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LG's new ThinQ recipe service sources ingredients from Amazon and Walmart
As usual, LG has unveiled its latest smart appliances for CES 2022, but this time they come with an unusual twist: a recipe service.
Sony's FlavorGraph uses AI to predict which ingredients will pair together
AI has gone into games and self-driving with mixed success, but now it's trying its hand at cooking.
Hitting the books: The ancient technology behind astronaut ice cream
And what orbital party would be complete without the most American of freeze-dried fare, astronaut ice cream?
Vape maker PAX launches PodID to explain what's in your cannabis oil
Consumers want to know what's in the stuff they buy and where it comes from, whether that's food, electricals or clothing -- so why should cannabis be any different? Vape company PAX Labs is rolling out a new feature for its mobile app which gives users detailed information about what makes up their oil concentrate.
Google AI could keep baby food safe
Google's artificial intelligence technology can help the food industry beyond picking better cucumbers. In one company's case, it could prevent your child from getting sick. Japanese food producer Kewpie Corporation has revealed that it's using Google's TensorFlow to quickly inspect ingredients, including the diced potatoes it uses in baby food. The firm and its partner BrainPad trained the machine learning system to recognize good ingredients by feeding it 18,000 photos, and set it to work looking for visual 'anomalies' that hint at sub-par potatoes. The result was an inspection system with "near-perfect" accuracy, culling more defective ingredients than humans alone -- even with a conveyor belt shuttling potatoes along at high speed.
TellSpecopedia breaks down how ingredients affect your health
Few things in life are better than food, and even ridesharing companies like Uber are beginning to take note of this. Still, sometimes it's hard to know everything about the grub you're consuming, making you completely unaware of the impact certain stuff could have on your health. Enter TellSpec, a startup which has created a knowledge database, named TellSpecopedia, to provide people with detailed information on food ingredients. As it stands, the website covers a total of 1,300 every-day elements, including additives, contaminants and "manufacturing by-products," allowing you to search through them, find out what each ingredient is exactly and, ultimately, see if it's good or bad for your health. TellSpecopedia also lets you narrow things down and focus on how a specific ingredient can affect different sections on your body -- there are categories like Gastrointestinal Effects, Metabolic Effects, Cardiovascular Effects and many more. The new online database comes after TellSpec introduced a portable, $150 scanner last year, which allows users to identify food ingredients on the fly.
PantryChic's Bluetooth ingredient dispenser is for lazy, type-A bakers
Earlier this summer, we showed you a smart kitchen scale that worked with an iPad app to make sure you were adding the right amount of each ingredient to your recipe. At the time, it seemed like the Internet of Things had reached its peak. Jumped the shark, even. Well, apparently even that requires too much effort. Meet PantryChic, an airtight food canister that dispenses ingredients into a digital scale, so that you never even have to break out a measuring cup. All told, if you were serious about your baking (and seriously OCD), you could buy any number of these stackable canisters, and fill each with a different ingredient, like baking soda or brown sugar. Then, when you need one, you attach it to the digital scale, which is pre-programmed to dispense 50 ingredients (meaning, it knows how to convert volume to weight). Oh, and don't worry about pushing any buttons: You can connect over Bluetooth using the PantryChic app, at which point the machine can "see" what recipe you're using and know, for instance, that you need three cups of flour.
Making/Money: Flawed by Design
Last week your intrepid blogger was caught up in the other kind of beta testing - a Statistics final. Yeah, that was a bad pun. Oh well. Back to the money talk!In the last column, we discussed value chains and how, in World of Warcraft, they work when dealing with NPCs but not the auction house. Today we are looking at another game and how it deals with value chains to ensure that they do not work when crafting by NPC purchases/sales alone.Lord of the Rings Online offers players vocations - sets of three linked professions that cannot be chosen by themselves. In any given vocation, there is usually one "useful" gathering profession which supports one of the craft professions in the set and another, unsupported, profession. In other words, vocations are structured to enforce cooperation and trade between players by ensuring that no one can gather all the raw materials they will require to level their craft. But that doesn't mean that the supported profession is good to go from the start.
