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What would you do if…

Imagine you’re on holiday in France with your partner. It was an absolutely amazing adventure with a camera roll full of photos and videos for memories.

Holidays now over, and you two drive for hours all the way back to the UK. You two are now unpacking your luggage in the car only to find some dude has been hiding at the back of your vehicle THE WHOLE TRIP BACK!!!

Yeah, I don’t know about you, but I’d be shitting bricks!

By the way, this is an actual real life story that happened to an actual real life couple!

The ‘stowaway’ was a 16-year-old migrant from Sudan, who boarded their vehicle on their way to the UK via ferry. As soon as he was discovered, they called the police to report the situation.

but the plot thickens….

You’d think (I don’t even know what I thought would happen, but) the police would pull up and take the boy into custody and you know, do police stuff (which they did do); but they ended up also slapping the couple with a £1,500 fine for “check that no clandestine entrant was concealed“.

You really can’t win with these people

There’s this food lab called Mattson who have over the last 50 years been “creating the future of food“.

They’ve recently been working on what they call “GLP-1 Optimised/Friendly products”, which are foods that include reformulated ingredients that can potentially bypass the effects of GLP-1 drugs (Ozempic, Wegovy and the likes).

So for context, GLP-1 works by mimicking the hormones that tell your brain you’re ‘full‘ in turn resulting in reduced appetite.

Why all this you ask?

Well, one of the side effects of this drug is that users report changes in the types of foods they are interested in eating and tend to prioritise organic food over processed foods. So people on GLP-1 are buying less food (well less processed food) - and that in turn means less money for “Big Food“ companies.

In an interview with Bloomberg, Walmart US CEO, John Furner, mentioned that they’ve noticed people taking GLP-1 agonist appetite suppressant medications are buying "less units, slightly less calories".

Food engineers are now hard at work to create this new range of foods to get GLP-1 users, which sort of defeats the purpose of the drug. It would be interesting to see how this develops over time and if it actually catches on.

Humaine has now shut down 

Remember Humaine - the company that made the AI Pin that caused such a major uproar in the tech space last year?

Well, they’ve now shut down operations. They announced they had been acquired by HP for $116 million! This deal includes Humane’s CosmOS, Humane’s technical staff and will also include over 300 patents and patent applications.

They reportedly started looking for buyers shortly after they launched, due to poor sales.

As of 3 PM ET on February 28th, all Ai Pins stopped connecting to Humaine servers, essentially leaving customers with bricked devices.

Bloomberg reports that “Humane’s team, including founders Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, will form a new division at HP to help integrate artificial intelligence into the company’s personal computers, printers and connected conference rooms,” per an HP executive. The new team will be called HP IQ, which will be “

Breakthrough research making ‘waves‘ in animation

Researchers at Yale University and University of California, Santa Cruz have now figured out how to properly and more accurately recreate black hair digitally.

Why does this even matter, you ask?

Well simulating and animating hair digitally has always been a massive pain in the ass for animators. To solve this problem, several algorithms have been created to help simulate hair. However, this opened up another can of worms as most of these algorithms were based on loose curls and straight hair, leaving out afro hair types with tighter curls such as 4C, etc. So they would have to manually tweak things to get things to look as close to accurate as possible, which I can tell you is not a fun task. Hence why a lot of animated black characters ended up having odd-looking hair.

The Curly-Cue: Geometric Methods for Highly Coiled Hair study by Haomiao Wu, Alvin Shi, A.M. Darke and Theodore Kim

One of the biggest wins from this project was figuring out how to make curls that aren’t just perfect spirals. Coily hair has these little “switchbacks” where the curl changes direction, and they found a way to show that. They also figured out how coily hair naturally separates at the ends, which works differently from straight hair.

This is exciting research for the TV, movie and game industries - It would be great to see how this is implemented in the future.

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