Nut milks are everywhere. The nut beverage’s 2010 arrival in dairy cases helped lead to a 13% growth in milk alternatives, though it had been available in shelf-stable varieties for years. Now it’s easy to find oat, hemp, and cashew milks in a normal grocery story. Perfect Day hopes to spark a similar trend with its flora-based foods.
Co-founders Perumal Gandhi and Ryan Pandya were unenthusiastic vegans, whose dairy cravings never quite subsided. They went looking for a substitute that could allow them to enjoy cheese, milk, and ice cream again.
Unlike plant-based beverages, the flora-based products are made from the same proteins as cow’s milk, only without the cow. It’s made by fermentation, with a boost from bioengineering. Artificial casein and whey genes (which are found in milk) are combined with a fungus, Trichoderma, that thrives on plant sugars, so the protein-creation process is animal-free.
“We then carefully separate these milk proteins and combine them with plant-based sugar, plant-based fats, and nutrients to produce a product that has the identical taste and texture of cow’s milk, but packs in more nutrition with no food safety or contamination concerns,” Pandya told Digital Trends in 2016. Because Perfect Day is creating real milk proteins, those allergic to those them will still have to steer clear of its products. The goal is to create a product with the creaminess that comes with milk protein (that plant-based products have difficulty mimicking), while using fewer resources, like water and land.
Gandhi knows people are going to be confused, and possibly skeptical, at first. “We need to come up with new vocabulary for this field in general, because this isn’t plant-based. It’s also not animal-based,” he said during a panel at the Smart Kitchen Summit in Seattle on October 7. “It’s sort of its own third category.” While he’s hoping “flora-based” will catch on — and become widely adopted — the process could also be referred to as “fermentation-based.”
Another issue is that the Food and Drug Administration dictates what products can be called ice cream. The dairy industry has objected to plant-based varieties being called milk. Though Perfect Day said it would have products on the shelves within a year back in 2016, the rollout has been much slower — and expensive. Perfect Day provided its first proof-of-concept product with $20 pints of animal-free ice cream. To bring down the cost, the company plans to partner with other manufacturers to make other (more affordable) flora-based dairy products over the next couple of years.
Another startup, New Culture, is also attempting to make animal-free mozzarella through a similar process. Gandhi thinks these animal-free, fermented substitutes will play a role in feeding a growing population more sustainably, but to really make an impact, they can’t do it alone, he said.
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.