Monthly Archives: September 2021

From petri dish to poultry From meat free, plant based and now lab made meat – the search for meat alternatives continues and it has officially hit South African shores with two locally based companies; Mzansi Meat Co. and the Mogale Meat Company wanting to be a part of the international laboratory league. The idea behind ‘cultivated meat’ is to provide a viable alternative to the current traditional agricultural equivalent, that is taxing both environmentally, economically and ultimately ethically in terms of its treatment of the animals before they are bred and slaughtered for consumption. This will be done by [...]

WTF are NFTs? If you actively participate in any social media platform, you would have undoubtedly have heard of NFTs. If you’re not entirely sure as to what NFT stands for or why celebrities and influencers seem to be making obscene amounts of money from them, you are not alone - but what exactly are they? Are they emoji’s or cryptocurrency or digital assets, and if so – what does that even mean?  NFTs are largely a product of 2021, and are an interesting addition to the cryptocurrency sphere. NFTs more formally known as Non-Fungible Tokens are “digital assets that [...]

Off the back of COVID, Moderna to start HIV vaccination trials Off the back of their COVID-19 vaccine success, biotech and pharmaceutical company Moderna is looking to begin human trials for two new mRNA-based HIV vaccines as soon as September this year. The vaccination study takes its cue from the core mechanism used in the recent COVID-19 vaccine development which has been rolled out en masse globally. While most of the vaccines have a slight variation in terms of the mRNA strands that they are centred around, it has been largely accepted as the most effective way to work towards [...]