No matter what restaurant week specials they put out in your local town, none will compare to the stale taste of the $300,000 3D-printed hamburger Modern Meadow offers. The father-son startup company has figured out a way to combine the process of bioprinting with edible food so they can create a hamburger patty – albiet at an astronomically expensive price.
The 3D-bioprinted meat uses the same process scientists have long studied for printing artificial organs. Instead of the usual plastic ingredient found on traditional 3D printers, Modern Meadow utilizes specialized stem cells and layer the print into the desired shape.
“If you think about a hamburger, its lateral dimensions are much bigger than its thickness so that makes the printing considerably simpler,” Professor Gabor Forgacs of University of Missouri and co-founder of Modern Meadow tells BBC. “Three-dimensional printing has taken off big time, and printing things such as whipped cream is just another application of it – but it’s no big deal.”
Of course, the resulting meat, such as patties and pork chops, created by the bioprinter will still need to be cooked on a frying pan to taste. Forgacs estimates that a lab-engineered (but still technically authentic) meat could run up to $300,000, forcing us to run right back to that organic meat aisle at Whole Foods and considering those offerings a steal. The benefits to cultured meat could decrease agricultural costs in the long run, and bioprinters can engineer a way to print just the right amount of fat on a single slab of meat so the piece comes at a perfect marble.
Forgacs also believes that price should decrease as technology advances and he can achieve economy of scale, especially now that the company was recently funded by billionaire Silicon Valley investor Peter Thiel for $350,000 (jut a little more than what one burger would cost). In the end, that all seems to be ways away from now and we’re gonna have to stick with the real deal in our foreseeable future. Sorry, hippy animal lovers. If you’re still itching to taste 3D printed food, however, maybe the Burritobot can satisfy your odd hunger in the mean time.
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.
Military working dogs charge into places the rest of us would flee. So, I understand why anyone would want to breed tougher, healthier dogs for the job.
Warhound, a new startup from Colossal Biosciences co-founder Ben Lamm and Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey, has stepped out of stealth with $200 million to clone and gene-edit working dogs for American troops, police departments, and emergency services (via TechCrunch).
AI can describe a picture, identify objects, and answer questions about what a camera sees. But when a blind user needs a quick answer, getting an entire spoken essay about the scene isn't exactly helpful. Researchers at the University of Maryland (UMD) have found that AI-powered visual assistance can leave blind users doing too much work to get the information they actually need.
The study, titled Say It My Way: Exploring Control in Conversational Visual Question Answering with Blind Users, examined how people interact with Be My AI, an AI-powered feature of the Be My Eyes app. The researchers found that users often received lengthy descriptions that didn't adequately address their immediate goals, forcing them to ask follow-up questions or find ways to steer the AI towards a more useful answer.