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Sergey Brin invests in synthetic beef

theguardian.com

231–240 of 272 posts

Re: Sergey Brin invests in synthetic beef

#231
Fully automated, mass production of synthetic beef would be an amazing feat and would definitely change nutrition for millions, if not billions of people. That being said, I don't think we'll be there in less than 50 years.

In the short term, there's already a method of producing high quality protein and fats at around 90% efficiency: insects!

Now if only the Western world would get over the stigma attached to bugs...

Re: Sergey Brin invests in synthetic beef

#232
post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think in this case it does. Can you think of anything sci-fi that would NOT be transformative enough?

Three-dimensional chess. (Not really disagreeing. Just couldn't turn down the challenge.)

Video phones also turned out to be kind of boring, once they stopped being part of the shiny future and started being part of the present.

Re: Sergey Brin invests in synthetic beef

#234

Best quote from Sergey: "If what you're doing is not seen by some people as science fiction, it's probably not transformative enough"

and he is spot on with artificial meat. The artificial meat impact on our civilization will be comparable with that of beginning of meat eating by apes 2M years ago.

Once more nutritious than natural, the artificial meat will allow to overcome the current energy limitation on our brain.

Once artificial meat becomes mainstream and eating natural meat become obsolete, the human race will be able to overcome obsolete concepts wrt. human/animal intelligence, which will have profound effect on social ethic and intelligence (the share of human civilization resources going into issues of violence, enforcement (of bad rules onto good people and good rules onto bad people), wars, etc... is staggering - more than half), and, in particular, as a side effect, will open our mentality to outside contact as well.

Re: Sergey Brin invests in synthetic beef

#235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is a healthy level of meat intake and we far exceed it Why do you think that? I definitely eat a lot of meat, but I've never really seen any reason to think it was an inherently bad thing.

Overconsumption of red meat has been indicted, if inconsistently, for health conditions ranging from cardiovascular disease to diabetes to obesity. I haven't seen any such studies for poultry or seafood though.

I wonder how they controlled for processed carbohydrates in those studies given that there is undoubtedly a high correlation between American red meat eaters and the increasing plethora of intensely processed grain products over the past 70 years or so.

I don't remember the source, but I remember reading how back in the 60s there were two divergent schools of thought on the increasing obesity epidemic from two prominent researcher, one researcher heavily backed the saturated fat theory and one heavily backed the sugar theory. For some inconsequential reason, the latter got discredited personally which led us down decades of ill-proven assumptions about how bad saturated fat was.

Re: Sergey Brin invests in synthetic beef

#236
post #53

Do British newspapers not capitalize the word Internet? I know all American papers capitalize it because it's a proper noun. I'm wondering if that's just a recurring typo in this article or if British journalists follow a different convention.

The Guardian is pretty progressive in style terms. I think there's an increasing tendency to write it as internet and they're closer to the cutting edge than a more conservative (style-wise) newspaper like the NYT. Here are their capitalisation rules: http://www.theguardian.com/styleguide/c#id-3043710

Thanks for taking the time to find and share this interesting guide.

I think that The Guardian is a very progressive paper in general, but I'm not sure that lowercasing "the Internet" is a progressive move.

The Internet is capitalized because it's a proper noun: not just any general network, but a specific global network of computers. [1] There is only one Internet. If an author is referring to a subset of the Internet, he or she should be specific and elaborate. E.g. Is the author talking about an intranet?

In other words, it seems that NOT treating the Internet as a proper noun perpetuates a misunderstanding about what it is and how it operates. It implicitly gives writers a license to be more vague in their description of computer networks.

But I'm curious to hear your take on this. What do you see as the advantages of lowercasing the word?

[1] http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/capitaliz...

Re: Sergey Brin invests in synthetic beef

#237
post #43

Do British newspapers not capitalize the word Internet? I know all American papers capitalize it because it's a proper noun. I'm wondering if that's just a recurring typo in this article or if British journalists follow a different convention.

Maybe back in the 90's.

I'm not sure I understand your comment. Will you elaborate on it?

Re: Sergey Brin invests in synthetic beef

#238
post #107

Mostly carnivorous guy here; I have started playing around with the use of tofu and mushrooms in stead of meat and have come to the realization that it is actually a lot easier to substitute them for meat. Another, even bigger realization I have come to is that it seems that my addiction, yes, addiction, to meat and meat having to be a minimum requirement for having any interest in a dish, is that it is really a psyc…

>> Just think of how many meals have some form of meat in it. It's probably approaching 100% for most Americans that are not vegetarians. Really? Neither myself, nor 99% of the people I associate with are vegetarians, but I'd say I AT MOST 50% of my lunches and 25% of my dinners actually contain meat (and maybe 7% for breakfast). Granted, I do consider myself a heath conscious eater, and thus eat lots of veggies and…

if you paid closer attention to things like gelatin and cochineal, you might notice an increase in the percentage of non-vegetarian meals you consume.

Re: Sergey Brin invests in synthetic beef

#239
post #8

We have a lot of entrepreneurs here. Why don't we start with an easier lab-grown animal product than something we ingest? How about lab-grown fur coats (EDIT from evilduck's comment: or lab-grown leather for clothing, furniture, shoes, etc)? Who wouldn't want to wear a "mink" coat created with no animal pain? Develop the technology on something we don't have to eat, along with the associated health risks and sensitiv…

One reason is that leather is a waste by product of the demand for meat. If we made artificial leather it wouldn't really lower the number of animals that would need to be raised.

Re: Sergey Brin invests in synthetic beef

#240
post #3

Does it taste like despair? Seriously though, that's always my first thought when I read a story about something like this. It's like my brain can't help but cringe of the thought of eating something made this way, even if it's irrational.

Well, once they get the technology for proper fat inclusion in the meat, they can make it taste however they want. But your (and by extension, the public's) mental "cringe" is probably going to be a much bigger hurdle for them to jump over than the technology was.

I think it's been demonstrated time and time again that with enough monetary interest, the public will happily gulp down whatever slop is thrown their way. If this can be supplied cheaper than real beef, I think the fast food corporations will switch to it. Sergey Brin throwing his support behind the synthetic meat movement has really given me a new hope for the viability of a readily available consumer synthetic meat product in the near future.
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