3D Printed Food, Automated Farms & Lab-Grown Meat

Food and drinking water are still a serious problem for a large portion of the world's population.  For the rest of us that have easy access to both, the growth, processing and delivery of both are not very cost-effective.

In fact, just livestock production consumes 26 percent of ice-free land on Earth and each year 13 billion acres of forest is converted into new pastures and farmlands every year.

Some people have responded to this problem by becoming vegetarian.  Some do it just on the premise that animals in captivity or going to slaughter often suffer or have inadequate quality of life.

As far as water is concerned, the current issue lies with recycling wastewater back into usable water, in particular in areas of the world where drinkable water is sparse.

Thankfully, private funding and advanced scientific minds come to us with some very nice solutions.

I speak about the repercussions of the technologies mentioned below a bit further in the video below:

Water
First things to consider with water is its availability.  In many countries, drinkable water is available directly from nature.  In some other locations, it needs to be filtered or treated before we can safely drink it. 

Using Metal-Organic Frameworks (MOF), scientists from the University of California, Berkeley were able to extract decent amount of drinkable water from the air.  The only thing their process needs is the MOFs, which are not used up in the process, and solar energy.  They were able to extract 2.8 liters of water in 12 hours from air with only 20-30% humidity.  That's pretty impressive.  The process required about 1 kg of MOF.  The process needs to be refined with different MOF combinations to increase the speed or efficiency of the process, enough to allow every single home on the planet to extract its own drinkable water directly from the air, without the need for any sort of treatment.  You only need the MOF component and the sun after all.  Easy peasy.

And how about our wastewater?  Well, an experimental team in Spain has designed a very easy process using electroactive bacteria that loves the organic matter in wastewater to very quickly and efficiently clean the wastewater and fuel it's own energy needs on its own.  The bacteria does that by creating electricity as they consume the waste matter in the water.  The purified water can then be sent to a pool where it can be redistributed to irrigate or be recycled to other uses.  The water is not suited for drinking but it could be reused in many ways through its reintroduction to nature's water cycle.  The current process by the team at iMETLand can convert 25,000 liters per day, enough for a small community.  This can likely be scaled up for larger communities or scaled down for individual houses with further research and testing.

Here is the process described in video:

Meat
Lab-grown meat has become pretty real these days with investors like Richard Branson endorsing the process and investing significant amounts in one of the companies that are developing such things, Memphis Meats.  Don't forget guys, humans are omnivores.  We're supposed to largely eat fruit and vegetables, but we're supposed to eat animal muscle too.

Believe it or not but 14.5 percent of greenhouse gas is attributed to livestock.  If we grew our meats in vats, we could reduce that amount by 90 percent and reduce land usage for livestock by 99%.  That's huge.  That land can then be used for lots of other things instead and we would only need animals to sample interesting cell cultures, which doesn't require us to hurt or kill the animals.  In fact, one turkey has enough cells to cultivate enough vat meat to replace several trillion turkey nuggets.  That's a lot.

Here is how it works:

The cost of a burger has already gone down from $350,000 to $11 using lab grown meats in the past 4 years and it is estimated by the investors in companies that are interested in such things that the cost of lab-grown meat will be equal to that of real meat in approximately 3 years. 

I'm pretty sure the meat won't taste as good as the real thing to start with, but we'll have full control over flavor at that point, therefore it can only get cheaper and better tasting with time.  Not to mention way more ecological.

The Chinese have also made significant investments in the technologies, promising soon we'll be seeing this type of foodstuff in supermarkets and restaurants all over the world soon enough!

3D Printed food
This is another beauty.  We already have processed foods but that food is not very healthy as most people know.  But what about 3D printed food?  Well, in principle, companies have been able to do it using core materials like calorie-free fibers to create artisanal food items that look like the real thing.  This technique can become quite popular when people need to make their own food at home at some point with full knowledge of what is exactly in the food item.  So in principle, this should be better than fast-food but just as fast, and better than processed foods as well since no preservatives or odd chemicals are needed.  Though, make no mistake, this method of making food is not as good and nutrient-rich as the real thing.  Still, very interesting way to create neat food items from designs and very interesting edible materials!

Automated Farms
Not much to say about that, but several companies, including this one, Hands Free Hectare, have started selling their solution of fully automated farms to the public.  These farms can resolve another issue we're having around food:  30% food waste.  Automated farms, connected to data based on demand from people, can possibly sow, grow and pick fruit and vegetables in exactly the right time to provide the market with what it needs based on exact demand.  We can therefore significantly reduce waste in production, shelving and transportation of food grown from these farms in the future.  Something to support and develop for sure!

I'm incredibly enthusiastic about our future as a society.  Our population increases constantly, but innovative individuals are constantly coming up with amazing solutions that resolve big issues while considering others and the technology's environmental impact.

My goal is to educate people that these technologies exist and I encourage every single person that is reading this to use these technologies and products.  Demand creates market drive.  Let's keep it going guys!

3D Printing Human Replacement Organs

It is indeed really fascinating at how far we've gone with 3D printing in just a few years.  3D printing started off experimentally and then moved into some specific industrial applications as early as the 1980's but it only became a commercial product, albeit expensive, around the year 2009.  (History of 3D printing).

Since then, 3D printing has become well known in every household.  Though most houses don't have one such device, most houses now have some gadget, widget or device that was either partially or fully built using 3D printing technology.  Not to mention that you can buy your very own 3D printer on the Internet and in home improvement stores too for less than $300 if you shop around.

Because 3D printing technology has advanced enough to deal with multiple materials nowadays as well as being able to scale up (3D printed houses), and down.  Historically, they were used to prototype small things but now we are able to 3D print very complex tiny structures.  Now we are working at all sizes.  There are still a number of issues we're working out, primarily being the techniques for 3D printing don't provide much refinement in the finished material, hence why the technique is still mostly used for prototyping or rough work that we know will require some finish in the end anyway.  Engineers are working on it.

What is amazing is in the last couple years, 3D printers were designed to 3D print tissues, both animal and human.  The exciting aspect of this, is in medical research where usually the research is done on animals first, before a medicine or surgery technique is used on humans.  It is a long process and even though some animals have tissue and body structures similar to humans, their body chemistry is different and it often means that a new drug successful at treating a problem in an animal, won't work or work as well when the human trials come up.

As far as I know, we've managed to use 3D printers to make human organs.  The first interesting one is our current ability to 3D print human skin.  This is exciting because burn victims often need compatible skin for grafting.  With a 3D printer, specialists can now use the patient's cells to make grafts (along with a stock of compatible skin).  Also, with this technology, we can easily experiment on human skin bypassing much of the work that is required on animals in the path of drug development.

I go more in depth on this in the video below, in particular talking about future applications:

Now skin is one thing, but printing more complex organs is still a challenge.  Well, turns out that a lab at Northwestern University of Chicago has been able to 3D print functioning mouse ovaries that later were capable to produce mouse pups.  Humans would logically be the next step.  Can you imagine women losing their ovaries due to some disease or accident and being able to get new ovaries 3D printed and then implanted in to them, making them fertile again?

Of course, other labs are using similar cellular techniques, mainly using human pluripotent cells, to successfully generate other functioning organs, like human colon and human livers, both of which are extremely complicated organs.  Of course, they are not able to currently grow them to full human size, but they seem to be able to do the job they are supposed to do.  The issue of size is still being worked on as larger organs need a network of blood vessels to feed and oxygenate cells near the middle of the organs, and it is extremely difficult right now to do so as the organ grows.  Perhaps when we are able to 3D print these quickly, it'll be feasible.

Give it a few years and we may hear about those organs being printed fully ready for implantation and full size, using the patient's own cells (thus avoiding issues with immune response and rejection.

All in all, we're constantly working out ways to being able to properly replace failing body parts using the patient's own cell stock, which should be super exciting for anyone with serious organic ailments, missing organs, or requiring transplants in the next few years.

It won't be long after when we'll be able to 3D print fully formed human bodies with refined organic tissue 3D printing technologies....

Can I have my 20 year old body back?  (assuming one could transfer my knowledge, experience and everything that makes me ME, into the brand new body....).    Something to start getting used to...

Transhumanism and the merge with the machine

Elon Musk and many other initiatives around the world, like Initiative 2045 are working on ways for humans to transcend our biological bodies into up-gradable bodies.  Why?  They say that humans need to keep up with advancements in computing and the power of machines or become obsolete.

In truth, this is an opinion only.  However, while I don't agree with Mr. Musk and trans-humanist groups on our need to merge with the machines so to speak to keep up with them, we do agree on one inevitability:  computers and artificial intelligence is on its way to equal and then surpass human capabilities.

And this will occur sooner than we think.

Already, computing is able to do certain tasks way faster and better than any human can.  And thanks to advancements in automation, excellent programming and human ingenuity, we could replace over 50% of current jobs held by human beings today.  

Give us 5 yeas, with the humongous amounts of artificial intelligence investments going on cine 2016, and that percentage will reach closer to 70%.

The point is, it is only a matter of years until computers and software will be just as clever or creative as humans.

When that happens, what purpose will humans have?

This is what Elon Musk and others are concerned about.  The loss of human purpose.

I on the other hand, do not think we will lose our purpose at all.  In fact, I think it will be the time for us to gain our actual purpose because working 40 hour weeks for someone else definitively isn't why we live and breath is it?

I go over more of this in the video below:

We are definitively in the era of transhumanism.  We are currently enhancing our abilities using machines.  Smartphones, computers, the Internet:  all tools we use to make our lives and work more efficiently.  These are now extensions to our brains and biology.  They are allowing us to be more than what we are, but they aren't us.

Humans are motivated by simple things:  positive emotions that drive us forward like joy and negative emotions that drive us away like fear, disgust, anger etc....

Thus at the core, we are designed to be happy, love and be loved and that's pretty much it.

We aren't designed to work for the sake of work, but we can create machines that are just as good as us, or better than us, to do things that aren't directly aligned with our happiness or love.

We can completely automate the provisioning of food and housing.  We can completely automate transportation, governance, teaching, health and economical systems.  These are very complex systems that we built to organize our society.  They are not things that humans enjoy working in for fun.

We can most certainly focus our efforts on developing ways to free humanity from doing things it doesn't want to do.

Humans have lists of things they need to do and lists of things they want to do.

Machines can do the "need" list, while humans can do the "want" list.  How about that?

No need to enhance, upgrade or cyber up humans to "keep up" with machines.  Machines will become artificial humans, if you will, that can be highly motivated to do the "need" list while we do the "want" list, hence coexisting in harmony.

Machines will be able to iterate and improve on themselves to achieve their goals (the "need" list) more and more efficiently.  While they are doing that, we'll be busy on focusing on what we "want" to do, supported by our new (eventually sentient) synthetic partners.

And by partners, I do mean exactly that in all the meanings you can imagine.

Heck already today, some people have fallen in love with very rudimentary robots with limited intelligence.  The sex industry is all in and over this too.

Imagine our future where intelligent machines can be just as much friends with us than any human, or just as powerfully connected to us as a human lover.

Not saying everyone will go there.  Just saying that if the machine you are enjoying life with makes you feel certain emotions, like love perhaps, are you ready to step in and live that emotion fully even if the target of your emotion is synthetic?

3D Printed & Bionic Organs, Medical Update

We’ve all had a family member or a friend, at some point in time, that was at risk or actually needed an organ transplant.  Whether it be an ear, skin, kidney, heart or lung.  We’ve all heart at least a little bit about it.

We have heard about the associated difficulties of finding a proper donor for the transplant.  In the case of skin or cartilage transplants (nose or ear, for example), the raw material comes from another part of the body, hence avoiding any kind of immune rejection and associated need for the patient to take immune system suppressants for the rest of their lives.  On the other hand, such transplants generally leave scars either where it is transplanted or where the raw material comes from.

In the case of internal organs like lungs, kidneys or hearts, it requires an organ that comes from another human being.  With kidneys or lungs, you can be lucky and have a good match with a living family member of the correct size, since theoretically, you only need 1 of those to survive, so you can each have 1 and you’re good to go.  For organs that don’t come in pairs, like the heart, you need a match from a recently deceased, and more often than not it won’t be a very good genetic match, since it’s fairly rare that another matching family member (genetic family, not wives and second cousins) would die at the right time when you need the organ for transplant.  And then either way, you have to take immunosuppressants for the rest of your life, else your own body will try to kill the foreign cells (unless the source organ comes from an identical twin… but can you imagine the odds of that actually happening?).

Now just so you know, side effects of immunosuppressants could include, depending on which ones you are taking:

•           Osteoporosis
•           Decrease in muscle function
•           Hyperglycemia (high blood sugar) and secondary diabetes
•           High cholesterol
•           Gastrointestinal problems
•           Gout
•           Anxiety, depression and sexual drive reduction
•           Unwanted hair growth
•           Anemia
•           Diarrhea and headaches
•           And more

And of course, since your immune system is suppressed, you are at higher risk of getting sick or fight things like cancer, which means transplant patients will likely need more medicines, with their own side-effects, to support the weakened immune system.

Thankfully, over the last couple years, scientists have figured out wonderful ways to replace malfunctioning organs with functional ones, either mechanical or biological, in ways that can keep your looks and avoid all undesirable side-effects of the replacement organ.

Bionic organs  

Boston University researchers seem to have successfully found a way to treat Type 1 diabetes with a small battery-powered continuous injection system using smart algorithms.  It’s really a mechanical pancreas you hook onto your belt that has a tiny sensor fixed just under your belly’s skin and a small injection needle.  Here is a good article about this device.

The sensor constantly measures the patient’s blood sugar level and either injects glucagon or insulin through the needle, letting the patient relax about whether they need to take injections or having too low blood sugar. 

The worst fear of diabetics is to suffer from acute hyperglycemia, having way too much blood sugar, since that can kill them fairly easily, put patients in a coma and often cause other life-threatening problems.  The little device replaces the pancreas’ job of adding insulin into the bloodstream with the right amount as the person goes about his or her day.  Insulin allows blood sugar to either enter cells to be consumed for energy or to be absorbed into the liver to create glycogen (basically glucose storage).

Not as worrisome, having low blood sugar and also called hypoglycemia, is also a concern, especially when patients are sleeping, because if the blood sugar level goes too low, and can cause other effects such as:  clumsiness, confusion, loss of consciousness, seizures and even death in extreme cases.  Most diabetics make sure they hike their blood sugar levels a bit more before bed to ensure they avoid such issues while sleeping.  Glucagon is normally produced by the pancreas to take glucose out the liver’s storage, the glycogen, and back into the bloodstream.

So the bionic pancreas, because it Is continuously connected to it’s sensor and can inject both substances, prevents the blood sugar from fluctuating too much, and tests with the device has shown that it is MUCH better than any other method of controlling Type 1 diabetes out there so far.  We take it for granted, but this insulin-glucagon effect to balance sugar levels is super important.  Too much roller coaster in your blood sugar level and eventually diabetes patients can eventually lose the use of their eyes, and even get their extremities amputated….

We should only hope that more bionic organs can be invented like this one in such a way to avoid immune responses like described above.  The diabetic can then easily have a normal life assisted with an easy to manage little snap on machine.  

The opportunities are limitless here on inventing more bionic devices but just on this one, one could figure out a way to remove the need for the subdermal sensor by using a nano-intravenous sensor that transmits information to your bionic device, for instance.  Perhaps one can find a way to insert the glucagon and insulin into the body using other methods that don’t pierce the skin (super dermal method …

3D organic replacement organs  

Even better than bionic devices, scientists are working on actually using 3D printing techniques combined with patient’s stem cells to create brand new living organs that are fully accepted by the host body.

A team of researchers from the University of California (US) and the University of Edinburgh (U.K.) have refined a technique that can create molded cartilage replacements for deformities or lost noses and ears in accidents, by using fat stem cells (you won’t miss those), a mold and a specialized 3D printing device.  The growth is done outside of the patient to create the body part that is the right size and shape, made of cartilaginous cells (the stem cells differentiate into the cartilage through the technique into the mold).  The body part, once grown, can then be supplemented with some skin tissue as needed (if an ear or nose) from the patient), and put into place.  If the body part is small enough, any needed blood vessels and other systems and tissues grow into place naturally to make a fully functional organ, with no immune response or need for medicine to keep it all intact.

Other groups have also been able to do great things in this regard in the West, such as the Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center, who have developed a specialized technique, again involving a special 3D printer, to transplant cartilage-based organs, but also bone and muscle structures.  One of their doctors has even been able to make a successful bladder transplant using the patient’s stem cells. Here's an article demonstrating their progress so far.

Soon these groups and others will move on from animal testing and start transplanting more complex organs like the aforementioned Kidneys, hearts, lungs etc… from stem cells, making immunosuppressant issues a thing of the past.

What seems to be holding lots of the research up in the West is the political systems and religious lobbyists who are concerned about “playing god” or the potential evil use of stem cells, which is why agnostic countries like China have a leg up on the western world in this research currently.

But for those of you interested in changing the face of medicine, surgery and help loads of people that have life threatening problems such as dysfunctional or missing organs, now is your opportunity to make a real solid difference in the world!