Tag Archives: future technology

World’s First 3D Printed Edible Eel: Sushi Ready

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Hot on the heels of 3D-printed salmon comes the world’s first 3D-printed eel, made by Steakholder Foods using its line of 3D meat printers. Its current iteration of eel is plant-based, but it plans to ethically harvested eel cells and cultivate them once “economies of scale allow for price-competitive cell development.” These are fascinating times for the sushi industry!

SteakHolder’s printing process involves printing alternating layers of varied textures to as closely resemble the meat it’s printing as possible. So, it’s not just a solid block of the same texture and flavor. Its printing technology also allows the company to produce meat alternatives using significantly fewer ingredients than others currently on the market.

Above: A filet of grouper being printed.

SteakHolder Foods CEO Arik Kaufman says, “The launch of our printed eel marks a pivotal moment in the seafood industry…This technology is designed to enable partners to generate products on a potential industrial scale of hundreds of tons monthly, not only at lower costs compared to wild eel, but also with the flexibility to create a variety of printed products using the same production line.”

Would you eat 3D-printed eel? I would. As a matter of fact, I want some right now. Ideally, laid atop some rice with wasabi and soy sauce on the side. Great, now I want sushi. But I just had Mexican! I suppose I still have a little room…

[via TechEBlog]

‘Madeleine’ is a Smell ‘Camera’ That Captures Scents Instead of Images

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Smell Camera

The Madeleine is a camera that’s as unusual as cameras get. Because instead of immortalizing memories by capturing images of it, it captures smells instead. The odor-capturing ‘camera’ of sorts was developed by designer Amy Radcliffe using technology that’s used in the perfume industry.

Amy explains: “The Madeleine works in much the same way as a 35mm camera. Just as the camera records the light information of a visual in order to create a replica The Madeleine records the molecular information of a smell.”

Here’s how it works: the source of the scent or odor is placed inside the glass dome that’s connected to the main part of the Madeleine. A pump then extracts and pulls scent molecules, which are then captured in a resin trap. This trap can then be sent off to a lab to be analyzed and maybe even re-created.

Amy dubs this concept as “scent-ography” and envisions this as an alternative way of recording memories, saying: “From manipulating our emotional well-being through prescribed nostalgia, to the functional use of conditioned scent memory, our olfactory sense could take on a much more conscious role in the way we consume and record the world.”

VIA [ C|NET ]

Telephoto Contact Lenses May Be Right Around The Corner

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telephoto-contact-lenses

Imagine putting your contact lenses on, flicking a switch, and suddenly getting magnified vision. If the project by a team of researchers from the US and Switzerland (led by University of California San Diego Professor Joseph Ford) ever becomes a commercial product, you may be able to do just that. Initially developed for patients with macular degenerative disease, the lenses feature a telescoping area in the center, which can provide 2.8X magnification:

The new lens system developed by Ford’s team uses tightly fitting mirror surfaces to make a telescope that has been integrated into a contact lens just over a millimeter thick. The lens has a dual modality: the center of the lens provides unmagnified vision, while the ring-shaped telescope located at the periphery of the regular contact lens magnifies the view 2.8 times.

To switch back and forth between the magnified view and normal vision, users would wear a pair of liquid crystal glasses originally made for viewing 3-D televisions. These glasses selectively block either the magnifying portion of the contact lens or its unmagnified center. The liquid crystals in the glasses electrically change the orientation of polarized light, allowing light with one orientation or the other to pass through the glasses to the contact lens.

Granted, you have to wear a pair of glasses over your contact lenses for this to work, so we’re far from the “bionic enhancement” that most geeks are hoping for. But it’s early tech, and there’s no telling what the next few years have in store.

[ Press Release ] VIA [ DVice ]

Telephoto Contact Lenses May Be Right Around The Corner

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telephoto-contact-lenses

Imagine putting your contact lenses on, flicking a switch, and suddenly getting magnified vision. If the project by a team of researchers from the US and Switzerland (led by University of California San Diego Professor Joseph Ford) ever becomes a commercial product, you may be able to do just that. Initially developed for patients with macular degenerative disease, the lenses feature a telescoping area in the center, which can provide 2.8X magnification:

The new lens system developed by Ford’s team uses tightly fitting mirror surfaces to make a telescope that has been integrated into a contact lens just over a millimeter thick. The lens has a dual modality: the center of the lens provides unmagnified vision, while the ring-shaped telescope located at the periphery of the regular contact lens magnifies the view 2.8 times.

To switch back and forth between the magnified view and normal vision, users would wear a pair of liquid crystal glasses originally made for viewing 3-D televisions. These glasses selectively block either the magnifying portion of the contact lens or its unmagnified center. The liquid crystals in the glasses electrically change the orientation of polarized light, allowing light with one orientation or the other to pass through the glasses to the contact lens.

Granted, you have to wear a pair of glasses over your contact lenses for this to work, so we’re far from the “bionic enhancement” that most geeks are hoping for. But it’s early tech, and there’s no telling what the next few years have in store.

[ Press Release ] VIA [ DVice ]

This is the Modem World: So what’s next?

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Each week Joshua Fruhlinger contributes This is the Modem World, a column dedicated to exploring the culture of consumer technology.

DNP This is the Modem World

I just spent a week in Japan, where I attended my first Japanese wedding in Tokyo. It was lovely, different and the same all at once. I've been coming here almost annually since 1998, and while most things have remained the same, I've watched Japan's pace of consumer technology innovation take a seeming nosedive in recent years. I have no solid evidence to prove this -- just some observations.

When I first visited Tokyo in 1998, Japanese mobile phones were years ahead of their American and European equivalents. Japanese mobiles were lightweight, had high-resolution -- for the time -- color screens, allowed internet access and some even had video cameras that supported real-time video chat.

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