Our future source for meat will not be the animals

The cattle farm of tomorrow

What if we could enjoy the taste and nutritional benefits of meat without subjecting the animals from whom the meat comes to the suffering that we currently put them through? In vitro meat is an attempt to fulfill this ideal. Also known as synthetic meat, test-tube meat, and victimless meat; in vitro meat is an animal-flesh product that has never been part of an animal that has been alive.

Winston Churchill said in an article that was written in 1931, “We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium.” Thus, the idea of in vitro meat has been around for a long time. Only recently have we actually developed the technology to try it.

The first lab grown burger was cooked and eaten in 2013 at a news conference in London. This was accomplished by taking stem cells from a cow and growing them into strips of muscle. It was tasted by two critics, one of whom stated: “There is really a bite to it, there is quite some flavour with the browning. I know there is no fat in it so I didn't really know how juicy it would be, but there is quite some intense taste; it's close to meat, it's not that juicy, but the consistency is perfect. This is meat to me... It's really something to bite on and I think the look is quite similar.”

There is, of course, a world of difference between lab tested and consumer ready. Some challenges exist before we will find this option at our local grocery stores. One challenge is the cost. In 2008 a piece of in vitro beef weighing only 250 grams cost about $1 million. The burger that was created in 2013 had about $275,000 in funding to develop it. The professor leading the team estimated that it would be about 10 years before it would be cost competitive to traditional beef.

Another challenge, which is related to cost, is scale. Producing this stuff in a large enough scale to be useful to consumers is going to have to be considered. How do we culture these cells in a way that provides a well-balanced mixture of ingredients and growth factors? One possible solution is using a plant-based medium to keep costs down. In that case allergenic factors might need to be considered.

In vitro meat would not only reduce the suffering of animals, there are possible benefits for those who eat it over traditional meat too. Artificial growth hormones may not be required for production of in vitro meat. Omega-3 fatty acid could be added to it as well. It would also be produced in a much more sterile environment leading to reduced exposure to things like pesticides and fungicides.

On the environmental front, an Oxford study found in vitro meat to be much more friendly and efficient. According to the study, cultured meat would generate up to 96% lower greenhouse gas emissions than traditionally produced meat. They also estimated that it would require 7-45% less energy to achieve equal volumes of pork, sheep, or beef. Another major benefit would be 99% lower land use.

As far as ethical and religious concerns, thoughts vary among interested individuals. Though many animal welfare organizations are tend to favor in vitro meat since it does not have a nervous system, some who enjoy a vegetarian diet argue that using fetal calf serum as a growth medium negates the ethical consideration. Those identifying as Jewish disagree on whether in vitro is kosher. Scholars of the Muslim population state that in vitro meat would be allowed by Islamic law if the original cells and growth medium were halal.

I personally have been on vegetarian and vegan diets in the past. Currently meat does not sit well with me from the standpoint of suffering that it causes, therefore I have not been eating it. I would eat this “test-tube meat” were it to be available to me inexpensively. I am going to keep an eye on the progression of in vitro meat and am a candidate to be an early adopter once it is ready for consumers.

What do you think? Would you rather eat traditionally grown meat or meat produced in vitro given a choice if the end product was almost indistinguishable? Comment to let me know.

Kirk Aug

Kirk cultivates the Idea Farm here at SeedSing. He is always on the look out for the next great sociological invention. If you have an interest in the future, make sure to follow Kirk on twitter @kirkaug.

We Must Halt the Dumbening of Our Society

The most accurate thing in this photo is the uniform

So we now live in a world where a high school freshman is arrested for making a clock.  Although it impressed the science teacher, it scared the English teacher (apparently not enough to evacuate the classroom, but let’s not let logic interfere).  According to the police, said clock looked like a “movie bomb,” because their training came from Die Hard.  And then, with no understanding themselves, the left starts throwing around a word like “genius” as if any bright, curious kid who likes to play with technology is automatically Einstein.  (Apologies to Ahmed Mohamed, who may be a genius, but who might just be a talented future engineer.)  This whole pile of stupid is what happens when lay-people have no functional understanding of science and technology.

How many times have you heard a supposedly educated and thinking person say to you “Oh, I can’t do algebra” or “chemistry is so boring” without a hint of embarrassment?  These same people would never proudly declare “Oh, I can’t read at a 7th grade level,” or “Shakespeare is so confusing” because people would assume they’re uneducated rubes.  But to my ear, these are one and the same.

When did this happen?  Was it when we divided the world into jocks and nerds?   When we decided all science-types had some form of autism spectrum disorder?  (For the record, I know many socially well-adjusted science-types.)  Five hundred years ago, the model of the educated man was someone like Rene Descartes, who was a philosopher (Cogito ergo sum) but also developed an entire branch of mathematics.  Ben Franklin is as famous for being an inventor as he is for political theory.  But now, top caliber universities offer humanities and social science degrees without any lab science requirements, instead granting credit for “Biology for Poets” and other nonsense.

I’m not on this hobby-horse just because it’s a personal pet peeve.  This is important because it informs our public debate. 

Part of the problem is that lay-people do not understand the process and language of science.    I’m sure we were all taught the scientific method as children.  First, you formulate a hypothesis.  Then, you design an experiment to attempt to DISPROVE this hypothesis.  Once that hypothesis survives enough reasoned attempts at disproving it, it becomes established science.  Sometimes, new data or research methods yield contradictions to established science, and we develop a new testable hypothesis and go from there.

The words “theory,” and “law” mean something different in science than in the vernacular.  A scientific theory is not just a harebrained idea that hasn’t become scientific law.  It’s not a science bill awaiting Stephen Hawking’s signature or something.  They’re distinct concepts.  Laws are models that describe HOW things work, whereas a theory is a broader explanation for a set of phenomena.  (For instance, Newton’s laws of motion describe an object’s behavior at sub-light speeds.  On the other hand, a workable theory of gravity must pull together all prior work on the subject, from Galileo to Hawking.)

Prudent scientists are never 100% certain about anything.  But a dishonest media uses that 0.001% uncertainty as a cudgel in public debate to claim that the scientific jury is still out.  Thus, because of prudence on the part of science, we “debate” whether or not man-made climate change is real.  (It is.)  We “teach the controversy” about whether or not the earth is only 6000 years old.  (It’s not.)  Dr. Trump warns that vaccines cause autism.  (They don’t).  And we talk about whether or not these are “differences of opinion.”  (They’re not.)  These are as “proven” as science ever gets.  There is most certainly a debate to be had about policy approaches, but not about the data itself. To paraphrase the late Pat Moynihan, you are entitled to your own opinion, but not your own science.

The other factor that allows liars, charlatans, and know-nothings to manipulate the public debate is lack of mathematical literacy.  I remember years ago watching Dennis Miller discuss climate change on Jon Stewart’s show.  He mentioned that the earth’s temperature had risen 1 degree Fahrenheit over the past century, and then dismissed such a small change as insignificant to the future.  Miller made the mistake of assuming that all relationships are linear.  They are not.  A 1 degree change over the past century does not necessarily predict a 1 degree change over the next century.  More likely, this change is exponential:     

With only two data points, Miller has no reason to assume that the trend looks like the chart on top as opposed to the second chart (or some other relationship altogether).  But he doesn’t even seem to understand that he made that assumption to begin with!   It requires a functional understanding of analytic geometry to see that (thanks Descartes!).  I’m not suggesting that comedians are considered authorities on climate change.  But they and other lay people influence the debate, and as a society, we need tools to critically evaluate their claims.  And we don’t have them.

We don’t have them because we think that math and science are only done by geniuses, so “regular” people can’t possibly learn them.  Or we think that science is informed by “opinion” and that anyone’s opinion matters.  Neither is true.  For the future of our democracy (baseball, apple pie, the American way of life, etc.), we must teach our kids that science isn’t “scary” and “hard.”  Props to Carl Sagan, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Bill Nye, and a host of others for trying.   The next step might be expecting educators to not immediately be scared of an engineering project.  

Science is as easily accessible as history.  We used to teach history as a rote collection of names and dates, but we don’t anymore, because context lends the subject relevance.  Scientific context and relevance should be even easier since you see it around you every day.  But you need reading comprehension to learn history, and you need math comprehension to learn science.  All are essential for an engaged public and a vibrant civic debate.  We know that we can’t leave history in the past.  We must learn that we can’t leave science in the lab.

Fight the dumbening of society.  (Is that how you spell dumbening?)

Tina S

Tina hangs out around the virtual cube farm of SeedSing and throws out world changing ideas. We assume those are home made clocks she leaves around the office. Show off your smarts by writing for SeedSing.

The SeedSing (half) Year in Idea Farming

We have a few ideas

Part of SeedSing's mission is to highlight the ideas and technology that will create a better future. We call this collection of essay's The Idea Farm. Contributors seek out and discuss these innovations on the pages of the website. What began as a few book reviews posted in the Politics/Society portion of SeedSing has grown into its own community. Join us as we highlight the (half) year in Idea Farming.

Kirk Aug started his posting career on SeedSing by taking a look at the unintentional benefits brought to us through piracy. He stayed in the world of computers and customization with a look at a future without an installed dedicated operating system on our computers. The use of one's electronic devices may one day allow us to communicate with anyone around the world. The pirates of yesterday have become the innovators of tomorrow.

How we conduct our day to day lives through technology is rapidly changing. Your car will soon not need your participation to get from point A to point B. The Microsoft Band and Android Wear watches started occupying space on our wrists long before Apple's offering. Even as we speak, unmanned drones are slowly filling our skies, confusing many of library patrons. The productivity of one's office is rapidly changing. Guest contributor Matthew Young highlighted many new technologies beneficial to the business world.  While there does not seem to be a lot of use for 3-D printing in the home, the technology is radically transforming the world of manufacturing. The technology innovations of today will be parts of our normal lives in the future.

The Idea Farm was not only about looking at future tech. Tina S asked us why we celebrate stupidity in our society. RD wanted to know if it is time we give up on the poisonous ideas of capitalism. Kirk wanted to give a proper name to the communicator he carries around to make calls and search the internet. The future is full of questions and uncertainty. Once we have worked our way through these questions, it is best to relax and mediate.

The Idea Farm was very interested in the food of the future. One of our most popular posts came from Kirk and asked us all what is real food. The rise of lab created nutrition may create a safe and guilt free hamburger. If the idea of eating something that looks and taste to natural turns you off, one could always take a sip of some Soylent. The farms of tomorrow are being cultivated in the lab.

The world we are creating is exciting and unknown. Electronics have moved away from the desktop and inhabited every aspect of our world. Hunger and global climate change can be reversed with some of the innovations surrounding nutrition. We have a lot to be hopeful for, and a lot to be anxious about. When the drones fill you with dread, go home and have a nice meditation session. It will all be ok.

RD Kulik (and the SeedSing contributors)

RD is the Head Editor for SeedSing. Come join the conversation of tomorrow by writing for SeedSing today.

Soylent: The pet food for people?

Since we are not Soylent, sales have been challenging.

Being a house pet must really be nice, ya know? You never have to think about what to eat. It is just the same thing for every meal. You can rest assured that as long as you eat that one thing and only that one thing, you will get a balanced nutritional serving.

Us humans on the other hand have it tough. Options. Nothing but piles and piles of options. Always either fighting off an urge to eat more leftover Halloween candy or worrying about whether another bowl of pasta might make three too many. If only there were an option to fill my cupboards with a single product that would satisfy all of my nutritional needs and make it so that I do not have to put any more effort into my nutrition than to consume said product every so often.

Enter Soylent. “Soylent is a meal replacement beverage, advertised as a "staple meal", available in both liquid and powdered forms. Its creators state that Soylent meets all nutritional requirements for an average adult.” (via Wikipedia)

When I first heard about Soylent the first thing that came to my mind was, “is it made of people?” This as I had only been subjected to the 1973 film Soylent Green and not the earlier term reference in a 1966 science fiction novel Make Room! Make Room! which featured a product called Soylent made of soya and lentils. Soylent’s name apparently comes from the novel, but I am still suspicious.

Soylent has gone through several revisions since it was released as a product for consumers to utilize. The first versions came as a powder which needed to be mixed. The powder was shipped in bags that contain 3+ servings. They are available in various quantities and there is even a monthly subscription option for those who want to put this diet of nutritional ease on autopilot.

Now in revision 2.0 there is a ready to drink bottle. You can subscribe to get 144 bottles a month for only $348. It apparently does not spoil, even unrefrigerated, for a year. What is claimed to be in it, if you are one of those who believe the claims that it is not people, is soy protein, algal oil, isomaltulose, vitamins, and minerals. Each 400 calorie serving contains 33% carbohydrates, 47% lipids, and 20% protein. The product is vegan and the bottle is recyclable.

Reports on the taste of the substance are highly variable. Some find it surprising, some find it disgusting, others have more of a neutral stance on the taste.

So I suppose I need not envy my dogs’ tightly simplified diet any longer. I too can have the option of no options. I am not sure if I really want to try this or not though. After all, my dogs are always begging for table scraps. What about you. Would you try a diet of Soylent for the benefit of making your dietary needs super simple? Let me know what you think.

Kirk Aug

Kirk cultivates the Idea Farm here at SeedSing. He is curious why they did not name Soylent Bachelor Chow. Follow Kirk on twitter @kirkaug.

Marty will be here soon. Do we have all the tech he needs?

Displayed at the 2015 Hill Valley retro auto show

I like writing about self-driving vehicles, drone deliveries, 3D printing, and other technology that has great potential to shape our future. Occasionally however, I like to look back at how today was conceptualized by generations before ours. One great example of this was released in the form of a film known as Back to the Future II. When Marty arrived in October 21st, 2015 the setting was quite a bit off from what we will really see on that day. Let us take a look at some of the predictions made by that film and how close they actually came.

Flying Cars

Doc, Marty, and Jennifer arrive in 2015 on a skyway. A skyway appears to be an interstate in the sky which flying cars can use to more efficiently travel longer distances. Flying cars were not conceptualized by the Back to the Future writers. In 1962 the animated series, The Jetsons, traveled by flying cars. Every kid growing up in that era knew that by the time they were adults, flying cars would be ubiquitous. Perhaps the culture that was started with The Jetsons is the main reason that many times when someone expresses disappointment of the present, they commonly utter the phrase, “Where’s my flying car?”

In 1940 Henry Ford, of Ford Motor Company fame, said, “Mark my word: a combination airplane and motorcar is coming. You may smile, but it will come.” Where are we on Ford’s promise?

Of note are the Moller Skycar M400 and the Xplorair PX200. Both of these are what is known as vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) aircraft. The Xplorair is a single seat aircraft, while the Moller can accommodate up to four people. Moller states that the skycar is “an aircraft that takes off and lands like a helicopter, is able to fly at high speed, yet also able to travel at low speed on the ground and narrow enough to fit on urban streets.” The Moller uses rotary engines, unlike the Xplorair which takes advantage of the Coandă effect to propel itself into the air. The Xplorair has been funded by the Government of France and is scheduled for a drone flight in 2017 at the Paris Air Show and commercialization thereafter.

As you can see there are challenges to creating flying cars. Engineering something that is going to be practical takes time. But we haven’t given up yet and maybe by the time we get there we will even have flying cars that drive themselves!

Auto-Lacing Shoes

In 2015 Marty looks very out of place in his 1985 style. So Doc gets him some more current apparel including the Nike Air Mag shoes. So do we have Nike Air Mags today? Well, sort of. You can get a pair of officially licensed Nike Air Mags from an online costume shop for around $100. However you will be disappointed to find that there is no auto-lacing technology in these shoes. But, hey, they have functioning lights!

So what hope do we have for auto-lacing shoes? Well there is a company called Powerlace who have designed an auto-lacing shoe that works simply by pressing your heel down to tighten the auto-lacing. The problem is that their Kickstarter campaign never got fully funded and so it remains to be seen whether Powerlace will ever release a product.

The other, perhaps more promising, hope comes as a confirmation from Nike designer Tinker Hatfield who reportedly said that his team is working on delivering a Nike MAG with Power Laces sometime in 2015. The year is quickly slipping away, but maybe we will see them. I wonder if this would be more of a case of Back to the Future inspiring the future than predicting it, however.

Hoverboards

When Marty runs into Biff’s grandson, Griff, he manages to anger the violent psychopath and “borrows” a hoverboard to escape. Griff follows him on his own, more featured hoverboard which was jet powered. Not knowing that hoverboards would not work on water without jet power he was stuck and so to escape Griff he jumps off causing Griff and the gang to crash into the courthouse. Griff was arrested and Marty got away.

If you want something that looks more or less exactly like the board that Marty hovered around on in the movie, you are in luck. That product does exist today. When it was originally released, it cost a mere $120. That sounds like a pretty good deal for a hoverboard until you realize that it is a prop replica and is little more than a plastic board. It does not hover. Every once in awhile I see these things around. But then I am the type of person who hangs out at geek conventions where there are souped-up DeLoreans made to look like a Back to the Future time machine. I usually see the hoverboard sitting in the back seat next to the flux capacitor.

As far as an actually functioning hoverboard, there have been several attempts. As far back as the 1950s the Hiller Flying Platform was a hovercraft which was quite a bit more cumbersome than anything similar to a skateboard, but did accomplish the task of propelling a person in the air in a sort of hovering effect pretty early on. Jamie Hyneman built a makeshift hovercraft for MythBusters, dubbed the Hyneman Hoverboard. It was made using a surfboard and leafblower, but was still not very practical.

The closest that we have gotten is the Hendo Hoverboard created by a company called Arx Pax. The boards use magnetic field architecture technology to work. To the recreational hoverboarder all you need to know is that it requires a special surface to operate. According to Arx Pax: “Hoverboards have been in high demand since their launch in October 2014. Building Hoverparks and retro-fitting skateboard parks will soon be underway for this new sport to take flight.” There has also been a press release from the company just today that a next generation of their hoverboard will be unveiled on October 21st. This new version will supposedly feature a more skateboard-like design and feel and was collaborated on with famed skateboard guy, Tony Hawk.

So I guess we sort of have hoverboards now.

All of these advances are still far from commonplace though as depicted in the film. The challenges with these ideas are many and while we are forever trying to be inspired by our science fiction dreams of the future, reality always has laws that limit the extent to which we can reach them. But still we try and eventually we come up with some pretty interesting uses of technology. Some of which past fictional ideas never could have thought of.

Lastly, if you want to see a pretty funny fan-fiction comedy of Marty and Doc coming to the real October 21, 2015, I encourage you to check out College Humor’s: Back To The Future In ACTUAL 2015.

(ed note: Some non-tech predictions. Back to the Future predicted a Cubs World Series win. Is it going to happen? Universal also released a preview for Jaws 19, go check it out).

Kirk Aug

Kirk is waiting for his automatic drying jacket to turn on. He got all wet when his wheeled hoverboard ran him into a creek. Follow Kirk on twitter @kirkaug.

Kirk comes to terms with a dwarf planet thanks to Neil deGrasse Tyson's The Pluto Files

On this eve of the Pluto flyby of the New Horizons spacecraft I could not help but think of how much has changed for the planet since the probe’s launch over nine years ago in January of 2006. Indeed nothing actually changed for Pluto itself, but for the way we define and classify him (her?) and the presumed hundreds of other celestial bodies like it. See, when New Horizons launched, Pluto was still classified as a planet. In August of that same year the International Astronomical Union (IAU) declared Pluto to be a dwarf planet. This was a big letdown to the ninth planet  lovers everywhere.

As the only planet discovered by an American astronomer, Pluto had become an American icon. Even Mickey Mouse’s dog bears the name. And many Americans, as well as some other folks around our planet, were not comfortable with the designation change. One man stood to receive much of the heat for re characterization of the icy Pluto. That man was Neil deGrasse Tyson, and in 2009 he described from his own point of view the path out of planet-hood that Pluto took in his book, The Pluto Files.

Earlier this year Dr. Tyson was going to be doing a lecture here in St. Louis. In anticipation of my attendance, I decided to to pick the book up.

Long before we knew of nine planets in our solar system, we had already settled on eight. In fact, Tyson starts out by pointing to the Adler Planetarium in Chicago was out-of-date the day it opened its doors. Opening only two months after the discovery of Pluto by Clyde W. Tombaugh in February of 1930, Adler had already been designed to showcase eight planets. One can still go there today and see the plaques depicting the eight planets which after 76 years of being out-of-date are finally right with the times.

I think that Tyson was pointing this out to exemplify the cost of changing our view of the universe and our solar system in particular. In reclassifying Pluto, textbooks need to be revised, museums need to be reorganized, and entire generations of people will go on without accepting it because either they do not care enough, they are unwilling to see the nuance as to why, or perhaps because of the culture surrounding our old understanding.

Mickey’s dog was far from the only part of this culture. Upon the discovery of Pluto, this new planet was an budding rock star. In 1932 a laxative known as Pluto Water hit the market. In 1941 a new element who needed a name became known as Plutonium. And of course how can anyone raised in the 80s and 90s forget that My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas? If Pluto is no longer a planet, many Plutophiles have pointed out, we have to come up with a new mnemonic. Indeed the culture of Pluto was strong and so demotion was destined to bring about controversy.

Throughout describing the history and science surrounding Pluto, Tyson helps to distinguish it from what we now define as a planet. For example, Pluto is mostly made of ice. Pluto’s moon, Charon, is so large that center of motion is between Pluto and Charon. Every other planet in the solar system has moons whose center of motion lies within the boundaries of the planet. Pluto is so small that it is less than five percent the size of mercury. Pluto also exists in the Kuiper belt along with many smaller ice balls as well as some similarly sized icy objects. Should we start calling the larger of those planets as well? For a little while some people did.

Of course Tyson was not personally or otherwise responsible for Pluto’s fall from grace. The planet had long been on the radar in a large part due to the discovery of Kuiper belt objects that were increasingly closer to Pluto’s size. What put Tyson in the crosshairs of the Plutophiles was mostly exposure due to his involvement of the design of the New York Hayden Planetarium’s Rose Center for Earth and Space. Given the climate of disagreement of how to classify Pluto among relevant scientists at the time and the permanence of the Rose Center which was to be built and opened in 2000, some presentational creativity was going to be required. Instead of an “enumeration of orbs to be memorized” (Tyson, 2009), they presented the solar system as families of objects with similar characteristics. You have the Sun, the rocky terrestrial planets, the asteroid belt, the gas giants, and the Kuiper belt. Pluto lives in the Kuiper belt.

No one really noticed that Pluto was missing from the presentations of the Rose Center until a New York Times article came out almost a year after its opening. The article was titled, “Pluto’s Not A Planet? Only In New York”. This is when the firestorm started for Tyson. In the book several humorous letters are shared from various elementary classrooms begging Dr. Tyson to make Pluto a planet again. This was probably my favorite part of the book. I never cease to be amused by the visceral reaction to those who resist a change that is so obviously needed.

Part of the problem for the IAU was that there hadn’t really been a formal definition of the term planet. Therefore, the task ahead was to formulate that definition which then included them deciding what to do if or when certain celestial bodies did not make the cut. In any event there were no longer going to be nine planets in our solar system. If Pluto made the cut, Pluto’s moon, another Kuiper belt object named Eris, and an asteroid belt object named Ceres would also have become planets. As it turned out. All four of those objects became part of a new class called dwarf planets.

For Tyson, the emails came at a rate of hundreds per day. Articles were written blasting the decision. Even many astronomers were burned by the development. But no amount of passion from the Plutophiles could reverse it. Pluto was now a dwarf planet. When I saw Dr. Tyson’s lecture a couple of months ago, he could not have put his attitude toward it better. In three words he said, “Get over it.”

The Pluto Files is a fascinating read. I hope this week as you are enjoying the new data coming from our favorite little dwarf planet, you might give this book a look.

Kirk Aug

Kirk has conflicting feelings about losing the planet Pluto. He is excited to see whatever thing New Horizons takes pictures of. Follow him on twitter @kirkaug