Photo Credit: ALAMYReports last week that researchers could be just six months away from producing the world’s first artificial meat, using thousands of stem cells bred in a laboratory, sent a wave of fascination around the world. Yet there is an even more ghoulish prospect ahead: the idea of eating artificial food made from humans.

This may sound like science fiction, yet a new technique for making gelatin from human DNA is attracting “increasing interest from research and industrial circles”, according to a new study by scientists from the Beijing University of Chemical Technology. The paper, published recently in the Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry, revealed that successful experiments had been carried out in which human genes were inserted into a strain of yeast to “grow” large amounts of recombinant (genetically engineered) human gelatin.

Gelatin has a long history of use as a gelling agent by the food industry – and, according to the journal’s publisher, the American Chemical Society, human-derived gelatin “could become a substitute for some of the 300,000 tons of animal-based gelatin produced annually for desserts, marshmallows, candy and innumerable other products”.

There would be safety issues to consider. When an ice-cream parlour in London began selling flavours derived from human breast milk earlier this year, it was soon withdrawn for hygiene reasons. The Food Standards Agency said: “There would be a restriction on the sale or import of this type of product, because it would require a pre-market safety assessment.”

However, scientists do not believe that the new gelatin product would pose any risk. “There’s a very high degree of similarity between gelatin that comes from a cow, a pig, and a human,” explains Dr David Olsen, senior scientist at FibroGen, which specialises in recombinant gelatins. “So due to their similarities, I can’t see why there would be a health risk to it. It’s a very similar protein to what people have been ingesting for many years.”

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Photo Credit: UPTO/Motorola Forget Google Glass, smartwatches and even the biohacker who inserted a microchip under his skin, Motorola is hoping to trump them all with its microphone tattoo.

According to a patent filed by the Google-owned phone maker, the tattoo would be placed onto a person’s throat and pick sounds created by their voice.

If the user is making a phone call, the tattoo would then send these sounds wirelessly to the smartphone and the caller.

The patent is called ‘Coupling an electronic skin tattoo to a mobile communication device’ and was originally filed in May last year.

Throughout the patent, Motorola calls the device ‘electronic tattoo 110’ and said it would ‘comprise audio circuitry that enables reception of acoustic signals from a person’s throat’.

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Photo Credit: ReutersIt’s no secret trans fats are unhealthy. But now that the Food and Drug Administration is pushing to remove them from the food supply, there may be some unintended consequences: America’s favorite snacks won’t last as long on grocery store shelves, they could be more expensive, and they might not taste as good.

The fact that FDA said Thursday a widely used ingredient should no longer be considered safe represents one of the most sweeping actions the agency has taken in recent years.

And American consumers could very well see — and taste — a difference.

Take Pop Secret popcorn. Partially hydrogenated oils is on the list of ingredients and the nutrition facts show there are 5 grams of trans fat per serving.

But that’s just one of many popular products that likely would have to undergo a reformulation. Other products with labels that show they possess trans fats, according to a recent article in Health Magazine, include: Duncan Hines buttercream frosting, Bisquick’s original pancake mix, Kid Cuisine All American Fried Chicken meal and Häagen-Dazs caramel cone ice cream.

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Photo Credit: Reuters/NASA Ames/JPL-CaltechOne out of every five sun-like stars in the Milky Way galaxy has a planet about the size of Earth that is properly positioned for water, a key ingredient for life, a study released on Monday showed.

The analysis, based on three years of data collected by NASA’s now-idled Kepler space telescope, indicates the galaxy is home to 10 billion potentially habitable worlds.

The number grows exponentially if the count also includes planets circling cooler red dwarf stars, the most common type of star in the galaxy.

“Planets seem to be the rule rather than exception,” study leader Erik Petigura, an astronomy graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley, said during a conference call with reporters on Monday.

Petigura wrote his own software program to analyze the space telescope’s results and found 10 planets one- to two-times the diameter of Earth circling parent stars at the right distances for liquid surface water.

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Photo Credit: Wikimedia CommonsWould you like to surf the Internet, make a phone call or send a text message using only your brain? Would you like to “download” the content of a 500 page book into your memory in less than a second? Would you like to have extremely advanced nanobots constantly crawling around in your body monitoring it for disease? Would you like to be able to instantly access the collective knowledge base of humanity wherever you are?

All of that may sound like science fiction, but these are technologies that some of the most powerful high tech firms in the world actually believe are achievable by the year 2020. However, with all of the potential “benefits” that such technology could bring, there is also the potential for great tyranny. Just think about it. What do you think that the governments of the world could do if almost everyone had a mind reading brain implant that was connected to the Internet? Could those implants be used to control and manipulate us? Those are frightening things to consider.

For now, most of the scientists that are working on brain implant technology do not seem to be too worried about those kinds of concerns. Instead, they are pressing ahead into realms that were once considered to be impossible.

Right now, there are approximately 100,000 people around the world that have implants in their brains. Most of those are for medical reasons.

But this is just the beginning. According to the Boston Globe, the U.S. government plans “to spend more than $70 million over five years to jump to the next level of brain implants”.

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