Lifeboat Foundation

The monster fruit is the size of a ping-pong ball and weighs 20.4g, about 10 times the average blueberry.

Bill Gates said current AI models need “data that embodies the expertise,” such as in pharmaceuticals or agriculture, in order to succeed.

A genetically modified cow has produced milk containing human insulin, according to a new study. The proof-of-concept achievement could be scaled up to, eventually, produce enough insulin to ensure availability and reduced cost for all diabetics requiring the life-maintaining drug.

Unable to rely on their own supply due to damaged pancreatic cells, type 1 diabetics need injectable insulin to live. As do some type 2 diabetics. The World Health Organization estimates that of those who require insulin, between 150 and 200 million people worldwide, only about half are being treated with it. Access to insulin remains inadequate in many low-and middle-income countries – and some high-income countries – and its cost and unavailability have been well-documented.

In a newly published study led by the Department of Animal Sciences in the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the Universidade de São Paulo, researchers say they may have developed a way of eliminating insulin scarcity and reducing its cost using cows. Yep, cows.

Some dairy farms could turn into lifesaving insulin factories.

Results are in from the six-month test of the Pyxis Ocean, a cargo ship outfitted with fiberglass sails as part of a fuel-saving test by Cargill Inc.

The Wayzata, Minn.-based agriculture giant said the partially wind-powered cargo ship saved an average of 3 tons of fuel per day and 11.2 tons of carbon dioxide emissions. Cargill calculates that this savings would be the equivalent of taking 480 cars off the road.

In optimal conditions, the ship saved nearly 11 tons per day. That’s roughly a 37% decrease in carbon emissions. According to Ship and Bunker’s global 20 port average, that’s a savings of about $656 per metric ton in fuel. Most cargo ships are fueled by bunker fuel, also known as heavy fuel oil.

Researchers at the US Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) have developed camera-based autonomous driving tools that can work without deploying technologies like LIDAR and RADAR.

The technology can potentially deliver stealth capabilities for the military while finding applications in space and agriculture.

Modern autonomous driving solutions rely extensively on light detection and ranging (LIDAR) sensors to visualize objects around the vehicle. A software solution then identifies the objects nearby and helps the vehicle’s computer decide whether to halt or slow down.

The mysteries of photosynthesis have been unveiled at the atomic level, providing significant new insights into this plant super-power that transformed the Earth into a green landscape over a billion years ago.

John Innes Centre researchers used an advanced microscopy method called cryo-EM to explore how the photosynthetic proteins are made.

The study, published in Cell, presents a model and resources to stimulate further fundamental discoveries in this field and assist longer-term goals of developing more resilient crops.

On the Zanzibarian island of Pemba, sea turtle meat is considered a delicacy — but it also, apparently, can fatally poison you.

As the Associated Press and other outlets report, nine people have died and 78 others were hospitalized after eating sea turtle on Pemba, an island in the Zanzibar archipelago in the Indian Ocean.

The veal-tasting meat of green turtles is, like in other coastal communities throughout Asia and Africa, still a delicacy on Zanzibar — despite the endangered status of the animals and, as this incident indicates, its predisposition towards severe and sometimes fatal food poisoning.

Covariant this week announced the launch of RFM-1 (Robotics Foundation Model 1). Peter Chen, the co-founder and CEO of the UC Berkeley artificial intelligence spinout tells TechCrunch the platform, “is basically a large language model (LLM), but for robot language.”

RFM-1 is the result of, among other things, a massive trove of data collected from the deployment of Covariant’s Brain AI platform. With customer consent, the startup has been building the robot equivalent of an LLM database.

“The vision of RFM-1 is to power the billions of robots to come,” Chen says. “We at Covariant have already deployed lots of robots at warehouses with success. But that is not the limit of where we want to get to. We really want to power robots in manufacturing, food processing, recycling, agriculture, the service industry and even into people’s homes.”