Gaijin Panty

Each year on September 26, just days after the start of autumn, we celebrate Johnny Appleseed Day. And while this day of recognition doesn’t get you off work, it’s a day to remember an American pioneer who helped bring, arguably, the most iconic fruit to North America: the apple.

Known for his planting of apple orchards from Pennsylvania to Illinois to modern-day Canada, Appleseed would be astonished to learn that today the U.S. grows 240 million bushels of apples on average each year. Annually, the wholesale value of the crop is close to $4 billion.

But outside of loving apples, Appleseed was a conservationist. Because of this, he would be equally astonished to learn that apples are among the most wasted foods across the globe – according to UK supermarket giant Tesco, around 40 percent of the fruit is thrown away.

Many consumers throw away fruits like apples, peaches and bananas, because they brown so easily. This is especially challenging for apples because the fruit is often enjoyed sliced, which significantly speeds up the browning process.

Through biotechnology, however, researchers have identified a way to modify the genes of the fruit so that it doesn’t brown as quickly, thus extending self-life and reducing food waste.

Distributed to grocery stores in the fall of 2017, Arctic Apple’s non-browning apple slices are the latest GM crop to hit the market. Currently, the company has three popular varieties of apples available, including the Arctic Granny, the Arctic Golden and the Arctic Fuji. Additionally, the company has recently released its Arctic ApBitz, which are sliced dried apples packaged as an easy to eat snack especially great for kids.

As companies and consumers look for ways to cut down on the nearly 150,000 tons of food that is wasted in U.S. households each day, biotechnology innovations such as non-browning apples should continue to be explored as a possible solution. Currently, the potato is another crop that has been modified to be non-browning, and more crops with non-browning or reduced bruising traits should be on the horizon.

As a conservationist and apple lover, I’m sure Johnny Appleseed would be a supporter of any innovation that reduces food waste and allows more Americans to consume the fruit which he was nicknamed after.

A tweet from the official Chicago Cubs account posted back in 2012 got a new wave of attention online this afternoon thanks to its explicit content.

Editor’s Note: As part of BIO’s 25^th Anniversary celebration we will be spotlighting biotechnology innovations that have made a major impact over the past 25 years. This “Innovation Series” will publish on the 25^th of every month throughout 2018. In the ninth installment we spotlight food and agriculture biotechnology. 

So, you want to grow a vegetable. Let’s say you’re looking to grow a jalapeño pepper. You go to your local nursery, buy a young pepper plant, take it home and plant it in the ground or in a pot. Then, you water it, place it in the sun and nature pretty much takes care of the rest.

While you patiently wait and brainstorm recipes for your bountiful pepper harvest, billions of microbes just beneath the soil are working to help provide your plant the nutrients it needs to grow. In one spoonful of soil, there are billions of microbes – tiny organisms like bacteria and fungi – that naturally exist. What if there was a way to boost microbes and improve plants to benefit both humans and the environment?

That’s where “ag microbials” come in.

Through biotechnology innovation, products have been created that can be applied directly to a seed to enhance the natural microbes, improving outcomes for both nutrition and the environment.

Thanks to new understandings from gene sequencing, researchers can identify microbes with particular attributes, allowing farmers to control the microbes going into the soil.

Many of the attributes being explored benefit more than just the plant. Some microbials have the potential to suppress plants’ negative responses to drought, essentially tricking them into continuing to grow through dry conditions. In an increasingly warmer world, water conversation is a growing priority, and ag microbials such as these will allow farmers to use less water, thus benefiting the environment.

Recognizing the potential and beneficial impact of ag microbials, biotechnology companies are now investing in research and development of this innovative technology. For example, Pivot BIO in California is developing ag microbials to help reduce the nitrogen runoff that can pollute lakes, rivers and oceans. Plants need nitrogen to grow and thrive, but nitrogen from fertilizers can runoff into waterways, leading to “dead zones” – large areas in the water that do not have enough oxygen to support marine life.

Pivot’s microbials allow plants to absorb more nitrogen from the atmosphere. This allows farmers to apply less nitrogen-containing fertilizers and enhance the plant’s natural ability to convert nitrogen from the air to meet crops’ daily nitrogen needs.

Additionally, Monsanto (now a part of Bayer Crop Science) and Novozymes formed an alliance to develop microbial solutions to transform agriculture. The alliance is developing two microbial products: inoculants, which help plants with absorbing nutrients like nitrogen, and biocontrols, which help protect plants against pests and diseases. The latter will allow a plant to fight off pests and diseases on its own, reducing the need for pesticides and, again, reducing environmental impact.

Small companies like Ginkgo Bioworks are also looking to microbial science to help enhance agriculture. The startup is using biotechnology to engineer microbes to also reduce runoff from fertilizers into the environment. For this effort, Gingko Bioworks has formed a joint venture with Bayer to pair the company’s know-how with Ginkgo Bioworks’ manufacturing capabilities. In addition to producing ag microbials to fix nitrogen, the alliance looks to tackle soybean rust and citrus greening – a topic we covered previously here.

And while much of the conversation has focused on genetic engineering of plants to solve food and agriculture challenges like citrus greening, ag microbials hold tremendous promise as another solution.

By enhancing the microbes already at work beneath the soil, farmers can essentially optimize nature for greater benefits – benefits that transcend plant health, helping to also reduce environmental impact.

So next time you pick a pepper, remember most of the work came from the billions of microbes living just beneath the soil. Biotechnology allows us to harness the power of microbes to work to the advantage of plants, humans and the earth more than ever before.

Tomorrow marks the beginning of the fifth annual Oculus Connect: Facebook’s annual virtual reality (VR) conference.

Facebook acquired Oculus, a maker of VR hardware like headsets, as well as certain programs that pair with it, in 2014. Some have argued that the investment has yet to show any truly measurable return for Facebook, perhaps because of VR’s slow path to going mainstream.

But at Oculus Connect, we’re encouraged to dream big. At last year’s opening keynote, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced his goal to have one billion people using VR — by when, however, wasn’t quite as clear.

Goal = 1 billion people in VR. #oculusconnect

– Amanda Zantal-Wiener (@Amanda_ZW)
October 11, 2017

But in order to do that, VR needs to become both more accessible and affordable, the latter of which the company has addressed by way of its less expensive $199 Oculus Go headset. 

What’s next, then, on Facebook’s path to take VR mainstream, and get it into the hands of one billion people?

We have a few ideas. Here are five predictions we have for Oculus Connect.

Note: These are purely predictions that are not based on any information from Facebook or Oculus.

1. Integration With Facebook for Dating

At Facebook’s annual F8 developer conference this year, Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company would build a native dating app within Facebook.

Earlier this month, that app was unveiled for testing in Colombia. Some of the key features: the ability to see which events your potential matches might be attending or common interests you share, and finding a place to meet as a result. (Of course, there are privacy issues associated with that — but that’s another story.)

One way to create more use cases for VR — Oculus headsets specifically — is to merge them with features already available within Facebook. Dating could be one such use case if it’s integrated with Oculus Venues: an app that allows users to experience live events (like sports games or concerts) in VR, and interact with other users who are tuning it.

Pairing Facebook for dating with Oculus Venues could be one way to help potential matches get to know each other: by creating virtual first dates within Venues to help break the ice and see if they want to meet in-person.

2. More Business Use Cases

Superstore chain Walmart recently remarked that it’s putting Oculus headsets to use for workplace training, to help employees improve skills in areas like new technology, compliance, and emotional intelligence.

At last year’s Oculus Connect, the opening keynote pointed to workplace use cases for VR, such as virtual meetings and offices.

Workplace training, however, didn’t come up quite as much — but there have been other business use cases for VR, such as those from Tobii Pro, which pairs VR with eye-tracking technology to help retailers learn where a shopper pays the most visual attention and plan store layout accordingly.

Walmart, for its part, is slated to ship 17,000 Oculus Go headsets to its stores, to provide every employee with access to the VR training. This year, I’m curious — and believe it could be possible to see more business use cases, in which multiple units of Oculus headsets have been ordered and used by businesses to help with things like workplace training. 

3. More Education Use Cases 

Similar to workplace and B2B use cases, I’m eager to see more ways to leverage VR technology within classrooms. The company does have its Oculus Education division, and in August, it announced that it would be donating Rift and Oculus Go headsets to schools, libraries, and museums — “to better understand how teachers, students, and various institutions can use VR for learning and collaboration.”

 If this strategy sounds familiar, it might be due to similar, earlier plays from other Big Tech companies. Apple also has a history of distributing mass quantities of units, like its computers, to schools. And while the company had a bumpy road to its $1 trillion valuation, some argue that it was the education distribution strategy that helped Apple amplify its brand awareness.

…especially on the large-scale distribution & standardizations side. Remember when Apple gave close to 1 billion computers to schools? https://t.co/TYQoaDwDiV

– Amanda Zantal-Wiener (@Amanda_ZW)
October 18, 2017

It would be interesting to see a similar move from Oculus and hear more about these educational pilot programs during this week’s keynotes — particularly in ways that benefit underserved communities. That could point to a collaboration between Oculus Education and the company’s VR for Good Creators Lab.

4. Integration With Portal, Facebook’s Smart Speaker

Facebook originally planned to unveil its video smart speaker — said to be named Portal — at F8 in May. However, those plans were shelved after weeks of PR crises around privacy concerns.

Now, rumors are swirling that Portal will be formally announced this week, according to a scoop from Cheddar‘s Alex Heath. The timing seems suspect, given that Oculus Connect is also scheduled for this week — perhaps we’ll receive some official word of Portal’s Debut at the VR event.

It seems odd, however, to unveil non-VR hardware at a VR-specific event. So what would make the announcement make sense? The answer to that question could exist in some sort of integration.

So, what would an integration of a video smart speaker with VR technology look like? Well, for one, it could serve as another way to share in VR experiences together. After all, virtual reality isn’t for everyone — headsets have been known to cause nausea among some users (yours truly, included), and some simply don’t want to pay for the hardware.

Heath had made the point of Portal technology being used to communicate with older family members — “grandparents,” he said — which could serve as one VR-smart speaker integrative use case.

Will Portal be able to make calls to other devices, like these relatives’ televisions or mobile phones? And if so, will the technology be equipped to share VR experiences and visuals with them?

We’ll see if we hear about it at this week’s events.

5. Leaning Into Augmented Realty (AR)

Big Tech companies have been known to, in a word, emulate features that one might have “invented” first. Take the idea of Stories, for example — the ephemeral content first introduced by Snapchat that was later adapted by Instagram, Facebook, and — most recently — by Google.

One of those “must-have” technologies is AR: the type of semi-virtual that doesn’t require a headset and create a similarly immersive experience. Instead, it uses something more accessible, like a smartphone, to place virtual objects into your physical environment via a screen.

One pop cultural example of AR is the game Pokémon Go, which allowed users to “catch” virtual creatures within the real world.

Source: Vice

Google, for its part, recently announced an integration of AR features into its own Daydream VR headsets, and Microsoft already makes its HoloLens headset to combine AR with VR (creating what is known as a “mixed reality headset”).

So, is Facebook next? Can we expect the unveiling of an Oculus mixed reality headset?

Possibly. Facebook does have among its staff a “Director of Camera,” Ficus Kirkpatrick, who is scheduled to speak about AR at a TechCrunch event in October. In the event announcement — which alludes to previous remarks from Zuckerberg about Facebook’s work in AR —  Kirkpatrick is credited as the company’s “head of Camera AR Platform.”

Source: Facebook

The question now is: What would an Oculus mixed reality headset be named? Personally, I’m pushing for the “Oculus Almost.”

I’ll be covering Oculus Connect this week — stay tuned.

People on Twitter have been slamming the brand for its 43 outfits that fall under the “sexy Native American” and “sexy Indian” categories, and started a …

Next week the 73rd session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) will convene in New York City. Among the many high-level meetings taking place, the UN will be evaluating progress of sustainable development goal (UN SDG) #3, “Ensuring Access to Healthcare,” with a specific focus on combatting tuberculosis (TB) globally and preventing early death from non-communicable diseases (NCDs), such as cancer, diabetes and heart disease.

World leaders are expected to adopt high-level political declarations that will set priorities for tackling TB and NCDs. However several countries continue to demand the inclusion of language calling for weakened intellectual property (IP) protections as they view IP as the sole barrier to access to medicines treating TB and NCDs. BIO opposes these misguided efforts to weaken IP protections for TB and NCD medicines because they do nothing to improve patient access and while removing the economic incentives that healthcare innovation.

The price of TB drugs is not a significant barrier to treatment and access. Most tuberculosis medicines- both low-cost generics and new patented treatments- are currently sold at very low prices and/or deeply discounted. A six-month treatment of TB drugs through the Global Drug Facility is around USD $20 per patient. Newer patented medicines are also available at deeply discounted costs and through an array of globally broad access programs. Other factors, such as costs associated with hospitalization and poor health infrastructure, are actually contributing the most to the cost of TB and NCD treatment in most countries, not high medicine prices.

Ultimately, weakening global IP standards will not only fail to improve access, but also significantly discourage urgently needed private investment into TB and NCD research and development. By passing policies that encourage innovation, the UN will ensure a positive step towards achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Shares of Unity Biotechnology Inc (NASDAQ:UBX) have earned a consensus broker rating score of 1.17 (Strong Buy) from the three brokers that cover …

Here’s a seven-step plan to help you reclaim your kitchen, maximize efficiency, and reduce waste.

Food waste and food loss is a hot topic right now and rightly so.  The United Nations has set a target of halving food loss and waste by 2030. But a new consulting group has found that if current trends continue, food waste will continue to rise, both in terms of volume and in terms of money lost.

Of course, people have different ideas of what food waste is when you mention it to them. For some, it means, throwing away food on your plate after a meal. For parents of picky eaters, it’s throwing away of food that doesn’t look perfect or has gone brown. For others, it’s grocery stores or restaurants throwing away food that they couldn’t sell.  And for farmers, it can mean food lefts in fields that couldn’t be picked, or won’t be sold at market. Whatever your idea of food waste is, GMOs can help!

A new article from Reuters talks about the increasing cost of food waste. A recent article in the Boston Globe highlights what people are doing locally. A column in AgDaily details issue of food loss on farms.  All of these things have one thing in common: using all the tools we have to help combat this issue.

In a new blog post on our Medium page, GMO Answers expert and volunteer Janet Carpenter writes about how GMOs and other technologies can help in the fight against food waste. She writes,

GM crops have already increased yields and reduced the environmental impact of farming, where they have been deployed, especially in developing countries where hunger is more prevalent. However, there is much unrealized potential for available GMO technologies that could be beneficial in countries where they are not currently grown, as well as from technology that is still in development.

GMOs are just one way that we can all help to fight food waste. To learn more about how they can help, read the entire post. And check out GMO Answers to learn all about GMOS, and ask your own questions about GMOs.

Every year around this time, we begin the process of putting together our educational program for the next year’s BIO International Convention. Without fail, we receive hundreds of fascinating proposals that uncover important new trends in scientific research, healthcare delivery, intellectual property, environmental issues, sustainable farming, business development and digital health.

As we plan the 2019 BIO International Convention in Philadelphia, we work with our Program Committee to select the best of the best to educate, inspire and enlighten the global biotech community. We are proud of our well-deserved reputation for putting on the industry’s finest showcase, and that’s not going to change.

What is changing, however, is the lens through which we view the session proposals.

At our recent Convention in Boston, BIO affirmed our commitment to lead an industry-wide effort to promote inclusion and diversity in the biotechnology sector. This is not only the right thing to do; it’s the smart thing to do. It starts with one simple objective: to help promote a level playing field for advancement in life sciences, and this includes who we feature at our industry’s largest Convention.

So with that goal in mind, I am proud to announce the theme for the 2019 BIO International Convention: It Starts with One.

Scientific progress begins with one idea, one theory, one trial, one success. The small initiatives of today-the incremental investments of time, energy, and dedication that each of us makes-can have a global impact on tomorrow. Our theme highlights the critical daily contributions that combine to bring new breakthroughs to the world. And yes, it can start with one front-office executive or hiring manager resolving to discover new talent or make an inspired promotion that brings vital new voices to the table.

For next year’s Convention, BIO is looking for outstanding speakers whose backgrounds embody the full richness of our diverse ecosystem. We want to feature brilliant women and men who bring new ideas and perspectives to the forefront. Our Convention goal is to help elevate the next generation of biotech leaders. We’re looking to uncover those diamonds in the rough who may not be in the C-suite but perhaps should be, because they see the world-and the challenges of innovation-differently than others as a result of their unique experiences.

So if that describes you, or an undiscovered superstar in middle management at your company, or a brilliant woman who spends nights and weekends in the lab trying to do what no one else ever has, please submit a session proposal or encourage them to do so. We’re looking for people like you to lead the conversation at BIO 2019.

Inclusive and united, we will heal, fuel, and feed the world, and it starts with you.