Day: April 15, 2022

It’s unfortunate that the fundamental ingredients that make food taste better—salt and sugar—can have less than desired effects on the human body if over-consumed. But just as VR goggles can trick the eyes into seeing 3D worlds that don’t exist, these chopsticks can trick the user’s tongue into tasting salty flavors, even in healthier dishes that are low in sodium.

Jointly developed by researchers from the Yoshinori Miyashita Laboratory of the Department of Advanced Media Science, Meiji University, and a Japanese food producer called Kirin (mostly known for its beer), the chopsticks were created as part of an effort by Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare to reduce the daily salt intake of the Japanese people which, on average, is actually considerably higher than the recommendations of the World Health Organization.

The goals are to reduce the amount of salt being consumed by at least 20%, but that also leads to a reduction in flavor: an endlessly problematic stumbling block for those trying to switch and stick to a healthier diet. That’s where the chopsticks come in. On the end of one of them is a metal contact that passes an electrical current with a specific waveform into a diner’s mouth that affects the ions in sodium chloride and monosodium glutamate so that the salty and umami flavors experienced by their taste buds are enhanced.

In a recent trial the added electrical stimulation was found to increase the salty flavor of a given food by almost 1.5 times. When eating something made with a 30% reduction in salt, the difference in flavor would be imperceptible to the user. Anyone who’s ever licked the contacts on a 9-volt battery on a dare will agree that deliberately shocking the tongue seems like a bad idea, but the level of electrical current used here is undetectable, and the idea has a lot of precedents.

In 2016 another team of Japanese researchers created an electric fork that enhances the flavors of both salty and sour, and a company called SpoonTEK sells an upgraded spoon with electrical contacts that not only promises to enhance flavors, but also reduce the unpleasant aftertaste and tang of foods like greek yogurt. Researchers have even gone so far as to create lickable screens able to recreate a wide variety of tastes without actually putting any food in your mouth.

The idea of enjoying a virtual meal without ingesting a single calorie is still a few years away, but the researchers at Meiji University have refined their chopsticks to create a more consumer-friendly version that connects to a wrist-worn battery pack, although it’s not quite ready for prime-time just yet, so for the time being maybe just skip the salt shaker or soy sauce.

Razer’s latest laptop has arrived, but it’s not what we were expecting. Not only is this Razer Blade 15 doppelganger not meant for gaming, but it’s not even being sold by Razer. This unique new notebook is instead a collaboration between Razer and Lambda, a company that makes workstations, GPUs, and servers for machine learning. It’s being marketed as a “deep learning” laptop, not as a system meant for gamers.

The laptop is called the Razer x Lambda Tensorbook, and it is almost identical to last year’s Razer Blade 15 Advanced. It shares the same organs: a 15.6-inch, 1440p display at 165Hz, an 11th Gen Intel Core i7 CPU, 64GB of RAM, 2TB of SSD storage, and an Nvidia RTX 3080 (16GB vRAM) laptop GPU. And that’s it: there is a single configuration selling at an eye-watering $3,500.

Lambda makes bold claims about the laptop’s machine learning capabilities, stating on its website that the system is up to 4x faster than a MacBook Pro 16 powered by Apple’s M1 Max chip when running vision and language training benchmarks.

“Most ML engineers don’t have a dedicated GPU laptop, which forces them to use shared resources on a remote machine, slowing down their development cycle.” wrote Stephen Balaban, the co-founder and CEO of Lambda, in a blog post. “When you’re stuck SSHing into a remote server, you don’t have any of your local data or code and even have a hard time demoing your model to colleagues. The Razer x Lambda Tensorbook solves this. It’s pre-installed with PyTorch and TensorFlow and lets you quickly train and demo your models: all from a local GUI interface.”

The only customization options are for software and warranty: the base $3,500 choice comes with Ubuntu 20.04 with a Lambda Stack (including drivers, PyTorch, TensorFlow, CUDA, and others) and a one year warranty, a “standard” version goes for $4,100 and nets you a two-year premium warranty, and a $5,000 Enterprise edition tacks on Windows 10 and a third year of premium warranty.

From the outside, the Tensorbook looks like a Razer Blade 15 with a custom paint job. It has the same dimensions and 4.4-pound weight but trades a black exterior for a silver one with matching white keys and swaps Razer’s famously green USB ports for purple-accented ones. If you ask me, the purple Lambda logo on the Tensorbook looks better than Razer’s green triple-headed serpent. In any case, the Tensorbook comes with the same robust port selection: two Thunderbolt 4 ports, three USB-A ports (3.2 Gen 2), HDMI 2.1, a headphone jack, and an SD card reader.

The Tensorbook doesn’t have any custom performance optimizations, so it won’t run better than other gaming laptops with similar or better specs. This isn’t even Razer’s most powerful system now that the company has upgraded its own fleet to Intel 12th Gen processors. What makes the Tensorbook unique is the included software package consisting of one-line installation and management paths for PyTorch, TensorFlow, Caffee, and Caffee 2 deep-learning frameworks, along with GPU-focused applications CUDA and cuDNN.

Razer co-founder and CEO Min-Liang Tan wrote on Facebook back in 2017 that the company would create the “best notebook in the world that supports Linux.” It never arrived. Hopefully, the Tensorbook is a success, so Razer feels compelled to make its own Linux-based system—after all, Valve and Google are already using the OS as a platform for gaming.

A private aerospace company is preparing for the ultimate stunt in rocketry: attempting to catch a rocket mid-air as it returns to Earth from space using a large helicopter. The mission is scheduled to take off within a two-week window starting April 22.

Rocket Lab will launch its Electron rocket from New Zealand’s Māhia Peninsula, carrying 34 small satellites from commercial operators like Alba Orbital, E-Space, and Unseenlabs. But on its way back, the rocket booster hopefully won’t stick the landing, instead a helicopter will catch it mid-air with a customized Sikorsky S-92, a large twin engine craft normally used to transport oil and gas or for search and rescue operations, according to Rocket Lab.

How exactly do you snag a rocket booster mid-air? About two minutes after liftoff, Electron’s first stage, or its engine, will separate from the second stage, which will carry the payload to space. The first stage will start falling back towards Earth at a speed of about 5,000 miles per hour, reaching temperatures of 4,352 degrees Fahrenheit.

The Electron booster will then deploy a parachute at an altitude of 8.3 miles, and a second parachute at 3.7 miles to really slow its speed down to 22 miles per hour. Meanwhile, the helicopter will be waiting in position, ready to snag the parachute line through a hook.

This stunt isn’t just about showing off, though. The recovery of the rocket booster is meant to facilitate its use for future launches, and catching the booster mid-air will avoid possible water damage to the hardware from falling into the ocean.

Rocket Lab has previously recovered three rocket boosters from the ocean, and those attempts helped inform the design of the Electron rocket so that it can withstand the harsh conditions of re-entering Earth’s atmosphere. The company has also performed multiple successful mid-air recoveries with replicas of the Electron booster.

“Trying to catch a rocket as it falls back to Earth is no easy feat, we’re absolutely threading the needle here,” Peter Beck, Rocket Lab founder and CEO, said in a statement. “But pushing the limits with such complex operations is in our DNA.”

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket is the only other major rocket with a reusable booster. That rocket is designed to be able to fly 10 times, and has an automated landing sequence that allows the rocket booster to touch down on Earth on an offshore platform or a landing pad.

Rocket Lab wants to be the second company to use a reusable booster stage, although the Electron rocket is much smaller than the Falcon 9, standing at about 60 feet tall while Falcon 9 hovers over it at 207 feet.