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States Are Lining Up to Outlaw Lab-Grown Meat

States Are Lining Up to Outlaw Lab-Grown Meat

The pushback from legislators sympathetic to ranchers and the broader meat industry puts cultivated meat companies in a difficult situation. Major meat producers Cargill and Tyson have both invested in cultivated meat companies, while Brazil’s JBS is working on a cultivated research site in Brazil. “We see ourselves as an ‘and’ solution, not an ‘or.’ We’re never looking to replace conventional [meat],” says Sean Edgett, chief legal officer at Upside Foods, a cultivated meat startup which counts Cargill and Tyson among its investors. “We think there’s always going to be a place for it on the market. So as I look at these bills, they seem very protectionist.”

Wildtype cofounders Justin Kolbeck and Ayré Elfenbein have visited legislators in Arizona, Alabama, and Florida to try to persuade them to vote down or amend proposed legislation in those states. “The shift we’re seeing is toward something that is far more extreme, which is talking about outright bans,” says Elfenbein. The cofounders are particularly keen on a carve-out for cultivated seafood, pointing out to legislators that the US is a net importer of seafood and that a new source of fish would improve food security within the country.

Also worrying for cultivated meat companies are a number of proposed bills that would impose new labeling restrictions. A proposed bill in Arizona would prevent companies from using meaty terms to describe products made from cultivated meat, plants, or insects. A similar bill in West Virginia that passed in March requires any cultivated meat product to be labeled as “cell-cultured,” “lab-grown,” or a similar term. The fact that legislators are proposing legislation that lumps cultivated meat together with insect meat—a category that many would-be consumers find gross—is a worrying sign, Almy says.

A political backlash against cultivated meat isn’t surprising, says Sparsha Saha, a lecturer on meat and politics at Harvard’s Department of Government. “I think it was always going to be political fodder, because you have conglomerates, you have a very powerful and increasingly integrated meat and dairy sector,” she says.

In Florida, the debate was particularly extreme. On the House floor, representative Dean Black called cultured meat a “bacterial culture” and “nitrogen-based cellular protein paste.” Representative Daniel Alvarez compared the cells found in cultured meat to cancer.

Such arguments are extremely misinformed, says Elfenbein. “A lot of the arguments that were made were made under the false pretense of safety,” he says. On X, Florida’s agricultural commissioner has compared the Food and Drug Administration’s conclusion that cultured meat from two US companies is safe to eat to mask mandates. “It’s inherently a political war,” says Saha.

Behind closed doors, lawmakers strike a more balanced tone, says Edgett. “Our conversations with all these lawmakers in their offices are very different to what they are on the floor,” he says. Upside Foods has released a blog post urging prospective customers to ask Governor DeSantis to veto the bill.

Resistance from lawmakers to cultured meat is also bubbling in Europe. In November, the Italian parliament approved a ban on the food, which is not currently available to customers anywhere in Europe. It is not clear, however, whether the Italian law will stand, as it may violate a European Union directive designed to stop regulatory barriers within the bloc. In a meeting of the EU Agriculture and Fisheries Council on January 23, a number of delegates called for “a renewed and broad debate in the EU specific to lab-grown meat.”

“The kind of laws popping up in the US and EU appear to be largely political theater but have the potential to negatively impact research, at the very least within those regions,” says Dwayne Holmes, director of research and innovation (EU) at the cultured meat research nonprofit New Harvest. “These laws are also arguably the unintended byproduct of a race-to-market hype cycle designed to create excitement, which in practice can cut both ways.”

The prospect of more state-level proposed bans lurks in the background. A proposed ban in West Virginia was introduced this year but is no longer an active bill. In 2023, Texas legislators brought a proposed ban that didn’t make it into law. “I wouldn’t be surprised to see that bill pop up again,” says Almy. Her hope, though, is that if a similar bill rears its head, legislators will have heard enough from nonprofits like the GFI and cultivated meat startups that they don’t take the same route as Florida. Cultivated meat might be approved for sale in the US, but the race to convince legislators to accept it is only just beginning.

How Do Heat Pumps Work?

How Do Heat Pumps Work?

Now stretch it really hard and quickly hold it to your upper lip, which is sensitive to temperature. You will feel that it’s warmer than it was before. That’s because you’re adding energy to the rubber band, which increases its temperature.

Are you ready for the awesome part? Keep it stretched for a little while until it returns to room temperature. Now let the rubber band relax and quickly touch it to your lip again. It’s now colder than room temperature! Seriously, try this for yourself.

So if you had a big enough rubber band, could you use this to cool your house? Wait a minute, you’re gonna say: In the first stage, when we stretched the rubber band, it got hot, and then it cooled back to its original temperature—and in doing that it heated the air. You’re right. But what if we could vent that warmer air outside? Then you could keep just the cooling phase inside.

Boom. You just re-invented the air conditioner! Instead of a rubber band, an AC has a fluid called a refrigerant that circulates in a closed loop from inside to outside. This fluid has a low specific heat, so it changes temperature quickly, and a very low boiling point—turning into a gas at something like –15 Fahrenheit.

How’s it work? The gas is first compressed, causing it to heat up to like 150 degrees. The hot gas circulates in a set of copper coils outside, with a fan blowing over them, so the gas loses thermal energy to the atmosphere. (Copper also has a low specific heat.)

Then it’s pumped back inside, where the pressure is quickly reduced, causing it to expand and instantly cool down to something like 40 degrees. As the now cold fluid circulates through indoor coils, a fan blows warm inside air over it, heating the fluid again and cooling the indoor air in the process. As the system circulates, it basically picks up thermal energy indoors and carries it outdoors.

By the way, this is exactly the same process that your fridge uses to keep your cheese and soda cold. In both cases, the process makes something inside cooler and something outside warmer. Put your hand behind the fridge and you’ll see what I mean. Oh, just for kicks, here’s a guy who actually built a refrigerator that runs on rubber bands.

So Heat Pumps Aren’t New!

You thought this was going to be an article about heat pumps, right? Well guess what. We’ve been talking about heat pumps this whole time, because they run on the same principles. A heat pump cools your home just like an air conditioner, by circulating a refrigerant and varying the pressure to change its temperature, so it takes thermal energy from one place and puts it in a different place.

So back to the big mystery: How can a heat pump increase the temperature of indoor air on a cold day without actually generating any heat? Simple: Just run it in reverse! This time we let the hot compressed refrigerant cool off inside the house to raise the indoor air temperature. The low-pressure, cold gas then goes outside to warm up.

Warm up outside? Yep. Even on a freezing day, the air still has thermal energy. So long as it’s above absolute zero—which, believe me, it is, since that’s around –460 Fahrenheit—the air molecules are in motion. And since we’re cooling the refrigerant to, say, –15 degrees, which is lower than winter temperatures in most places, it will wring thermal energy out of even frigid air.

Of course, you can’t get energy for free. Heat pumps rely on electricity to drive the compressor and fans. But if you have solar panels at home, or if the electricity in your area is even partly from non-carbon sources, replacing a gas furnace with a heat pump can make a big difference in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. And it’ll probably lower your utility bills in the process.

The US Has Big Plans for Wind Energy—but an Obscure 1920s Law Is Getting in the Way

The US Has Big Plans for Wind Energy—but an Obscure 1920s Law Is Getting in the Way

The reason for the Jones Act’s longevity, says Colin Grabow, a research fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, is that while it tends to benefit only a few people and businesses, the act goes unnoticed because there are many payers sharing the increased costs.

The Jones Act is one in a string of protectionist laws—dating back to the Tariff Act of 1789—designed to bolster US marine industries. The Jones Act’s existence was meant to ensure a ready supply of ships and mariners in case of war. Its authors reasoned that protection from foreign competition would foster that.

“Your average American has no idea that the Jones Act even exists,” Grabow says. “It’s not life-changing for very many people,” he adds. But “all Americans are hurt by the Jones Act.” In this case, that’s by slowing down the United States’ ability to hit its own wind power targets.

Grabow says those most vocal about the law—the people who build, operate, or serve on compliant ships—usually want to keep it in place.

Of course, there’s more going on with the country’s slow rollout of offshore wind power than just a century-old shipping law. It took a slew of factors to sink New Jersey’s planned Ocean Wind installations, says Abraham Silverman, an expert on renewable energy at Columbia University in New York.

Ultimately, says Silverman, rising interest rates, inflation, and other macroeconomic factors caught New Jersey’s projects at their most vulnerable stage, inflating the construction costs after Ørsted had already locked in its financing.

Despite the setbacks, the potential for offshore wind power generation in the United States is massive. The NREL estimates that fixed-bottom offshore wind farms in the country could theoretically generate some 1,500 gigawatts of power—more than the United States is capable of generating today.

There’s a lot the United States can do to make its expansion into offshore wind more efficient. And that’s where the focus needs to be right now, says Matthew Shields, an engineer at NREL specializing in the economics and technology of wind energy.

“Whether we build 15 or 20 or 25 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030, that probably doesn’t move the needle that much from a climate perspective,” says Shields. But if building those first few turbines sets the country up to then build 100 or 200 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity by 2050, he says, then that makes a difference. “If we have ironed out all these issues and we feel good about our sustainable development moving forward, to me, I think that’s a real win.”

But today, some of the offshore wind industry’s issues stem, inescapably, from the Jones Act. Those inefficiencies mean lost dollars and, perhaps more importantly in the rush toward carbon neutrality, lost time.

You Can’t Buy Lab-Grown Meat Even If You Wanted To

You Can’t Buy Lab-Grown Meat Even If You Wanted To

“The restaurant dinners we held at China Chilcano in Washington, DC last summer went extremely well,” wrote Eat Just’s director of global communications, Carrie Kabat, in an emailed statement to WIRED. “We plan to resume these dinners this year.”

Good Meat/Eat Just’s chicken had also previously been on sale in Singapore, but sales there have also been paused. “In Singapore, we are ramping up production and plan to begin serving shortly,” Kabat wrote.

The goal of these early cultivated meat sales was likely to generate buzz, gauge public reaction, and raise awareness of the industry, says Steve Molino, an investor at Clear Current Capital, a plant-based and cultivated meat venture capital firm, who has not invested in either Eat Just or Upside Foods. “It accomplished what it needed to accomplish and now it’s time to refocus,” Molino says, noting that the companies probably made a loss on the sale of their meat given the high costs of production.

Eat Just is currently embroiled in a legal dispute with a former partner over alleged unpaid invoices. In a November 2023 WIRED investigation, former employees alleged that the company was struggling financially and failed to pay vendors on time. “The reality for us now is we need to figure out a way to build large-scale facilities without spending north of half a billion dollars, because it’s simply not viable long-term,” Eat Just CEO Josh Tetrick told WIRED at the time. “There has to be a better way of doing it. And if we can’t figure out a different way of doing it, then what we’re doing won’t work.”

Although cultivated meat is no longer on sale in the US and Singapore, both Eat Just and Upside Foods told WIRED that they planned to relaunch sales in 2024. And last month, Israel-based Aleph Farms received regulatory approval from the Israeli Ministry of Health for its cultivated beef product: a mix of beef cells and plant protein. The company still requires an inspection of its pilot production facility in Rehovot and directions on labeling and marketing from Israeli regulators before it can sell its product in Israel.

“Post inspection of our production facility, Aleph Cuts will be introduced in targeted tasting experiences for consumers and relevant stakeholders,” says Aleph Farms CEO and cofounder Didier Toubia. “This phase of limited market activations allows us to gather feedback from consumers, refine our brand positioning collaboratively with them, and lay the foundation for a successful long-term launch.”

Sheila Voss, senior vice president of communications at the alternative protein nonprofit the Good Food Institute, says she expects the rollout of cultivated meat to continue in the US.

“As we saw in Singapore, the first country in the world to approve the sale of cultivated meat, the rollout to consumers migrated across fine dining restaurants, home delivery, and hawker stalls, highlighting the versatility of this product, and we expect similar introductory rollouts in the US,” she says. “We are still at the very early stages of cultivated meat’s entrance into the marketplace.”

Unpicking the Mystery of the Body’s ‘Second Brain’

“We think that they do everything,” Gulbransen said. “The more that people find out about them, it’s less surprising that they do these diverse roles.”

They can also move between roles. They’ve been shown to change their identities, shifting from one glial cell type to another, in lab dishes—a useful ability in the ever-changing gut environment. They’re “so dynamic, endowed with the functional capacity to do so many different things, sitting in this incredibly fluctuating and complex environment,” Scavuzzo said.

Even as excitement builds about glia in the enteric nervous system, scientists like Scavuzzo have fairly basic questions still to work out—such as how many types of enteric glia even exist.

A Force to Reckon With

Scavuzzo became fascinated with digestion in childhood when she witnessed her mother’s medical troubles due to a congenitally shortened esophagus. Watching her mother go through gastrointestinal complications compelled Scavuzzo to study the gut in adulthood to find treatments for patients like her mom. “I grew up knowing and understanding this stuff is important,” she said. “The more we know, we can intervene better.”

In 2019, when Scavuzzo started her postdoctoral research at Case Western under Paul Tesar, a world expert in glial biology, she knew she wanted to unravel the diversity of enteric glia. As the only scientist in Tesar’s lab examining the gut and not the brain, she often joked with her colleagues that she was studying the more complex organ.

The first year, she struggled massively in trying to map out the individual cells in the gut, which proved to be a harsh research environment. The very start of the small intestine, the duodenum, where she focused her studies, was especially tough. The bile and digestive juices of the duodenum degraded RNA, the genetic material that held clues to the cells’ identities, making it nearly impossible to extract. Over the next few years, however, she developed new methods to work on the delicate system.

Those methods allowed her to get the “first glimpse into the diversity of these glial cells” across all tissues of the duodenum, Scavuzzo said. In June, in a paper published on the Biorxiv.org preprint server that has not yet been peer-reviewed, she reported her team’s discovery of six subtypes of glial cells, including one that they named “hub cells.”

Hub cells express genes for a mechanosensory channel called PIEZO2—a membrane protein that can sense force and is typically found in tissues that respond to physical touch. Other researchers recently found PIEZO2 present in some gut neurons; the channel allows neurons to sense food in the intestines and move it along. Scavuzzo hypothesized that glial hub cells can also sense force and instruct other gut cells to contract. She found evidence that these hub cells existed not only in the duodenum, but also in the ileum and colon, which suggests they’re likely regulating motility throughout the digestive tract.

She deleted PIEZO2 from enteric glia hub cells in mice, which she thought would make the cells lose the ability to sense force. She was right: Gut motility slowed, and food contents built up in the stomach. But the effect was subtle, which reflects the fact that other cells are also playing a role in physically moving partially digested food through the intestine, Scavuzzo said.