It’s not a trip to Austin without sampling some of the best local cuisine the town has to offer. Armed with our best appetite, we stopped by SouthBites, a food truck courtyard curated by Top Chef season 9 winner Paul Qui. The Austin local tells us the food truck gathering is a collection of things he enjoys eating, but what we want to know most is how to gear up our kitchen like a Top Chef would. And surprisingly? Qui’s a big fan of electric induction appliances.
Digital Trends: Not everyone can cook like a Top Chef, but we sure as heck wanna look like one. What would a Top Chef dream kitchen have?
Paul: For cooking equipments, I definitely want a Gastrovac, Pacojet, a freeze dryer, centrifuge … I’m a big fan of induction, actually. It’s slightly more expensive than what we can afford in the kitchen right now but I really like running electrical equipment in the kitchen. It’s a lot cleaner.
DT: That seems to be the opposite reaction people have – most people say they want fire and gas burners.
Paul: I love working with gas and wood, so I would do a combination of both. I have three Green Egg [smoker grills] in the restaurant – so you gotta combine high and low: Old school and new school altogether. I like the flavor from smoke, but at the same time I enjoy the convenience of electrical equipment. With the technology these days, for me, it’s not about fire to bring out flavors; there are other ways to extract flavors from things.
DT: One of DT’s fascinations with cooking is molecular gastronomy, which you’ve dabbled with during your run on the show. Do you like cooking in that style?
Paul: I do quite a bit of molecular gastronomy, I use it for very practical reasons and try out different techniques. As far as a modernist’s approach towards food, I do a lot of monochromatic style of cuisine. I used to do Roy G. Biv-inspired tastings where each plate is based on primary colors. I just like to play with food, so any new technique, I’m always game.
DT: What’s one must-have cooking equipment I should own if I want to attempt things Top Chef style?
Paul: I’m a big fan of the Vitamix blender – you can do so many things with it. It’s a very handy tool.
San Francisco startup Dimensional advertised for people to walk robot dogs through city streets. The New York Times reported that the job could include carrying a roughly 33-pound robot back to the office if it overheated. A lift home is an awkward requirement for a labor-saving machine.
Keeping the hardware running is only one challenge. Anthropic's robotics tests found that language models mostly failed when controlling joints directly, but did better when directing trained controllers. Giving an AI agent a body doesn't teach it to handle ordinary household objects.
Soon, a mattress protector may be more than a bed cover. Australian medtech company Sleeptite and researchers at RMIT University have received a US patent for FlexiSense, a smart bedding technology that tracks body position and posture to help caregivers identify when older residents may be at risk of falling.
The technology is being developed for Sleeptite’s in-bed monitoring system, REMi, and was recently on display at The MedTech Conference in Boston. A peer-reviewed study in Flexible and Printed Electronics says the sensors can also be made at scale without sacrificing performance or durability.
AI companies spend enormous amounts of time convincing us their technology is safe and secure. But what happens when those same companies become targets of increasingly sophisticated AI-powered attacks? Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now facing that question. According to a Washington Post report, cybersecurity startup Cathedral discovered vulnerabilities that let its researchers access sensitive information in Anthropic's internal systems.
The researchers used AI agents to identify potential entry points in less than 12 hours. Interestingly, they didn't need to crack Claude itself. Instead, they exploited weaknesses in third-party business applications that Anthropic uses for everyday operations. Anthropic's security testing program disclosed the findings, which allows outside researchers to identify and report vulnerabilities.