Material Farming: Where plant meet material sciences
Collaboration with:
Dr. Michaela Eder and Prof. Peter Fratzl (Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces, Golm, Germany)
We are interested in combining plant and material sciences to harness plants as biofactories to produce complex biological materials with tailored properties, with particular focus on cotton. Cotton is the global leading natural fiber involving 250 million around the world from farmer to retailer. Combining chemical synthesis of cotton fibers building blocks and a comprehensive understanding of the underlying biochemical and physiological mechanisms, we can produce cotton fibers with tailored properties such as increased hydrophobicity (think about your rain jacket). We coined this approach as Material Farming. This approach is an opportunity to implement sustainable alternative(s) to produce functional fibers overcoming the chemical fiber post-processing known to generate large amounts of chemical waste hazardous to the enviroment and humans. Finally, our approach will allow us to harness higher organisms' complexity, such as cotton plants, which can change how we currently think about the design of complex biological materials, plant sciences, and their physiology and biochemistry with a profound impact on the future of cotton-related industries.
Scientific Archaeology - Artificial Inteligencemeets Archaeology
Collaboration with:
Prof. Michael Chazan (University of Toronto)
Dr. Liora Kolska Horowtiz (Hebrew University)
We explore hidden signatures from the archaeological artifacts using artificial intelligence (AI) to infer human behavior. Our research explores cultural evolution and transmission in the Levant, the origin of domestication of cattle in the Fertile Crescent, and the relations between hominins and fire use. We combine the dozens of thousand unearthed and available archaeological remains (pottery, statues, stone tools, etc.) with AI to infer new relations between cultures - the known of the unknowns - while pinpointing the origin of revolutionary technologies their dispersion and implications to the cultural transmission continuum.
We investigate the domestication of cattle, and their use for cultures was originated in the Fertile Crescent. What if older organic artifacts (plow) perished and the use of animals for plowing started earlier? We use AI combined with ancient cattle bones to find morphological changes induced by plowing and inform whether this behavior started earlier, implying a new conceptual understanding of a revolutionary technology that changed our way of living until today. Pyrotechnology is one of the most revolutionary advances in human evolution initiated about 2 million years ago. This technology allowed, for example, the cooking of food, changing our biochemistry (e.g., more energetic intake) and physiology (e.g., larger brain size). We develop new AI-based methodologies applied to flint stone tools (the most durable artifacts) that act as a thermometer to infer hominin relations with fire deep in time.
