Lia+Wilmoth

Welcome to Lia’s Sustainability Space! Week 4: **SMALL ROBOT COMPANY ** "Small. Is. Good." Link : @https://www.smallrobotcompany.com/

Summary : This agri-tech start up is aiming to propose a more environmentally friendly alternative for farming. They hope to prove that these small robots offer a better option to yield crops instead of tractors. Big tractors are currently consuming way too much energy, as its large size is not efficient in any way. In fact, 95% of energy is used for ploughing! This problem can easily be fixed by shifting to the use of small robots instead. Small is better!!!

The robots being built are programmed to only seed and care for the individual plants that need it. By focusing on just the crops that require care, excess nutrients and products will be saved and conserved. The perfect levels of nutrients and support will be provided to the crops, with absolutely no extra waste. This attention to detail and higher accuracy allows for a multitude of advantages: kinder soil, more efficiency, more production, and overall a healthier environment. While using minimal chemical usage, more crops can be yielded to provide for consumers. Using robots, revenues can be increased up to 40%, while costs can be reduced by up to 60%. The structure of the robot was also built to reduce compaction, its lightweight increasing the working window available to farmers. These robots are a great alternative for tractors.

Meet Tom!  Tom digitizes the fields on a farm, as he monitors the health of each individual plant and keeps track of their development. He reports back to his "Kennel" on the farm, where he will replace his battery for a fully charged one. Tom is used to evaluate and analyze which chemicals and fertilizers are needed to care for the plants. He will then send a message to the other robots (Dick and Harry), who serve to actually bring out and disperse the chemicals. Tom, Wilma, Dick, and Harry all serve different purposes to maximize crop production and reduce energy and material waste. To learn more about the others, check out the link above!

Video : Here is a short visual of the robot, Tom, at work! media type="youtube" key="Hm935J-hw08" width="560" height="315" align="center"

Connection : This past week we learned about how much the world consumes energy, mainly through the use of fuel and oil products. This small robot company directly relates to REDUCING the energy consumed by switching from tractors to these small robot companies. Tractors run on oil for their petrol-paraffin engines. The small robots are powered electrically, which will reduce the carbon footprint as 95% less CO2 is pumped out. Overall, small robots need 95% less energy to yield a single crop. Also, an autonomous robot can also work for 24 hours a day. It's small structure allows for less energy consumption, but more production of crops. This can help to provide food for the growing population, while also helping to conserve energy in the world. Killing to birds with one stone!

media type="youtube" key="4RiWMOz3J4w" width="560" height="315" This video explains exactly how minimal energy is used by the small robots. Week 3: ACCELERATING TOMATO ENGINEERING! Link: http://www.biologynews.net/archives/2016/08/30/more_tomatoes_faster_accelerating_tomato_engineering.html

Summary: Is it possible to manufacture and produce more tomatoes? Faster? Yes! Scientists have developed a new technique that allows the production of tomatoes to be genetically engineered and modified in an efficient and successful way. This process will cut down the time needed to modify the genes by approximately six weeks. Scientists at the Boyce Thompson institute have tweaked this process, which can benefit more than just the use of tomatoes needed for research. Specifically, BTI Assistant Professor Van Eck and former postdoctoral scientist Sarika Gupta were attempting to find more productive ways to grow and develop tomatoes in the lab. They created a method for "transforming" the tomato, a process where they artificially inserted foreign genes into the tomato to allow faster and more secure growth. They do this by inserting the plant hormone auxin into the medium that the tomatoes are grown in. The exposure to these hormones support the growth and speed up the time it takes for them to fully develop. This than helps to accelerate the production of the plants for further research in the scientist's labs. For more detailed description of this advancement, the study was published in //Plant Cell, Tissue and Organ Culture.//

For a quick refresher, transformation typically works by obtaining a soil bacterium known as Agrobacterium tumefaciens, and inserting a new, foreign segment of DNA into the cells of tomato seedling tissues. This allows for the transformation of cells which will be transplanted and exposed to a plant regeneration medium. This medium contains the necessary nutrients and hormones needed for the tomato tissue to grow and develop into a new, tiny plant. These small plants are then transferred to a different medium, to allow them to grow roots so they can be planted into soil and hardened in the greenhouse. Van Eck's lab uses a new method by adding the auxin hormones to the regeneration and rooting media, which results in the procedure length reducing from 17 weeks to only 11.

There are MANY advantages of the discovery and application of this new process. With the use of few materials, scientists can boost growth and development products while also saving money. These products can be used to complete experiments and research by potentially running multiple projects at once. This project is also collaborating with Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory to identify the gene pathways that can be applied to breeding more crops and increase the yields.

Connection : This past week, we discussed the major issue of livestock production and how the availability for land to yield these meat products has been recognized as a significant problem around the world. With the growing population, in a decent amount of years the land needed to grow and kill animals for food will exceed the amount that should be used. The population's demand for meat products will increase greatly, and the world will need to find a new way to produce food more efficiently. This article relates to this problem directly, as the discovery allows for increased yields of production of tomatoes. The ability to artificially engineer the gene pathways in the growth of tomatoes allows for faster growth, which can solve the problem related to meat production. Week 2: Can sharks and Camels save lives? Link: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/05/mini-antibodies-discovered-sharks-and-camels-could-lead-drugs-cancer-and-other-diseases

Summary: I chose an article that seemed appropriate and genuinely interesting because it deals with new discoveries that can possibly save lives via the immune system. So you may be wondering, how exactly can sharks and camels save lives? Well, it all started with Immunologist Helen Dooley, from University of Maryland (BMD) Medicine in Baltimore, who has been conducting studies by tapping the blood of sharks. Many other researches have continued to drain the blood of camels, llamas, and their relatives for the same purpose. Every couple of weeks, Dooley and other help to net sharks at the Institute of Marine and Environmental Technology, wrestle them into a sedative filled tank, take a few seconds to extract samples of their blood, and let them free. The blood from these animals, along with other camels, pump out unusual antibodies that are about half the size of the normal versions. These tinier versions containing smaller fragments, known as nano bodies, allow for easier use and application to their work, because they can penetrate themselves deeper into tissues and cells. There are many advantages to using these newly discovered nano bodies over usual conventional antibodies. The small antibodies found in sharks and camels differ in structure and binding activity as well, which also contribute to their different capabilities within the immune system. They can bind to their targets with great specificity, allowing them to allowing them to enable the immune system and fight off a much broader range of pathogens. They also remain functional inside cells, which conventional antibodies are not able to do, which allows researchers to further their studies and observe the nano bodies in action while inside cells.

These antibodies are seen to play their best research role in binding to and stabilizing wobbly proteins, in order to their architecture to be probed for further research and use. This allows for certain molecules throughout the body to be crystallized, in order for accurate determination of their structure. Their ability to bind to specific proteins and eliminate them from the body by carrying them to the "garbage disposal", set researchers on a search for a multitude of areas this can be applied to. These nano bodies are predicted to take over the treatment of a variety of diseases, even cancer, by tracking key proteins that need to be eliminate, or cancer cells. Having a small nano body bind to the cancer cells can also be used to guide surgery by tagging a fluorescent tracer that will illuminate the tumor.

Connection : This discovery can be connected to our recent class topics, more specifically the did you know video about water availability. The video stated how the drinking of contaminated water can cause many diarrheal diseases, including Cholera, and other serious illnesses such as Guinea worm disease, Typhoid, and Dysentery. In fact, these diseases cause 3.4 million deaths each year. This point can relate to the main purpose of the nano bodies being described above- fighting diseases. Disease is a problem scientists and researchers around the world are trying to overcome, in relation to the sustainability goal in good health and well-being. This connection emphasizes the severity of diseases and how hard people around the world are working to solve the problem.

Video : This video gives an accurate overview of the process and how exactly the antibodies can save lives based on their structure. The visual helped me understand a lot easier. I recommend watching! media type="youtube" key="p1nrzEYZ5rY" width="560" height="315" align="center"

Week 1:

Top 5 Sustainability Themes

<span style="color: #101257; font-family: Lucida Console,Monaco,monospace;">1) Clean Water and Sanitation <span style="color: #101257; font-family: Lucida Console,Monaco,monospace;"> <span style="color: #101257; font-family: Lucida Console,Monaco,monospace;">Safe drinking water is essential for life to continue on earth. About only one percent of all the water on the earth is accessible for humans to use, and even in that one percent, millions of people and children across the world are struggling to find clean, fresh water. Due to bad economics and poor infrastructure, water supplies are running scarce or contaminated with bacterias that cause disease in the people who consume them. This issue is predicted to be the cause of the next world war, stressing how important the conservation of clean water is for people all over the world. The advancement of sustainable development in this field is the most important in order to ensure healthy and happy lives to humans across the world. <span style="color: #101257; font-family: Lucida Console,Monaco,monospace;">2) Life Below Water <span style="color: #101257; font-family: Lucida Console,Monaco,monospace;"> <span style="color: #101257; font-family: Lucida Console,Monaco,monospace;">When looking at the numerous amount of sustainability themes, one will often skip of “Life Below Water” because it doesn’t seem that important to many of the more popular world issues being addressed recently. However, life below water is one of the most fundamental and vital sources to allow life on the planet. The world’s oceans drive life across earth by sustaining their temperature, acidification, currents, and more. These processes all contribute to maintaining systems that allow for habitation of humankind across the world. To get a little more in detail, the ocean absorbs about 30 percent of the carbon dioxide produced by humans, and the greater this number becomes, the greater danger we are in. With more CO2 being absorbed, the higher acidity levels become, which pose a great threat to the life under water, including the lives of phytoplankton. Phytoplankton are critical to help sustain all life on the planet, as they serve as the base of the food web for marine systems, and produce about half of the oxygen on the planet. Unbalanced levels of these gases in the ocean are a serious issue, which shows how life below water must maintained and cautiously observed in order to keep the earth a healthy planet. <span style="color: #101257; font-family: Lucida Console,Monaco,monospace;">3) Health and Wellbeing <span style="color: #101257; font-family: Lucida Console,Monaco,monospace;">4) Quality Education <span style="color: #101257; font-family: Lucida Console,Monaco,monospace;">5) Affordable and Clean Energy