The mass shooting was inextricably tied to Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
Source: CNET
As part of a settlement of five legal cases that claimed Facebook allowed advertisers to discriminate against minorities, the company is making changes to its ad-targeting technology.
Source: Wired
Eclipse Foods may be the company that finally takes milk out of the dairy business.
Ever since the acquisition of WhiteWave Foods by the French dairy giant Danone for over $10 billion investors have been thirsting for a technology that would give consumers a better tasting, more milky (for lack of a better word), milk substitute than the highly valuable (but not very tasty) almond, soy, and other plant based dairy alternatives.
There are at least $37.5 billion worth of other reasons for investors’ interest in the milk alternative category. That’s how much money will be spent on dairy alternatives by 2025, according to a newly released study by the market research firm Global Market Insights.
Enter Eclipse Foods. Founded by two veterans of the alternative sugars and proteins business, the company is going after the whole dairy industry, starting with a line of spreads and select additives for restaurants around San Francisco.
“We had an oh shit moment when we got our plant based milk to act just like the real thing,” says Thomas Beaumon, Eclipse Foods co-founder and the former director of product development at Hampton Creek (now known as Just Foods). “We’re not pureeing nuts or seeds or legumes. We asked, ‘What are the properties of milk?’ and built this dairy base of the exact amino acids and fat profile.”
Thomas Beaumon in the kitchen (Courtesy Eclipse Foods)
Joining Beaumon on the journey to create the perfect milk substitute is Aylon Steinhart, a former specialist working with the Y Combinator aligned food technology incubator and think tank, the Good Food Institute.
The two men met at the launch event for Just Egg, the fourth product to debut from Just after the release of the company’s mayonnaise alternative, cookie dough, and porridge.
“We started talking about ideas and landed on this dairy platform,” recalls Steinhart. “It’s a place where we can make a big change very fast given the technological breakthroughs that we solved for early on.”
The demand is certainly coming on strong. According to Steinhart about 80% of millennials are consuming dairy replacements at least once a week.
Aylon Steinhart (Courtesy Eclipse Foods)
Humans didn’t start out drinking milk. Over the 300,000 odd years that some form of homo sapien has been stalking the planet, it has only been in the past 10,000 odd years that people decided to squirt the liquid out of a cow’s udders to consume it.
At first, humans couldn’t even consume the stuff without getting at least a little nauseous. They needed to develop a genetic mutation to even process the lactose sugars properly.
“The first time that we see the lactase persistence allele in Europe arising is around 5,000 years BP [before present] in southern Europe, and then it starts to kick in in central Europe around 3,000 years ago,” assistant professor Laure Ségurel of the Museum of Humankind in Paris, told the BBC earlier this year.
Segurel speculates that the health benefits of consuming milk might have been related to the exposure (and potential inoculation) to various diseases that may have otherwise spread from the animals to the humans that were raising them.
If that was the rationale, it’s increasingly unnecessary for modern living, and may indeed be more of a hazard to human health.
Global meat and dairy producers could count among the largest contributors to climate change if their growth remains unchecked, according to a report from the non-profit Grain.
They estimate that meat and dairy consumption should be reduced by 81 percent in order to meet global emissions reduction targets.
With the production of Eclipse’s dairy alternative, there’s no animal required.
“We have an off-the-shelf platform right now. The only additive will be water,” says Beaumon.
And unlike other alternative dairy products, Beaumon and Steinhart claim that theirs actually tastes good. And, as a Michelin starred chef, Beaumon should know.
The company’s first line of products will be a line of cream cheeses, including one for the bagel-and-schmear loving crowd. However, the majority will be more millennial focused, according to Steinhart.
“There will be various unique flavors that are culinarily focused,” he said.
Expect the first products to debut in an exclusive pilot with Wise Sons and through the ice cream maker Humphry Slochombe, a leader in high end ice cream in SF.
However companies decide to label their Eclipse-based products, they certainly shouldn’t call them vegan, according to Beaumon.
“Vegan cheese is gross,” he says.
Source: TechCrunch
A House committee is urging tech execs to prioritize the removal of violent terrorist content after the mosque shootings.
Source: CNET
Users will be prompted to make a choice, as Google tries to avoid more EU sanctions.
Source: CNET
Waymo is opening another technical service center in the Phoenix area, an expansion that will allow the autonomous-vehicle technology startup to double its capacity in the area as it prepares to grow its commercial fleet.
The new 85,000-square-foot center will be located in Mesa and is expected to open sometime in the second half of the year. The company’s existing 60,000-square-foot facility in the Phoenix suburb of Chandler will remain.
The former Google self-driving project that spun out to become a business under Alphabet opened its first location in Chandler, Arizona in 2016. Since then the company has ramped up its testing, launched an early rider program and slowly crept toward commercial deployment. The early rider program, which launched in April 2017, had more than 400 participants the last time Waymo shared figures on the program.
In December, the company launched Waymo One, a commercial self-driving car service and accompanying app. The service isn’t widely available yet and Waymo-trained test drivers are still behind the wheel. (Waymo does have driverless vehicles on public roads in Phoenix.)
This latest announcement signals that Waymo is still committed to its initial plan to eventually cover a large portion of the sprawling metropolis of Phoenix, which is about 600 square miles. Waymo currently operates in Chandler, Tempe, Gilbert and Mesa. It also means local residents will likely encounter more Waymo self-driving vehicles on public roads — an experience that hasn’t exactly sparked joy for some. (There have been several reports recounting fits of road rage directed at these autonomous vehicles.)
Waymo’s global fleet is about 600 cars, the large majority of which are in the Phoenix area. The new technical center will act as a second dispatch center as well as a place to maintain, clean and manage the fleet, according to the company.
It also means Waymo will hire more people in the months ahead. As Waymo noted in a blog posted Tuesday, this is not the first time it has grown its operations in Phoenix. Waymo expanded its full-service center in Chandler last year to 60,000 square feet, a facility that houses its operations and support teams, including fleet technicians, fleet dispatch, fleet response and rider support.
Source: TechCrunch
Una versión cuántica del péndulo de Newton hecha con fotones revela que, a esta escala, la transmisión de energía funciona diferente ante el ruido. Cuando se introduce, la energía se transfiere de forma más eficaz, un fenómeno que ya se había detectado en la fotosíntesis y la captación de olores
Source: MIT
Una investigación de dos décadas detalla cómo sería y dónde debería estar este nuevo cuerpo celeste que habría pasado desapercibido frente a todos los astrónomos. Si la hipótesis es correcta, los investigadores afirman que será descubierto en la próxima década con los telescopios actuales
Source: MIT
Un equipo de su filial de IA, DeepMind, ha analizado distintas configuraciones de algoritmos para estudiar su influencia en las burbujas de filtros y en las cámaras de eco. Cuanto más personalizadas y precisas son sus recomendaciones para cada usuario, más rápido queda atrapado
Source: MIT
Engineers in Ilsan, South Korea, have installed a system of LED lights and lasers to help alert smartphone-using pedestrians of traffic.
Source: CNET