Meat consumption in the United States has risen in recent years, and despite a variety of activism efforts, the trend shows little sign of slowing down. The alternative meats industry seeks to provide sustainable alternatives to meat in order to provide the experience of meat consumption without the environmental cost; however, current products are expensive, highly processed, and rarely healthy. Sundial Foods’ mission is to alleviate the global environmental and public health burden of concentrated animal agriculture. Sundial Foods is revolutionizing the alternative meat industry by developing a new method for the creation of these products that relies upon a biological approach to meat structure in order to inform the creation of a product that looks, cooks, and tastes like animal chicken. The processing method in development is significantly more efficient than the methods currently used in the alternative meat industry, and makes use of whole plant ingredients rather than micronutrient-depleted protein isolates.
Awards: Grand Prize Finalist
HelioVap
Across the 2,700 islands of Indonesia, one in eight households lack clean water access. Traditional desalination technologies have too high energy requirements, costs, and brine discharges to be implemented in these coastal communities. As a result, households often purchase bottled water, which is both expensive and environmentally damaging. HelioVap is a floating, stand-alone desalination device that can provide reliable water access to coastal communities through an off-grid, zero-liquid discharge process that directly uses sunlight to separate seawater into its fundamental components. HelioVap is being designed to produce 75 L of water per day, which should be sufficient to meet the drinking and cooking requirements of five households through the utilization of alternative energy sources including sunlight, wind, and natural temperature gradients. This technology does not threaten biodiversity in the coastal ecosystems that over 50% of the population relies on for income, and the use of alternative energy sources reduces cost and carbon emissions of the process.
FootMo Kit
Sub-Saharan Africa has one of the world’s fastest growing human populations. The expansion of the livestock population is necessary to address this population growth, however the output depends critically on livestock productivity, which is generally poor across the region’s various production systems. Currently, 25% of livestock in sub-Saharan Africa die due to highly contagious and viral Foot and Mouth disease and 65% of this livestock in Uganda is predominantly cattle. FootMo Kit is a hand-held device that detects Foot and Mouth Disease in livestock in hard-to-reach and under-served areas through early disease detection. The kit is simple to use and is a low-cost device that is put in the mouths of a cattle that detects the disease against the antigen content in the saliva. FootMo Kit addresses poverty, well-being, and sustainable development, as well as empowers farmers to detect diseases without relying on the veterinary doctors.
FakeNetAI
Over one billion hours of video are uploaded to the internet daily. Deepfakes, videos manipulated using deep learning techniques, represent a tiny fraction of those videos but are growing rapidly, doubling in the past nine months. Deepfake quality is improving to the point where the best are unidentifiable by human reviewers–and already have been used for nefarious purposes, including inserting a person into pornography or manipulating politics. As a result of the growing quality and ability to insert Deepfakes into a sea of uploaded content, the risk of their spreading and causing damage for content hosting companies is increasing. It is critical to be able to identify and react to Deepfakes by flagging or removing them. FakeNetAI’s Deepfake detection technology enables content hosting platforms to detect Deepfake content to counteract this growing threat. FakeNetAI’s technologies allow companies to respond to the threat even as Deepfakes continue to grow exponentially.
BioMilitus
Agricultural co-products and other food wastes are used as feedstock for insects, which are later harvested for biomass, rich in proteins and fats valued as animal feed ingredient. Consequently, the bioconverted food waste is transformed into a microbially active insect compost known as frass, which may be used as a soil amendment for crops. Given that 3 million tons of organic waste are generated each year from California alone, this resource represents a significant opportunity for insect bioconversion. BioMilitus leverages the bioconversion potential of black soldier fly larvae (BSFL) as a solution for bridging the gap between the increasing global food demand and abundant organic waste. In order to realize the idea’s full potential, BioMilitus has further innovated this process through the engineering of growing conditions, specialized blends of wastes used as feed stock, and specially bred lines of insect larvae targeted for more efficient bioconversion of waste.