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Enter a new project from IBM Research and Mars Incorporated. Today, scientists from the two organizations announced the Sequencing the Food Supply Chain Consortium, a collaborative food safety organization that aims to leverage advances in genomics and analytics to further our understanding of what makes food safe.

The researchers will conduct the largest-ever metagenomics study of our foods, sequencing the DNA and RNA of popular foods in an effort to identify what traits keep food safe and these can be effected by outside microorganisms and other factors. Eventually, the researchers will extend the project “from farm to fork,” examining materials across the length and breadth of the supply chain.

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Chocolate has not always been the common confectionary we experience today. When it first arrived from the Americas into Europe in the 17th century it was a rare and mysterious substance, thought more of as a drug than as a food. Christine Jones traces the history and literature of its reception.

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Everything about the project, known as Iter (formerly known as the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor), is huge. The main fusion reactor will be built on a flattened area of concrete that has been blasted into the hills at Cadarache and stretches to 60 football pitches. Around 2.5m cubic metres of earth and rubble were excavated from what was originally a small valley that undulated by several hundred metres in parts. That concrete baseplate sits on dozens of pillars containing layers of rubber sandwiched between the mortar and cement – not only do these pillars raise the building above the height of the surrounding countryside (the height was calculated to be above the maximum height that water would flow past if the nearby dam broke), they also create a “seismic isolation pit” that will protect the building from earthquakes.

And it’s not happening in America because bureaucrats and eco-Nazis have made it too expensive. Lucky us.

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The term “hypersonic” generally refers to a class of long-range precision strike weapons that travel at Mach 5 or better. This definition generally excludes such munitions as the LRLAP (long-range land attack projectile), fired by the Advanced Gun System, which can only travel sixty miles, as well as traditional cruise missiles such as the Tomahawk, which travel under the speed of sound.

Come Back With a Warrant Front Mat.

The Nightlighter.

Ceramic Pot Minder. No, the other kind.

Tactical Self-Defense Flashlight With Spikes. Perfect for the Klingon on your gift list.

Candle-Powered Heater.

Leatherman Bracelet with wrenches and screwdrivers.

Automatic Jar Opener. No more Mr Nice Guy….

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A new procedure can quickly and efficiently increase the length of human telomeres, the protective caps on the ends of chromosomes that are linked to aging and disease, according to scientists at the Stanford University School of Medicine.

Treated cells behave as if they are much younger than untreated cells, multiplying with abandon in the laboratory dish rather than stagnating or dying.

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Lucky Netanyahu. But he still has to be around Boehner; hard to say which prospect is more unpleasant.

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I’m in.

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In between gasps about the hottest year ever, and palpitations over fracking, environmentalists have been worked up for a long time now about BPA—bisphenol-A, an ingredient in many plastic products.  Environmentalists want it banned, because Rosie O’Donnell or something.  Well, European environmental regulators, who typically ban [six impossible] things before breakfast, have given BPA a clean bill of health.

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And there you have it.

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Funny how that works. Guess the sky isn’t falling after all.

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Researchers have found a key that may unlock the only library of classical antiquity to survive along with its documents, raising at least a possibility of recovering vanished works of ancient Greek and Roman authors such as the lost books of Livy’s history of Rome.

The library is that of a villa in Herculaneum, a town that was destroyed in A.D. 79 by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius that obliterated nearby Pompeii. Though Pompeii was engulfed by lava, a mix of superhot gases and ash swept over Herculaneum, preserving the documents in a grand villa that probably belonged to the family of Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, the father-in-law of Julius Caesar.

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Next up: One for blood alcohol?

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Archaeologists digging just outside of the castle gate have found traces of buildings from the 16th and late 15th centuries. Previously, it had been believed a town was built next to Dunluce Castle from 1608 – it was destroyed during an Irish uprising in 1641.

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A new study in JAMA Internal Medicine is adding to the evidence the CDC’s sodium advice is basically a superstition, that is to say, a belief or practice resulting from ignorance, fear of the unknown, trust in magic or chance, or a false conception of causation. In this case, the CDC and lots of physicians are buying into what has turned out to be a false conception of causation.

HAH!

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As 2015 legislatures swing back into action, several states are considering decreasing regulation of small-scale food producers, making it easier for residents to buy and sell homemade, farm-fresh products. Bills making their way through Connecticut, Virginia, and Wyoming statehouses would release “cottage foods” and products like raw milk from rules currently prohibiting direct kitchen-to-consumer sales.

“Cottage foods” are homemade items, such as baked goods and jams, deemed not especially hazardous from a food-safety perspective. The Connecticut General Assembly is considering a bill to legalize cottage food sales. “Under existing rules, specialty food companies must use licensed commercial kitchens, except in cases where food is sold to raise money for charitable causes, such as school bake sales,” notes the Stamford Advocate.

Rollin’ back the Nanny State.

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You could have done that in Excel, you know….

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Every recipe has both instructions and ingredients. So does the human genome. An error in the instructions can raise the risk for disease.

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Nice to learn that not sitting will let you live forever. Oh, wait….

Bee’s Wrap.

Stayhold.

Inexpensive Bluetooth Car Diagnostic Scanner.

Night Glow Toilet Seat.

FlicFloc Flaker. I am not making this up.

Seated Strider. My kind of exercise machine.

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This is really cute.

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Each country has its own invasive species and rampant plants with a tendency to grow out of control. In most, the techniques for dealing with them are similar – a mixture of powerful chemicals and diggers. But in the US a new weapon has joined the armoury in recent years – the goat.

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Poison ivy, multiflora rose and bittersweet – the goats eat them all with gusto, so Knox now markets their pest-munching services one week at a time from May to November.

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A herd of 35 goats can go through half an acre of dense vegetation in about four days, which, says Knox, is the same amount of time it gets them to become bored of eating the same thing.

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Short answer: 60 miles wide, give or take.

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Unlike pneumatic tires, which cushion rides using a bed of pressurized air, the X Tweel uses a combination of deformable polyurethane spokes, a steel-and-rubber outer rim, and rigid metal hub. The outer rim—called a shear beam—carries most of the load. The spokes and hub distribute the load across different parts of the shear beam as the tire rolls over objects.

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So they can give IDs to illegal immigrants, of course, and — oh, yes — provide yet another  source of municipal graft.

That’s not in your copy of the story, of course….

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Asians have emerged as the fastest growing of the three major ethnic and minority populations in the United States. According to Census Bureau data, the number of US native and foreign-born Asian residents rose 56 percent from the 2000 Census to the 2013 American Community Survey (one year release). This is calculated by comparing estimates based on interviews with residents who have classified themselves as a single race and Asian. In the last two censuses, respondents have been asked to designate their race, with the option of selecting more than one (“combinations”). For simplicity, this analysis uses “one race” rather than “combination” data for Asians and African-Americans as well as all data for Hispanics or Latinos. In 2010, 4.8 percent of the nation’s population was “Asian alone” (not in combination with another race or ethnicity).

I regard this as an encouraging trend. To paraphrase John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, there is very little wrong with any large American city that a million ethnic Chinese wouldn’t fix.

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With the smartphone revolution, an increasingly powerful new set of tools—from attachments that can diagnose an ear infection or track heart rhythms to an app that can monitor mental health—can reduce our use of doctors, cut costs, speed up the pace of care and give more power to patients. Digital avatars won’t replace physicians: You will still be seeing doctors, but the relationship will ultimately be radically altered. (I consult for several companies on many of the issues discussed here.)

All of this raises serious issues about hacking and personal privacy that haven’t yet been addressed—and the accuracy of all of these tools needs to be tested. People are also right to worry that the patient-doctor relationship could be eroded, diminishing the human touch in medicine. But the transformation is already under way.

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The WarkaWater tower is an unlikely structure to find jutting from the Ethiopian landscape. At 30 feet tall and 13 feet wide, it’s not half as big as its namesake tree (which can loom 75 feet tall), but it’s striking nonetheless. The spindly tower, of latticed bamboo lined with orange polyester mesh, isn’t art—though it does kind of look like it. Rather, the structure is designed to wring water out of the air, providing a sustainable source of H₂O for developing countries.

Meal Snap. (phone app)

Plastic Storage Caps for Wide Mouth Canning Jars.

Lasers in the Service of Ending Baldness.

SkyBell doorbell.

Cryptex USB drive.

Subzero Warm Breath Balaklava. Perfect for robbing a post-Apocalypse bank.

Poop Emoji Pillow. We all know someone for whom this is the perfect gift.

Lockpick School in a Box.

Compleat FoodBag.

Anti-Paparazzi Clothing Collection.

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You didn’t watch it, did you? You totally didn’t. It’s only three minutes! How could you not possibly want to watch Boxer, 74, answer staged questions from her own grandson in what looks like a Marriott timeshare condo somewhere?

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Antibiotic resistance is spreading faster than the introduction of new compounds into clinical practice, causing a public health crisis. Most antibiotics were produced by screening soil microorganisms, but this limited resource of cultivable bacteria was overmined by the 1960s. Synthetic approaches to produce antibiotics have been unable to replace this platform. Uncultured bacteria make up approximately 99% of all species in external environments, and are an untapped source of new antibiotics. We developed several methods to grow uncultured organisms by cultivation in situ or by using specific growth factors. Here we report a new antibiotic that we term teixobactin, discovered in a screen of uncultured bacteria. Teixobactin inhibits cell wall synthesis by binding to a highly conserved motif of lipid II (precursor of peptidoglycan) and lipid III (precursor of cell wall teichoic acid). We did not obtain any mutants of Staphylococcus aureus or Mycobacterium tuberculosis resistant to teixobactin. The properties of this compound suggest a path towards developing antibiotics that are likely to avoid development of resistance.

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California lawmakers approved the law in 2004, but it wasn’t until 2012 when it took effect. It requires the state to “prohibit a person from force-feeding a bird for the purpose of enlarging the bird’s liver beyond a normal size” and bans sales of out-of-state foie gras. While vendors faced fines of up to $1,000, residents were still allowed to possess the delicacy and eat it.

Two out-of-state foie gras producers, and a California restaurant that was forced to gut foie gras dishes from its menu, sued the Golden State to get it overturned.

In his ruling, U.S. District Judge Stephen V. Wilson held that the foie gras ban was preempted by a federal law regulating the distribution and sale of poultry products.

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TrackingPoint is an Austin startup known for precision-guided firearms and has also experimented with Google Glass, letting you shoot from behind cover. The company, which is here at CES Showstoppers, has just announced ShotView, an iOS and Google Play app that lets a hunter stream video from his or her gun to anyone in the world. And the press release is very clear about its place in the tech world:

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Top-level boffins say they have discovered a valuable new tool for mapping the genetic history of sheep: namely, the extraction of DNA from old documents, which are generally written on parchment made from the skin of sheep or other animals.

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The great thing about this is that legal documents are normally exactly dated and carefully preserved. Unlike bones, for instance, you don’t need to dig them up – they’re already in archives ready organised.

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THE North and South Poles are “not melting”, according to a leading global warming expert. In fact, the poles are “much more stable” than climate scientists once predicted and could even be much thicker than previously thought. For years, scientists have suggested that both poles are melting at an alarming rate because of warming temperatures – dangerously raising the Earth’s sea levels while threatening the homes of Arctic and Antarctic animals.

But the uncertainty surrounding climate change and the polar ice caps reached a new level this month when research suggested the ice in the Antarctic is actually growing.

And there could even be evidence to suggest the polar bear population is not under threat.

Ted Maksym, an oceanographer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, conducted a study in which he sent an underwater robot into the depths of the Antarctic sea to measure the ice.

His results contradicted previous assumptions made by scientists and showed that the ice is actually much thicker than has been predicted over the last 20 years.

Dr Benny Peiser, from the Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF), said this latest research adds further proof to the unpredictability of the supposed effects of global warming.

Heh,

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One can always tell what’s fashionable by what sort of things get covered by the Usual Suspects. To see the New Yorker cover a canal in MesoAmerica is certainly suggestive of the Next Big Thing with ‘progressives’.

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Devising a way to one day land astronauts on Mars is a complex problem and NASA scientists think something as simple as a child’s toy design may help solve the problem. Safely landing a large spacecraft on the Red Planet is just one of many engineering challenges the agency faces as it eyes an ambitious goal of sending humans into deep space later this century.

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An infrared laser pulse briefly modifies the structure of a high-temperature superconductor and thus removes its electrical resistance even at room temperature.

This is HUGE.

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You first.

Lefty rag Business Insider actually has some worthwhile information for a change.

It may be 2015 already, but in 2014 we saw some truly amazing scientific discoveries. We landed a probe on a comet, discovered new particles that further our knowledge of the physics of the universe, and learned more about the properties of the wonder-material graphene, which could eventually transform everything from fuel cell technology to battery and computing power and more.

2014 was a great year.

Cryptex USB Flash Drive.

Butterfly Spring Door Closer.

Headgehog Multitool.

Wall Outlet Space Heater.

Potato-chip Flavored Chocolate. I am not making this up.

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Cancer immunotherapy comes in several forms. The drugs sparking the most interest are called checkpoint inhibitors. They work by releasing the natural brakes on the immune system, enabling its foot soldiers, called T cells, to attack tumors.

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This isn’t a case of a protein going rogue. It seems to be part of the recycling process that occurs when there’s a mistake in a protein being built. When an error is introduced, the ribosomes stall and call in a group of quality control proteins, including Rqc2. In observing this process, the researchers saw how Rqc2 links up with the transfer RNA and tells it to insert a random sequence of two amino acids into the chain (out of 20 total amino acids).

The researchers believe that Rqc2’s seemingly aberrant behavior might be an integral part of keeping your body free of faulty proteins. It’s possible that it is flagging the protein for destruction, or that the string of amino acids could be a test to see if the ribosome is working properly. People with disorders like Alzheimers and Huntingtons diseases have defective quality control processes for their proteins. Understanding the exact conditions where Rqc2 is triggered, and where it fails to trigger, are the next step in this research, and could be important for developing new treatments for neurodegenerative diseases.

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To mitigate this and other environmental issues affecting Africa such as land degradation, the effects of climate change, and a loss of biodiversity, Senegal is leading a 20-nation initiative known as the Great Green Wall. Most notably, this initiative involves erecting a wall of trees across the southern edge of the Sahara desert, which will be 14 km wide and 7,600 km long. When completed, it will be the largest horticultural feature in history. The initiative will also focus on establishing sustainable farming and livestock cultivation, and improving food security.

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Yeast. Is there nothing it can’t do? Scoop it up from nature and it makes alcohol. Fiddle with the genes and you can coax it to produce gasoline. Useful, but such synbio projects tend not to be cost-effective. Now, though, biochemists are genetically modifying yeast and algae to produce stuff with good enough profit margins that you could find it in the grocery store (or on the street corner).

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If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

Darn Tough Socks.

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Whether responding to genuine necessity or not, a new aqueduct itself was a statement of a city’s power, grandeur, and influence in an age when such things mattered greatly. Its creation also glorified its sponsor. Trajan—provoked, in part, by the unfinished projects of his grandiose predecessor, Domitian—seized the opportunity to build his own monumental legacy in the capital: the Aqua Traiana (“Aqueduct of Trajan” in Latin). The aqueduct further burnished the emperor’s image by bringing a huge volume of water to two of his other massive projects—the Baths of Trajan, overlooking the Colosseum, and the Naumachia of Trajan, a vast open basin in the Vatican plain surrounded by spectator seating for staged naval battles.

Popular Science shows us a glimpse of the future.

As military strategists look ahead, the days of asymmetric warfare and the uncontested airspace that comes with it seem to be drawing to a close. “There are no active area defenses run by insurgents in Afghanistan and Iraq or, for that matter, Syria,” says defense analyst Phil Finnegan, of the Fairfax, Virginia–based Teal Group. “But the next generation of UAVs will have to confront potential threats like China. They’ll need to be much more capable—faster, with greater autonomy in case communication links are disrupted, and stealthier so they are more difficult for an adversary to detect.”

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It’s more interesting than you might think.