers.
The dairy industry, with its clout and hefty lobbying budget, may not agree there is room for everyone: In 2022, US cow dairy had ceded 16% of all retail milk sales to plant-based milk. Plant-based milk companies also may not welcome the competition, especially if cultivated dairy products are positioned as more sustainable and less resource-intensive. A glass of almond milk takes 90 liters of water to produce.

Payday

It is difficult to track or even imagine all the ways in which a cycle of steady, progressive depletion of funds shaped Americans’ experiences of labor and leisure in towns and cities at the moment when this cycle first took root. The reverberations were undoubtedly broad. For starters, the combination of weekly reckonings and diminishing resources could be felt in the workplace. It may well have induced workers to accept more overtime work (when the choice was theirs) later in the week, which might have contributed to the weekly rise in textile output after Thursday. Labor records from a Massachusetts mill in the early 1850s show a decided spike in overtime pay at the end of a week, and especially on Saturdays. But the weekly pay system had an even greater impact beyond the walls of the workshop and the factory, in the proliferating commercial venues where wage earners spent their money. Pay weeks, rent weeks, and the different Sabbath observances of Christians and Jews all shaped the urban lending industry and in turn structured the microfinances of ordinary life. Although interest rates were calculated by the month, borrowers had to repay the full interest on a loan even when they redeemed pledges after a week, as they often did. More generally, the rhythms of the pawning week, in tandem with the pay period on which it depended, became a feature of the urban timescape, determining when working people had money to spend and when they could gain access to their valued possessions. Like taverns and boardinghouses, pawnshops registered this calendar with special sensitivity, but the pay week shaped more than just business cycles; it shaped urban experience.

Haber-Bosch

50% of the nitrogen in our bodies came from the Haber–Bosch process. It’s in every protein and every strand of DNA. Ponder that — “50% of the nitrogen in your blood, your skin and hair, your proteins and DNA, is synthetic.” The Haber-Bosch process catalyzes the production of ammonia (NH3) from N2 and H2 gas. We need “fixed nitrogen”, available to our organic chemistries as atomic nitrogen. It is the limiting factor for the growth of all food. While nitrogen gas is about 80% of our atmosphere, not one atom of it is available for our use when tightly bound by the triple bond of N2 gas, the strongest chemical bond in nature. It is sequestered all around us. In nature, N2 is liberated to atomic nitrogen in small amounts by lightning strikes (it needs 1000°C) and slowly by nitrogen-fixing bacteria in the soil. Hager argues that if we reverted to relying on just those natural sources, 3b people would die of starvation in short order — our soils simply could not produce enough food for the mouths now on Earth. The Haber process consumes 4% of the world’s natural-gas production and 1.5% of the world’s energy supply.

2021-11-30: There’s a potential replacement:

The process is as clean as the electricity used to power it, and produces around 53 nanomoles of ammonia per second, at Faradaic efficiencies around 69%. The highest reported previous efficiencies for ammonia electrolysis sat around 60%, with the exception of 1 other lithium cycling approach that managed 88%, but required high temperatures of 450 °C. The team says it’s massively scalable, capable of operating either at industrial scale, or in extremely small on-site operations. “They can be as small as a thick iPad, and that could make a small amount of ammonia continuously to run a commercial greenhouse or hydroponics setup, for example.” This kind of distributed production model, as we explored looking at FuelPositive’s modular, container-sized ammonia production units, would have additional benefits in that it would eliminate the distribution and transport that contribute significantly to the financial and emissions costs of the current ammonia model.

2022-05-04: What happens when you think you can do without Haber-Bosch.
2022-07-22: The same team was able to improve ammonia electrolysis further, with 3x yield and nearly 100% energy efficiency.

We investigate the role of the electrolyte in this reaction and present a high-efficiency, robust process enabled by compact ionic layering in the electrode-electrolyte interfacial region. The interface is generated by a high-concentration imide-based lithium salt electrolyte, enabling stabilized ammonia yield rates of 150±20 nmol s-1 cm-2 and current-to-ammonia efficiency closely approaching 100%.

Universal Tick Vaccine

Over 10 diseases can be transmitted by tick bites. The most well-known is Lyme disease, caused by a bacterium called Borrelia burgdorferi. In the past, vaccines have successfully been developed to specifically target this Lyme disease bacterium. However, this new vaccine candidate takes a different approach, using mRNA technology to target the tick itself. This particular vaccine directs cells to produce a number of proteins found in the saliva of the black-legged tick Ixodes scapularis. This vaccine is unique in the way it targets a carrier of a pathogen rather than the pathogen itself. This means it should offer a broad-based protection from all kinds of tick-induced disease and not just a single pathogen. “When you feel a mosquito bite, you swat it. With the vaccine, there is redness and likely an itch so you can recognize that you have been bitten and can pull the tick off quickly, before it has the ability to transmit B. burgdorferi.”

2022-02-24: A gene drive might be an alternative:

This approach is already being applied to malaria-transmitting mosquitoes, but scientists have run into a wall trying to use CRISPR to prevent tick-borne diseases — or, more accurately, a hard shell. The problem is that scientists need to be able to insert their CRISPR system into ticks when they’re at the embryo stage. But ticks grow in eggs coated in a hard wax, which can literally shatter the glass needles used for injections. “Previously, no lab has demonstrated genome modification is possible in ticks. Some considered this too technically difficult to accomplish.” They have now demonstrated 2 different techniques that make gene editing a viable option for fighting tick-borne diseases. So far, all we know is that it’s possible to get a CRISPR system into ticks — we still don’t know what edits, if any, can prevent the spread of tick-borne diseases.

Spinlaunch

It is great to see alternatives to Rockets becoming feasible, both for pollution reasons, as well as for the Moon, where it would be much easier to build this than to produce fuel.

it’s a 100 meter diameter chamber they are rotating at 450 rpm. This is about 10k g at peak loading. They pointed out that even unmodified smartphones and action cameras are within the tolerances needed to handle this and that might be hard to believe if you’ve ever dropped your phone and broken its screen but the screen breaks because you’re putting a whole lot of force on a very small point if you spread that amount of force over the entire device it’s not unrealistic that these things can handle that. So while they’re not going to get customers that just decide to switch their satellite from falcon 9 to this rocket they might well be able to get customers who are interested in the complete ecosystem who can build their satellites to the specs required in exchange for having a much cheaper launch system

RNAi pesticides

If you could introduce dsRNA into a pesky pathogen—a particularly irritating fungus, for example—you could instruct that pathogen’s cells to destroy its own mRNA and stop it from making crucial proteins. In essence, they could switch off genes within pathogens at will. RNA crop sprays could have some major advantages over the current toolbox of chemical-based pesticides. Microbes break down RNA in the soil within a couple of days, which lessens the problem of environmental buildup. And because RNA sprays would target genes specific to individual species, there is—at least theoretically—a much lower chance that other organisms would get caught in the crossfire. Even 2 very similar species have enough genetic differences that it’s possible to make RNA sprays that target one bug while leaving the other one alone. Resistance is always a concern. “It’s unavoidable. But we will do everything we can to make sure that growers use the products the way we believe minimizes that risk.” Growers might be directed to use dsRNA only at certain times of the year, and that since RNA breaks down so quickly in the environment it’s less likely that pests will be exposed enough to develop resistance. RNA sprays will likely be mixed with existing pesticides—attacking pests from several angles rather than taking a single one-spray-to-kill-them-all approach. “It’s [reducing] the number of ag chemicals that are used, but not full replacement of them”.