Archive for the 'Food' Category
McDonald’s Acquires AI Company to Help Automate the Drive-Thru
September 10th, 2019In other AI news, 120 Million Workers May Need to be Reskilled or Retrained in the Next Three Years. Via: CNBC: McDonald’s said Tuesday it has agreed to acquire a company that is trying to automate the drive-thru. It’s the fast-food giant’s third tech-focused deal this year. Apprente, a Silicon Valley company founded in 2017, […]
“Fussy Eater” Goes Blind and Deaf After Years of Eating Only Junk Food
September 4th, 2019Via: Ars Technica: A British teenager has permanent vision loss, hearing loss, and weak bones after years of eating only select types of junk food. The teen’s doctors eventually diagnosed him with a relatively newly defined eating disorder called avoidant-restrictive food in-take disorder (ARFID). … The crack in the case came when he finally confessed […]
The Average U.S. Farm Is $1,300,000 In Debt
August 14th, 2019Via: End of the American Dream: We haven’t seen anything like this since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Leading up to this year, farm incomes had been trending lower for most of the past decade, and meanwhile farm debt levels have been absolutely exploding. So U.S. farmers were desperate for a really good year, […]
California Farmers Are Planting Solar Panels as Water Supplies Dry Up
August 2nd, 2019In Blade Runner 2049, the California Central Valley looks like this: (In case you’re wondering, the solar concentrators in the opening scene of the film were inspired by the idiotic Ivanpah Solar Power Facility, which is based on concentrated solar thermal energy.) Nestled in among the heliostat fields are protein farms: They grow some variety […]
U.S. Fast-Food Drive-Thrus Will Soon Use License Plate And Facial Recognition Technology
July 13th, 2019I like the picture at ZeroHedge of a morbidly obese person ordering slop at the drive-thru. Wow. Via: ZeroHedge: License plate recognition could be the new big thing at American drive-thrus, according to FT. Chains are now looking to deploy cameras that recognize license plates and help identify customers, personalizing digital menus and speeding up […]
Solein: Synthetic, Protein-Heavy Product, Tastes Like Wheat Flour, Made from Electricity, Water and Air
June 29th, 2019Safety? I can’t find anything related to safety. Also, even if there were claims about it being safe to consume, should we believe them? See: Vaccines, aspartame, GM food, fluoride, etc. “The foodstuff was said to mark a break with a thousand years of production…” Alright. How much time and effort will be spent studying […]
Corn Prices at 5-Year High as Flooding Leaves U.S. Plantings Way Behind
June 19th, 2019Via: MarketWatch: U.S. farmers are millions of acres behind their usual pace of corn planting this spring because of flooding, which may lead to a supply shortage that lifts prices by year end past $5 a bushel to their highest in more than five years. Corn planted in the 18 states that account for the […]
Citizen Cattle
June 7th, 2019Via: Ben Garrison:
Americans May Be Ingesting Thousands of Microplastics Every Year
June 7th, 2019Via: Smithsonian Magazine: Microplastics are everywhere in our environment: oceans, soils, the air, the bodies of animals. It’s hardly surprising, then, that the tiny fragments have also been found in humans. But a new study is shining troubling light on the quantity of microplastics Americans are consuming each year—as many as 121,000 particles, per a […]
High Radiation Levels Found in Giant Clams of Marshall Islands Near U.S. Nuclear Dump
May 28th, 2019Via: Los Angeles Times: Researchers have found high levels of radiation in giant clams near the Central Pacific site where the United States entombed waste from nuclear testing almost four decades ago, raising concerns the contamination is spreading from the dump site’s tainted groundwater into the ocean and the food chain. The findings from the […]
