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Good Catch Foods, the Pennsylvania-based startup which makes seafood out of plants, closed an $8.7 million Series A funding round yesterday. This ups their Series A from the $5.5 million the company announced in April. The round was led by New Crop Capital with participation from Stray Dog Capital, the PHW Group, Blue Horizon, and others. Founded in 2016, Good Catch Foods is developing plant-based alternatives to shredded tuna, crab cakes, and fish patties. They’re aiming to bring their fish-free tuna, which comes in three flavors and has roughly half the protein of “real” tuna, to market by 2019. According...

10. ManchineelWould you believe that there's a tree so poisonous that you don't actually have to touch it to be harmed? It's called the manchineel tree (Hippomane mancinella), found throughout the Florida Everglades, Central America and the Caribbean. Inhaling sawdust or smoke from the 30-foot (9.1-meter) tall tree may result in a variety of uncomfortable side effects, including coughing, laryngitis and bronchitis. Some reports suggest that simply standing beneath the tree during a rainstorm and being splashed by runoff may result in rashes and itching. Your car isn't even safe from this toxic tree: Park under its low branches, and...

From a first-principles perspective, the task of feeding eight billion people boils down to converting energy from the sun into chemical energy in our bodies. Traditionally, solar energy is converted by photosynthesis into carbohydrates in plants (i.e., biomass), which are either eaten by the vegans amongst us, or fed to animals, for those with a carnivorous preference. Today, the process of feeding humanity is extremely inefficient. If we could radically reinvent what we eat, and how we create that food, what might you imagine that “future of food” would look like? In this post we’ll cover: 1.Vertical farms 2.CRISPR engineered...

Plant Email System Described Posted on April 7, 2017 in Intelligent Design What do you call a long-distance signaling system that involves coded information? Japanese researchers identified a coded string of information that acts as a signal, but it wasn’t intercepted email: it was a molecule inside a plant, the humble lab plant Arabidopsis thaliana. Phys.org says that scientists at Nagoya University identified a polypeptide that tells roots when the top of the plant is starved for nitrogen, essentially telling the roots to send some up pronto. The polypeptide is not a random string of amino acids. It’s an ordered...

Ford Motor Co. is set to announce new investments in three plants in Michigan, reports reveal. The carmaker will reportedly invest a “significant amount” in assembly plants in Wayne, Flat Rock, and its Romeo Engine Plant, according to The Detroit News. The latest news of the carmaker’s U.S. expansion comes only two months after the company announced it was investing up to $700 million in its Michigan facilities. In February, Ford CEO Mark Fields said his company’s decision to create jobs in America rather than in Mexico is a “vote of confidence” in Trump’s incoming administration and the pro-business environment...

One of the emails contained in the Wikileaks’ Podesta email release shows that Hillary Clinton had gun control supporters planted in a town hall audience in Manchester, New Hampshire. The town hall occurred on October 5, 2015; just four days after a man opened fire on Umpqua Community College campus in Oregon.

Life came to ice-free Canadian corridor too late to sustain migrations of Clovis and pre-Clovis people. Archaeologists need a new theory for the colonization of the Americas. Plant and animal DNA buried under two Canadian lakes squashes the idea that the first Americans travelled through an ice-free corridor that extended from Alaska to Montana.The analysis, published online in Nature on 10 August and led by palaeo­geneticist Eske Willerslev of the University of Copenhagen, suggests that the passageway became habitable 12,600 years ago1. That’s nearly 1,000 years after the formation of the Clovis culture — once thought to be the first Americans — and...

Dr. Patrick Moore sent me this last week, and after reading it, I agree with him in his initial note to me that This is probably the most important paper I will ever write. Moore looks at the historical record of CO2 in our atmosphere and concludes that we came dangerously close to losing plant life on Earth about 18,000 years ago, when CO2 levels approached 150 ppm, below which plant life can’t sustain photosynthesis. He notes: A 140 million year decline in CO2 to levels that came close to threatening the survival of life on Earth can hardly be...

A tease thread for those who can't wait for spring Color my world Morning Mist in a Daylily Garden https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9te4c-8zBc Cooley's Iris Garden youtube.com/watch?v=gPxk5R2FJ_8 Edge Hill Gardens https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUbv1nyUz_c PORTLAND, OR- JAPANESE GARDEN https://www.youtube.com/embed/Z2FXIqil1RU Luscher Farm's Clematis Collection https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJuopjCP_Y0 IRIS, NOT JUST A NAME https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Yv-trVK1GeQ http://youtube.com/watch?v=w-tC8awgb_Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6s-iYR38FaM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bp2ah5_Pquc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTwzI-ISZMU Morning Mist in a Daylily Garden https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9te4c-8zBc

Excerpt: Groover said supporters who work hard for the party will be rewarded tickets. People selected will fill the 1,900 seats that have been made available for the event, according to Groover. Groover said the Republican National Committee gives a lot of tickets to supporters. He said more are then allocated for the state party to distribute among the county chairs.

The real estate mogul is responsible for 40 percent of the conversation during the CBS debate from Greenville, S.C., according to data obtained from Twitter. Jeb Bush accounted for 20 percent of the conversation, followed by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) at 14 percent, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) at 13 percent, Ben Carson at 8 percent and Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R) at 5 percent. ... Trump also gained the most Twitter followers of all presidential candidates, followed by Rubio, Kasich, Democratic contender Hillary Clinton who wasn't on stage, and Ted Cruz. ... The top three moments on Twitter all centered...

Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) sparred in an early presidential debate exchange during which Trump confronted the audience multiple times. (SNIP) Trump took another shot at the audience shortly after. The crowd loudly booed Trump when he mocked Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina), for having "0%" in the polls before dropping out of the presidential race and endorsing Bush.

Hip college students and grown folks alike are scratching their clover-laden heads wondering who got the idea to walk around with Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Secret Garden sprouting from their tresses. “I think this comes more from Western culture,” one student told the Times. “It’s fun, but I guess it’s also about protecting the environment, to show that you care about nature,” a peddler of the green headgear offered (which is interesting considering the country is one of the biggest polluters of out planet). But probably the best explanation came from a 24-year-old medical student, who best sums up how the...

Anarchy reigned in Mankato, Minn., for a short time last week before authorities stepped in to curb the scourge of outdoor dining without enough live plants in the vicinity. The Mankato Times reports police shut down the patio at Blue Bricks on Front Street last week after they determined there weren’t enough flowers nearby. In Mankato, 25 percent of the area around patio dining has to have at least 25 percent live plants

The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reports that global monthly CO2 levels reached 400 ppm. They present this as threatening news, but it is good news for plants and animals. I was involved in a brief to the US Supreme Court opposing the EPA actions on CO2. I proposed we seek Power of Attorney (POA) for the plants. We would vote on behalf of the plants against any attempts to reduce atmospheric CO2 from the current claimed 400 ppm and for any increase, at least to a level of 1200 ppm. Seeking POA sounds like an environmental stunt for...

Nine hundred kilometers off the east coast of Madagascar lies the tiny island paradise of Mauritius. The waters are pristine, the beaches bright white, and the average temperature hovers between 22°C and 28°C (72°F to 82°F) year-round. But conditions there may not have always been so idyllic. A new study suggests that about 4000 years ago, a prolonged drought on the island left many of the native species, such as dodo birds and giant tortoises, dead in a soup of poisonous algae and their own feces. The die-off happened in an area known as Mare aux Songes, which once held...

One of the country's largest coal utilities will begin closing power plants next month in four states, as strict federal environmental regulations begin to kick in. The company, American Electric Power, made the announcement in a notice advising employees at the electricity stations that it plans to close six power plants in Virginia, West Virginia, Ohio and Indiana, according to news reports. The company said it plans to shutter as much as 6,000 megawatts of power plant capacity in seven states by the start of 2016. The closures were planned as far back as 2011 to comply with new pollution...

Across the edges of the Indian Ocean, the amount of rainfall differs greatly. If it rains particularly hard in the Sumatran rain forest, the already arid region of East Africa is onset with drought. Researchers from the Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre (BiK-F), the California Institute of Technology, the Univerity of Southern California and the University of Bremen found that this cyclic, bipolar climate phenomenon has likely been around for 10,000 years. The pilot study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), sheds light on the climate system of a region whose rainfall patterns have a...

Video Linky Here Salvia is the largest genus of plants in the mint family, Lamiaceae, with nearly 1000 species of shrubs, herbaceous perennials, and annuals. Within the Lamiaceae, Salvia is member of the tribe Mentheae within the subfamily Nepetoideae. It is one of several genera commonly referred to as sage.

As a tech-obsessed child growing up in the nineties, Rob Rhinehart was always puzzled by food. Here he was, eagerly embracing the wonders of the information era, and he had to gnaw on seared chunks of meat and raw vegetables. “I remember when I was very young, eating lettuce and thinking it was very weird to be eating leaves, sitting in this nice house with all of these electronics around us,” he says now. These days, Rhinehart doesn’t eat much lettuce or anything else recognizable as food. Instead, the 25-year-old gets most of his nutrition from a water bottle filled...