Luminexus

How to Leverage Agriculture to Increase Food Security Across Africa

Ibrahim's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ibrahim-maigari-455427188/ RiceAfrika: https://riceafrika.com/ Ibrahim previously co founded and led Livestock247 to become Nigeria's leading online livestock platform, and he is currently the founder and CEO of RiceAfrika an agriculture optimization service that provides everything a smallholder farmer in Tanzania and Nigeria needs to increase yields and profits, which directly correlates to increased food security for smallholder farming households, and decreased poverty. It's hard to summarize everything RiceAfrika is doing in just one sentence, so we deep dive into the why behind providing these services to smallholders, and the how with Ibrahim. In this episode, we talk about what Ibrahim and RiceAfrika call the 7 touchpoints, 7 inputs and resources that smallholder farmers need access to, so that they can generate the yields on par with those in the western world. These touchpoints are like the root causes at the end of the root cause analysis of why smallholder farmer yield's across africa are so low and almost 40% of the population is living in poverty. We also talk about scaling solutions, why it's so important to treat quote on quote social impact as a business, not as a charity, and we do a mini dot connecting session of the problem of poverty, agriculture productivity, paired with smallholder farmers and beneficiaries across the supply chain.

Deep Dive into the Underrated World of Science: Being a Scientist, Food X Science and Science Startups

Livestock farming makes up 15% of global greenhouse gas emissions. 77% of global farming land is used for grazing and growing food which livestock eats. And animal agriculture uses 20% of global freshwater. In other words, livestock farmer uses an atrocious amount of resources, making it one of the top contributors of climate change. In this episode of the Luminexus Podcast, we talk with bioengineer and entrepreneur Vanessa Small about the solution to this problem of livestock farming: cellular agriculture. This episode is about the “how” of cell ag and the research that is being done right now to find the ‘secret sauce’ to make cultured meat taste just like real meat. Learn about Vanessa: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vanessa-small-a498b916/ Learn about Alcheme Bio: https://www.alchemebio.com/

The AI Boom and Its Impact on Education: How it Will and is Affecting Education

Welcome to the 27th episode of the Luminexus podcast! In this episode, we spoke to Garrett Smiley [https://www.linkedin.com/in/gwsmiley/], founder and CEO of Sora Schools [https://soraschools.com/] an innovative online school for students in 6th-12th grade. This episode is centered all around AI, especially its uses in education. In this episode, we talk about topics ranging from AI as an important tool for the 21st century and how Sora is approaching addressing and implementing it to How AI can be used to enable non-technical experts to create products and the realm of misinformation in this field. This conversation was flooded with budding ideas and interesting perspectives. So, whether you're new to the topic or have budding ideas of your own this episode is perfect for you.

Technical Challenges in Quantum Computing and the Problem of Scale

Quantum computing - it’s such a buzz word now and everyone is talking about it for what it might be able to do decades off in the future. And while these futuristic conversations about quantum computing are interesting and inspiring, they are not realistic, because before we get to this point where quantum computing can accomplish all these crazy feats, we first need to solve all the technical problems that limit large scale adoption of quantum computing. And there are a lot of technical problems. Decoherence, low malleability and the extremely cold temperatures quantum computers operate at are massive technical problems that must be solved before we can even think about quantum computers taking over the world. So in this episode, we talk with Nick Johnson, a trapped-ion physicist and quantum engineer at Riverlane, about the problem of scaling quantum computing, and these hard technical problems with quantum computing. Nick holds a PhD in physics from the university of Sussex where he researched a scalable demonstrator for trapped-ion quantum computing using modules connected by electric fields.

How Will We Produce 75% More Food to Feed Everyone by 2050?

You may have clicked on this episode hoping to find a crystal clear answer to this billion-dollar question. An answer like increasing fertilizer application, or creating a crazy new drone technology to monitor individual plants. But *spoiler alert* this conversation is not about one perfect solution to producing more food. Because this solution doesn’t exist. Instead, you will find that there is no singular solution to producing more, and no silver bullet for a better food system, technology is creating many opportunities for improvements in agriculture across the globe. In this episode of the Luminexus Podcast, we explore the complex and interconnected world of agriculture, with Ariel Patton, creator of the Topsoil [https://topsoil.substack.com/] newsletter, about what makes agriculture unique, and how change can happen given the status quo.