Month: April 2022

If you’re not living inside a heavily populated zone, it’s likely much, much harder to gauge the air quality outside. Despite a rather quiet rollout, a new feature on Google’s search engine isn’t likely to make it easier for people to know whether they should go outside or else crack open a can of Spaceballs’ “Perri-air.”

Last year, Google started showing people their local air quality on their Nest Hub and other smart display devices, as well as Google users in India. The function has now been expanded this week to include Google search users in the U.S. and Victoria, Australia according to a Google spokesperson. Google’s systems in the U.S. aggregate data from AirNow.gov, a government site which uses EPA monitoring data, and PurpleAir, a private air quality monitoring company.

“We continue to explore ways to make authoritative information on a range of sustainability and environmental topics readily accessible and look forward to sharing more in this space soon,” a Google spokesperson told Techcrunch.

The addition was made to Google’s search engine in time for Earth Day, a holiday that has largely been coopted by big polluters in their regular greenwashing campaigns. Just like many corporations’ supposed environmental crusades, this new search engine feature might just be more hot air.

AirNow relies on state and local monitoring agencies that submit their data to the EPA. PurpleAir uses its own sensors that individuals install within their communities. This information can line up together in certain circumstances, as long as both services are actually recording data in that area. Both systems use Air Quality Index to monitor the overall healthiness of the air.

For example, AirNow’s interactive might display data for a sliver of Washington Heights in New York City or Melrose in the Bronx, but it won’t have any for Prospect Park in Brooklyn. If neither PurpleAir nor AirNow have data for an area, then Google has nothing to display.

Entire portions of some cities, but especially more rural regions, have no data related to air quality whatsoever from the EPA’s AirNow site. PurpleAir relies on individual air monitoring devices, so while it has coverage for areas that governments do not monitor, it is also only helpful where their devices are hooked up to the network.

A representative from Google was not able to confirm how it aggregates its AQI data and there are gaps for air quality in many local neighborhoods. A spokesperson did confirm the company was working on future tools for people monitoring their environmental conditions, but could not offer specifics of what those are.

We also reached out to PurpleAir to ask them whether Google has worked with the company in creating this new feature on the search engine, but we have yet to hear back. We will update the story if either gets back to us.

Either way, despite the EPA championing the use of the data, AQI monitoring has already been shown to not be a wholly accurate way of determining whether air is safe to breathe, since peoples’ health isn’t the only consideration. While the thresholds for AQI, which are revised every five years, takes into account long-term health data, it also takes into account the impact of regulations on industry, even though even small amounts of airborne pollutants can cause harmful effects. The EPA also does not use real-time data in the case of emergencies like wildfires.

ProPublica has previously reported on areas that the EPA leaves out industrial carcinogens from its AQI readings, effectively allowing high air pollution zones around industrial facilities. These zones have been shown to dramatically increase the likelihood of health issues like cancer. As just an example from Propublica’s map, one area around Wallingford, Connecticut is shown to have 1.5 times the acceptable risk of cancer thanks to a local metal products manufacturer. Googling for Wallingford air quality does not offer any results from the search engine’s new system. Using AirNow’s system for air quality in Wallingford, using all three zip codes for the area, either comes up with no data available or “good” AQI.

If Google wants to help people monitor their air quality in a way that will help them in the day-to-day, then a much deeper investment in infrastructure is necessary to allow it.

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.

There are many reasons even big-budget movie and TV productions have switched to using digital cameras—the most obvious being that shooting on film is expensive. It’s why amateur filmmakers rarely opt for the 35mm cameras that dominated Hollywood for years, but Yuta Ikeya found a way to make them more affordable by designing and 3D printing a film camera from scratch.

No one’s going to pretend that the high-end digital film cameras commonly used in the industry today are cheap, but they eliminate the costs of film stock and the extra steps of having footage developed and then digitized so it can be graded, processed, and edited in post-production. But there’s a certain aesthetic to shooting on film that digital can’t quite match yet, which is why amateur filmmakers with smaller budgets will shoot on 8mm or 16mm film instead of 35mm, but the savings come at the cost of a reduced resolution and results that don’t quite look as professional.

In what has to be one of the most technically impressive attempts at budget-conscious guerilla filmmaking we’ve seen, Yuta Ikeya designed, modeled, and 3D-printed most of the parts needed to assemble a custom 35mm film camera. The parts that didn’t come from a 3D printer include a single DC motor to drive all the motorized mechanisms inside, an Arduino to control it, a power source, and the optics: a lens on the front and a mirror inside to split the incoming light so the shooter can check framing through the viewfinder.

Ikeya also chose to shoot on more affordable C-41 based photographic 35mm film instead of the pricier stocks used by the motion picture industry. For the test footage they captured, Ikeya spliced two rolls of Ilford HP5+ film which is loaded into a custom 3D-printed film cartridge which is then inserted into the camera.

The captured footage has a very distinct lo-fi aesthetic that suffers from issues like light leak and gate weave. Without knowing where the footage came from, it would be easy to dismiss it as being overly artsy, but the fact that it was captured by a DIY 3D-printed film camera instead leaves us incredibly impressed with what Ikeya has achieved. There’s obvious room for improvement, which is why we’re really hoping that Ikeya decides to eventually share the printable plans for the camera so that the 3D-printing community can contribute ways to upgrade its performance and improve the captured results.

Bad news for everyone who loved watching Bill Nye the Science Guy during middle school science class: your fave is problematic. This week, Coca-Cola, one of the world’s biggest plastic polluters, teamed up with TV’s favorite scientist for a campaign to create a “world without waste,” a joke of a corporate greenwashing campaign.

In a video innocuously titled “The Coca-Cola Company and Bill Nye Demystify Recycling,” an animated version of Nye—with a head made out of a plastic bottle and his signature bow tie fashioned from a Coke label—walks viewers through the ways “the good people at the Coca-Cola company are dedicating themselves to addressing our global plastic waste problem.” Coke, Nye explains, wants to use predominantly recycled materials to create bottles for its beverages; he then describes the process of recycling a plastic bottle, from a user throwing it into a recycling bin to being sorted and shredded into new material.

“If we can recover and recycle plastic, we can not only keep it from becoming trash, but we can use that plastic again and again—it’s an amazing material,” quips Shill Nye the Plastic Guy. “What’s more, when we use recycled material, we also reduce our carbon footprint. What’s not to love?” What’s not, indeed! (We reached out to representatives for Nye to ask questions about his involvement in this video and will update this piece if we hear back.)

The video is, on the surface, an accurate depiction of the process of recycling a beverage bottle. The problem lies in what recycling can actually do. Nye paints a rosy picture in the video of plastic Coke bottles being recycled “again and again”—but if everything worked like he’s said, we wouldn’t be facing plastic pollution that has grown fourfold over the past few decades. Thanks to concerted lobbying efforts, the public has been led to believe that recycling is the cure for our disastrous plastic addiction. What it does in actuality is place the burden of responsibility on the consumer and allow companies like Coca-Cola to get away with no repercussions for their waste.

Over recycling’s 60-year history, less than 10% of plastic that has been produced has ever been recycled; most of those plastics can only be reused once or twice before ending up in a landfill. And while in theory, PET—the type of plastic that makes bottles—can be recycled more times than other types of plastic, that’s not usually what happens. Virgin plastic is, simply put, cheaper to make into things like bottles than recycled plastic. Less than 30% of plastic bottles are recycled in the U.S., and a lot of that stock is turned not into other bottles, but “downcycled” into other things, like filler and fabric. These products, in turn, can’t be recycled again. The plastic ends up in landfills. Even with effective recycling mechanisms, research has shown that stuff like bottles can’t be in use for long and will eventually be delegated to landfills. From there, the Coke bottles that Shill Nye so cheerily shows off in the video will last for so long that their lifecycle lasts beyond human frameworks for time. Fun!

There’s also a particular irony in Coca-Cola using Nye to send this message. The company produces about 3.3 million U.S. tons of plastic packaging per year, and has been named one of the most polluting brands in the world by multiple different audits. Coca-Cola has also said it has no plans to stop producing single-use plastic, because, it claims, customers simply don’t want anything else. If Coke had a history of fighting for beneficial recycling policies, one ad might not be a problem, but representatives from the company were caught on tape as recently as 2019 lobbying against bottle bills that would reward customers for recycling but tack an extra charge onto the company.

Recruiting the public’s favorite Science Guy, who has been outspoken on climate change, isn’t an accident—it’s part of the company’s strategy to publicly cut ties with the oil industry while continuing to use oil products. As more public attention turns to rampant plastic contamination, big polluters like Coca-Cola have gotten the message that public ties to fossil fuels won’t fly. Accordingly, Coca-Cola has severed ties with industry groups known for working with oil and gas companies to push recycling and made promises on reusing plastics, while also sponsoring plastic cleanup efforts (which have their own issues).

These moves, however, are much too little too late. Plastic waste is rising fast; the amount of plastic trash in our oceans is set to triple by 2040. If Coca-Cola was serious about a “world without waste,” as Nye says in the video, it would be innovating ways to sell products that use no plastic at all. And if Nye wants to really galvanize people on climate change, maybe he shouldn’t do promotional videos for one of the oil and gas industry’s most dedicated customers.