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How Feed Supplements Could Solve Cow Farts and Fix the Planet

May 16, 2022 tremendousblog Leave a comment

It’s time we acknowledge an uncomfortable truth: everybody burps and farts.

But amongst all animals, cows are the reigning champions. Those charming emissions contain methane, a potent greenhouse gas.

Indeed, cows produce more greenhouse gases than Brazil or Germany. But an innovative startup may have found the solution.

Mootral produces a garlic-based product that farmers can mix into cow feed. It cuts methane emissions by 20 to 38% and boosts milk production by as much as 5%.

Best of all, it doesn’t hurt the cow or change the flavor of the milk or flesh. Think of it as Beano for cows.

As far-fetched as it may sound, Mootral’s product is backed by numerous peer reviewed studies. UK farmers can even get the supplement for free if they share their methane data.

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Mootral isn’t the only startup tackling this pungent problem.

Blue Ocean Barns has created a seaweed-based supplement that may be even more potent than Mootral. Their product reduced methane emissions by 52% in a recent study.

A young lady I spoke with recently told me that the world is doomed because of climate change. I couldn’t disagree more.

Bit by bit, innovative scientists and companies are figuring out this problem. A feed supplement here, a wind turbine over there, and we may soon be amazed at the progress we’ve made.

What do you think of Mootral and Blue Ocean Barns? And what are the most interesting environmental technologies you’ve seen recently?

Leave a comment at the bottom and let me know.

Have a fantastic week everyone!

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Growing Veggies on Mars

May 2, 2022 tremendousblog 4 Comments

NASA intends to put the first man on Mars in the 2030’s. But once he’s there, what will he have for lunch?

Perhaps veggies grown in a BioPod.

This incredible new device from startup Interstellar Lab could finally allow us to cultivate crops in space. It could also revolutionize agriculture here on Earth.

The BioPod is an inflatable dome about 20 feet wide, 33 feet long, and 15 feet tall. It uses aeroponics, precision nutrient delivery, and careful climate control to produce the ideal growing environment for plants.

This means it can grow high value crops like flowers and microgreens. It can even grow plants that can’t be grown with traditional agriculture, like vanilla.

It’s also remarkably efficient, reducing water consumption by 98% while boosting yields up to 300-fold.

The BioPod is designed not just to feed humans in space, but on an increasingly unpredictable Earth. From a recent interview:

“Climate change is a real emergency for Earth, and we only have a small window to bring about positive change. We are developing a new framework for sustainable living on Earth and a testbed for future space missions,” Barbara Belvisi, Founder and CEO, Interstellar Lab said.

The BioPod is currently in production. You can even pre-order one now!

But at $250,000 each plus a monthly subscription fee, it’s a bit out of reach for most gardeners. Oh, and shipping’s not included.

However, if the BioPod can reduce inputs and boost yields as radically as Interstellar claims, I could see rapid adoption in the agriculture industry.

Already, companies like Bowery Farming are taking agriculture from farms to urban warehouses using hydroponics. They seem like a natural customer for Interstellar Lab, and I’m sure there are many more.

Long term, perhaps the BioPod will be deployed on Mars to support astronauts brought there by a SpaceX Starship. It’s a beautiful future I look forward to.

In the mean time, I’m itching to try a BioPod salad! 🙂

What do you think of the BioPod? Would you try its food?

Leave a comment at the bottom and let me know.

Have a great day everyone! 👋

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Business, Science, Technology

Can A Scientific Dream Team End Aging?

February 3, 2022 tremendousblog Leave a comment

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No one wants to get old. But how can we stop and even reverse aging?

Perhaps a Dream Team of the world’s greatest scientists. And a whole lot of money.

Well, that just became a reality.

For those of us who follow venture capital, the news hit like a bomb. Previously unknown Altos Labs burst onto the scene with a $3 billion seed round, likely the largest early stage fundraise in history.

To put that in perspective, a typical seed round is more like $1-3 million.

Altos will be putting that money in the hands of some of the world’s top scientists.

Noted antiaging researchers like Izpisúa Belmonte and Alejandro Ocampo are on board. Nobel Laureates Shinya Yamanaka and Jennifer Doudna have also joined as advisers.

Altos has promised salaries over $1 million, generous research budgets, and autonomy. Plus, no more constant grant writing.

So can aging be reversed? New findings suggest it may be possible.

Just last September, researchers succeeded in reversing aging in mouse hearts using Shinya Yamanaka’s Yamanaka Factors:

…after two and a half decades of fitful starts and abandoned leads, Braun and a team of researchers at the Max Planck Institute showed that they could reprogram heart cells in mice and get the animals to regenerate cardiac tissue after a heart attack. The breakthrough, published in Science, adds new evidence that it will eventually be possible to help patients recover muscle lost in heart attacks and gives another boon to anti-aging researchers who want to one day apply these rejuvenation techniques across much of the body.

Heart cells are some of the hardest to reprogram. If scientists can do this, what else can they accomplish?

David Sinclair at Harvard reversed aging in mouse eyes the year before. The pace of these breakthroughs seems to be increasing.

Any investor in startups always asks the founder “why now?” Why is now the right time to raise this money and build this business?

Altos has a very compelling “why now.”

The foundation for reversing aging has been laid by Yamanaka and others. Scientists worldwide are building on it rapidly, coming up with cure after cure for previously untreatable diseases.

I’m itching to see what Altos can accomplish. Best of luck to their incredible team!

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Photo: “Shinya Yamanaka” by Rubenstein is licensed under CC BY 2.0

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Business, Science, Technology

Cana: The Star Trek Replicator for Beverages

January 26, 2022 tremendousblog 2 Comments

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I woke up this morning and wandered into the kitchen. I opened the fridge and poured a delicious glass of tingly seltzer.

Mango flavor.

After a glass or two, I threw out the empty plastic bottle. That bottle may soon make it into the ocean and perhaps even back into my body as microplastics.

But what if I could have my yummy seltzer, along with my morning coffee or even a glass of wine…all from one printer?

This is what Cana, an incredible startup backed by David Friedberg, may soon make a reality. Cana has spent 3 years developing a 3D printer for beverages.

It can make thousands of drinks, from iced coffee to orange juice to beer. Since those drinks are 90% or more water, Cana only has to send you a tiny cartridge with flavor compounds.

The water comes from your tap!

And Cana can add unique flavors to your drink. Maybe almond seltzer is what we’ve been waiting for all along!

If it works, Cana will be incredibly convenient and should be cheaper than regular beverages. But Cana offers a lot more than convenience.

If we quit shipping heavy beverages that are almost entirely water, and quit stocking them on shelves and housing the empties in landfills, the environment will benefit greatly. Imagine all the carbon emissions of trucks and warehouses used to transport and store beverages, gone!

And drinks are just the beginning. Some day, Cana aims to print any consumable item you may need.

The device, about the size of a toaster oven, should be available within the next year, with pricing to be released in February.

I signed up for early access on their website, and I’ll knock over 10 people to be an investor too!

What do you think of Cana’s technology? Let me know in the comments at the bottom of the page.

And check out this great interview with David Friedberg on Cana from the This Week in Startups podcast!

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Business, Health, NYC Area, Science, Technology

3D Printing a Human Ear

December 2, 2021 tremendousblog 3 Comments

What would it be like to not have ears?

Unfortunately, for patients with microtia, this is no hypothetical. Microtia, or lack of a fully developed ear, is a congenital condition affecting about 1 in every 6-8,000 people.

Some patients have a malformed outer ear. Others have almost no ear tissue at all.

The only treatment is taking cartilage from the rib and fashioning a new ear. This requires multiple painful surgeries and tends to produce an unsatisfying outcome.

But now, an incredible NYC startup called 3D Bio can use the patient’s own ear tissue to 3D print a new ear! The patient’s sample is expanded in a cell culture and printed.

The ear can be attached in a simple outpatient procedure.

This treatment is now in early clinical trials. If it works, it could change medicine forever.

What if we could print new hearts, lungs, or livers? Imagine making a new, functional eye for a blind person.

Such technology could alleviate enormous suffering and greatly expand human life expectancy. And I’m extremely excited about it.

Best of luck to the incredible team at 3D Bio!

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Health, Science, Technology

A Vaccine for Breast Cancer?

November 2, 2021 tremendousblog Leave a comment

Breast cancer killed 685,000 women worldwide last year. But the Cleveland Clinic has a new drug that could change that:

Cleveland Clinic researchers have opened a novel study for a vaccine aimed at eventually preventing triple-negative breast cancer, the most aggressive and lethal form of the disease.

Triple negative breast cancer only accounts for 12-15% of cases, but it’s unusually deadly.

Unlike most vaccines, the breast cancer vaccine could even help people who already have cancer:

“We are hopeful that this research will lead to more advanced trials to determine the effectiveness of the vaccine against this highly aggressive type of breast cancer,” said G. Thomas Budd, M.D., of Cleveland Clinic’s Taussig Cancer Institute and principal investigator of the study. “Long term, we are hoping that this can be a true preventive vaccine that would be administered to healthy women to prevent them from developing triple-negative breast cancer, the form of breast cancer for which we have the least effective treatments.”

Dr. Vincent Tuohy, inventor of the breast cancer vaccine, thinks vaccines may also work against ovarian and endometrial cancers:

“If successful, these vaccines have the potential to transform the way we control adult-onset cancers and enhance life expectancy in a manner similar to the impact that the childhood vaccination program has had.”

The idea of a vaccine for cancer isn’t as crazy as it may sound. BioNTech, producer of the first COVID vaccine approved in the United States, was working on cancer vaccines when the pandemic hit.

BioNTech currently has a colorectal cancer vaccine in Phase 2 clinical trials. That drug is even customized to each person’s body for maximum effectiveness.

We may be headed toward a world where if you have cancer, a few injections could stop the tumors in their tracks. And if you don’t have cancer, a preventive vaccine could ensure you never develop it.

The breast cancer vaccine’s Phase 1 trials should wrap up in September of 2022. I can’t wait for the results!

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Photo: “Breast Cancer Cells” by National Institutes of Health (NIH) is marked with CC PDM 1.0

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Business, Science, Technology

How Tech Could Stop Wildfires

October 5, 2021 tremendousblog 1 Comment

The US West Coast wildfire season used to be 4 months long.

Now it’s 8, running from May to January. 2.5 million acres of land have burned in California alone this year.

But for desperate homeowners in fire prone regions, there may be hope. Several new technologies have been developed recently that may protect homes from these terrifying fires.

Long-Acting Chemical Sprays

Just today, the US Forest Service approved a new fire retardant chemical. It can be sprayed on houses and critical infrastructure and last for months.

It may even last an entire fire season.

The chemical is called PHOS-CHEK FORTIFY®. Developed by Perimeter Solutions in Missouri, it is the first fire retardant that can protect structures for the long term.

I could see every house in the West being coated in this material or something like it each spring.

Fire Blankets

Giant foil blankets have saved some homes from wildfires.

However, a study by Case Western Reserve University Prof. Fumiaki Takahashi found that fire blankets are usually only effective for short periods. In a prolonged fire, they may fail.

Dry Ice

An intriguing possibility I first heard about on a recent episode of This Week in Startups. The idea is that CO2 from the dry ice would suffocate the fire, which needs oxygen to burn.

Unfortunately, this approach does not seem very effective for forest fires. From a study presented at the International Symposium on Fire Investigation Science and Technology:

To be effective against class A fires, the solid state CO2 tends to need to be in direct contact with the fuel material. As many forest fires travel through the canopy, this is not a feasible extinguishment method.

Wrap Up

The best candidate looks like a long term fire retardant chemical. Coupled with advanced satellite imaging to track fires just seconds after they begin, it could be a powerful tool to stop these fires.

Best of luck to the innovative companies and researchers tackling this huge challenge!

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Male Contraception With an Ultrasound Device?

September 29, 2021 tremendousblog 7 Comments

A fascinating new device could one provide the elusive male contraceptive:

German design graduate Rebecca Weiss has won a James Dyson Award for a male contraceptive device called Coso, which uses ultrasound waves to temporarily halt sperm regeneration.

Weiss’s Coso device is designed to be a reversible contraceptive solution. To use it, a person would fill the device with water up to the indicated mark, turn it on so it heats to operating temperature, and sit for a few minutes with their testicles dipped into it.

Coso looks like it could be the newest Alexa. It even comes with an app to show where you are in the process.

Right now, this device is just a prototype and is not available to the public. Its technology is based on a published study in the journal Reproductive Biology and Endocrinology.

This study successfully used ultrasound currents on rat testes in order to reduce sperm count. It will take a lot more research to determine this is safe and effective in humans.

If it works, I think this innovation could be transformative. Most, if not all, of the burden of contraception is generally on women. Those methods often have significant side effects.

Perhaps there is a better way!

I think a startup like this would make a wonderful candidate for Y Combinator, which backs startups from all over the world in areas including biotech and medical devices.

Best of luck to the amazing Rebecca Weiss!

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What if Everyone on Earth Had Super Fast Internet for $1?

September 10, 2021 tremendousblog 1 Comment

Only about half the world has internet access. Even rural America lags behind in broadband penetration.

But what if everyone on earth had incredibly fast internet for $1 a month?

A fascinating company called Akash Systems just might pull that off. It is delivering internet 100 times more cheaply than its competitors.

Given that Starlink is charging $99/month for its high speed satellite internet, Akash may one day be able to do it for as little as a dollar.

“This is sort of where the internet was in, I would say, ’98, ’99.”
Felix Ejeckam

The key is a new type of transistor called Gallium Nitride (GaN)-on-Diamond. The founder of Akash, Felix Ejeckam, invented it.

The hottest part of a transistor is put within nanometers of a synthetic diamond. Synthetic diamonds conduct heat better than any other material.

This means that the transistor produces way less heat. Anyone who’s had a laptop on their lap knows it can get hot.

Electronics getting hot cause all sorts of problems, especially in space.

Excess heat means problems with wireless communication. It also requires large heat sinks to dissipate the heat.

This makes the satellite bulkier and more expensive.

Today, Akash focuses on building transmitters for other satellite makers. In the future, they plan to launch their own satellites and internet service.

I can’t wait to sign up and cut my bill down to nothing!

In an interview with the Ejeckam, I was fascinated to hear that he dreamed up this idea 17 years ago. It shows the persistence needed to make a dream real.

“The limits of your imagination today define the limits of space tomorrow.”
Felix Ejeckam

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