Monthly Archives: November 2024

Climate, research, Science

These companies are creating food out of thin air | MIT Technology Review

A new crop of biotech startups are working on an alternative to alternative protein.

Some of these companies are focused on industrial animal feed, fish meal, and pet food—products with slimmer profit margins but less exacting consumers and fewer regulatory hurdles. Human food, however, is where the real money—and impact—is. That’s why several companies, like Dyson’s Air Protein, are focused on it. In 2023 Air Protein opened its first “air farm” in San Leandro, California, a hub for the commercial food production industry, and announced a strategic development agreement with one of the largest agricultural commodity traders in the world, ADM, to collaborate on research and development and build an even larger, commercial-­scale plant. The company’s “Air Chicken” (which, to be clear, is not actual chicken) is slowly making its way toward grocery store shelves and dinner tables. But that’s only the beginning. Other companies are making progress at harnessing bacteria to spin air into protein, too—and someday soon, these microbial protein patties could be as common as veggie burgers.

An alternative to alternative proteins

The environmental case for microbial protein is clear enough; it’s a simple calculus of arable land, energy, and mouths to feed. The global demand for protein is already at an all-time high, and with the population expected to grow to 9.7 billion by 2050, traditional agriculture will have a hard time keeping up, especially as it battles climate change, soil degradation, and disease. A growing global middle class is expected to raise levels of meat consumption, but factory-farmed meat is one of the leading drivers of greenhouse-­gas emissions. Although protein-rich alternatives like soy are far more sustainable, most of the soy grown in the world is destined for use as animal feed—not for human consumption.

In contrast, bacterial “crops” convert carbon dioxide directly into protein, in a process that uses much less land and water. Microbial protein “farms” could operate year-round anywhere renewable electricity is cheap—even in places like Chile’s Atacama Desert, where farming is nearly impossible. That would take the strain off agricultural land—and potentially even give us the chance to return it to the wild.

“We are liberating food production from the constraints of agriculture,” Juha-Pekka Pitkänen, cofounder and CTO of the Finnish startup Solar Foods, explained in a recent company video. In April 2024 Solar Foods opened a demonstration factory in Vantaa, a short train ride from the Helsinki airport. It’s here, at Factory 01, that the company hopes to produce enough of its goldenrod-yellow protein powder, Solein, to prove itself viable—some 160 metric tons a year.

Source: These companies are creating food out of thin air | MIT Technology Review

Health

Part 4 Nutrition and Strength for Aging Strong

 

The habit of consuming a nutrient rich diet along with building a physically active lifestyle is one of the best marriages we can embrace in today’s fast paced, stress-filled world. As the demand for greater output goes up we should be matching it with sufficient input to preserve our resilience to the stressors we encounter each day.

Building high quality muscle takes a daily effort of eating sufficient bioavailable protein as well as loading the muscle to provide the stimulus for growth. A big culprit for losing our physical abilities as we grow older is the age-related loss of muscle mass and strength which is called sarcopenia. Typically, muscle mass and strength increase steadily from birth and reach their peak at around 30 to 35 years of age. The RDA for protein is 0.8g/kg/day, but several studies suggest that higher protein consumption than the RDA is required to preserve muscle mass and function in the elderly (1). When it comes to protein quality, plant-based protein is generally of lower quality with a lower amino acid profile and reduced bioavailability (2). Essential amino acids (EAAs) are known to increase muscle protein synthesis. This is especially true for a high proportion of leucine is important for optimal stimulation of muscle protein synthesis (3). This science, though empowering, can get overwhelming and very expensive quite quickly when you consider budgeting for both food and supplementation on a regular basis.  In this article we want to show you how to utilize the science and give you some ideas on eating and moving to build muscle and avoid age-related decline in function. 

Considering the paragraph above, we know that the science tells us that we need to consume sufficient protein beyond the RDA, especially as we move into middle age. Current evidence suggests intakes in the range of at least 1.2 to 1.6 g/kg/day of high quality protein is a more ideal target for achieving optimal health outcomes in adults. Although a position stand in the International Society of Sports Nutrition shared that 1.4-2.0 g protein/kg body weight /day is sufficient for most exercising individuals (5).

When you combine an active lifestyle with sufficient loading, you absolutely can stave off the decline in functional capacity that occurs because of under-nourishing and under-loading along with a stressful lifestyle. Fortunately, US Wellness Meats has us covered with a wide range of high protein resources that we can access. Collagen is another very important term related to protein that we need to discuss before moving on to implementation. Collagen is protein molecules made up of amino acids. It provides structural support to your all important connective tissues. Collagen is resistant to stretching (that’s a good thing), so it is the perfect matrix for skin, tendons, bones and ligaments.  

Collagen rich proteins  include: 

Protein serving sizes, generally 2-3 ounces of poultry, beef or fish is about the size of a deck of cards. Using US Wellness Meats as your resource, here are some top favorite high quality animal proteins that are also high in collagen that will help you to build a more resilient you!

Here are some favorite meal combos: 

Corned Beef Brisket along with eggs, cherries and sauteed spinach

Beef Chuck Roast in a wrap with peppers and onions

Pork broth made with pig ears and pig feet used to make a White Soup with Pork and Kale (swap the chicken broth for pork broth)

Pork Shoulder Roast with sweet potato and swiss chard

Lamb Rib Chops with baked potato and roast broccoli

Lamb Osso Bucco and Sweet Potato Risotto

Beef Short Ribs with your favorite 3 bean salad recipe

Beef Center Cut Shoulder Roast with roast potato and spinach salad

Chicken Feet and chicken necks chicken broth made into savory oats or lentils 

This is a short list of the many options that we have available to us through US Wellness Meats! 

NOW, as movement professionals we want to tell you how combining a high protein diet, rich in collagen with an active lifestyle will prompt the building of a more resilient you. Traditionally we think of building muscle mass and strength through weight lifting in a progressive loading program. That still holds true, we need to load the tissue to cause a breakdown and then remodel the tissue to get stronger. But, if we integrate the concept of microdosing movement that we shared in part 3, we can take this concept of building strength one step further. We can utilize microdosing movement to extend the benefits of your traditional strength workout by adding small doses of movement throughout the day. 

Adding small doses of  strength training throughout the day is not uncommon for most people who have manual labor jobs. Farmers, construction workers, gardeners or landscapers all spend some time either producing forces or resisting forces in their jobs. It may not look like traditional strength training but don’t be fooled. Those people that engage in smaller doses of exercise more frequently throughout the day are strong and preserve their functional capacities when they eat protein. 

Strength and muscle growth is essential to function. When you load the body against gravity and with an external resistance (your body or tool) the tissues of the body receive those forces. As the tissues continue to be loaded frequently and consistently the body will need protein and collagen to fortify muscle and connective tissue. 

Science has shown us that repeated loading of muscle and connective tissues in a lengthened under load environment has the greatest impact on preventing sarcopenia and increasing muscle hypertrophy. An example of being lengthened under load is hanging from a bar, or lowering a weight slowly or performing a task like shoveling. When we exercise with loads in multiple directions the body requires collagen to fortify the connective tissue. Connective tissue gets stronger when loading (this is called Mechanotransduction – process of converting mechanical energy into chemical activity) with different loads, directions, angles and speeds. In terms of total amount of exercise, known as volume and duration, most of the research tells us that 12-50 sets of structured exercise throughout the week will be beneficial for muscle hypertrophy. When you break it down into micro-doses you could do strength training for 7 minutes at a time (7sets) 3 times throughout the day = 21 sets per day. 21 sets per day of a particular muscle group or task one day per week would certainly provide an environment conducive for muscle growth. Imagine if you did that every day? Exercising 21 minutes of focused strength training per day will be a great way to enhance your strength and function. As professional coaches we ask our clients to try to commit to 7 minutes of strength training daily. Then we slowly progress your volume and complexity of movement over time.

Here is a sample workout along a similar style to Seven Movements which offers micro dosing prescriptions. This workout gives you a little metabolic boost, long lines of reach and some integrated breathwork. This is the type of stimulus that helps with recovery, extension of a training session and blood flow to the tissues to support growth. 

Health and resilience practices as we age must bring together multiple inputs. This article introduced two huge inputs that you can begin to incorporate today. Stay tuned for part 5, but in the meantime, head over and subscribe to Seven Movements on YouTube for more content! 

Source: Part 4 Nutrition and Strength for Aging Strong

Climate, research, Science

Tipping Point after Trump Victory: Why No One Can Stop the Global Energy Transition – CounterPunch.org

 

Donald Trump’s victory as next president of the United States is depressing news for climate protection. He already made clear that under his presidency

So, in addition to the “silent revolution” of solar and wind energy, strong pressure on governments to change course is still needed. According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), around seven trillion dollars, or 7,000 billion dollars, are spent each year on direct and indirect state subsidies for fossil fuels – a record amount – which distorts energy markets and prices, offloads damage and costs onto the general public and puts renewables at a massive disadvantage.

Redirecting these funds to clean energy would be an important, fair and socially responsible way to speed up the energy transition.

Source: Tipping Point after Trump Victory: Why No One Can Stop the Global Energy Transition – CounterPunch.org

Art, History

Death Whistle | | UZH

Many ancient cultures used musical instruments in ritual ceremonies. Ancient Aztec communities from the pre-Columbian period of Mesoamerica had a rich mythological codex that was also part of their ritual and sacrificial ceremonies. These ceremonies included visual and sonic iconographic elements of mythological deities of the Aztec underworld, which may also be symbolized in the Aztec death whistle. Their skull-shaped body may represent Mictlantecuhtli, the Aztec Lord of the Underworld, and the iconic screaming sound may have prepared human sacrifices for their mythological descent into Mictlan, the Aztec underworld.

Aztec death whistles have a unique instrumental construction

To understand the physical mechanisms behind the whistle’s shrill and screeching sound, a team of researchers at the University of Zurich led by Sascha Frühholz, Professor of Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, created 3D digital reconstructions of original Aztec death whistles from the Ethnological Museum in Berlin. The models revealed a unique internal construction of two opposing sound chambers that create physical air turbulence as the source of the screeching sound. “The whistles have a very unique construction, and we don’t know of any comparable musical instrument from other pre-Columbian cultures or from other historical and contemporary contexts,” says Frühholz.

Death whistles very, very frightening

The research team also obtained sound recordings of original Aztec death whistles as well as from handmade replicas. Listeners rated these sounds as extremely chilling and frightening. The Aztec death whistle seems to acoustically and affectively mimic other deterring sounds. Most interestingly, human listeners perceived the sound of the Aztec death whistle to be partly of natural and organic origin, like a human voice or scream. “This is consistent ith the tradition of many ancient cultures to capture natural sounds in musical instruments, and could explain the ritual dimension of the death whistle sound for mimicking mythological entities,” explains Frühholz. 

Affective response and symbolic association

The Aztec death whistle sounds were also played to human listeners while their brains were being recorded. Brain regions belonging to the affective neural system responded strongly to the sound, again confirming its daunting nature. But the team also observed brain activity in regions that associate sounds with symbolic meaning. This suggests a “hybrid” nature of these death whistle sounds, combining a basic psychoaffective influence on listeners with more elaborate mental processes of sound symbolism, signifying the iconographic nature.

Connecting modern humans with Aztec audiences

Music has always had strong emotional impact on human listeners in both contemporary and ancient cultures, hence its use in ritual religious and mythological contexts. Aztec communities may have specifically capitalized on the frightening and symbolic nature of the death whistle sound to influence the audience in their ritual procedures, based on the knowledge of how the sound affects modern humans. “Unfortunately, we could not perform our psychological and neuroscientific experiments with humans from ancient Aztec cultures. But the basic mechanisms of affective response to scary sounds are common to humans from all historical contexts,” says Frühholz.  

Acoustic sound samples: https://caneuro.github.io/blog/2024/study-skullwhistle/

Literature
Frühholz S, Rodriguez P, Bonard M, Steiner F, Bobin M (2024), Psychoacoustic and archeoacoustic nature of ancient Aztec skull whistles. Communications Psychology. 11 November 2024. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s44271-024-00157-7

I actually have four of these.

Source: Death Whistle | | UZH

Here’s the sounds they make:

https://caneuro.github.io/blog/2024/study-skullwhistle

Poetry

The Shoelace – Poetic Outlaws

a woman, a
tire that’s flat, a
disease, a
desire: fears in front of you,
fears that hold so still
you can study them
like pieces on a
chessboard…

it’s not the large things that
send a man to the
madhouse. death he’s ready for, or
murder, incest, robbery, fire, flood…
no, it’s the continuing series of small tragedies
that send a man to the
madhouse…
not the death of his love
but a shoelace that snaps
with no time left …

The dread of life
is that swarm of trivialities
that can kill quicker than cancer
and which are always there –
license plates or taxes
or expired driver’s license,
or hiring or firing,
doing it or having it done to you, or
roaches or flies or a
broken hook on a
screen, or out of gas
or too much gas,
the sink’s stopped-up, the landlord’s drunk,
the president doesn’t care and the governor’s
crazy.

light switch broken, mattress like a
porcupine;
$105 for a tune-up, carburetor and fuel pump at
sears roebuck;
and the phone bill’s up and the market’s
down
and the toilet chain is
broken,
and the light has burned out –
the hall light, the front light, the back light,
the inner light; it’s
darker than hell
and twice as
expensive.

then there’s always crabs and ingrown toenails
and people who insist they’re
your friends;
there’s always that and worse;
leaky faucet, christ and christmas;
blue salami, 9 day rains,
50 cent avocados
and purple
liverwurst.

or making it
as a waitress at norm’s on the split shift,
or as an emptier of
bedpans,
or as a carwash or a busboy
or a stealer of old lady’s purses
leaving them screaming on the sidewalks
with broken arms at the age of 80.

suddenly
2 red lights in your rear view mirror
and blood in your
underwear;
toothache, and $979 for a bridge
$300 for a gold
tooth,
and china and russia and america, and
long hair and short hair and no
hair, and beards and no
faces, and plenty of zigzag but no
pot, except maybe one to piss in
and the other one around your
gut.

with each broken shoelace
out of one hundred broken shoelaces,
one man, one woman, one
thing
enters a
madhouse.

so be careful
when you
bend over.

Charles Bukowski

 
Source: The Shoelace – Poetic Outlaws

Climate, Health, Science

‘You’re not the boss of me’ – by Bill McKibben

America’s current conspiratorial politics offers some possibilities for action

Solar power is cheaper. (and those who oppose it know so, and are conspiring to make sure you keep paying them for energy when the sun provides it for free)

It’s more reliable. (and you can plug your EV to your house after a hurricane and run everything for a week).

It’s the ultimate liberty to have your own powerplant on your roof.

It’s far better to have a wind farm in your county than to rely on Saudi Arabia (or Chris Wright).

An electric car goes zero to sixty far faster than your antiquated gas model and it costs half as much to run. (Rich guys in their Teslas are laughing at you)

Because it has fewer moving parts, you don’t have to visit your mechanic nearly as often. You can drive right by the gas station.

Oil companies are a scam, pushing antiquated technology to keep you hooked. They don’t care if you breathe dirty air as long as it makes them money.

Their shareholders are getting rich while you pay for repairing roads and bridges everytime there’s a new climate disaster.

Source: ‘You’re not the boss of me’ – by Bill McKibben

inspiration, Kindness, Monday Musings, motivation

Monday Musings — 18NOV24

It time to Gird your loins folks. It’s time to do battle and get to work.

I don’t think the next 4 years (hope that’s all it will be) is going to be great for lot of people. In fact if Trump does half of what he’s telegraphed, then it’s going to be really shitty. So get ready to put some hard work into the things you feel are important, and that the elites are going to try to fuck up.

I put some resources in last week’s Musings, and a few more since then. Check them out.

So, I’m handicapped. Can drive myself, don’t leave the house as much as I used to (especially in the cold weather), I’m weak (can barely lift myself out of a chair), all that crap. I can write and make art still. Thank goodness for that. Have all (or most) of my faculties. So I can still read, also. I can’t join protests, making it to meetings is, while not impossible, not practical, unless it’s via Zoom or something. It’s not something I worried about, even a couple of years ago, but there you have it. I do what I can. Around the house I do chores, with lots of rest breaks, I cook, etc. I work in my studio, when I can. Some days motivation is damn nigh nonexistent, others it comes back.

So I do my art, I write this blog. Which I hope can be motivating for you all. I donate money to causes (not much). I Zoom with some people who help me motivate to write the comic I’m working on. I do what I can. You should to.

On that note, I’m an old fart, and there’s an organization for older people who want to make a difference. Read about it:

“Experienced Americans” are the fastest-growing part of the population: 10,000 people a day pass the 60-year mark. That means that there’s no way to make the changes that must be made to protect our planet and society unless we bring our power into play.

We’re used to thinking that humans grow more conservative as they age, perhaps because we have more to protect, or simply because we’re used to things the way they are. But our generations saw enormous positive change early in our lives—the civil rights movement, for instance, or the fight to end massive wars or guarantee the rights of women. And now we fear that the promise of those changes may be dying, as the planet heats and inequality grows.

But as a generation we have unprecedented skills and resources that we can bring to bear. Washington and Wall Street have to listen when we speak, because we vote and because we have a large—maybe an overlarge—share of the country’s assets. And many of us have kids and grandkids and great grandkids: we have, in other words, very real reasons to worry and to work.