#3,103 – Extracting Gold From Electronics

When you think of a modern day gold rush you probably thinking of getting rich quick from crypto or capitalizing on all the AI hype. But in actuality all you might need is some old computers. That’s because scientists have figured out a way to literally turn old electronics into gold.

Futurism explains:

“A team of researchers at ETH Zurich in Switzerland has made a discovery that they say could turn recycling e-waste into a literal goldmine.

The researchers devised a novel way to extract precious metal from electronic waste, a sustainable method that is based on a byproduct from the food industry.

And it’s pretty lucrative as well. For each dollar spent, the team suggests you could make $50 worth of gold.

Best of all, they say, it’s an incredibly environmentally friendly process. The team found that protein fibril sponges, made from protein-rich byproducts from cheesemaking, can be used to extract the gold from discarded e-waste.

‘The fact I love the most is that we’re using a food industry byproduct to obtain gold from electronic waste,’ said coauthor and ETH Zurich professor Raffaele Mezzenga in a statement. ‘You can’t get much more sustainable than that!’

As detailed in a new paper published in the journal Advanced Materials, the team was able to recover a 450-milligram nugget of 22-carat gold from just 20 old computer motherboards.

To do it, the team denatured whey proteins under acidic conditions and high temperatures to create a slurry of protein nanofibrils. They then dried this gel to create a sponge.

After dissolving the metal parts of the 20 motherboards and ionizing them in a bath, they placed the sponge in the solution to attract the gold ions.

By heating their sponge, the team reduced the collected ions into flakes, and eventually melted them into a tiny gold nugget.

This 450-milligram nugget was 91 percent gold and nine percent copper. At current rates per ounce, that’s roughly $33 of gold.

According to the team, the energy costs present a mere 50th of the value of the gold that can be recovered, making it an incredibly profitable process if scaled up.

Now, the researchers are looking for ways to market their idea, and for other protein-rich byproducts that could be transformed into sponges.”

Yea, but are they also looking for someone to partner with?!

Is turning electronics into gold the Greatest Idea Ever?

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#3,102 – Snake Meat

Earlier tonight while hiking I saw a snake. The first one I’ve seen so far in 2024 which means that hiking season is officially cancelled. But it also reminded me of a story I’d seen recently about how eating snakes could be in our future. Could my sworn mortal enemy actually be my savior?! What a plot twist that would be.

The Smithsonian sum it up best:

“Move over, lab-grown meat: Python could be the food of the future. These scaly reptiles may be one of the most sustainable animals to farm on the planet, according to new research published last week in the journal Scientific Reports.

And as climate change threatens global food security, python farming could be one possible way to produce a source of protein with a relatively small environmental footprint, the researchers report.

‘We really are running out of resources, whilst at the same time, the demand for high quality nutrients is going up,’ says study co-author Patrick Aust, a conservation scientist at the nonprofit People for Wildlife, to ABC News’ Julia Jacobo.

Diners already eat snake meat in some regions of the world, including parts of Africa, Latin America and Asia. In Hong Kong, for instance, snake soup is a popular dish, particularly during the winter. To help meet this demand, commercial python farms have been popping up in recent years.

‘Reptile meat is not unlike chicken: high in protein, low in saturated fats and with widespread aesthetic and culinary appeal,’ write the scientists in the paper.

Researchers were curious to know how farm-raised python stacked up against other types of livestock: How much food did pythons need to eat to produce a pound of meat for humans? This metric is known as the food conversion ratio.

After studying more than 4,600 Burmese and reticulated pythons on commercial farms in Vietnam and Thailand, they found the snakes had a more efficient food conversion ratio than salmon, pigs, cows, chicken and crickets. The snakes went long periods without eating but did not lose much of their body mass as a result; they also required very little water. On top of all that, they ate food that would not have been used otherwise, known as waste meat, such as wild-caught rodents and stillborn pigs.

‘A python can live off the dew that forms on its scales. In the morning, it just drinks off its scales and that’s enough,’ says co-author Daniel Natusch, director of the consulting firm EPIC Biodiversity and a herpetologist at Macquarie University in Australia, to the Washington Post’s Rachel Pannett. ‘Theoretically, you could just stop feeding it for a year.’

The fact that pythons can fast for long periods without any apparent consequences could help farmers hedge against future supply chain disruptions, which are becoming increasingly common amid climate change. During the Covid-19 pandemic, for instance, some swine farmers had to euthanize their pigs, because it had become too expensive to feed them or because meatpacking facilities were shut down.

When it comes time to butcher them, pythons are easy to fillet and produce very little waste, since they don’t have limbs. Snake meat—which can be used in soups, curries, sauteed on skewers, dried into jerky and barbecued—is similar in flavor and texture to chicken.

Pythons are also easy to farm. They get along with each other and are mostly sedentary when they don’t need to hunt for their own food. They also seem to tolerate small, confined spaces, and they seldom get sick with the viruses that affect livestock and poultry.

‘They display few of the complex animal welfare issues commonly seen in caged birds and mammals,’ the researchers write in the paper.”

All this sounds amazing. They have a better food conversation ratio than most of the things we eat while being just as nutritious and tasting like chicken, can be fed things we don’t care about, if we even have to feed them at all, require less space and maintenance, are easier to prepare, less susceptible to disease, etc. the list goes on and on.

And we’d be getting rid of the bane of my existence in the process, while helping to save the planet. I mean. Come on. This is almost too good to be true. The Smithsonian is right. Move over lab grown meat. Snake meat is the sustainable food of the future!

Is eating snake meat the Greatest Idea Ever?

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#3,101 – Insulin Milk

Drinking milk provides a lot of health benefits and soon it could even help treat diabetes thanks to a new procedure that injects human DNA into cows to allow for insulin to be produced in their milk.

The Jerusalem Post explains it best:

“Nearly 500 million people around the world suffer from type-2 diabetes, caused mostly by poor diet, obesity, and lack of physical activity, and an estimated 200 million of them are dependent on insulin therapy for their health.

In addition, there are about nine million people with type-1 diabetes because their pancreas doesn’t produce any insulin because the body’s immune system attacks the islet cells in the pancreas. 

The worldwide growing demand for human insulin, which is growing by leaps and bounds, costs their health insurers hundreds of billions, and in poor countries, some patients don’t get the drug they need.  

Now, an unassuming brown bovine from the south of Brazil has made history as the first transgenic cow capable of producing human insulin in her milk. The advancement, led by researchers from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the Universidade de São Paulo, could herald a new era in insulin production, eventually eliminating drug scarcity and high costs for people living with diabetes. 

‘Mother Nature designed the mammary gland as a factory to make protein really, really efficiently. We can take advantage of that system to produce a protein that can help hundreds of millions of people worldwide,’ said animal sciences professor Matt Wheeler at Illinois University.”

There are a lot of kinds of milk. 1%. 2%. Skim. Lactose free. Almond. But soon insulin milk could out shine them all!

Is having cows provide insulin milk the Greatest Idea Ever?

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#3,100 – The Four Day Work Week

It’s been over three weeks since I last blogged. The reason why? Work has been crazy busy and I’ve been too tired after work to do any writing. Sure would be nice if I could work less and have more free time. Which could soon be the case if Bernie Sanders gets his way thanks to his proposal for a 32 hour work week!

The New York Times explains:

“Senator Bernie Sanders this week unveiled legislation to reduce the standard workweek in the United States from 40 hours to 32, without a reduction in pay, saying Americans are working longer hours for less pay despite advances in technology and productivity.

The law, if passed, would pare down the workweek over a four-year period, lowering the threshold at which workers would be eligible to receive overtime pay. The 40-hour workweek has stood as the standard in the United States since it became enshrined in federal law in 1940.

In a hearing on Thursday before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions on the proposed law, Mr. Sanders, independent of Vermont, said profits from boosts in productivity over the decades had been reaped only by corporate leaders, and not shared with workers.”

Sanders is coming at this from a financial perspective as it relates to the threshold at which overtime can be paid. We’d probably still work just as much under his plan but just get paid more for doing so. But I really think we ought to establish a four day work week regardless of the finances involved. Simply put weekends need to be three days. So that we can have one day to do errands, one day to do something fun, and then one day to relax before going back to the grind.

Either way, I hope this bill passes and we soon have a four day work week so that I can blog more!

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#3,099 – Space Week: PIBOT

Airplanes are already mostly automated. In fact, according to the show Hijack on Apple TV, a pilot’s job is 90% automated with the pilot mostly just responsible for take off and landing. But we still have human pilots manning the cockpit for peace of mind. But soon we might not even have that as we could soon have our planes flown by a humanoid robot that fits in the cockpit and acts just like a real pilot would albeit powered by AI.

Freethink explains:

“Being an airplane pilot is a physically, mentally, and psychologically demanding job, and unfortunately, those conditions can sometimes lead to mistakes — while air travel is incredibly safe, pilot error remains a leading cause of the accidents that do occur.

The same way that autonomous cars are expected to make our roads safer, replacing pilots with autonomous systems could potentially reduce the number of accidents in our skies. Including private aircraft, there are hundreds of thousands of planes in the world, though, and custom modifying a large percentage of them to be autonomous would be a huge, expensive undertaking.

Instead of trying to make planes autonomous, researchers at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science are Technology (KAIST) are developing PIBOT, an AI-powered humanoid robot pilot designed to fit in the cockpit and fly unmodified airplanes.

‘PIBOT is a humanoid robot that can fly an airplane just like a human pilot by manipulating all the single controls in the cockpit, which is designed for humans,’ lead developer David Shim told Euronews Next.'”

This is an interesting twist on AI and autonomous vehicles taking over where we still need a human to be involved, or at least, a humanoid that resembles a human. Instead of just removing the parts that a human would no longer need to use, like removing the steering wheel in a driverless car, you instead leave the configurations the same but just add in a humanoid robot. The big question is if humans would trust to fly in a plane that is purely being flown by AI? Even one flown by a humanoid?

Is PIBOT the Greatest Idea Ever?

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#3,098 – Space Week: MOON

The Moon, our closest celestial neighbor, is already an iconic figure that dominates the night sky. But soon it could dominate the skyline in Dubai as well.

AP News explains:

“A proposed $5 billion real estate project wants to take skyscraper-studded Dubai to new heights — by bringing a symbol of the heavens down to Earth.

Canadian entrepreneur Michael Henderson envisions building a 274-meter (900-foot) replica of the moon atop a 30-meter (100-foot) building in Dubai, already home to the world’s tallest building and other architectural wonders.

Henderson’s project, dubbed MOON, may sound out of this world, but it could easily fit in this futuristic city-state…And even though a previous booms-and-bust cycle saw many grand projects collapse, Henderson and others suggest his vision, funded by Moon World Resorts Inc., where he is the co-founder, might not be that far-fetched.

‘We have the biggest ‘brand’ in the world,’ Henderson told The Associated Press, alluding that the moon itself — the heavenly body — was his brand. ‘Eight billion people know our brand, and we haven’t even started yet.’

The project Henderson proposes includes a destination resort inside the spherical structure, complete with a 4,000-room hotel, an arena capable of hosting 10,000 people and a ‘lunar colony’ that would give guests the sensation of actually walking on the moon.

The MOON would sit on a pedestal-like circular building beneath it and would glow at night.”

Considering the success of The Sphere in Vegas it wouldn’t be a surprise to see another similar structure pop up on the other side of the world. Especially in a region that’s fast becoming synonymous with larger than life, over the top, grandiose design projects from The Line to The Mukaab.

What’s great about this project is that it’s likely to be speak to so many people. I mean, who hasn’t dreamt about visiting the Moon and bounding from spot to spot unburdened by normal Earth gravity. Even with private space companies paving the way for eventual space tourism most of us will probably never be able to afford to step foot on the actual Moon (or just not want to risk the journey). But if we could visit the Moon down here on Earth?! That right there is a game changer.

Is MOON the Greatest Idea Ever?

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