Vegans and meat-eaters alike, take note: Beyond Meat said Tuesday, March 5, that its Beyond Beef plant-based meat substitute will be in stores by the end of the year. The product aims to replace traditional meat by offering a product that looks, tastes, feels, and smells just like ground beef.
That’s been an issue for the traditional veggie burger which is a popular choice among vegetarians but is not as popular among those who choose to eat meat. It just doesn’t taste as good, but Beyond Meat is aiming to change that stigma by offering more meat-like alternatives.
Beyond Meat is produced with a blend of pea, mung bean, and rice proteins that offers similar nutritional value with just a quarter of the fat. It actually has more protein than traditional beef; the company says a single serving contains 20 grams. For those concerned with what’s in their food, Beyond Meat says its ground beef substitute contains “no antibiotics, hormones, soy, gluten or genetically modified organisms.”
“We’ve long had our eye on creating a product that enables consumers to enjoy all the benefits and versatility of ground beef while tapping into the human health, environmental, and animal welfare benefits of plant-based foods,” Beyond Meat founder and CEO Ethan Brown says.
The introduction continues an aggressive growth strategy by the company as the demand for alternative foods increases. By the end of 2018, Beyond Meat’s products were available at 35,000 locations worldwide, and the company had completed construction of a new 26,000-square foot lab in El Segundo, California to continue research on new plant-based food substitutes. Beyond Beef is one of the first “innovations” to come out of this lab.
The company’s moves are a good indication of the increasing innovation and competition in the space. Its chief competitor, Impossible Foods, showed off a burger at CES 2019 that those that have tried say tastes very close to a real burger. There the company relied on a plant-based method to create heme, which is what makes meat taste like meat.
Other companies like Nestle plan other plant-based burger products, while another company, Aleph Foods, claims to have created the world’s first cell-grown minute steak. From the looks of it, 2019 could be a very busy year in the alternative foods space.
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.