Finance Geek

Yet another internet file-sharing service is making a big push into big businesses. On Tuesday, YouSendIt unveiled Workstream, a tool that gives businesses a means of not only transferring files among employees but sharing them with partners, vendors, and customers outside the company. The tool plugs into SharePoint, Microsoft’s widely used collaboration platform.

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The latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll finds Mitt Romney back on top of the GOP presidential contest, the first time since November. Thirty-eight percent of GOP primary voters chose Romney over his GOP presidential competitors, a 10-percentage point increase in two months. Rick Santorum garnered 32 percent of primary voters’ support in the poll, [...]

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Follow Yahoo!’s The Daily Ticker on Facebook here! President Obama met with Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Washington Monday to discuss the high stakes issue of Iran’s nuclear program and Israel’s declaration that it will do everything in its power, including military action, to prevent the Islamic country from getting a nuclear weapon. To [...]

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Follow Yahoo!’s The Daily Ticker on Facebook here! Stocks and precious metals slipped Monday morning amid a string of weaker-than-expected global growth figures, offset somewhat by stronger-than-expected reports on U.S. factory orders and the services sector. In recent trading, both the Dow and the S&P were down a modest 0.57%. In Europe, PMI data in [...]

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Follow Yahoo!’s The Daily Ticker on Facebook here! Can’t anybody here play this game? That’s what New York Mets manager Casey Stengel allegedly said about his epically incompetent team in the early 1960s. In his new e-book, Who’s in Charge Here? How Governments Are Failing the World Economy, Alan Beattie, international economy editor at the [...]

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Provided by Business Insider: Over the last several months, Apple’s vision for television has become clearer. Thanks to work by Wall Street analyst Gene Munster on the hardware side and the New York Post’s Claire Atkinson on the content and cable side, we now have a pretty good picture of what Apple wants to do: [...]

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Reading the Singularity Hub this morning, I was surprised by the following statistics:

• The total world meat supply grew from 71m tons in 1961 to 284m tons in 2007, and is expected to double again by 2050, driven by a combination of population growth and increasing per capita meat consumption
• Around 67 billion animals are slaughtered each year for their meat (worldwide)
• Livestock production uses up c30% of the world’s ice free land and produces almost 20% of the world’s greenhouse gases (more than the amount produced by global transportation)

The environmental, land use and ethical benefits to be had from artificially producing meat are huge. These numbers suggest that the quest for artificial meat is as important as the quest for sources of sustainable energy.

The good news is that progress is being made towards lab produced meat. Researcher Mark Post has announced that his lab is growing burgers in petri dishes and expects to have one fit for human consumption this autumn. This is how the cultivation process works:

Cultured meat begins with muscle cells taken from the rear of a cow for sirloin steak, for instance, or from the area surrounding a pig’s spine for growing pork chops. The cells are then placed in a nutrient mixture that helps them to proliferate. A biodegradable scaffold guides the cells as they grow together to eventually form muscle tissue. Making a hamburger requires joining these pieces of tissue into a coherent whole.

They will need a more consumer friendly description of the process if this is ever to go mass market! It looks like that point is still years away though.

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