News India Times
February 12, 2016
10
Community
– that’s all you need to know
BySumanGuhaMozumder
an you eat beef, pork
or chicken without
killing the animals or
the bird?
It seems very soon you
can indulge in meat, and be
compassionate to animals at the
same time.
Uma Valeti, an Indian-
American cardiologist and
founder CEO of San Francisco-
based startup, Memphis Meats,
which will be growing cultured
meat, meat outside a live ani-
mal. The company is already
growing real meat in small
quantities using cells from cows,
pigs, and chickens, according to
Veg News. Similar to all in-vitro
meat production, small
amounts of animal cells are
needed to start the culturing
process. Memphis Meats’
process includes using fetal
bovine serum—a nutrient-rich
cocktail extracted from unborn
calves’ blood that is popular in
cultured meat production
because of its resulting low lev-
els of antibodies and high
amounts of growth factors.
The company said in a press
release that its first products—
hot dogs, sausages, burgers, and
meatballs—will be developed
using recipes perfected over a
half century by award-winning
chefs. The founders expect to
have products to market in less
than five years.
Valeti made a presentation to
investors Feb. 4 in San Francisco
at the biotech accelerator Indie
Bio, which was created by ven-
ture capital firm SOS Ventures.
Google co-founder Sergey
Brin, who provided $330,000 to
fund the world’s first cultured
hamburger, describes cultured
meat as a technology with “the
capability to transform how we
view our world.”
Valeti, a cardiologist who
trained at the Mayo Clinic, and
is associate professor of medi-
cine at the University of
Minnesota and president of the
Twin Cities American Heart
Association, said that cultured
meat was the way of the future.
“We plan to do to animal
agriculture what the car did to
the horse and buggy.
Cultured meat will com-
pletely replace the status
quo and make raising ani-
mals to eat them simply
unthinkable,” he told the
Wall Street Journal.
Valeti founded
Memphis Meats with
Nicholas Genovese, a stem
cell biologist, andWill
Clem, a biomedical engi-
neer who owns a chain of
barbecue restaurants in
Memphis, TN. The mouth-
watering reputation of
Memphis barbecue
inspired the company’s
name.
While generating one
calorie from beef requires
23 calories in feed,
Memphis Meats plans to
produce a calorie of meat
from just three calories in
inputs. The company’s
products will be free of antibi-
otics, fecal matter, pathogens,
and other contaminants found
in conventional meat.
In addition to its initial accel-
erator funding from SOS
Ventures, Memphis
Meats is closing in on a
$2 million seed round of
venture capital funds, the
release said.
Bruce Friedrich, exec-
utive director of The
Good Food Institute said
that “cultured meat is
sustainable, creates far
fewer greenhouse gases
than conventional meat,
is safer, and doesn’t harm
animals.
According to a Veg
News report, Valeti wants
to advance the commer-
cial viability of meat
farmed directly from real
meat cells. Valeti, an early
board member of New
Harvest, a non-profit
dedicated to advancing
cellular agriculture
research and mainstream
adoption of cultured
meat, has extensive business
experience and is an investor in
a variety of food and tech com-
panies.
“We love meat. But like most
Americans, we don’t love the
many negative side effects of
conventional meat production:
environmental degradation, a
slew of health risks, and food
products that contain antibi-
otics, fecal matter, pathogens,
and other contaminants,” he
was quoted as saying.
“That’s why we started
Memphis Meats. We’re creating a
new kind of farming, one that
provides the same delicious
meat we grew up with—without
all the drawbacks. With one foot
in San Francisco and the other
in Memphis, Tennessee, we're
using the innovative spirit of
SiliconValley coupled with the
rich culinary traditions of the
American south to provide bet-
ter meat for the entire world,”
Veg News quoted him as saying.
His process he claims will pro-
duce 90 percent less greenhouse
emissions and would spare bil-
lions of animal lives a year.
Eat Meat But Spare Animals: Cardiologist Develops Cultured Meat
– NEWYORK
I
n a first, researchers including
one of Indian origin have
directly converted carbon
dioxide from thin air into
methanol fuel - a discovery that
can create a sustainable fuel
source from greenhouse gas
emissions in the near future.
Methanol is a clean-burning
fuel for internal combustion
engines, a fuel for fuel cells and a
rawmaterial used to produce
many petrochemical products.
The work, led by GK Surya
Prakash and George Olah from
the University of South Carolina
(USC) is part of a broader effort to
stabilize the amount of carbon
dioxide in the atmosphere by
using renewable energy to trans-
form the greenhouse gas into its
combustible cousin.
“We need to learn to manage
carbon. That is the future,” said
Prakash, professor of chemistry
and director of the USC Loker
Hydrocarbon Research Institute.
The researchers bubbled air
through an aqueous solution of
pentaethylenehexamine (PEHA),
adding a catalyst to encourage
hydrogen to latch onto the CO2
under pressure. They then heated
the solution, converting 79 per-
cent of the CO2 into methanol.
“Though mixed with water, the
resulting methanol can be easily
distilled,” Prakash added in a
paper published in the Journal of
the American Chemical Society.
Prakash and Olah hope to
refine the process to the point
that it could be scaled up for
industrial use, though that may
be five to 10 years away.
Of course it won't compete
with oil today at around $30 per
barrel. “But right now, we burn
fossilized sunshine.We will run
out of oil and gas but the Sun will
be there for another five billion
years. So we need to be better at
taking advantage of it as a
resource,” Prakash pointed out.
The new system operates at
around 125-165 degrees Celsius,
minimizing the decomposition of
the catalyst.
In a lab, the researchers
demonstrated that they were able
to run the process five times with
only minimal loss of the effective-
ness of the catalyst.
– IANS
CO2 From Thin Air Converted Directly Into Clean-burning Fuel
C
– NEWYORK
A
team of Indian-origin
researchers has devel-
oped a new type of radio
frequency identification (RFID)
chip that is virtually impossible
to hack, thus preventing your
credit card number or key card
information from being stolen.
According to Chiraag
Juvekar, graduate student in
electrical engineering at
Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (MIT), the chip is
designed to prevent so-called
side-channel attacks.
Side-channel attacks analyze
patterns of memory access or
fluctuations in power usage
when a device is performing a
cryptographic operation, in
order to extract its crypto-
graphic key.
“The idea in a side-channel
attack is that a given execution
of the cryptographic algorithm
only leaks a slight amount of
information," Juvekar said.
“So you need to execute the
cryptographic algorithmwith
the same secret many, many
times to get enough leakage to
extract a complete secret,” he
explained.
One way to thwart side-
channel attacks is to regularly
change secret keys.
In that case, the RFID chip
would run a random-number
generator that would spit out a
new secret key after each trans-
action.
A central
server would
run the same
generator, and
every time an
RFID scanner
queried the tag,
it would relay
the results to the
server, to see if
the current key
was valid.
Such a sys-
temwould still,
however, be vul-
nerable to a
"power glitch"
attack in which the RFID chip's
power would be repeatedly cut
right before it changed its
secret key. An attacker could
then run the same side-chan-
nel attack thousands of times,
with the same key.
Two design innovations
allow the MIT researchers' chip
to thwart power-glitch attacks.
One is an on-chip power
supply whose connection to
the chip circuitry would be vir-
tually impossible to cut and the
other is a set of "nonvolatile"
memory cells that can store
whatever data the chip is work-
ing on when it begins to lose
power.
For both of these features,
Juvekar and Anantha
Chandrakasan, professor of
electrical engineering and com-
puter science and others used a
special type of material known
as a ferroelectric crystals.
Texas Instruments and other
chip manufacturers have been
using ferroelectric materials to
produce nonvolatile memory
or computer memory that
retains data when it's powered
off. Along with Texas
Instruments that has built sev-
eral prototypes of the new chip,
the researchers presented their
research at the “International
Solid-State Circuits
Conference” in San Francisco
recently.
– IANS
Scientists Develop Hack-proof Chip
