Experts predict that another two billion people will inhabit the Earth by 2050, bringing the global population to 9.7 billion. That’s a lot of mouths to feed. Current food production systems can’t keep up with today’s demand — more than ten percent of the world is undernourished — so how the hell are we going to feed our future?
The answer will likely lie in technology. And one of the most promising contributions comes from a gene-editing tool called CRISPR, which scientists can use to create crops that are more resilient to climate change and have higher yields.
A team of researchers from Purdue University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences recently demonstrated the potential of CRISPR in an intriguing new study. By making mutations in 13 genes, the scientists produced a crop of rice with 25-31 percent high yield. Without the aid of CRISPR, the crop would’ve required trial and error with millions of plants to reach a similar goal, according to the researchers.
To create the crop, the researchers used CRISPR to precisely snip out undesired genes that play a double role, increasing stress tolerance and suppressing growth. So although the crop had a higher yield, it was less resilient to environmental stress. Still, in field tests in Shanghai and on Hainan Island, China, the researchers found little impact to stress tolerance but significant gains in grain production.
“An important fact concerning CRISPR technology is its immediate applicability to agricultural problems,” Jian-Kang Zhu, a plant biologist at Purdue who led the study, told Digital Trends. Although much of the attention and investment surrounding CRISPR has been in medical research, Zhu pointed out that “the successful applicability of this incredible technology to medicine is much farther in the future.”
After all, plants and microbes aren’t entangled with the same bioethical concerns that keep scientists from performing certain animal studies. “We can make genetic crosses and clones with plants and we can discard our mistakes,” Zhu said. “Obviously [those are] not ethical pursuits in human biology.”
Moving forward, Zhu and his colleagues will use this same tool on “elite” strains of rice, with the hope that the production boosts transfer over. They also plan to apply their approach to different crops.
A paper detailing the study was published this month in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Google has been finding more ways to make Gemini a part of your daily routine, from putting together playlists to ordering groceries through your favorite apps. Now it's expanding those capabilities to more services, with Google Search joining in, too.
The company has announced a new Connected Apps Platform that makes it easier for developers to bring their services to both Gemini and Search. Alongside this, Google is adding new partners to its growing lineup, bringing more of the apps people already use into its AI ecosystem.
In the broad context of AI and its perceived harms, health and medical risks often pop up in the conversation. The warnings even come from frontier AI labs, such as ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and Anthropic, both of which have warned about misusing AI to cook up bioweapons. Security experts have already spotted a few such incidents in the wild, especially with the usage of AI models without any solid guardrails.
Well, it appears that the risks run deeper. As per an analysis appearing in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), AI bots are now being deployed to influence public policies governing health risks to citizens. In this instance, an attempt was made using AI bots to thwart regulations that aim to restrict the sale of disposable vapes, all while disguising the manipulation efforts as a response from real humans.
What if checking your drinking water for dangerous chemicals were as simple as plugging a tiny gadget into your smartphone? Researchers in Japan have developed a compact sensor that could make that possible, potentially bringing sophisticated water contamination testing out of expensive laboratories and into people's hands.
Scientists at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) have created a portable device capable of detecting extremely low concentrations of PFAS, commonly known as "forever chemicals." The findings were published in the journal Biosensors and Bioelectronics, which demonstrate how an inexpensive sensor and a smartphone could make identifying potentially harmful chemicals in water a lot easier.