This Japanese fungus can dry-age a steak in 48 hours. Here’s how.

This Japanese fungus can dry-age a steak in 48 hours. Here’s how.

https://ift.tt/2lDfsDv

In the hipster precincts of Brooklyn, New York, it’s getting so you can’t ride your fixie down the street without getting your mustache caught in a banjo string. The same type of cultural giggle might be had about a certain fungus, which has, for the past two years, been colonizing the menus of America’s top foodie establishments. It’s called Aspergillus oryzae, otherwise known as koji, and chefs are slathering it on everything from salad dressings to steaks.

Koji ferments food. The Japanese have used it for centuries to make soy sauce, miso, and natural sweeteners. They also use it to brew sake. It’s considered the national mold. Kind of like a microscopic mascot that imparts umami wherever it goes.

The science behind koji is less well-known. Its spores are fond of hot and humid environments (what spore isn’t?), and grows on cooked rice. As they get bigger, they release biochemical agents-protease enzymes that break down protein and amylases that digest starch. When mixed with, say, soybeans, the ensuing culture helps transform the concoction into soy sauce.

But when applied to steak, koji does something amazing. Its powerful enzymes slowly tenderize the meat. Innovative chefs have found that in just 48 hours, koji can turn a fresh-cut piece of beef into something that resembles, in texture and taste, a 45-day-aged steak. A koji-aged New York strip, properly cooked, will offer up the same nutty and funky flavor as one that’s been professionally cured, and with a touch of miso sweetness.

You don’t need a Michelin star to use koji. You just buy a bag of it (online is easiest), crush it up, rub it on a steak, let it sit in the fridge for 48 hours, and cook. To serve a slab this summer that tastes like a $75 restaurant cut but costs a fraction of that, follow these six steps:

Buy koji rice online or at an Asian or Japanese grocery. The rice, which has been inoculated with koji spores, will look like it has a crust on it. Pulverize the grains in a blender.


Rub the resulting fine powder on all sides of a steak. Any cut will do. The koji will turn an average cut of meat into a way-above-average dining experience.


Put the steak on a wire rack (so it and the koji can breathe), place the rack on a sheet pan, and refrigerate. After about 12 hours, the meat will look like a snowy slab as the enzymes break down the flesh and turn brown. Leave for a full for 48 hours. You can go for up to 72 hours, but the longer the meat sits, the more its ages and dries and eventually gets tough.


Use the back of a knife to scrape off the koji. What you’re now holding should look dark red and dried, just like an aged steak. Rinse the meat in cold water to get rid of any remaining koji paste.


Season the steak with salt and pepper. Don’t bother with any other seasonings because you’ll ruin the final effect. Pan-sear the meat in clarified butter in a cast-iron skillet until it has a nice dark crust, usually for a total of three minutes per side. Be careful: A koji steak caramelizes much faster than a standard one, or even an aged piece of meat.


Pop it in a preheated, 400-degree oven for about 4 to 5 minutes. That should produce a medium-rare result. Take it out, let sit for another 10 minutes, then slice and serve.

Tech

via Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now https://ift.tt/2k2uJQn

June 28, 2018 at 09:36AM

This Japanese fungus can dry-age a steak in 48 hours. Here’s how.

This Japanese fungus can dry-age a steak in 48 hours. Here’s how.

https://ift.tt/2lDfsDv

In the hipster precincts of Brooklyn, New York, it’s getting so you can’t ride your fixie down the street without getting your mustache caught in a banjo string. The same type of cultural giggle might be had about a certain fungus, which has, for the past two years, been colonizing the menus of America’s top foodie establishments. It’s called Aspergillus oryzae, otherwise known as koji, and chefs are slathering it on everything from salad dressings to steaks.

Koji ferments food. The Japanese have used it for centuries to make soy sauce, miso, and natural sweeteners. They also use it to brew sake. It’s considered the national mold. Kind of like a microscopic mascot that imparts umami wherever it goes.

The science behind koji is less well-known. Its spores are fond of hot and humid environments (what spore isn’t?), and grows on cooked rice. As they get bigger, they release biochemical agents-protease enzymes that break down protein and amylases that digest starch. When mixed with, say, soybeans, the ensuing culture helps transform the concoction into soy sauce.

But when applied to steak, koji does something amazing. Its powerful enzymes slowly tenderize the meat. Innovative chefs have found that in just 48 hours, koji can turn a fresh-cut piece of beef into something that resembles, in texture and taste, a 45-day-aged steak. A koji-aged New York strip, properly cooked, will offer up the same nutty and funky flavor as one that’s been professionally cured, and with a touch of miso sweetness.

You don’t need a Michelin star to use koji. You just buy a bag of it (online is easiest), crush it up, rub it on a steak, let it sit in the fridge for 48 hours, and cook. To serve a slab this summer that tastes like a $75 restaurant cut but costs a fraction of that, follow these six steps:

Buy koji rice online or at an Asian or Japanese grocery. The rice, which has been inoculated with koji spores, will look like it has a crust on it. Pulverize the grains in a blender.


Rub the resulting fine powder on all sides of a steak. Any cut will do. The koji will turn an average cut of meat into a way-above-average dining experience.


Put the steak on a wire rack (so it and the koji can breathe), place the rack on a sheet pan, and refrigerate. After about 12 hours, the meat will look like a snowy slab as the enzymes break down the flesh and turn brown. Leave for a full for 48 hours. You can go for up to 72 hours, but the longer the meat sits, the more its ages and dries and eventually gets tough.


Use the back of a knife to scrape off the koji. What you’re now holding should look dark red and dried, just like an aged steak. Rinse the meat in cold water to get rid of any remaining koji paste.


Season the steak with salt and pepper. Don’t bother with any other seasonings because you’ll ruin the final effect. Pan-sear the meat in clarified butter in a cast-iron skillet until it has a nice dark crust, usually for a total of three minutes per side. Be careful: A koji steak caramelizes much faster than a standard one, or even an aged piece of meat.


Pop it in a preheated, 400-degree oven for about 4 to 5 minutes. That should produce a medium-rare result. Take it out, let sit for another 10 minutes, then slice and serve.

Tech

via Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now https://ift.tt/2k2uJQn

June 28, 2018 at 09:36AM

This Brilliant Case Packs Built-in Springs to Protect Your Phone From Falls

This Brilliant Case Packs Built-in Springs to Protect Your Phone From Falls

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I struggle with phone cases. On one hand, I’d like to protect my expensive handheld computer. But at the same time, I can’t stand ruining the look and feel of a phone with big, bulky hunks of plastic, which means my phones tend to be naked. But at long last, I think I’ve found a case so cool, I don’t care how ugly it is.

Created by Philip Frenzel, a student from Aalen University in Germany, the AD Case (the “AD” stands for active damping) is like an airbag for your phone, except that instead of using an inflatable cushion to protect the device, it uses built-in sensors and eight hook-like springs that deploy automatically when the case detects that your phone is in free fall.

If this case really performs as well as it does in the video above, when your phone finally hits the ground, it will just harmlessly bounce around before coming to a rest, safe and sound with nary a crack. From there, all you need to do is fold each spring back into the case, and it’s ready to protect your phone from its next tumble.

That said, even a case as sophisticated as this isn’t entirely foolproof. While the two springs on each corner of the case should do a good job of guarding your phone from falls onto flat ground, the same can’t be said about uneven surfaces like rocks or any other irregular shaped object your phone encounters.

Also, while there are sure to be some countermeasures to prevent the springs from deploying accidentally, a small shudder goes down my spine when I think about the case popping open while my phone is sitting in my pocket.

But with Fenzel already having won the top award from the German Society for Mechatronics and registering a patent for his AD Case, there’s a good chance this thing might be more than just a one-off prototype relatively soon.

Tech

via Gizmodo http://gizmodo.com

June 28, 2018 at 09:15AM

Amazon Buys PillPack in a Move to Swallow Your Pharmacy

Amazon Buys PillPack in a Move to Swallow Your Pharmacy

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Amazon has a new side hustle. The company confirmed on Thursday that it’s buying its way into the pharmacy industry by snapping up PillPack, a service that sells prescription drugs online.

Simple over-the-counter drugs are already available on Amazon.com, but this will mark Amazon’s first big foray into the pharmaceutical industry. PillPack describes itself as a “full service” pharmacy. Its deliveries are sealed into individual daily packs, sent out in a roll each month.

“PillPack’s visionary team has a combination of deep pharmacy experience and a focus on technology,” Jeff Wilke, the boss of Amazon’s consumer-facing business, said in a statement. “PillPack is meaningfully improving its customers’ lives, and we want to help them continue making it easy for people to save time, simplify their lives, and feel healthier. We’re excited to see what we can do together on behalf of customers over time.”

What, exactly, the two companies plan to do together isn’t public. We’ve reached out to Amazon to find out if PillPack will continue on as a somewhat independent company, if the service will appear on Amazon.com someday, or if it’ll get turned into something dystopian-sounding like “Prime Prescriptions.” Amazon reportedly paid “just under” $1 billion for the service. 

Many have hypothesized how Amazon-as-a-Pharmacy might impact the industry, since rumors of an acquisition first emerged last year. Amazon may target customers who already pay out of pocket for drugs, including both the uninsured or those with high deductibles.

Amazon began obtaining pharmacy licenses last October, acquiring them in 12 states, including New Jersey, Connecticut, and Nevada. In a press release, Amazon said the PillPack deal is expected to be done “during the second half of 2018.”

[CNBC]

Tech

via Gizmodo http://gizmodo.com

June 28, 2018 at 09:57AM

‘Mavericks’ promises 1,000-player battle-royale mayhem

‘Mavericks’ promises 1,000-player battle-royale mayhem

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It’s difficult to stand out in the battle-royale genre right now. Fortnite‘s bright and zany combat has attracted over 125 million players, while PUBG stands firm with its slower, military-inspired shooting. Blockbuster franchises such as Battlefield and Call of Duty are readying modes inspired by the pair’s breakout success. If you’re a newcomer like Automaton, a 40-person studio based in Cambridge, England, how do you differentiate and, more importantly, persuade people to switch from the competition? With larger maps and 1,000 player skirmishes, apparently.

Mavericks: Proving Grounds is a hugely ambitious game. Fortnite, PUBG and similar battle-royale titles currently cap out at 100-player deathmatches. Automaton is promising 200- to 400-player bloodbaths at launch later this year. Five-man teams will compete in 1,000-person gauntlets soon after, according to the company. The matches will supposedly take place on a 10-by-10 kilometer map, dwarfing those offered by its competitors. And as players creep around the world, they’ll find destructible buildings similar to Rainbow Six: Siege and realistic fire that can quickly spread across fields.

But that’s not all. Players will leave footprints and blood trails, according to the studio, which can be spotted by other competitors. Empty med kits, weapon magazines and bullet casings will also lie in the grass, waiting to be uncovered. As you hunt down other people, roaming wildlife will come into play, providing cover or, if you’re not careful, giving away your position during crucial sneak attacks. Paired with a day and night cycle, these features, the team hopes, will provide more intense and strategic combat scenarios to give players more information and flexibility in how they approach each match.

Mavericks‘ battle-royale mode will sit inside a vaguely-defined MMORPG experience. The game will have a town called The Capital, which acts as a lobby for the last-man-standing matches. Here, the company says, you’ll be able to customize your character and upgrade your weapons before heading into the fray. There will also be banks, shops, auction houses and a range of quest-giving NPCs. The Capital will be part of a “persistent open world” that launches in 2019. What you will do beyond battle-royale matches, though, is unclear right now.

The MMO element is important to contextualize the violence, according to Automaton CEO James Thompson. Books and movies that use the battle-royale format — the original Battle Royale novel by Koshun Takami, for instance, and The Hunger Games — often wrap the bloodshed around larger political stories. They give the hero a reason to survive and provide consequences for their actions outside the ring. “Mavericks: Proving Grounds provides that broader narrative,” Thompson said. “It’s more of a simulated world. One with narrative, and one that’s more believable. That setting, we think, even if you’re focused on session-based games, makes it a richer experience.”

Automaton has some MMORPG experience. Many of its staff worked on Runescape, the popular but visually primitive browser game, and Eve: Online, the deep-space-economy simulator, before joining the company. Furthermore, Mavericks isn’t the team’s first game. The studio released Deceit, a multiplayer horror title, through Steam Early Access in 2016. That title, though, is based around a small group of players trying to escape a house or, if they’re chosen to play a disguised monster, kill their fellow competitors. It’s a far cry from a 1,000-player battle royale.

Automaton is banking on SpatialOS to make Mavericks work. The much-hyped platform, built by a secretive London-based startup called Improbable, allows developers to create large, persistent worlds that many people can inhabit simultaneously. Thompson calls it a “fabric layer,” which sits between the game engine and a cluster of remote servers. Together, they can track each match and figure out what information is necessary for every player at any given time.

“That’s not been done effectively by any game before,” he said. “That completely changes the landscape in terms of how much we can simulate and how many players we can support. Because if you’re just turning around in the world, the system itself knows what it needs to send you and at what rate, so you’re not just getting all of this information between all of the different players, for no reason, all of the time. The distributed system [SpatialOS] is able to handle that load.”

“All the exciting-looking stuff comes at the end. That’s just how it works.”

It’s a bold claim, and one that’s difficult to judge given the early state of SpatialOS. Aside from Worlds Adrift, a skyship-riddled MMORPG developed by Bossa Studios, it’s hard to find a playable game built on the platform. Improbable has given its support to a bunch of other titles, including Scavengers and Seed, but almost all of them are early in development. (I tried a social VR experience called the MetaWorld in 2016, which is yet to come out.) The potential of the platform, then, and its ability to deliver what Automaton is promising, is still a mystery right now.

I played an early Mavericks demo with four other people at E3. The matches were slow, tense affairs, with lots of careful flanking and precision shooting. Many of the game’s headline features, though — the high player count, for instance, and wildlife — weren’t present. “Right now, we have to look at it in different demos,” Thompson said, “and show different things.” Most of the team’s efforts have been focused on back-end, he said, which is why the environments and character models were rough, too. “All the exciting-looking stuff comes at the end,” he said. “That’s just how it works.”

Automaton is aiming for a closed beta in August. The 400-player battle-royale mode will launch publicly later this year, followed by the 1,000-person matches and, finally, the persistent world and MMO trappings in 2019. If the team can deliver on its vision, Mavericks has the potential to dethrone Fortnite and usher in a new generation of battle-royale titles. One with larger environments, an MMO backdrop, and stories that provide greater meaning for your actions.

That is, if Epic Games and the PUBG Corporation don’t do it first. Fortnite, in particular, has changed dramatically since its release last September. Epic Games is determined to capitalize on its success and keep players happy with new modes and tweaks to its construction-based gameplay. There’s a good chance the company, and many of its rivals, are considering features that are similar to Mavericks. It’s on Automaton, then, to strike first and prove its take on the genre is worth playing.

“It’s difficult to showcase to everyone, certainly before our beta, what it means for this world and battle-royale experience to co-exist,” Thompson said. “I think people have a lot of preconceptions about the battle-royale genre because of its popularity over the last couple of years. But when we say battle royale, we mean a deeper experience. It’s difficult to describe. I think people are going to have to see it.”

Tech

via Engadget http://www.engadget.com

June 28, 2018 at 09:03AM

Boeing’s Proposed Hypersonic, Mach 5 Plane Is Really, Really Fast

Boeing’s Proposed Hypersonic, Mach 5 Plane Is Really, Really Fast

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Aviation enthusiasts yearning for ultra-fast, ultra-sleek intercontinental transportation—rather than 18-hour flights on stuffed-to-the gills widebody behemoths—might finally get their wish. At least, if the airplane concept Boeing unveiled this week becomes reality.

The company revealed renderings of its proposed hypersonic, passenger-carrying airliner Tuesday at the annual American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics conference in Atlanta. Both visually and technologically, the airplane, which could be used for both military and commercial purposes, has much in common with an unmanned hypersonic surveillance and reconnaissance concept the company revealed in January.

Both share the general delta-wing configuration with dual rear fins, a streamlined fuselage, and a sharp nose. The craft would travel at up to Mach 5, enabling it to cross the Atlantic Ocean in just two hours and the Pacific in three. (A merely supersonic aircraft flying between Mach 1 and Mach 2 would take an hour or two longer.)

The plane is fast, but it could have been even faster. “We settled on Mach 5 version,” says Kevin Bowcutt, Boeing’s senior technical fellow and chief scientist of hypersonics, noting that exceeding Mach 5, or about 3,800 mph, requires far more advanced engines and materials. Plus, it’s not worth it. “This aircraft would allow you to fly across the ocean and back in one day, which is all most people would want. So why go past those boundaries and complicate it? The world’s just not big enough to go much faster than Mach 5.”

A Mach 5 aircraft can also be built more affordably than plane that goes Mach 6, 7, or 8 because it would use readily available titanium for its structure instead of materials like composite ceramics to manage the heat produced at higher speeds. Boeing’s current proposal would also use a relatively simple pairing of a jet engine and a ramjet, called a turboramjet, instead of less proven scramjet engines required for faster aircraft.

For this plane, the two engines would share the same air inlets, and the jet engines would operate up to Mach 2 or 3 before the inlets seal off the jet engine and divert air into the ramjets, which can handle faster airflow. The famed SR-71 Blackbird reconnaissance aircraft used such a system in the 1960s, as have multiple missiles and experimental aircraft. Boeing is collaborating with Northrop Grumman Innovation Systems on the engine technology.

Though Boeing hasn’t decided the final dimensions, the airplane (which doesn’t have a name yet) would be larger than a business jet but smaller than a 737, Bowcutt says, so presumably seating between, say, 20 and 100 passengers. It would cruise at 95,000 feet, which is 30,000 feet higher than the supersonic Concorde flew, and a full 60,000 feet higher than the average airliner. That altitude maximizes the efficiency of the engines and keeps turbulence to a minimum, since the air density is so much lower that far up in the air.

The G-force feeling upon takeoff would last a full 12 minutes as the plane accelerated to cruising speed (on a conventional craft the feeling lasts just a few seconds) but the cruising-altitude experience should be serene, with stunning views featuring the earth’s curvature at the horizon and the blackness of space above. “Other than that you would also weigh a bit less,” Bowcutt says. “At that altitude you’ll be a few pounds lighter than on the ground.”

Boeing says a production aircraft with these capabilities—including autonomous piloting, as that technology continues to evolve—could be ready in 20 to 30 years, though a prototype could be ready in as soon as 5 or 10. A lot will have to go right for the effort to succeed, and such an aircraft would need to arrive with substantial proof of reasonable cost, safety, and efficiency in order for airlines and the military to want to actually fly it.

This concept does, however, have advantages over other long range, high speed transportation visions, most notably the proposed next generation of supersonic jets. Those airplanes actually only go a bit faster than commercial aircraft—even though they break the sound barrier in the process. (The speed of sound at 35,000 feet is 660 mph; the average jetliner cruises at 575 mph at the same altitude; the fastest currently proposed supersonic jet would travel at Mach 2.2 at 50,000 feet, or 1,450 mph, and the rest hover around Mach 1 or 1.2.) They also tend to be smaller, which means they may not be able to carry much fuel and thus may have shorter ranges than airlines might like.

Hypersonic jets could also stack up favorably against vehicles in the other end of the spectrum: suborbital rockets. Both SpaceX’s Elon Musk and Virgin Galactic’s Richard Branson have indicated that they want to adapt their rockets for global flights, reaching from New York to Sydney, for instance, in just an hour.

Though rocket-powered spaceships are certainly exciting, Bowcutt thinks that air-breathing vehicles—meaning, those that ingest oxygen from the atmosphere for combustion rather than carrying it along with them in liquid form—have much greater potential. Rockets will never be as reliable as airplanes, for one thing, and they are scary and uncomfortable. “The overall safety risk is much higher in a rocket while the passenger comfort level is much lower.”

Indeed, rocket re-entries into the atmosphere are notoriously brutal experiences, given that the vehicles have to use steep descent angles and blunt shaping, as opposed to the sleek pointy-nose look of a hypersonic jet, to generate enough drag to slow down enough for landing. But a hypersonic aircraft will be so smooth and fast during all phases of flight that it could effectively glide unpowered for the final 500 miles of each trip. It might take a bit longer—and you won’t be able to float around the cabin while in space—but you also won’t be throwing up on the way back down.


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June 28, 2018 at 06:09AM