Good chocolate is among the world's most beloved foods, which is why scientists are seeking to improve the product, and enhance the world's pleasure. A team of researchers from Germany and Switzerland -- the heartland of fine chocolate -- have embarked upon a quest to better understand natural cocoa fermentation and have published findings ahead of print in the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology.
"Our studies have unraveled the metabolism of the rather unexplored acetic acid bacteria in the complex fermentation environment," says corresponding author Christoph Wittmann of Saarland University, Saarbruecken, Germany
In the study, Wittmann and his collaborators from the Nestle Research Centre, Lausanne, Switzerland, simulated cocoa pulp fermentation in the laboratory. They mapped metabolic pathway fluxes of the acetic acid bacteria, feeding them specific isotopes that could easily be tracked. Wittmann compares the process to viewing the flows of city traffic from the sky. "We could see what they eat and how they use the nutrients to fuel the different parts of their metabolism in order to grow and produce extracellular products," he says.
The key molecule to initiate flavor development is acetate, says Wittmann, noting that "The intensity of the aroma from a fermented bean is amazing."
Production of acetate requires two major nutrients: lactate and ethanol. These are produced by lactic acid bacteria, and yeast, respectively, during the initial fermentation of cocoa pulp sugars, says Wittmann.
The acetic acid bacteria then process these simultaneously, via separate metabolic pathways, ultimately producing acetate from them.
"This discovery reveals a fine-tuned collaboration of a multi-species consortium during cocoa fermentation," says Wittman. And that may help improve selection of natural strains for better-balanced starter cultures.
When you drop molten glass into water, it creates a droplet shape with a long tail. The droplet head is unbreakable, yet the slightest touch of the tail makes the entire piece of glass explode. We now call this Prince Rupert’s Drop, named after Prince Rupert of the Rhine, who first demonstrated it to the Royal Society.
I have written before about the death of the Renaissance Man: the polymath who could discourse knowledgeably on diverse topics, from literature to astronomy. As what we know has grown, experts have had to specialize, in order to make advances at the frontier. Generalists are few and far between. But in this process, we have lost certain types of colorful characters. And one is the scientist-warrior-prince, embodied by Prince Rupert of the Rhine.
Prince Rupert of the Rhine lived in the Seventeenth Century, was a member of the German royal family, as well as being the nephew, first cousin, and uncle of several kings of England. He was a soldier and military leader. But he also was an active scientist and inventor. He helped found the Royal Society and was known as a “philosophic warrior.” He invented various weapons, was involved in chemistry, and even contributed to biology, with experiments related to the healing of wounds. Some more from Wikipedia:
He demonstrated a new device for lifting water at the Royal Society, and received attention for his process for “painting colours on marble, which, when polished, became permanent”. During this time, Rupert also formulated a mathematical question concerning the paradox that a cube can pass through a slightly smaller cube; Rupert questioned how large a cube had to be in order to fit. The question of Prince Rupert’s cube was first solved by the Dutch mathematician Pieter Nieuwland.Rupert was also known for his success in breaking cypher codes.
Aristocratic gentleman scientists are no longer a commonplace. And I’m not even sure we, as Americans, feel entirely comfortable with this idea. Yet, whether or not we need individuals exactly like Prince Rupert, it is important to try our best as a society to keep the potential for generalists alive. They are, if nothing else, very interesting people.
Vessyl is a cup that always knows what's inside of it. Image: Vessyl
Vessyl is a cup that always knows what's inside of it. Image: Vessyl
Justin Lee, founder of Mark One, started developing the molecular analyzing technology it relies on seven years ago. Image: Vessyl
Justin Lee, founder of Mark One, started developing the molecular analyzing technology it relies on seven years ago. Image: Vessyl
The cup will wirelessly communicate with an app that will ID what you're drinking and record its caloric content, as well as caffeine, sugar, protein, etc. Image: Vessyl
The cup will wirelessly communicate with an app that will ID what you're drinking and record its caloric content, as well as caffeine, sugar, protein, etc. Image: Vessyl
Lee sees it as the other half to the tracking equation. Image: Vessyl
Lee sees it as the other half to the tracking equation. Image: Vessyl
Practically speaking, hauling the same cup around for every drink you have throughout the day might be a tough sell. But the technology is still pretty impressive. Image: Vessyl
Practically speaking, hauling the same cup around for every drink you have throughout the day might be a tough sell. But the technology is still pretty impressive. Image: Vessyl
You’ve quantified yourself. Soon, you’ll be able to quantify your soda.
Vessyl is an ordinary-seeming cup with a fairly extraordinary hidden feature: It always knows what’s inside of it. Using sensors built into its inner walls, it automatically analyzes the molecules of whatever liquid you pour in. It works with all sorts of prepackaged beverages–coffees, beers, wines, smoothies, juices and more. And it’s impressively precise. It doesn’t just know that you’re drinking soda; it can actually tell whether you’re drinking Sprite, Squirt, or Seven-Up.
It will record a breakdown of things like calories, sugar, protein, and caffeine.
The connected cup is the brainchild of Justin Lee, the culmination of seven years of work. Lee sees it as “the other half of the tracking equation.” While we’ve already seen myriad devices that can passively track our physical activity, tracking what we consume throughout the day has been much trickier. Most apps today require that you manually log your food and drink. As Vessyl shows us, in a sensor-laden near future, that might not be the case.
The idea is that Vessyl will wirelessly pass information to an accompanying app every time you fill it up. There, it will record what you’re drinking, how much of it you’ve poured, and a breakdown of things like calories, sugar, protein, and caffeine. The app will also make use of a proprietary metric dubbed Pryme, intended to be an at-a-glance measure of your overall hydration, much like NikeFuel is for activity.
Lee started working on the project as a student in the Human Media Lab at Queens University, in Ontario. While fellow classmates were looking at ways to add connected functionality to all sorts of already-complex products, Lee thought there was something poetic about the idea of imbuing one of our most foundational, mundane tools with technological smarts. Cups are one of the most enduring technologies we’ve created, after all.
After several years of development, Lee felt confident the core sensing functionality was in reach. During a trip to San Francisco, the engineer paid an unannounced visit to Fuseproject, the powerhouse design studio helmed by Yves Behar. Even without an appointment, the technology was impressive enough that the studio took up the job of designing the hardware itself.
Justin Lee Image: Vessyl
It might not seem like a cup presents much of an industrial design challenge. But what was unique about Vessyl is that it had to feel appropriate for many different types of beverages. One of the criteria that guided the design was that it had to look good on a table. Where Nalgenes and other popular water bottles come with a whiff of the camp fire, Lee and the designers at Fuseproject strove to create a cup that looked perfectly at home on a desk, a coffee table, or a nightstand. The design they landed on feels appropriately versatile. It’s elegant, but not too elegant. It’s inconspicuous, and feels sturdy in the hand.
As designed, the Vessyl will have a simple light-up display on the side that shows your Pryme level on the cup itself. A clever magnetic lid will keep things spill-proof, and charging is taken care of just by placing the thing on a companion saucer. You can pre-order one today for $99; retail will be $199 when the cup comes out in “early 2015.”
But There’s One Big Issue
The real world problem with a drink-tracking cup is obvious: It’s just one cup. For it to be useful, you’ll have to bring it everywhere you go. And think about how many different cups you encounter everyday. There’s your coffee mug in the morning, your water bottle at your desk, a can of Coke from the vending machine at lunch, and a glass of wine or two at night. To say nothing of the fact that each of these vessels is uniquely suited for the drinks they carry and convey, it’s going to be a pain in the ass to rinse out and fill-up your high-tech cup every time you grab a new drink.
Still, as we grope toward the still-vague connected world of tomorrow, Vessyl seems like a fascinating milestone. It’s a reminder smart homes could extend beyond appliances to all sorts of less glamorous objects. When I ask Lee if Vessyl’s sensing technology could ever work with something like, say, a knife and fork, he only smiles and says that his company has already envisioned an aggressive roadmap of products.
Figuring how best to employ this intelligence–how to harness it to help people live richer, simpler, healthier lives–remains the very real challenge. Until then, so many of these connected products won’t be anything more than demos. But, as far as demos go, this is an impressive one. I’m not convinced that a cup that knows what’s inside of it is a silver bullet for healthy living, by any means. But watching Lee pour half a can of orange Slice into a prototype container and seeing his phone, after a brief, bubbly animation, light up with the name and flavor of that very soda–that, I have to admit, felt like a peek into some sort of future.
If you want someone to transfer money straight into your bank account, you probably have to look up some very long numbers you have trouble remembering. Typically, such transfers require not only your bank account number, but your bank’s routing number.
That’s a bit of a pain. But an online payments startup called Balanced wants to make things easier. Starting today, the company is offering a new service called Push to Card that lets others send you payments using your debit card details. All they need to send you money is your name, card number, and expiration date.
Normally, a company would develop a new service like this in secret, but Balanced took a very different approach.
The service isn’t available to everyone. Balance doesn’t offer payment services directly to consumers. It seek to streamline payments for online marketplaces, such as RelayRides, Tradesy, and Gittip. And, for the moment, the new Push to Card offering is only available to select marketplaces as part of a private beta program. But it will filter down to consumers through these marketplaces–if Tradesy adopts it, it’s available to Tradesy users–providing yet another way we can simplify how we transfer money from place to place.
After PayPal got things rolling in the late ’90s, the payments world is evolving yet again through startups such as Balance and Stripe–a company that aims to simplify things for ordinary merchants in much the same way Balanced hones operations on marketplaces. And then there’s bitcoin, the open source software that could completely overhaul the way we not only send but store money.
The Push to Card tool was launched with a crowdfunding campaign. Customers using its existing payment services were asked to pay fees for the tool before it was even built. “The idea wasn’t to fund the development of the new feature, but to ask customers to put their money where their mouth is,” says Balanced founder and CEO Matin Tamizi. “Our goal was that if people paid $50k in 30 days, we’d build the feature. We hit that goal in 24 hours, including companies that weren’t even customers yet.”
Such an unorthodox approach is typical of Balanced. Tamizi describes it as an “open company.” That means not only that the company’s services are based mostly on open source software–enough that a competitor could build a clone of Balanced’s services fairly easily–but also that the company tries to make most of its decision in public. This lets employees from all parts of the company participate in major decisions and make suggestions about projects they’re not working on, and it lets the company get feedback from customers on new ideas, such as Push to Card. Bitcoin isn’t the only one reinventing payments with the open ethos.
For decades, Nintendo fans have asked for a game that lets them create their own Super Mario levels, and so of course this has never happened. Until this week, that is; Nintendo has announced that it will bring Mario Maker to Wii U in 2015.
The demo version that Nintendo showed on the E3 floor this week is surprisingly good. You can’t truly grok just how good it is until you try it on for yourself. But Nintendo’s only showing a little slice of the game. And whether Mario Maker is merely good versus mind-blowing is all down to what they do with the rest of it.
Wii U’s GamePad controller, with its touchscreen and stylus, is as expected a perfect control scheme for Mario Maker. You begin with an empty Mario level, and beginning to build out your platforming level is as easy as dragging items, terrain and characters down from the menu bar on the top of the screen. (You can also simply click an item, then click where you want it on the screen.)
The version shown on the E3 floor — which I believe has been stripped down significantly from the real game, so that players don’t spend too much time on it — lets you place enemies from the first Super Mario Bros., although you can tweak them a little bit more than that game allowed. You can put wings on a Hammer Brother and have him pop out of a green pipe, for example, if you are a jerk.
Amazon introduced a new streaming music service for its Prime members today. Amazon Music is an ad-free service that features more than one million tracks from 10,000 albums drawn from the catalogs of Sony, Warner and many independent labels (Universal Music Group’s catalog is absent, as it wasn’t part of the deal). You can listen to music online, or download them to your device for offline use. It goes live today on Kindle Fire HD and HDX, iOS, Android, PC and Mac apps, and the web. Amazon says it will be coming later this year to Sonos, Fire TV, and other platforms.
Streaming music is increasingly a commodity, with the various services trying to set themselves apart via features. Amazon says that it’s focusing on a few key areas. There will be no ads–neither audio nor graphical ads within the app. You won’t have to pay extra to listen to music offline. Nor will listeners have to suffer through tracks they don’t want to hear — you’ll be able to skip songs or reply them to your ear’s content.
There are a few nice features in the service. For example, if you’ve been buying music from Amazon since it began selling CDs in 1998, you’ll see many of those tracks and albums already populated in your library. And if there’s music from Universal you’ve previously purchased—something from Kanye West for example—it will still show up in your personal Amazon Music library even though you can’t stream other Universal tracks. If you’ve only bought a track or two from an album, the service will show you there are more free ones to be had. There are also playlists created by Amazon’s own “experts,” and Songza-style music lists meant to match your mood—for example under “Happy and Upbeat” you’ll find “Pop to make you feel better.” You can, of course, create your own playlists as well.
But really, the main feature is Prime itself. Without a deal that gives access to tracks from Universal, it would be hard to justify choosing Amazon’s streaming service over Rdio or Spotify. But given that this is yet another feature that comes with all the other benefits of Prime, and that the annual cost of a Prime membership is less than an annual subscription to Rdio, Spotify, Beats or Google All Access, it does more to help sell Prime than it does to sell itself as a standalone service. If you think of it as a music streaming service that also includes free shipping from Amazon, a robust video library, and a book lending library, it’s suddenly a very good deal–even without the songs from Universal artists. It is, very much, a way to help suck you into the Amazon ecosystem and eventually buy more stuff from Amazon.
Salesforce.com wants you to wear a computer at work.
This week, the big-name internet software company released Salesforce Wear, an open source software development kit that lets coders build business applications for wearable computing devices such as the Google Glass digital eyewear and the Samsung Gear and Pebble smart watches. Glass, Gear, and Pebble are largely billed as consumer devices, but Salesforce is among the many companies and analysts that hope to push such wearables into the workplace as well.
Mark Benioff and company also released the software code for six example apps, including a tool that can display business metrics on a Pebble watch and a gesture-based application that lets surgeons to pull up patient records without having to touch an unsterilized keyboard, mouse, or touchscreen. These apps aren’t ready for prime time, but at this point, says the company’s senior vice president of emerging technologies Daniel Debow, Salesforce just wants to provide some wearable inspiration for developers.
These include a gesture-based application that lets surgeons to pull up patient records without having to touch an unsterilized keyboard, mouse, or touchscreen.
There are plenty of examples of wearable computers being used in the workplace already. Epson and Evena Medical built a smart glasses system that helps health care workers find patients’ veins. Looxcie’s Vidcie head-mounted camera enables technicians to get live support in the field, as does a Google Glass application built by solar panel installation company Sullivan Solar. And last year, The Independent newspaper reported that UK grocery chain Tesco uses electronic armbands to monitor employee activities and give them scores based on how well they perform.
What Salesforce hopes to provide is an easier and faster way for companies to create their own wearable apps for their employees and customers. “People would have to build everything–like identity and security–from scratch,” Debow says. “But all of this is already built into Salesforce’s existing developer platform.” Salesforce Wear dovetails with this platform, a set of online service for building and running software that hooks into other Salesforce applications, and at least at this point, it doesn’t work with other development platforms. That means Salesforce also sees this new kit as a way of driving interest in its existing services, but whatever Salesforce’s own interests, Debow is adamant that wearable gear is the future.
Nintendo
