 coming up on D T N S ice cream made from real milk without cows a major quantum computing hurdle may have been passed and Blair Baszrich introduces us to the wonders of the robot chameleon D T N S this is the Daily Tech News for Monday August 16th 2021 in Los Angeles I'm Tom Merritt in lovely Cleveland Ohio I'm the show's producer Roger Chang and I'm joining us is Blair Baszrich yeah thank you Blair it's good to have you back thanks so happy to be here of course Blair the host of this weekend science we were just chatting with Blair about elephant milk I tried out some of the non cow made ice cream that we're gonna talk about in a minute if you want to hear my thoughts on that good day internet become a member patreon.com slash D T N S where you can join our top patrons like Reed Fischler Michelle Sergio and Mike McLaughlin let's start with a few tech things you should know the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened a formal investigation into Tesla's autopilot driving system of the 31 investigations by the NHTSA into crashes involving autonomous driver assistance system since 2016 25 involved Tesla autopilot with 10 deaths reported the information sources say that Wang Tu Zhong Wen technology owned by three Chinese state entities took a 1% stake in bite dance the bite dance Chinese entity sources also say as part of the deal the Chinese government can appoint a board director with bite dance this would reportedly not give the Chinese government any stake in tiktok according to a Walmart job listing the company is looking to hire a cryptocurrency and digital currency product lead senior director this position will be tasked with developing the digital currency strategy and product roadmap as well as identify a fine further investment and partnership opportunities in crypto if you undersea internet cable headlines amazon and facebook ask the FCC to approve a cable between the Philippines and California slated to start operation in late 2022 google and facebook announced they will take part in the apricot undersea cable system to link Japan Singapore Taiwan Guam the Philippines and Indonesia that one's planned for 2024 and facebook china mobile and mtn group announced that an expansion of its to Africa undersea cable network for Africa adding the seychelles kormoros angola and a new connection to Nigeria now set to reach 26 countries the connectivity standards alliance one of my favorite alliances delayed the release of the matter smart home standard until the first half of 2022 originally planned for late 2021 a rough version of the specification should be ready by the end of 2021 for all of you matter diehards out there but the dev kit first device certifications and formal certification program are being delayed to match the quote expectations of the market all right let's talk a little bit more about that no cow milk lab made foods want to be considered technology right alongside chips and wireless protocols hence you see beyond meat constantly making announcements at CES so who are we to resist new scientists reports on perfect days lab made dairy perfect day operates a bioreactor that cultivates genetically engineered fungi aka you know like a mushroom that contain genes that code for the way protein rodan in cow milk the way protein can be filtered out from the fungus dried and powdered and then used in cheese and ice cream products it contains no lactose or home organs or cholesterol but it is not suitable for people with a dairy allergy because it's an actual dairy protein vegans get ready for some cheese it also claims to produce 97% fewer greenhouse gases than a typical dairy perfect day sells brave robot ice cream I tried right before the show as well as providing materials for Knicks and graders brands and they have partnered with Hong Kong's Ice Age ice cream so if you can find any of those you can find the perfect day made ice cream they plan to release cream cheese by the end of the year and they're not the only ones either new culture is making cheese through a fermentation process that doesn't involve cows and turtle tree labs makes milk from cultured cells including human milk for baby humans to drink people that's that's like a formula replacement so I'd say the ice cream wasn't bad. Yeah I mean it's it's a really exciting kind of approach that they're taking here it what's interesting is that this is a lot of kind of legacy science that was originally developed in the 70s to kind of at least conceptually get this started but it seems to have kind of been kickstarted by these alt milk revolution or surge in popularity the revolution is a little little grandiose but that the surge in popularity that we're seeing with that the realization that there are a lot of people that for whatever reason don't want to or can't drink lactose or you know are looking for you know to reduce the amount of hormones or something in their intake and stuff like that so you know really kind of putting all that together and making this the science has been possible for a while but maybe making this more feasible for an investment and kind of marketability perspective as well because I mean you know Tom that wasn't like an like an extravagantly expensive ice cream was it. No it was like 399 you know maybe a little more expensive than than your your your you know normal brands but but not not crazy expensive more like on the Ben and Jerry's level yeah okay it's the question is what makes milk milk and what makes meat meat right because there are things like the lactose that's a that's a key protein in what part of what makes milk milk if you take the lactose out if there never was lactose to begin with is it still milk and also will the people who don't drink milk because of reasons related to either climate change and environmental impact or how the dairy cows are treated or is it suddenly okay now to eat this which like we've talked before on the show about the the 3D printed meat and whether I would eat that or not because I don't eat red meat and it's I still don't know the answer I think I would but it's yeah it's a really tough it's it's a it's a weird thing for you to think about it's a nice thought exercise that's actually coming to pass which is really interesting yeah and this one's a little bit different because with with the lab grown meat it's literally cells right it's literally like muscle cells being cultivated whereas this is a fungus that's just making a protein so does that make you a little more comfortable I don't know right because it's still it's still the protein it's still the organic material but it's not like you say it's not the whole milk situation which could have a whole other bunch of people saying yeah so it's not really milk and maybe there's unforeseen consequences to having just whey protein it is artificial it is processed because of that but I have to say it tastes like regular ice cream to me so the whey protein was enough to give it that texture anyway yeah and the new scientist article did kind of illustrate I mean beyond the tech angle kind of how this the the verbiage or I guess the industry you know within Dariable kind of will relate to this in terms of being like you know like the the US FDA you know says has a very specific definition of what is milk and what is milk so whether you know whether this will be able to be called milk or or however we brand this like I know ice cream has like all these different definitions of what's premium or you know all these that relate to like cream content and stuff like that so that may be a little bit of a of a trade industry battle about whether we can call this milk or this is you know whatever you want to call it you know perfected fermentation or something like that I don't think fungus juice is probably really going to be sure number one on there but I mean they've they've solved that for pee milk milk made from peas so I mean they can they can figure it out for the fungus I'm sure yikes yeah I know there was a conversation about calling cashew milk and almond milk nut juice for a while which I'm glad that didn't stick yeah the dairy farmers were very much in favor of them calling that I don't think the almond milk makers were so excited all right well moving on qubits are the basic computing units of quantum computers unlike a classical computer they're not they're not only ones and zeros there but also in superposition allowing the compute certain things much faster that pretty much answers every question you could possibly have about quantum computing so I will move on the qubit has been implemented as the spin of an electron it's controlled by magnetic fields traditionally delivered by a wire prop up in those fields means only what the electrons closest to the wire can be controlled which means more wires which means less room for qubits the whole thing needs to operate at 270 degrees below zero Celsius and adding more wires heats things up so you can see it's just a kind of a constant battle there the biggest quantum computer we've had is a Chinese 76 qubit system although d wave has a system that claims an effective 5000 qubits we can get into the the politics of how you count qubits uh uh you know tom I'm sure you have some thoughts on that scientists at the university of New South Wales and Sydney published research in the journal science advances however about a new technique which could expand the number of qubits you can control in a quantum computer into the millions range the Australian scientists have developed a system that doesn't use wires but generates the magnetic field from above the chip it's coming from above the chip manipulating all qubits simultaneously up to four million qubits the idea for this first service in the nineties but this is the first time someone's actually developed a practical way of achieving it the scientists used a crystal prism called a dialectic resonator which already sounds like it's from the future to focus the magnetic wavelengths from microwaves to below one millimeter the system doesn't need a lot of power so it doesn't generate much heat and control is evenly spread across the chip the team experimentally verified the system by controlling millions of qubits at once they now need to work through some engineering challenges to make it a usable processor tom I know you've been following quantum computers across your your various shows or various years the advances from you know single qubits into the tens excited to see it possibly going to the millions range with this advancement yeah it'll be good to see this become a more practical situation but it's it's a pretty exciting paper nonetheless to say that they've done it they still got a lot of techniques to work out to to make it so that you everybody can do it all the time but that really does take away one of the big hurdles to creating lots of qubits and as soon as you can create lots of qubits and power efficiently control lots of qubits which is what they're they're saying they can do here suddenly you can make practical quantum computers that aren't eking along and going well I think maybe we have quantum supremacy maybe we can solve a thing with a quantum computer that you can't with a Newtonian computer and everybody arguing whether it's really true or not you can just have four million qubits to go oh yeah there's no doubt this can do things that a classical computer can that's really exciting is it a situation though that do we need to wait for that four million qubit bit or is that if this even allows an expand of like just like an order an order of magnitude you know say like you know into the into the thousands ten thousands is that like where we're going to see oh we're like we're we're folding all the proteins we're predicting all the weather is that the kind of leap and then everything beyond that is you know we just kind of expect from the quantum perspective I mean I I think so you know I'm not a quantum scientist but from what I can tell even if even if the engineering of it limits the the the amount to a million you're still well beyond 76 right you're well beyond arguing whether d-wave is really controlling 5000 qubits or not so so the you know the order of magnitude there is is is huge and I I think it unleashes a lot a lot of uses for this also the power efficiency going down means that it could be more widespread you wouldn't necessarily only have IBM and Google and HP and big companies have these as mainframes it it would be the same thing that happened when we went from a mainframe computer to a desktop computer potentially anyway yeah and that's the exciting thing is like we've covered stories where there are you know it's a big deal when a quantum computer is being installed in like a business right as opposed to like at a research institution or on a corporate campus or something like that and the fact that you know this could change the power requirements to make it much easier to put these around also like having the number of quantum computers up could also kind of have that effect not just having one big giant you know super powerful one too all right speaking of chips intel announced it's upcoming high performance discrete consumer gpus will be branded as arc a r c not a r k intel does have a thing called intel arc a r k where you can like check product designs but this is a r c arc uh intel has released extremely limited discrete z d g one graphics cards before but arc will be intel's first mass market discrete gpu since back in 1998 if y'all remember the i7 40 gpu back in 1998 that's the last time we had a mass wide super the first arc cards will be released in q1 2022 based on intel's z h p g gpu architecture codename alchemist intel says they'll support hardware rate tracing they'll be fully direct x 12 ultimate compliant which means they'll offer graphical goodies like variable rate shading mesh shaders sampler feedback feature wise these should be roughly on par with current amd and nvidia offerings so they're checking all the boxes but intel also said it's working on artificial intelligence driven super sampling so similar to nvidia's dlss or amd's fsr there's still a lot of unknowns though uh we don't know what kind of processing node they're going to use we don't know how many configurations will be offered at launch uh to say nothing of any performance metrics because nobody's gotten to benchmark them uh but intel has already put a roadmap out so after alchemist you're going to get battle mage followed by celestial followed by druid yes alphabetical by fantasy entity will be the naming of the intel gpu's a harsh nay a harsh veto on the naming chart there but what's inch what's interesting about this is intel actually has a proud tradition of cancelling planned uh discrete gpu's they've done it a number of times i think the most recent was uh lara b or lara me uh in the mid two or in the i guess uh late 2000s uh around there uh this has just been a market they have not been able to crack the fact they're coming out with a roadmap itself i mean you know the you mentioned the i740 there were two successors that they basically unreleased them they came out and they were so underwhelming that they kind of took them off the market um intel's making a lot of hey about hey we're we're going to be making cpus for other people we're we're investing in technology this kind of to me is is key well one of the other key things for them as they continue to expand to not just be the x86 company obviously a lot of their and i mean these are consumer cards but this has a lot of ties to other you know kind of gpu computing driven uh projects although that's super sampling not having that seemingly at launch i think is a big deal it sounds like that's not like coming down with battle mage i mean i don't know but if there's a multi-year gap where they're still working on that and an nvidia and amd can kind of mess up you know have support for that for a long time i i feel like that is a pretty significant gap in today's gpu marketplace ours technica seemed to imply that that was coming with alchemist so i think there's still a little confusion about that as well uh folks all next week is dtns experiment week that's right uh with much of the world out on vacation we'll be swapping out our normal daily tech news show and trying out some new show ideas each day so dtns taken down for the week but cool new stuff coming like chris ashley's barbecue tech show jen cutter on the state of video gaming rob dunwood's second look at tech news uh riches ask a luddite and a few more it all starts next week so be prepared if you're like wait a minute this isn't my normal daily tech news show it's experiment week august 23rd through the 28th right here on the dtns feeds scientists in south korea have published an article in the journal nature communications about a robot they created that can change its skin color just like a chameleon uh blare you brought the story to us and it's fascinating is is this really like a chameleon how does the system work kind of so uh chameleons we actually haven't known for sure how chameleons changed their skin color until pretty recently it was always kind of assumed it was similar to cuttlefish and octopuses and the fact that you know they use kind of fluid filled sacks called chromatophores that are teeny tiny and they expand or contract so that from far from kind of the the macro angle they look like they've changed all one color the chameleons are pretty similar it turns out they change colors by rearranging a lattice of nano crystals in the top layers of their skin they're called erythophores so they have these tiny crystals made of guanine and so they based on their ordered arrangement and rotation changes their color reflection so the the light reflection the wavelength so that changes what color they appear to be and so this this robot is pretty similar they have on their top layer of skin if you want to call it skin they have a thin glaze of liquid crystal ink and then it can take on any color depending on the alignment of molecules so yes very similar and so they change based on temperature the way that they they decide what color to be and so that is a built-in sensor that changes the color of the skin based on the perceived color the the robot chameleon is walking on yeah so so it's it's the same technology that's in an lcd television the liquid crystals just implemented in a different way and it's it's not as fast is it I understand it's not as fast as a as an actual chameleon would be no definitely not no we're not very good at replicating natural adaptations generally speaking but it's within about a half a second it it does change faster depending on the temperature of the room around it and if it's going from hot to cold or cold to hot so it's easier to heat than to cool down make sense and so if the if the room is warm then it's harder to cool it back down to change it into some of those cooler colors yeah but so of course this has implications for like the military hunting wildlife observation lots of potential kind of uses here obviously I'm thinking about like a wildlife surveying camera that's on a drone that then is camouflage this is where my brain goes but um yeah no there's lots of cool implications it's nowhere near smooth yet it can't really fully change into patterns yet has a few pre-programmed patterns it can handle but otherwise it needs a lot more work before it can be closer to what a chameleon does yeah I mean looking at that's the interesting thing is to think about we we've you know we've kind of made an approximation of how something like magical nature work I mean not magical obviously but like thinking about what we can do with this I mean just the video watching this little robot crawl across this color swatch was just like it gets your mind spinning I mean I don't I don't know if there's like a superhero application to this that's kind of where my like my mind went like it's it does seem so science fictiony to to see it in action well it would be for the superhero that can change colors to their environment but this way they wouldn't have to be naked to do it they can have color change clothes that's always a benefit it's for your for your chameleon mutants out there it's a it's a relief for sure yeah and for your mpaa rating when you make the movie all right well our next story here in the first full week of august switch games from nintendo and third parties swept the top 30 best-selling games in japan reportedly the first sweep by a single platform since 1988 so it's been a while nintendo was behind that too part of this dominance is the continued sales of older titles for nintendo on the switch with the top slot in the week where they swept on the switch the the switch edition of the legend of zelda skyward sword originally reached on the we in 2011 the analyst at npd report that for the us switch games took a nine of the top 20 spots in july so a strong showing certainly in the us but uh not not quite a sweep of the top 30 you know there are other games on the chart uh you know i think mario cart uh the latest mario cart that came out on the we you and then was ported over to the switch is still in like the top 10 uh we have you know a lot a lot of the classic house like splatoon too a lot of these semi-launch titles or recent releases for the switch uh when it first launched uh are on that list it seems like you know nintendo has not jumped on the hey subscribe to a bunch of switch game bundles that microsoft seems to be really getting on the bandwagon on uh you know that you still have to pay your 60 bucks for your switch title pretty much unless you shop the sales uh but working out in terms of game game skills uh at least for now but just a kind of impressive of note to see that top 30 sweep yeah indeed uh i think one of the uh one of the things that that people will probably point out is you know nintendo doesn't have a subscription service like said uh and and so you know maybe what does that mean for subscription services well it doesn't mean anything because the subscription services account for their money in different ways and are valuable for do in for doing for different way reasons uh and so dominating the charts uh either the charts have to to change or the charts will only be telling you how well for sale games are doing not how well games are doing in general if people are using subscription services more often yeah and but we should point out also that this isn't the first time nintendo since 1988 has swept the top 30 in terms of like having all the games but they've been spread across council generations whether it's the Game Boy, Fanicom, Super Fanicom, you know whatever you want to say it so uh because i thought that too i was like there had to have been a week where they just had all the releases knocked out of the park but this is a single console uh kind of on there so you know a fun little story and uh hey nintendo they're still uh still rocking it yeah they're really good at what they do take us to space all right well we'll finish up here uh nasa's latest international space station resupply mission included machine from the red wire regolith print project meant to demonstrate 3d printing using moon or other extraterrestrial rocks also known as regolith this new machine will work with the iss's existing man d printer to try 3d printing simulated regolith and testing its strength if successful the goal is to someday let space colonists print some of their habitat on demand so they're right now they're testing on artificial moon rocks basically to see if those are going to be strong enough so that they can take this to the moon or mars and then print real structures out of real moon or martian rock at some point um kind of cool to have to not take everything with you maybe be able to build stuff on demand uh that's a game changer when it comes to a lot of planning uh for you know going to other places this is great it's i i am constantly talking to people about how we keep removing mass from our planet and sending it out into space and how that's a problem that's we're sending mass away from our planet you understand like when it's in the life cycle here it doesn't go away but when we send it into space it's gone so this is great that we can actually use matter from the planet that we are hanging out on to create things in space rolling on other planets that is a really good point because it's one of those problems that's not a big deal right now the percentage of mass we're sending is so small just like you know the percentage of carbon dioxide we were admitting a long time ago was so small or the amount of of sewage so you were throwing in the river was so small right like you maybe want to get ahead of these problems earlier and think about solutions not not so that you stop putting things into orbit or even sending them to mars but when you get to the point where it's industrialized and you're sending a lot of them you don't have to send them because honestly it's not even just sending our mass into space it's also just costly to lift it up out of the atmosphere wouldn't it be better if you could just print a bunch of stuff once you get there here's your snacks and your floppy disk with all of your 3d printing blueprints there you go exactly all right let's check out the mail bag previously we talked about the company who makes plume a way to optimize wi-fi coverage and provide motion detection without cameras they use the delay in wi-fi to tell oh an object must have been in the way because we're getting a certain pattern of delay middle-aged Mike wrote in and said i was interested to hear your plume story because i'm a plume user via my isp my isp is my local electric company last year when i decided to upgrade my service to their one gigabyte synchronous tier as a part of that tier you receive a set of three plume mesh router plugs and access to plumes premium service they're easy to set up you just plug them into a wall it's about the size of a plug-in air freshener the plug acts like a google nester euro mesh network and optimizes your connections with their software those we understand that it's not mesh and it's kind of the similar idea their app is fairly basic outside of setting up your network there aren't many options the motion detection has been available since i first installed it but i've never used it there is also a setting for the monitoring you and patrick discussed they call it privacy mode but they tell you to leave it off i have it turned on i don't care to share my info with my isp or have plume protect me from hackers and cyber criminals or monitor my network traffic metadata to do so all in all i'm happy with the router it was free and i have a great standalone network for my media but don't really trust their privacy mode i only use the plume for my streaming devices tvs light bulbs etc amazon prime grit box they all know what i'm doing anyway so i guess i'm giving them metadata about my use of those all my computers my phones my tablets are on a separate network to go through a vpn at the router signed one of your loving bosses middle-aged mike mike thank you for the for the on-the-ground report about plume there that was great yeah you can send any other feedback you have back again at dailytechnewshow.com and a special thanks to russell manthi who is one of our top lifetime supporters for dtns thanks for all your years of support russell and rich let's thank blair yes blair thank you so much blair basritch for being on the show getting sciency talking about all the good stuff where can people find more of your great work if they are so inclined yeah you can find out about twist this week in science at twist science with onus you can also watch us every wednesday at twist.org slash live at eight p.m pacific time or we are on itunes and everywhere else you find podcasts as well and i'm on twitter as at blairs menagerie because most of what i tweet is related to animals awesome we are live monday through friday at four thirty p.m eastern 2030 utc find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live we'll be back tomorrow with anna lee newitz see you then this show is part of the frog pants network get more at frogpants.com