Underwater Farming, Lion Burgers & Mobile Money 🦁

Unlike farmland, you obviously can’t monitor changes in the seabed manually 24/7. In order for underwater farming to work, Nemo’s needs technology with predictive, machine-learning insights to help them monitor the biospheres remotely. 

To achieve this, they use a software that creates a digital twin of the biosphere domes and monitors plant growth as well as the environmental conditions within them. 

Nemo’s team of engineers, divers, and scientists has successfully harvested a variety of crops from its prototype biospheres—reporting them to be “nutritionally richer” than traditionally grown versions.

Food-tech startups in the UK have been pitching lab-grown lion burgers, tiger steaks and zebra sushi rolls to climate-conscious consumers.

Lab-grown meat - often seen as the third revolution since the discovery of the fire and The Neolithic Revolution - is produced by cultivating animal cells to produce food from any species without slaughtering animals while retaining the nutritional values of conventional meat.

The lab-grown meat market has taken off quite well in recent years with several startups around the world. Most of them, however, focus on common meat categories such as chicken, beef and pork. 

But some companies have now started experimenting with exotic "cultured" meat products. Take for example, the London-based venture studio Ace Ventures. The company plans to have its meat in local supermarkets and Michelin-starred restaurants in London, once the products pass regulatory approvals.

But why?

Because common lab meat acts as an attraction for mainly vegetarians and vegans. To make a notable and long-lasting impact for animals and the environment, startups are realising the need to make foods that carnivores will crave.  

It also helps solve the problem of illegal exotic meat. Worldwide, endangered animals - tigers, crocodiles, etc. - are illegally hunted and traded for meat and skin. By cultivating such meat in labs, trading of wild animals could possibly reduce. 

How do they source the animal cells? 

The startups work with Siberian tigers, leopards, black panthers, Bengal tigers, white lions, zebras and some captive animals.

Can you imagine being able to move from one continent to another in just one hour? Or be able to take a two-day trip around the world? 

Startups like Venus Aerospace, Hermeus and Space Transportation are developing passenger planes capable of reaching a speed of Mach 9 (6,905.42 mph). 

To put things in perspective speed-vise:

• Commercial flight: 800 to 1,040 km/hr
• Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird (fastest military aircraft): 3,500 km/hr
• Venus Aerospace Planes: 11,113 km/hr
• Falcon 9 (from SpaceX): 28,968 km/hr 

How does this work: 

• These planes will have a state-of-the-art engine similar to the one used by space rockets, an aerodynamic design and a unique cooling system. 
• The aircraft will be able to take off from any airport like a conventional plane and rise to 35,000 feet.
• At that moment, the liquid fuel engine would be turned on, which would help it reach 170,000 feet and exceed 6,000 mph.

Bringing this technology to commercial flights, drones and eventually space planes will require hiring veterans as well as bright tech minds - which means a potentially new job market.

Somalia’s money transfer market is one of the most developed in the world. 73% of the population above the age of 16 use mobile money services, per data from the World Bank. 

Reasons: 

• A large diaspora sending billions of dollars in remittances each year. The UN Development Programme estimates that $1.6 billion is sent back to Somalia each year – almost a third of the country’s GDP. 
   
• Somalia has an extremely competitive mobile money market with lots of small-sized players that charge zero service fee on transfers. 
   
• A lot of times, these money transfer apps are used by organisations to deliver humanitarian aid to Somalia. More than $200 million has been sent to Somalia through these apps in the last few months as the country suffers its worst drought in decades.
   
• Somalis also have a lack of faith in the country’s banking system and physical money. Transfers between mobile accounts are usually done in dollars as the Somali shilling is very unstable, leading to a situation where the dollar has almost completely replaced the shilling in some parts of the country. Most people keep their money in a digital wallet as opposed to a physical bank, since around 98% of the local currency in circulation is fake, according to the IMF.