Hi, everyone!
I'm Katerina Zalamova, founder of CREA IDEA LAB- think tank of business models for the smart cities market. I'm a Physicist with PhD in Material Science. I just join the Blockchain Institute and Technology Barcelona as Academic Director. I'm a member of EIP Smart Cities and Communities and EU AI Alliance.
I'm currently living in Barcelona, Spain.
I hope to bring fresh view to the community.
Looking forward to working together.
Katerina
Thanks, Nick. To clarify, these systems scale from "home" use sizes, say the size of a parking spot or two, to commercial sizes larger than a football field. With mesh networking, a single system could cover every rooftop in a city and be controlled from a single location.
Thanks for the invitation to this very exciting initiative.
I am Bruce German, Professor and Director of the Foods for Health Institute at the University of California, Davis. Our mission is to understand what people should eat in the 21st century and what farmers should grow. To us this means we need to know how diet works in sufficient molecular and mechanistic detail that we can link health all the way to agricultural traits. We use a specific evolutionary model to understand diet and health: lactation. This remarkable biological process that emerged quite late in evolution is a mechanistic model for many of the global issues we are facing today. The evolutionary unit is the mother - infant dyad. The mammalian mother literally dissolves herself to make a complete diet for her infant. Everything in milk costs the mother so she must optimize cost with benefit i.e. sustainability. If a component of milk costs the mother and yet doesn’t provide benefit to her or the infant, it will tend to be lost to evolution by selective pressure. However, if anything in milk provides benefit to the infant in its competition to survive and reproduce it is hard to imagine anything under more positive selective pressure as food. This also means that mammalian milk was selected for health and prevention not disease and cure.
Using lactation as a model we have made some important discoveries about mothers, babies and how diet can and should work for all of us. As just one example, human milk contains as its 3rd most abundant solid component: undigestible oligosaccharides. Why would mothers dissolve themselves to make ‘poop’? We discovered that these oligosaccharides are undigestible by babies and by the vast majority of bacteria that could inhabit babies. But one strain of bacteria: Bifidobacteria longum subspecies infantis, contains all of the capabilities to digest, metabolize and multiply on these milk oligosaccharides. What an idea of evolution! Our intestinal bacteria are so important to our health that mother’s milk not only feeds her baby it also feeds the right bacteria in her baby. When we realized that antibiotics, c-section births and infant formula was eliminating this milk-oriented bacteria from modern babies the faculty at UC Davis founded a company (Evolve Biosystems) to help babies get it back. This entire program has convinced us that the bacteria in us is far more important than we previously imagined and future diets will need to consider this dimension.
I teach the best and brightest students at the University from freshmen to graduate students and one theme is clear: k-12 is doing a terrible job of educating our society in the rudiments of agriculture, food and health. This complacency must change. Recent history has shown that there is no more important activity to the planet’s health than agriculture and no more important variable to an individual’s health and pursuit of happiness than diet. Yet we don’t teach young people the basic information that they will desperately need. How can we expect young people to revolutionize the agricultural enterprise and their own health when they don’t know anything about food?!
I very much look forward to the xPrize community’s perspectives on these issues.
Hello everyone! I'm an entrepreneur with a business (Winko) where we make high protein snacks with Mexican grasshopper powder. I'm curious to know if anyone of you has ever tried insects, would you?
Hello everybody, I am Martin Schares, an IT Manager for a food distributor. I get involved in technology to support the food industry including tracability, information transparency and I have an interest in the future of food supply.
@Erika great question - never tried it but would be willing! in our Evaluating Breakthroughs section we've been discussing alternative proteins. take a look and let us know what you think! it'll be good to have some more expert opinions on the topic: https://community.xprize.org/discussion/319/alternative-proteins#latest
Comments
I'm Katerina Zalamova, founder of CREA IDEA LAB- think tank of business models for the smart cities market. I'm a Physicist with PhD in Material Science. I just join the Blockchain Institute and Technology Barcelona as Academic Director. I'm a member of EIP Smart Cities and Communities and EU AI Alliance.
I'm currently living in Barcelona, Spain.
I hope to bring fresh view to the community.
Looking forward to working together.
Katerina
I've created a separate discussion about home-grown solutions. I think it's worth getting some more input on that. Thank you for sharing your ideas!
I am Bruce German, Professor and Director of the Foods for Health Institute at the University of California, Davis. Our mission is to understand what people should eat in the 21st century and what farmers should grow. To us this means we need to know how diet works in sufficient molecular and mechanistic detail that we can link health all the way to agricultural traits. We use a specific evolutionary model to understand diet and health: lactation. This remarkable biological process that emerged quite late in evolution is a mechanistic model for many of the global issues we are facing today. The evolutionary unit is the mother - infant dyad. The mammalian mother literally dissolves herself to make a complete diet for her infant. Everything in milk costs the mother so she must optimize cost with benefit i.e. sustainability. If a component of milk costs the mother and yet doesn’t provide benefit to her or the infant, it will tend to be lost to evolution by selective pressure. However, if anything in milk provides benefit to the infant in its competition to survive and reproduce it is hard to imagine anything under more positive selective pressure as food. This also means that mammalian milk was selected for health and prevention not disease and cure.
Using lactation as a model we have made some important discoveries about mothers, babies and how diet can and should work for all of us. As just one example, human milk contains as its 3rd most abundant solid component: undigestible oligosaccharides. Why would mothers dissolve themselves to make ‘poop’? We discovered that these oligosaccharides are undigestible by babies and by the vast majority of bacteria that could inhabit babies. But one strain of bacteria: Bifidobacteria longum subspecies infantis, contains all of the capabilities to digest, metabolize and multiply on these milk oligosaccharides. What an idea of evolution! Our intestinal bacteria are so important to our health that mother’s milk not only feeds her baby it also feeds the right bacteria in her baby. When we realized that antibiotics, c-section births and infant formula was eliminating this milk-oriented bacteria from modern babies the faculty at UC Davis founded a company (Evolve Biosystems) to help babies get it back. This entire program has convinced us that the bacteria in us is far more important than we previously imagined and future diets will need to consider this dimension.
I teach the best and brightest students at the University from freshmen to graduate students and one theme is clear: k-12 is doing a terrible job of educating our society in the rudiments of agriculture, food and health. This complacency must change. Recent history has shown that there is no more important activity to the planet’s health than agriculture and no more important variable to an individual’s health and pursuit of happiness than diet. Yet we don’t teach young people the basic information that they will desperately need. How can we expect young people to revolutionize the agricultural enterprise and their own health when they don’t know anything about food?!
I very much look forward to the xPrize community’s perspectives on these issues.
great to be involved with this community. Please find a brief summary through my LinkedIn profile at: linkedin.com/in/johanneslecoutre
Best, Johannes