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Category: food

PlaNet, made by a team led by Google computer vision specialist Tobias Weyand, can determine the location of photos just by studying its pixels.

You can usually tell where a picture was taken by recognizing certain location cues within the photo. Major landmarks like the Great Wall of China or the Tower of London are immediately recognizable and fairly easy to pinpoint, but how about when the photo lacks any familiar location cues, like a photo of food, of pets, or one taken indoors?

People do fairly well on this task by relying on all sorts of knowledge about the world. You could figure out where a photo was taken by looking at any words found on the photo, or by looking at the architectural styles or vegetation.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8QMOYnWBq0

Urban Produce High Density Vertical Growing System is a patented technology that was developed taking advanced hydroponic technology and automating it. Urban Produce has the capacity to grow 16 acres of produce on 1/8 of an acre with just one of it’s High Density Vertical Growing Systems. Our mission is to build our patented systems across the U.S. to provide both locally grown sustainable produce to Urban Cities while also stimulating the local economies. We are 21st century growing! www.urbanproduce.com

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By 2050, the world will need to feed an additional 2.5 billion people living in cities. Yet as the demand for food rises, the amount of land available for agriculture in developed countries is expected to decline. In Japan, at the Fujitsu factory of Aizu-Wakamatsu which still manufactures semiconductor chips for computers, a different project is underway which may offer a solution to this problem. The company has converted an unused part of the factory into a farm to grow food — and more specifically, to grow lettuce. Fujitsu has focused on growing a low-potassium variety, which is sold to people with kidney problems who cannot process the mineral properly. Join Rachel Mealey in Japan’s Fukushima Prefecture to visit the sun-free and soil-free urban farms of the future.

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Food deserts, lack of arable land, and the frozen months of winter are all obstacles we face in our mission to keep people fed. Urban Produce is excelling in this mission by licensing its patented indoor vertical farming technology, which can produce 16 acres of organic, leafy greens in just 1/8 acre of space.

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The age of the restaurant self-service kiosks has dawned, and it’s the end of fast food as we know it.

McDonald’s is striding into the 21st century with the rollout of the “Create Your Taste” touchscreen kiosks, on which custom burgers can be built as well as full-menu ordering.

The kiosks are incredibly convenient and improve order accuracy, to which I can personally attest.

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You are really starting to see the shape of the Singularity, ever more clearly, in the convergence of so many engineering and scientific discoveries, inventions, and philosophical musings.

I can say, without a doubt, that we are all living in truly extraordinary times!

This five-fingered robot hand developed by University of Washington computer science and engineering researchers can learn how to perform dexterous manipulation — like spinning a tube full of coffee beans — on its own, rather than having humans program its actions. (credit: University of Washington)

A University of Washington team of computer scientists and engineers has built what they say is one of the most highly capable five-fingered robot hands in the world. It can perform dexterous manipulation and learn from its own experience without needing humans to direct it.

Their work is described in a paper to be presented May 17 at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

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Google and Amazon were quick to put drones to use delivering orders.

But new research suggests delivery is just one small way drones are going to replace humans. The tiny airborne vessels will soon clean windows on skyscrapers, verify insurance claims and spray pesticide on crops.

The global market for drones, valued at around $2 billion today, will replace up to $127 billion worth of business services and human labour over the next four years, according to a new research by consulting firm PwC.

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A nanoparticle commonly used in food, cosmetics, sunscreen and other products can have subtle effects on the activity of genes expressing enzymes that address oxidative stress inside two types of cells. While the titanium dioxide (TiO2) nanoparticles are considered non-toxic because they don’t kill cells at low concentrations, these cellular effects could add to concerns about long-term exposure to the nanomaterial.

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology used high-throughput screening techniques to study the effects of titanium dioxide nanoparticles on the expression of 84 genes related to cellular oxidative stress. Their work found that six genes, four of them from a single gene family, were affected by a 24-hour exposure to the nanoparticles.

The effect was seen in two different kinds of cells exposed to the nanoparticles: human HeLa cancer cells commonly used in research, and a line of monkey kidney cells. Polystyrene nanoparticles similar in size and surface electrical charge to the titanium dioxide nanoparticles did not produce a similar effect on gene expression.

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