Gluten-Free Superfood From Ethiopia Is Coming To Israel
Researchers are bringing teff – the staple food for millions of Ethiopians – to Israel.
Coming Soon: Human Skin You Can Print at Home
Revolutionary 3D-printed Second Skin could provide an easier, cheaper alternative for scars and topical wounds, and eventually for skin grafts.
By Abigail Klein Leichman JUNE 10, 2022, 8:40 AM
Israeli cultured milk company Wilk (formerly Biomilk) recently nabbed a US patent for its proprietary methods and technologies to produce animal-free cultured milk and cell-based human milk, placing the company firmly on track to scale its development and enter a dairy market that was valued at over $800 billion in 2020, and an infant formula industry that is expected to reach over $100 billion by 2026.
The exclusive patent, awarded in February by the US Patent and Trademark Office, protects the company’s intellectual property and covers the methods and systems Wilk developed for the cultivation and separation of milk components from cultured cells, as the company now turns its focus on processes that increase production volume, said Wilk CEO Tomer Aizen.
For the animal-derived cultured milk, Wilk uses mammal cells “that are then grown and cultivated” in bioreactors, combined with a “secret sauce,” Aizen told The Times of Israel in a videoconference interview in February, referring to processes based on a decade of proprietary research by Dr. Nurit Argov-Argaman and Maggie Levy of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Sea2Cell, which is developing cultured blue tuna, was founded in September 2021 in the Fresh Start food-tech incubator in Kiryat Shmona by Avishai Levy, Dr. Itai Tzchori, Pablo Resnik, Prof. Berta Sivan and Dr. Orna Harel. The company has raised NIS 3.5 million.
Prof. Sivan came to the fish alternatives sector from the fish industry itself. As a professor of biology at the Hebrew University Faculty of Agriculture she set up a company for accelerating the fish farming process. She was involved in another project in Africa to advance fish farming of carp in pools. But she believes wild fish should be left alone.
Prof. Sivan has gained major knowhow in isolating cells from living tissues of fish in order to raise them. She was approached by Dr. Orna Harel who for years had been thinking about developing cultured fish. They were joined by Dr. Itai Tzchori, an expert in fish stem cells and Pablo Resnik who has been involved in international trade in fish and seafood. They set up the start up in the Fresh Start incubator, a partnership of Tnuva, Tempo, OurCrowd and Finister.
While stem cells of mammals have been produced for many years, partly in research institutes, there are very few fish stem cells produced. Sea2Cell is first of all building a massive stem cell production capacity, which can be transferred under concessions for other companies to manufacture the products. The aim is blue tuna. "Prof. Sivan said, "Even if we prevent the killing of one tuna, we would have achieved something."
Tuna is overfished worldwide and attempts to raise them in captivity have failed.
N-Drip’s precise agriculture system drip-irrigates fields that were formerly flooded, addressing the world water shortage while improving outcomes.
https://www.israel21c.org/new-gravity-watering-system-saves-resources-and-raises-yields/
Doubts crop up as bid to lower price of produce targets farms for reform
Plan, which would up imports and pay farmers directly rather than via tariffs, ‘risks destroying entire sector,’ warns academic as data suggests retail markups may be to blame.
Hebrew University Prof. Ayal Kimhi, vice president of the Shoresh Institution for Socioeconomic Research, said that while direct payments work, the suggested figure is “so inadequate that you risk destroying the entire farming sector.”
The number, he told The Times of Israel, was taken from the European Union, where there are large tracts of pasture land, and in no way reflects the tens of thousands of shekels poured into intensive vegetable and fruit farming. “If prices go down as a result of lowering the tariffs, people will simply abandon their farms,” he warned.
Kimhi noted that fruit and vegetable prices in Israel are still cheaper on average than in other countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development — 5% cheaper in the OECD’s most recent analysis, carried out in 2017.
In Europe, the process of moving to direct payments to farmers took two decades. “Lowering import tariffs is right but you need to do it slowly, carefully, and to stop each time and review the result. Five years is too fast,” said Kimhi.
Plant-based meat substitute producer, SavorEat, has announced that it is opening up a subsidiary to tackle another protein in the plant-based battle for our meals. EGG’N’UP will have a crack at developing food products based on natural egg substitutes, designed to replace eggs without impeding on their original taste or nutritional values. ..
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctech/articles/0,7340,L-3906977,00.html
PNAS Journal Club: In the 1930s, scientists discovered a heavier form of water. So-called “heavy water” (D2O) weighs more because the nucleus of each of its two hydrogen atoms contains not just a proton but a neutron as well. Known as deuterium, heavy hydrogen causes subtle differences in heavy water—from small increases in boiling and freezing points to a roughly 10% increase in density.
Now, an international team of researchers has confirmed another difference long rumored to be true: Heavy water tastes sweet. “It’s a very gentle sweetness,” says study author Masha Niv, a taste scientist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. “It’s not like Sweet’n Low.”
Heavy water won’t work as a sweetener. Indeed, in large quantities, it’s lethal. But the work, recently reported in Communications Biology, could inspire a deeper understanding of how the sweet taste receptor works.
Heavy water’s flavor has rarely been formally tested as part of an experiment. Harold Urey, who discovered deuterium, tasted heavy water in 1935 and reported with a colleague in Science that it was no different than regular water. And a more recent study relied on human sensory studies alone to investigate. But anecdotally, some chemists have reported that heavy water tastes sweet—including Niv’s coauthors, chemists Pavel Jungwirth and Phil Mason of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague. So they and collaborators decided to put that sweetness to the test.
The Plant Sensing Laboratory (PSL) was established in 2018 and its main focus is at early stress detection and identification, and yield prediction based on sensing plant trait assessment. We are using spectral sensors (i.e., multi- and hyper- spectral cameras and spectro radiometrs) mounted on ground, airborne and spaceborne platforms to acquire spectral data.
We might refer to someone’s personality as “mousy,” but in truth, mice have a range of personalities nearly as great as our own. ...A quantitative understanding of the traits that make each animal an individual might help answer some of the open questions in science concerning the connections between genes and behavior. The findings of this research were published in Nature Neuroscience. Dr. Oren Forkosh, then a postdoctoral fellow who led the research in Prof. Chen’s group in Germany, explains that understanding how genetics contribute to behavior has remained an open question. Personality, scientists hypothesized, might be the “glue” that binds the two together: both genes and epigenetics (which determines how the genes are expressed) contribute to personality formation; in turn, one’s personality will determine, to a great extent, how one behaves in any given situation.
Personality is, by definition, something that is individual for each animal and something that remains fairly stable for an animal over its lifetime. Human subjects are generally given personality scores based on multiple-choice questionnaires, but for mice, the researchers needed to start with their behavior and work backward. The mice were color-coded for identification, placed in small groups in regular lab environments – with food, shelter, toys, etc. – and allowed to interact and explore freely. These mice were videoed over several days, and their behavior analyzed in depth. All together, the scientists identified 60 separate behaviors, including approaching others, chasing or fleeing, sharing food or keeping others away from food, exploring or hiding. ...
The secret to better equine wound healing might have been with us all along, thanks to bees.
"When field practitioners applied MGH to horses’ wounds prior to suturing, the defects were more likely to have complete wound healing within two weeks, before suture removal, than horses that didn’t receive MGH, said Gal Kelmer, DVM, MS, Dipl. ACVS, ECVS, of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem Koret School of Veterinary Medicine, in Beit Dagan, Israel.
Further, he said, these horses had fewer signs of infection, and their veterinarians were generally more satisfied with the wound healing process than those whose patients hadn’t received the honey.
Kelmer, who uses MGH in clinical settings regularly, said he wasn’t surprised by the results. “I use MGH inside repaired lacerations and inside elective surgeries, just prior to skin closure, in most of the surgeries I’ve performed in the past couple of years,” he said. “I’m extremely satisfied with the outcome.”
Microscopic droplets on the surface of leaves give refuge to bacteria that otherwise may not survive during the dry daytime, according to a new study published today in eLife. Understanding this bacterial survival strategy for dry conditions may enable scientists to develop practices that support healthy plant microbiomes in agricultural and natural settings.
The surface of an average plant leaf is teeming with about 10 million microbes – a population comparable to that of large cities – that contribute to the health and day-to-day functioning of the plant. Scientists have long wondered how bacteria are able to survive as daytime temperatures and sunlight dry off leaf surfaces.
“While leaves may appear to be completely dry during the day, there is evidence that they are frequently covered by thin liquid films or micrometre-sized droplets that are invisible to the naked eye,” says co-lead author Maor Grinberg, a PhD student at Hebrew University’s Robert H. Smith Faculty of Agriculture, Food, and Environment in Rehovot, Israel. “It wasn’t clear until now whether this microscopic wetness was enough to protect bacteria from drying out.”...