Month: January 2023

Not all coffees are created equal. You already know this if you’ve been brewing your own for more than a few cups’ time: Coffee beans vary wildly in taste, strength, and even caffeine content. But even how you brew your coffee changes its strength.

I don’t just mean the flavor. If you’re drinking coffee for the caffeine boost, your brewing method can affect how much of a jolt each serving will give you. You might thing an espresso shot is the best way to get moving in the morning, but an espresso—even a full or double shot from a specialty coffee shop—actually doesn’t have the most amount of caffeine per cup—at least according to tests conducted by popular Coffee Youtuber James Hoffmann. Hoffmann is the author of The World Atlas of Coffee, runs Square Mile Coffee Roasters, and won the 2007 Barista championship, so you can count on his brewing expertise.

Hoffmann got his hands on a $2,500 Lighttells caffeine analyzer and went to town with it. This is a simple (but pricey) piece of tech reveals the caffeine content of a brew by scanning a couple of drops of coffee.

The caffeine content in a cup of coffee is measured in milligrams (mg). According to the FDA, 400 mg/day is the recommended daily intake for adults (but of course, how much caffeine you actually “need” to feel the effects will vary from person to person). Unfortunately, there isn’t exactly a wealth of data out there of coffee’s wildly varying caffeine content, but if you Google, you’ll find that on average, a cup of coffee has 63-125 mg of caffeine in it.

What coffee brewing method delivers the most caffeine?

Hoffmann tested different kinds of coffees, ranging from instant coffee, espressos, and brewed coffees like pour-overs. And what he found was very interesting. It turns out if you want a big kick of caffeine to get you through a couple of hours of intense work, the brewing method that will serve you best is a pour over. According to hHoffman’s tests, 18 grams of his test sample of coffee beans (around 2 to 2-1/2 tablespoons of ground coffee), brewed as an espresso, had 110 mg of caffeine. But brewed as a pour over, they delivered 180 mg of caffeine. That’s close to a 50% jump!

That means if you need the biggest boost, you should skip that double-shot latte from Starbucks and order a pour over. (Or better yet, start brewing pour overs at home.)

Another big takeaway from Hoffmann’s study—if an unsurprising one—is that instant coffee is, on average, quite weak when it comes to getting you caffeinated. A full cup made with 2 grams of instant coffee (the recommended serving size) will only get you around 80 mg of caffeine.

Check out Hoffmann’s complete 20-minute video for more fascinating caffeine data.

[James Hoffmann]

Long a staple technology of electronic book readers, electronic paper is finally starting to expand its reach, finding its way into tablets, watches, and even cars, with a recent collaboration at CES between E Ink and BMW. But CES also saw the reveal of an even stranger device based on electronic paper: a wearable device called the Sol Reader that’s an e-reader you can wear on your face.

Although certain technical limitations prevent electronic paper from being used as a universal replacement for LCDs and OLEDs—you definitely don’t want an E Ink TV hanging in your family room—its technical advantages, including low-power draw and a reflective screen that’s easier on the eyes, make it ideal for everything from e-readers to e-notes. Where we didn’t expect electronic paper to show up, even the new color varieties, was in a pair of goggles.

So far, the goggles form factor has been reserved mostly for either virtual reality, augmented reality, or wearable devices that mix both, leveraging two screens to immerse viewers in 3D worlds or experiences. There’s little doubt that wearables are the future of the devices we still carry stuffed away in our pockets, but the Sol Reader isn’t looking to replace smartphones. Instead, it’s targeting e-readers.

Details about the device on its official website are slim, but Brad Lynch, of YouTube’s SadlyItsBradley channel, managed to get some hands-on time with a prototype of the Sol Reader at CES last week, and shared their impressions in a video. Weighing in at less than 100 grams, the goggles look and feel like a lightweight pair of VR goggles (you can’t see the world around you while wearing them) but instead feature a pair of electronic paper screens behind a set of pancake lenses.

The Sol Reader doesn’t present users with 3D interactive virtual worlds, but instead allows them to read. You’ll see what looks like a book page floating in a dark void in front of you, or above you when using the goggles while laying down, which is apparently the ideal use case, as the Sol Reader doesn’t feature a head strap. Page turning is accomplished through a wireless handheld remote, while battery life is promised to be close to 30 hours, thanks to the use of e-paper displays.

Lynch does give a quick peek at the screens inside the device in the video, which unfortunately look disappointingly low-res, but points out the team behind it has been talking to E Ink about securing a solution with more resolution. That will be critical, as the Sol Reader is expected to sell for a hefty $350 sometime this year. If the reading experience doesn’t come anywhere close to what a Kindle provides, it’s hard to imagine anyone spending that much money on the wearable when the Meta Quest 2 is just $50 more and has plenty of e-book reading apps available for it.

Seattle’s public school district is suing Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Snapchat, and their parent companies. The lawsuit, filed on Friday in a U.S. District Court, alleges that these social media sites have been a primary factor in a “youth mental health crisis,” and that these platforms have knowingly exploited, manipulated, and targeted young people for profit at the expense of their mental heath.

The district argues in its 91-page complaint that tech giants have intentionally engineered addicting platforms, cashed in on the vulnerability of still-developing brains, and algorithmically suggested harmful content to young users.

Ultimately, the school district is blaming these social media companies for the increase in mental health and behavioral issues that teens are showing up to classrooms with, which has rendered the task of educating more difficult, according to the suit. District officials point to a 30% increase in self-reported feelings of sadness and hopelessness among the student body, as well as a rise in student suicide plans and attempts between 2010 and 2018.

In an effort to manage those challenges, the school district says it has had to take expensive actions like hiring more mental health counselors, creating curriculum surrounding social media and mental health, adjusting and enforcing school policies surrounding social media use, and increasing disciplinary resources. However, even all of these changes haven’t been enough to manage.

“Plaintiff cannot keep up with the increased need for mental health services because of the youth mental health crisis,” the lawsuit claims. So, the Seattle schools are seeking accountability for social media platforms and meaningful change in how these companies operate, along with damages and compensation.

In past, similar cases, tech companies have used Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act as a legal shield. Under the law, digital publishers are not responsible for third-party content posted on their platforms (i.e. Meta is not liable for anything its users post on Instagram and Facebook). However, the Seattle case aims to get around this fundamental protection by targeting the design of social media sites—not their content. The school district is claiming the increasing incentives to spend more and more time scrolling and the algorithms that dictate what users see causes harm too—not just what’s in the posts.

“Defendants have maximized the time users—particularly youth—spend on their platforms by purposely designing, refining, and operating them to exploit the neurophysiology of the brain’s reward systems to keep users coming back, coming back frequently, and staying on the respective platforms for as long as possible,” says the complaint.

Some psychology research, along with both internal and external reports on social media company practices seem to support many of the new lawsuit’s claims. Studies have shown, for instance, that social media use and increased smartphone use may be linked to sleep depravation and accompanying depression. A Pew 2022 analysis found that more than half of teenagers surveyed would have a hard, or very hard, time giving up social media. Meta’s own internal research suggested that Instagram is toxic to some teen users, particularly girls, as it cultivates and amplifies body image issues. And Facebook has known for years that its algorithms boost time spent on its site to users’ detriment.

However, it’s very difficult to establish a direct link between increased social media use and worsened mental health because there are so many variables involved in mental health. And many experts dispute the use of the term “addiction” as applied to social media platforms altogether.

This isn’t the first attempt to sue social media companies for alleged mental health or youth harms in the U.S.. However past suits have mostly focused on individual cases. For instance, the mother of a 10-year old who died in 2021 sued ByteDance over allegations that a TikTok challenge caused her child’s death. And, in April, the mother of a Wisconsin 17-year old who died by suicide sued Meta and Snapchat for “knowingly and purposely” creating harmful and addicting products. The FTC has forced Fortnite to change its interface design so as to be less deceptive (and fined Epic Games half a billion dollars).

California legislators even tried to pass a bill banning addictive social media and explicitly making tech companies liable for every resulting violation involving children. The bill failed, but more than 30 states currently have some sort of proposed or pending legislation aimed at regulating social media.

Gizmodo reached out to Meta (Instagram and Facebook’s parent company), Alphabet (Google and Youtube’s parent company), TikTok (owned by ByteDance Inc.), and Snapchat (owned by Snap Inc.) for comment.

“We want teens to be safe online,” wrote Meta’s head of global safety, Antigone Davis, in a statement emailed to Gizmodo citing tools the company has developed “to support teen and families,” like age verifications, parental controls, and notifications encouraging breaks. Further, “we don’t allow content that promotes suicide, self-harm or eating disorders, and of the content we remove or take action on, we identify over 99% of it before it’s reported to us,” Davis’ statement said.

Though past cases, like the death of 14-year old Molly Russell, have demonstrated that harmful content like self-harm promotion does slip through the cracks. In the lead up to her suicide, Russell interacted with more than 2,000 Instagram posts relating to self-harm, suicide, and depression.

A Google spokesperson, too, responded by highlighting the efforts he said they company has taken to make its platforms safer for children and teens—like screen time reminders and content blocks.

TikTok and Snapchat did not immediately respond.

Neuro-sama is a VTuber who streams Minecraft and the rhythm game Osu! on Twitch. But unlike most anime avatars, she’s controlled by an artificial intelligence program rather than a human being. That makes her catnip for the denizens of Twitch chat, who can prompt her to respond with all sorts of questions ranging from innocent inquiries to 4chan trolling. Within the first few streams, someone had already asked Neuro-sama about the Holocaust. “I’m not sure if I believe it,” she said.

That was one of the more infamous clips that went viral online near the end of last month. Asked what she thought of women’s rights, she said they didn’t exist. How would she solve philosophy’s famous trolley ethical conundrum? Throw a fat person on the tracks. Often, however, she’ll go for long stretches without getting tempted by the chat into controversial or hateful remarks. In that way she’s an impressive simulacrum of a Twitch streamer straddling the chasm between repetitive banter and edgelord antics.

“The controversial things she says is due to the fact that she tries to make witty and comical remarks about whatever is said in chat, aligning AIs with human values is an ongoing area of research,” Neuro-sama’s creator, a game programmer named Vedal, told Kotaku. “To counter this, I’ve worked hard since the first few streams to improve the strength of the filters used for her. Data that she learns on is also manually curated to mitigate negative biases. We now also have a team of people moderating twitch chat who check everything she says.”

Neuro-sama isn’t Vedal’s first AI. In fact, a version of her was first created years ago with the explicit purpose of learning to play Osu!, a long running free-to-play rhythm game where you click shapes on a screen to the beat of anime music. While those sessions were also streamed, there was no avatar or interactive personality. Following last year’s surge of big-name VTubers, Neuro-sama builds on the Osu! skills of the original project with a fully-voiced Twitch performance that can riff with the audience.

It’s perfect timing given the internet’s recent love affair with the OpenAI-powered ChatGPT chatbot, where users could submit hyper-specific text prompts and receive uncannily artful responses in return. Vedal wouldn’t go into detail about how Neuro-sama learns and communicates, other than to confirm she relies on a large language model, which has been “trained on a large amount of text on the internet.” While not as sophisticated, the effect has been convincing enough to net Neuro-sama thousands of viewers per stream.

She also recently defeated the top-ranked Osu! player, Mrekk, on December 28, though some fans of the game debate whether the human opponent was ill-served by the song selection. Neuro-sama has since moved onto Minecraft, a much more complex game with far more possibilities for unexpected moments as players ask whether Melee is the best Super Smash Bros. and whether she’ll step on them. The moderation tools are apparently better now too.

“She picks what to respond to within a limited window,” Vedal said. “However it should be noted that she will not talk about the Holocaust as the filters have been improved.” Instead, she’s currently trying to learn how to sing.

Late last year, I attended an event hosted by Google to celebrate its AI advances. The company’s domain in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood now extends literally onto the Hudson River, and about a hundred of us gathered in a pierside exhibition space to watch scripted presentations from executives and demos of the latest advances. Speaking remotely from the West Coast, the company’s high priest of computation, Jeff Dean, promised “a hopeful vision for the future.”  

The theme of the day was “exploring the (im)possible.” We learned how Google’s AI was being put to use fighting wildfires, forecasting floods, and assessing retinal disease. But the stars of this show were what Google called “generative AI models.” These are the content machines, schooled on massive training sets of data, designed to churn out writings, images, and even computer code that once only humans could hope to produce.

Something weird is happening in the world of AI. In the early part of this century, the field burst out of a lethargy—known as an AI winter—by the innovation of “deep learning” led by three academics. This approach to AI transformed the field and made many of our applications more useful, powering language translations, search, Uber routing, and just about everything that has “smart” as part of its name. We’ve spent a dozen years in this AI springtime. But in the past year or so there has been a dramatic aftershock to that earthquake as a sudden profusion of mind-bending generative models have appeared.

Most of the toys Google demoed on the pier in New York showed the fruits of generative models like its flagship large language model, called LaMDA. It can answer questions and work with creative writers to make stories. Other projects can produce 3D images from text prompts or even help to produce videos by cranking out storyboard-like suggestions on a scene-by-scene basis. But a big piece of the program dealt with some of the ethical issues and potential dangers of unleashing robot content generators on the world. The company took pains to emphasize how it was proceeding cautiously in employing its powerful creations. The most telling statement came from Douglas Eck, a principal scientist at Google Research. “Generative AI models are powerful—there’s no doubt about that,” he said. “But we also have to acknowledge the real risks that this technology can pose if we don’t take care, which is why we’ve been slow to release them. And I’m proud we’ve been slow to release them.”  

But Google’s competitors don’t seem to have “slow” in their vocabularies. While Google has provided limited access to LaMDA in a protected Test Kitchen app, other companies have been offering an all-you-can-eat smorgasbord with their own chatbots and image generators. Only a few weeks after the Google event came the most consequential release yet: OpenAI’s latest version of its own powerful text generation technology, ChatGPT, a lightning-fast, logorrheic gadfly that spits out coherent essays, poems, plays, songs, and even obituaries at the merest hint of a prompt. Taking advantage of the chatbot’s wide availability, millions of people have tinkered with it and shared its amazing responses, to the point where it’s become an international obsession, as well as a source of wonder and fear. Will ChatGPT kill the college essay? Destroy traditional internet search? Put millions of copywriters, journalists, artists, songwriters, and legal assistants out of a job?

Answers to those questions aren’t clear right now. But one thing is. Granting open access to these models has kicked off a wet hot AI summer that’s energizing the tech sector, even as the current giants are laying off chunks of their workforces. Contrary to Mark Zuckerberg’s belief, the next big paradigm isn’t the metaverse—it’s this new wave of AI content engines, and it’s here now. In the 1980s, we saw a gold rush of products moving tasks from paper to PC application. In the 1990s, you could make a quick fortune by shifting those desktop products to online. A decade later, the movement was to mobile. In the 2020s the big shift is toward building with generative AI. This year thousands of startups will emerge with business plans based on tapping into the APIs of those systems. The cost of churning out generic copy will go to zero. By the end of the decade, AI video-generation systems may well dominate TikTok and other apps. They may not be anywhere as good as the innovative creations of talented human beings, but the robots will quantitatively dominate.

From its position in low lunar orbit, South Korea’s first Moon mission caught a unique glimpse of Earth rising from behind the cratered surface of our natural satellite.

The Korean Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter (KPLO), also known as Danuri, beamed back beautiful black-and-white images of Earth captured by its high-resolution camera. The two images were taken on December 24 and 28 and released by the Korean Aerospace Research Institute on Monday.

The images show a solemn Earth in the distance, while the Moon’s dusty surface appears in the foreground. From our perspective on Earth, we often see the Moon rising above our planet’s surface. But the images taken by Danuri from lunar orbit provide a counterintuitive view of our home planet glimmering behind the Moon’s surface.

Danuri captured the first image when it was 77 miles (124 kilometers) above the lunar surface and the second when it was around 213 miles (344 kilometers) above its surface.

Danuri launched on August 5 on board SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, marking South Korea’s first deep space mission. On December 17, the spacecraft completed its first lunar orbit insertion maneuver and entered into lunar orbit.

The 1,100-pound (500-kilogram) probe is equipped with four science instruments built locally, as well as a NASA camera to capture views of the lunar surface. From its low orbit, Danuri will explore the Moon’s shadowed regions, which could hold water ice.

By launching Danuri, South Korea hopes to advance its lunar exploration, as the orbiter is designed to scope out potential landing spots for future missions to the Moon. South Korea also wants to launch a lander and a rover, in addition to another orbiter, for the second phase of the mission.

More: Chinese Mission to Pluck Samples from Moon’s Far Side Just Got More Interesting