Imagine you are at a cocktail party. The room is crowded, people are coming and going, and you can barely hear your friend as they tell you some juicy gossip about the date they went on last week.
The fact you can still follow what their saying is down to your brain performing some very complex operations amid all the noise. Out of all the sound waves reaching your ears, it is successfully isolating the one of interest while filtering out the rest.
Trying to understand how the brain does this has kept auditory neuroscientists occupied since the 1950s, when British cognitive scientist Colin Cherry first coined the term “the cocktail party problem”.
This was initially studied in experiments that asked volunteers to listen to two speeches simultaneously – but only repeat one of them aloud afterwards. Cherry found that listeners could follow and repeat the pre-selected message remarkably well, despite both speeches being played simultaneously, one in each ear. In contrast, they recalled very little of the other message.
These experiments laid the foundation for decades of selective attention research. But it is only in the past 15 years that scientists have studied this phenomenon in experiments that more closely resemble the complicated, multi-layered way we listen in the real world – using technology that accurately tracks the brain’s activity as speech unfolds.
The most common non-invasive option, electroencephalography (EEG), uses what looks like a swimming cap fitted with small sensors. These measure very fast changes in the electrical activity of populations of neurons (the brain’s nerve cells) with millisecond precision.
In a 2014 study, neuroscientists found that, within 200 milliseconds of hearing someone speak, the brain favours the conversation someone is focusing on over all other noise. This prioritised attention shows up most markedly in secondary brain areas such as the superior temporal gyrus, which are responsible for piecing together the sounds we hear into meaningful speech.
This suggests that our attentive brain is not just enhancing the voice of who we are listening to, but helping us make sense of their words while filtering out all other conversations and background noise.
The original cocktail party problem did not investigate the full range of people’s listening experiences, which are often much less static. In everyday life, we repeatedly switch and reorient our auditory attention – for example, when hearing our name called across a crowded room, or when a door slams.
But what happens in that brief moment when we stop listening to one person and turn our attention to another? Can the brain switch from one voice to another instantly, or does it briefly have to process both? These were questions we investigated in our latest study with colleagues from the Eriksholm Research Centre in Denmark, which is funded by Danish hearing aid manufacturer Oticon.
Clarifying how the brain manages these rapid shifts in attention can help explain why some conversations are easy to follow while others become difficult, especially in noisy environments.
Coming back to the cocktail party: here you are, focused on your friend’s voice as they reveal the identity of their recent date. But then another familiar voice suddenly reaches your awareness. Your partner is (secretly) telling a friend about the surprise birthday gift they are planning for you. Your attention immediately shifts to your partner’s voice, while still giving the appearance of listening to your friend.
When we tested such a scenario in our laboratory, we found something striking. During this attention reorienting, the brain does not simply drop one voice and turn to the other. Rather, for a short period of between one and two seconds, the neural signals associated with the two voices overlap. In other words, the brain starts tuning into the new speaker before it has completely let go of the old one.
This mechanism may help explain how we navigate the constantly changing soundscape around us, moving our attention from one voice or sound to another while maintaining enough information about the previous speaker to make that transition seamless. This efficient processing strategy could be described as the brain maintaining a smooth “attention continuum”.
These insights have some important real-world applications. For example, traditional hearing aids are often designed to favour sounds coming from in front of the listener, which is obviously limiting in many situations.
But using enhanced these attention decoding techniques, hearing aids could be neurally steered not only to enhance the speaker that is currently attended to, but to switch between different speakers, almost in real time, as the listener’s attention is dynamically reoriented.
More generally, understanding how the brain shifts, maintains and combines information from different speakers can give us a clearer picture of how attention shapes what we ultimately hear, understand and remember.
The approach introduced in our study could be particularly useful for studying how individuals vary in their attentional strategies, particularly in noisy environments – and for relating these differences to the mental effort they use to follow and understand speech.
Ultimately, this brings us closer to understanding how the brain makes successful communication possible – at cocktail parties and everywhere else.
Sara Carta received funding from the William Demant Fonden and Taighde Éireann – Research Ireland.
Giovanni Di Liberto receives funding from William Demant Fonden and Taighde Éireann – Research Ireland. He is also supported by Research Ireland at ADAPT, the Research Ireland Centre for AI-Driven Digital Content Technology at Trinity College Dublin.
The cops who’re using Flock cameras to supposedly track down criminals and stalk their ex-girlfriends alike are quite literally laughing in our faces as they tap into the all-seeing surveillance panopticon.
According to a new investigation by the Electric Frontier Foundation, a not insignificant number of police officers are submitting nonsense, joke reasons to officially justify the searches they conduct on Flock systems.
One officer with the Lake County, Indiana Sheriff’s Department wrote “LMAO” in the Flock software’s “reason” box, before searching across more than 19,000 cameras in over 1,500 cities and towns.
The frivolous reasoning is a case in point of why there’s so much outrage over Flock’s AI-powered cameras — which are nominally intended to be licenese plate scanners — and how they’re frequently being abused by cops. Unlike traditional surveillance cameras, Flock’s are part of a centralized network and require no warrants to use. With such little oversight, it’s easy for police officers to conduct sweeping searches for wanton reasons.
In its investigation, which was reported on by 404 Media, the EFF found dozens of examples of cops writing childish responses like “LMAO,” “LOL,” “Hehe,” and “IDK,” in the reason box for Flock searches.
An alarming number simply button mashed their keyboards. “ghjhghjg,” was a sufficient reason for one officer in Oklahoma to plow through the recordings of over 83,000 cameras. Thousands of others simply wrote uninformative responses like “investigation” and “test.” The odd cop left short little messages, all seemingly unaware that their stated reasons would become public record.
“robbery I don’t remember the case number leave me alone,” one wrote.
“f*** this new search engine,” wrote another.
Following up on its findings, the EFF contacted police departments and found that few, if any, of the cops were meaningfully disciplined for their flippant entries. At most, a few were “counseled,” but by and large the departments tried to deflect and offered excuses.
Flock, conveniently, changed its software in late 2025 so that cops can no longer type in their own “reason.” Now, they’re provided a dropdown list of pre-made reasons instead. The EFF blasted the move for causing a “loss of transparency,” as it obviously doesn’t encourage cops to be more serious. It merely papers over the fact that they weren’t treating the powerful surveillance tools seriously in the first place.
“This culture of abuse has allowed police to treat a mass surveillance network like their own personal search engine,” condemned the EFF in a post about its findings, “permitting the tracking of the movements of everyday citizens for low-level complaints, personal whims, and sometimes, seemingly, for the lols.”
More on privacy: Trump Throws His Weight Behind Flock Cameras
The post Cops Are Giving Complete Nonsense Reasons to Search Thousands of Flock Cameras appeared first on Futurism.
Waymo called the cops on two youths in San Francisco after catching them handling an assault rifle while in the back of one of its robotaxis, according to local reports. Both passengers, a boy and a girl, have been arrested.
On the morning of September 4, Waymo intervened and pulled over a vehicle after detecting a “violation of our terms of service involving a firearm,” a company spokesperson told the LA Times, after which it alerted emergency services.
Police were called to the scene in the city’s Richmond District just before 4 AM, and conducted a “high-risk vehicle stop,” a spokesperson for the San Francisco Police Department told SFGATE.
When officers searched the car, they found a “ghost gun” — an untraceable, homemade firearm assembled from kits or 3D-printed parts — imitating an AR-style assault rifle. They also found, less ominously, some “suspected marijuana and mace spray.”
The young pair were arrested and booked into a juvenile detention center, the spokesperson told SFGATE, and are facing charges related to illegally possessing a firearm. Their ages and identities haven’t been released.
Robotaxis rely on a host of cameras to observe their surroundings, and they also closely monitor what happens inside their cabs, making them an obviously bad choice to take a joyride in or possibly commit crimes. It remains unclear, though, what the teens intended by toting around their makeshift rifle.
This isn’t the first time Waymo has tipped off local law enforcement about its own passengers. In July, it pulled over a car and alerted the San Mateo Police Department after realizing that its riders, two 15-year-old boys, were reportedly drinking in the backseat and shooting water beads out of a toy gun.
There have also been incidents of unruly and possibly illegal behavior in its cars that didn’t lead to arrests. As Waymos and other robotaxis become more popular, rowdy passengers will almost certainly become a more frequent problem.
More on robotaxis: Oops! Many Tesla Cybercabs Actually Do Have Steering Wheels, Undercutting a Core Promise
The post Waymo Calls Cops on Passengers With Assault Rifle appeared first on Futurism.
Battenberg cake is one of my favourite cakes. But when I tell people that one of the things I like most about this cake is its E-number, they tend to look at me strangely.
It contains the raising agent E541, acidic sodium aluminium phosphate, which is one of the most restricted food additives in the UK. This is due to health concerns about human exposure to aluminium.
According to the UK government regulations, E541 is permitted in almost nothing except “sponge cakes produced from contrasting coloured segments held together by jam or spreading jelly and encased by a flavoured sugar paste”.
The reason for this curious exception is that Battenberg manufacturers managed to persuade the authorities that the additive was essential for achieving the cake’s chequered pattern, and that aluminium exposure from such a niche product wasn’t a health risk.
This level of specificity in the regulations surprises most people, who assume that additives are loosely regulated, casually thrown into food by manufacturers cutting corners. It’s part of a massive counter-movement against additives, driven by fears over ultra-processed foods and a desire for “clean” labels. Though these concerns are understandable, my view of the scientific evidence is that the reality is a little different.
Additives, of course, are compounds used to enhance foods in different ways, but mainly they are about control. When you cook in your home kitchen, the results can be very variable – which is often part of the fun. No-one expects two homemade cakes to look or taste the same, while breads out of your kitchen oven can be very different if you make them from different batches of flour.
For commercial foods, it’s a different story: industrial production relies on predictability, while consumers expect consistency. Few of us would be happy if supermarket breads, biscuits or burgers varied from batch to batch. So commercial foods are usually standardised — and additives help to achieve that.
Welcome to our series exploring the cutting edge of food science. From the latest advances in meat alternatives to weird and wonderful new additives, science is transforming what we eat like never before. This series will bring you up to speed on all the latest and give you plenty of, er, food for thought.
Their number one role is preservation: extending shelf life, making it possible to produce foods further away, and often making them more affordable in the process.
Propionic acid (E280) stops bread from going stale and mouldy. Antioxidants like vitamin C (E300, aka ascorbic acid) and vitamin E (E306/tocopherol) prevent fats from oxidising and going rancid. Emulsifiers stabilise products such as mayonnaise which would otherwise quickly separate.
Creating a specific texture and flavour is also very important. Thickeners improve the creaminess of yoghurts and some cheeses. Emulsifiers also help to make ice-cream smooth and chocolate soft. Citric acid (E330) can help zing up a salad dressing, while also dialling down the earthiness in some plant-based milks.
Another use of additives is to overcome the problem of raw products of different quality. Wheat from a wet, cold year can behave very differently from the same variety in a dry, hot year. This can mean differences in protein content and gluten formation during baking, which can affect how much breads rise, for instance.
Ascorbic acid and synthetic fats (mono and diglycerides of fatty acids (E471) can compensate for this and ensure the quality of bread is consistent. Likewise, adding E500 (bicarbonate of soda) and E336 (cream of tartar) – in other words, baking powder – ensures cakes and muffins are light and fluffy.
In the same way, jam depends on the pectin content of fruits, which is affected by factors that can’t be controlled – extra sunlight during growing reduces it, for instance. So manufacturers add pectin (E440) during jam-making to ensure it gels properly.
Or take meat, whose water retention can be improved by adding phosphates like E451. This ensures that natural fluids don’t leak out in the supermarket chiller section (phosphates are also more dubiously used by some meat producers to enable them to add water to cheaper cuts so that they look more attractive to consumers). As for milk products, you can avoid the risk of separation by adding carrageenan (E407), a seaweed gum, which strengthens their protein network.
Indeed, whole product categories would barely exist without certain additives. Many low-fat spreads rely on gelling agents to mimic the texture of butter. Without sweeteners, there would be a much smaller selection of low calorie and low sugar foods.
Read more: Sweeteners and the quest for the perfect alternative to sugar
Very little of this is about deceiving consumers — and it should not be. The need to ensure the consistent quality of produce using additives is probably much greater than most people realise.
While we’ve only referred to them as additives for about a century, these compounds have been around a great deal longer. Findings from the Qesem Cave in Israel suggest ash was being used to preserve foods as much as 200,000 years ago.
In times when the food supply has been unreliable, meaning most of our history, preserving food was essential to human survival. Entire empires have been built on the trade of another vital preservative, salt, to be used either as brine for pickling or as crystals/powder for drying.
Nitrates (E251) and nitrites (E250) have also been used as additives for many hundreds of years. In Roman times they were used as a constituent of rock salt, both for preserving meat and to keep it nice and pink. With a little more chemical know-how, these compounds are still used today.
Another preservative in use since Roman times is sulphur dioxide (E220), both for wine and foods such as fruits. The Romans obtained it by mining brimstone and heating it into a liquid that could be made into sulphur candles. These could then be burned to produce sulphur dioxide gas in the presence of whatever was being preserved.
The Romans also used additives to make dull, bland food more palatable. Garum — the ubiquitous Roman fish sauce – provided salty and umami flavours by fermenting fish guts. Lead acetates, obtained from boiling grape juice in leaden pots and kettles, were used as a non-calorific sweetener – in wine, for example. It wasn’t until many centuries later that it was proven that this additive was poisonous.
Towards the end of the 18th century, we developed a better understanding of how additives work thanks to advances in food chemistry. It also became possible to extract these compounds in a laboratory, such as lecithin from egg yolk to be used as an emulsifier, pectin from apples, and agar, another gelling agent, from seaweed.
A few decades later, chemists started synthesising additives, which often proved cheaper and easier than obtaining them naturally. Salt of hartshorn – also known as Baker’s ammonia (E503) – could be made by heating ammonium sulphate obtained from soot in combination with limestone (calcium carbonate).
Previously extracted from deer antlers, this was used as a raising agent and preservative for things like digestive biscuits and lebkuchen, a German gingerbread. Much like making aspirin in a laboratory instead of extracting it from willow bark, or digoxin instead of foxglove tea (for heart problems), synthetic and purified additives allowed much better control over their use.
Scientists’ better understanding of chemical and physical mechanisms in the 19th century also allowed new additives to be developed to suit the food industry and consumer demand. These included dyes like aniline purple and martius yellow, both obtained from coal tar, and new flavours like amyl acetate, a byproduct from fermenting alcohol, which gives a sense of pear or banana. These were unveiled at the Great Exhibition in London in 1851 for the first time.
Other additives allowed the use of cheaper ingredients or extended shelf lives. Borax, also known as sodium borate, was harvested from lake beds starting in the late 19th century and added to sub-standard milk and butter to mask sour tastes and kill bacteria.
Additives also began to allow the development of new products that could be used as cheap alternatives, such as margarine. Though originally made from beef fat and skimmed milk in the 1870s, it became vegetarian around the turn of the century after chemists worked out how to make food oils solidify by forcing hydrogen into them at high temperatures (known as hydrogenation).
Margarine solved one problem – the affordability of butter – but food scientists realised a few years later that it created another: it lacks the vitamins naturally found in dairy. So from the 1920s onwards, manufacturers also started fortifying it with vitamins, as well as making it more attractive by incorporating emulsifiers, flavours and colours.
Elsewhere, the use of additives has put consumers at risk, often due to unscrupulous characters. They made bread whiter with chalk, for instance, at a time when many people were already suffering from malnutrition. They sweetened wine with lead salt long after it was known to be toxic. There have even been cases in more recent times of wine being sweetened with anti-freeze.
One other notorious case was the Bradford sweets poisoning of 1858. At the time, sugar was very expensive due to high taxes, so confectionery manufacturers would mix it with plaster of Paris to keep costs down. In the Bradford case, an apprentice muddled up plaster of Paris and arsenic, which led to around 20 people being killed from eating toxic peppermint lozenges.
The 20th century brought massive changes to the food system: a rapidly growing population needed to be fed, scientific advances provided a better understanding of food processing, and the rise of synthetic chemistry made hundreds of new compounds available. The upheaval of two world wars accelerated these processes as new products such as canned meats, sliced cheeses and even packets of crisps were all made possible by additives.
The same goes for British sliced bread. The Chorleywood process, named after the village near London where it was invented in 1961, revolutionised production of the daily loaf. By adding lard, ascorbic acid and extra yeast to dough, then mixing it at high speeds, there was no more need to wait hours for the mixture to rise.
This allowed the mass production of bread, which was extremely helpful in meeting ever growing demand. It also allowed the use of British-grown flour, which often has a lower protein content, meaning its dough traditionally didn’t rise as well. In subsequent years, other additives have also become common ingredients in this mass-produced bread, including E471 (mono- and diglycerides of fatty acids) as emulsifiers to improve dough handling and E282 (calcium propionate) as a preservative to enhance shelf life.
The post-war decades saw dramatic societal changes: rising incomes, longer working hours, and more women entering the workforce. These all created demand for foods that saved time and preparation. Ready meals, packet soups, instant desserts and salad dressings all reached supermarket shelves for the first time. This wouldn’t have been possible without emulsifiers, stabilisers, gelling agents and preservatives – even if such details were quietly hidden on labels that often sought to make these products look as traditional as possible.
At the same time, synthetic coal-tar dyes made sweets vivid and soft drinks luminous. Artificial flavours like strawberry, banana, pineapple, sometimes not tasting remotely natural, could be added to almost anything at negligible cost. And artificial sweeteners made it possible to indulge without sin … or at least calories.
For several decades between the 1950s and 1970s, all these new products were seen as unambiguous progress. At a time when science was enabling everything from tower blocks to rocket ships to the pill, it made perfect sense that it was doing the same for our eating habits.
The enthusiasm for this modern food was short lived. In 1973, Californian allergist Benjamin Feingold suggested that additives – in particular artificial dyes and flavourings – were responsible for hyperactivity in children. His book, Why Your Child is Hyperactive, became a bestseller. The so-called Feingold diet became popular among parents, eliminating artificial colours, flavours and other additives.
In Britain, Maurice Hanssen’s E for Additives (1984) was another major blow to this industry when it became a bestseller in the 1980s. It detailed the purpose and health risks of all the E-numbers, which were devised as a European mark of safety, so that only additives considered safe were allocated one. Now they became culturally inverted into a warning sign.
The case against additives wasn’t quite what many began to believe, however. There was little proof that Feingold’s diet could reduce hyperactivity, even after extensive research. This may have been because of the strong genetic component in the condition.
In 2007 the UK’s Food Standards Agency commissioned a research study to investigate the effect of some artificial food colourings on hyperactivity. Children in the study showed some increase in hyperactivity from consuming the compounds in question – tartrazine (E102), sunset yellow (E110), quinoline yellow (E104), carmoisine (E122), ponceau 4R (E124) and allura red (E129).
Yet the European Food Safety Authority decided there was sufficient uncertainty that there was no need to change the permitted use of these additives. Instead European lawmakers mandated that foods containing them carry the warning “may have an adverse effect on activity and attention in children”, which applies today in the UK and across the continent.
In parallel, the additives industry has tried to adapt to consumers’ concerns about the things that go into foods. For the past several decades, we have seen a plethora of products which claim to be free from “artificial colours and flavours” – and sometimes even “free from chemicals” (although that is impossible).
Much of this “clean-label” movement has been about replacing E-numbers with ingredients that sound more natural, though in many cases the manufacturers just replace additives with plant extracts that contain the same compounds.
Acerola extract contains vitamin C, for instance, but sounds better than E300. Seaweed extract sounds much more natural than E407 (carrageenan) and turmeric extract better than E100 (curcumin). Similarly, vegetable salts or celery extract in processed meat replace nitrite (E250). The nitrite in these compounds will still act — turning the meat more pink and killing bacteria – but the consumer is not always aware that this additive is even present.
In the EU and UK, whether something counts as an additive legally depends on what it does, not where it comes from. However, this often depends on interpretation. Acerola cherry extract, for example, is almost always added for its vitamin C content, which acts as an antioxidant. However, it usually appears on the label as a fruit ingredient rather than as ascorbic acid (E300). Clean labelling probably employs as many lawyers as food scientists.
One example of how this plays out is Naked Bacon, made by Northern Irish company Finnebrogue. The goal was to remove nitrite from bacon to make it healthier – not just create a nicer label. As an alternative to nitrite and nitrate, they used a proprietary fruit and spice extract called Natpre made by Spanish manufacturer Prosur. This was initially marketed as free from E-numbers. The Food Standards Agency, however, took the view that the ascorbic acid (vitamin C) in the mix was an additive that had to be declared. After a lengthy dispute the company agreed in 2018 to list “antioxidant: ascorbic acid” on the label. The remainder of the extract is still declared as “natural flavouring”.
As well as these kinds of uncertainties, there’s also a potential problem with plant extracts as alternatives to existing additives: a rigorously tested compound is being replaced by something less understood, and still potentially harmful, in the name of a cleaner label. They can contain natural toxins, for instance, while the levels of the additive can vary by batch.
Another part of the stigma against additives is that they enable industrially produced food, which has come to be seen by many as inherently unhealthy. This was abetted by the likes of US journalist Michael Pollan’s bestseller, In Defense of Food (2008), the documentary Food Inc (2008) and TV chefs like Jamie Oliver.
This mindset probably partly derives from all those unsavoury practices I mentioned in the early food industry, where chemicals were used to disguise spoilage, extend products or improve appearance.
Wrapped up in this is a romanticism of natural food, viewing chemical intervention with suspicion. Many people still see natural as better and healthier, though there is actually little evidence for this claim.
Whether industrially produced food is unhealthy depends very much on what is in the food. Foods high in fat, salt and sugar increase the risk of chronic disease, whether it is a home-baked cake or an industrially manufactured cookie. Sure enough, a recent study found no difference in health outcomes between processed and non-processed foods that meet current dietary guidelines.
With today’s focus on ultra-processed foods, it is true that certain industrial additives like emulsifiers and artificial colours and flavours are sometimes used as evidence that a product falls into this category. But the health impact of these foods is more tied to issues like high calorie-density and low fibre content than the toxicity of individual ingredients, so the additives are rarely the primary culprits.
It’s also worth emphasising that without additives, natural food can spoil much more quickly. Almost 20% of foods are lost to spoilage in retail, and more than 30 million years of healthy lives are lost every year to food-borne diseases. Without additives, this situation would be much worse. And at a time when the cost of living is such a burden for so many people, it’s hard to deny that additives make food much more affordable.
Unlike with pharmaceuticals, there is no formal system for checking whether additives are causing harm after they start being used in food manufacturing. Regulators rely on the scientific literature to keep them up to date on any risks, as well as commissioning research studies if there are reasons for concern.
The situation isn’t helped by the different classification frameworks that exist. A recent example is aspartame. In 2023 the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) classified this sweetener as possibly carcinogenic to humans, causing a huge amount of concern.
Yet at the same time Jecfa, the Joint FAO/WHO Expert Committee on Food Additives, whose pronouncements influence food regulation around the world, reaffirmed aspartame’s accepted daily intake of 40mg per kg of body weight. It concluded that there was no convincing evidence of adverse effects at current consumption levels.
This sounds contradictory, but actually the IARC and Jecfa ask very different questions. The IARC asks about hazard: could this substance possibly cause cancer? Jecfa asks about risk: could this substance possibly cause cancer at the amount people eat? Both can be right. A substance can probably cause cancer, only not at the amounts people generally consume.
The IARC, for instance, classes the Sun as a group 1 carcinogen, meaning it’s known to cause cancer in humans. Yet we still recommend sun exposure so that our bodies produce vitamin D. We manage the risk by reducing exposure — either by looking for shade or using sunscreen. As for aspartame, it’s worth noting that the IARC classification put it in the same category as aloe vera and pickled vegetables.
Emulsifiers are another additive currently receiving a lot of attention. Some studies have shown that they can alter the human gut microbiome and disrupt the intestinal barrier. Whether this causes harm is obviously an important question, but there’s much that isn’t yet clear: we don’t know if these effects are harmful, or whether they’re transient or lasting.
The trouble is that changes in the gut microbiome are difficult to interpret. It can change in response to all sorts of alterations to someone’s diet, and while there is some good data on links between the microbiome and health, we do not yet have a clear framework for interpreting what specific changes mean.
To be clear, change in itself isn’t a negative: fermented foods and prebiotics are recommended especially for their ability to change the gut microbiome. Regulators in the UK and elsewhere are actively investigating how to incorporate microbiome data into safety assessments, but the science is not yet at a stage where firm conclusions can be drawn.
It might still seem appealing to ban emulsifiers in the meantime as a precaution, but that might have consequences that eclipse the intended benefits. For example they could be replaced by natural lecithins from sources like egg yolks and sunflower seeds, but these are much more expensive. The consumer would bear the brunt – and there is no evidence that these alternatives are better.
There is also a question of consumer choice. Provided a food is safe to consume within established guidelines, there is a strong argument that individuals should be free to make their own choices, rather than having them imposed on the basis of uncertain evidence.
Alcohol, for instance, is another product categorised by the IARC as a group 1 carcinogen, and there is overwhelming evidence that drinking it can harm your health in numerous other ways. Yet while there are regular calls for tighter regulation of additives with a much better risk profile, calls for a ban on champagne or claret are much rarer.
This isn’t to say that the need for proportionality should always justify inaction. Regulatory agencies should and do act to protect consumers when the evidence warrants it. In 2007 data emerged that red 2G (E128), used as a colouring in sausages and burgers, was potentially carcinogenic and toxic to people’s genes. This was rightly considered serious enough that it was swiftly withdrawn in Europe and elsewhere.
One current area of rapid development has been plant-based foods, where achieving the texture, appearance and mouthfeel of meat and dairy requires a specific set of additives. For example, to produce plant-free dairy products that melt and taste like the real thing, food scientists add synthetic wheys and caseins made using a technique called precision fermentation. This involves inserting synthetic copies of dairy DNA into yeasts or fungi.
The first large-scale application of precision fermentation was actually in medicine in the early 1980s, producing insulin using genetically modified E. coli. The food industry got onboard in the early 1990s, with chymosin, an enzyme essential for cheesemaking to separate the curds and whey. It became the first major precision-fermentation product, and is now used in many milk-based cheeses instead of traditional rennet from calves’ stomachs, producing more consistent results and also vegetarian products into the bargain.
In the last couple of years, companies are now offering the entire suite of dairy proteins including whey, casein and lactoglobulins made in a fermentor as opposed to a cow. This is enabling products that are bio-identical to dairy rather than just plant-based alternatives, such as Bored Cow milk in the US. The line between additives and food itself is also increasingly blurring as different companies and research groups compete not just to produce individual proteins but entire muscle tissue in fermentation tanks.
Meanwhile, AI is somewhat inevitably being leveraged to help drive additives forward. One promising line of enquiry is discovering compounds that can fool human receptors into thinking they’re consuming salt or sugar that isn’t really there, or mask other tastes such as bitterness.
Also promising is a technique called nano-encapsulation, which raises the prospect of wrapping additives in microscopic biopolymers or bubbles of lipid (fat) to prevent them from spoiling. This could prevent colours from fading on supermarket shelves, or vitamins from being damaged by heat, for instance.
Whatever you think of these developments, food additives will probably be around for as long as humans need to consume food that is not freshly prepared. They are neither inherently good nor inherently bad, just tools that can be used to make food safer, more affordable and longer lasting.
Next time you enjoy a slice of Battenberg cake, indulge me by sparing a thought for E541 — and for the system that decided exactly where it could be eaten.
For you: more from our Insights series:
Kyrgyzstan’s Dordoi Bazaar: a world made from shipping containers and a city within a city
The grief myth: it doesn’t come in stages or follow a checklist – like love, it endures
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Gunter Kuhnle has received research funding from Mars, Inc., a company engaged in flavanol research and flavanol-related commercial activities. As a previous member of the EFSA ANS panel and the Committee on Toxicity (FSA), he was involved in the evaluation of food additives. He is currently a member of ACNFP. Gunter also had discussions with Finnebrogue ahead of the release of their Naked Bacon product. He has no financial interest in either Finnebrogue or Mars. The views expressed are his own.
The threat of perjury has a funny way of forcing people to say the quiet parts out loud.
As a recently unsealed and unredacted motion in the ongoing legal battle between the New York Times and OpenAI and Microsoft shows, top AI executives have admitted that training AI models required “an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions.”
In the motion filed on behalf of the NYT, flagged by digital media advocate Jason Kint, attorneys used the quotes of Microsoft director of applied science Brent Hecht and OpenAI cofounder and president Greg Brockman to essentially argue their case for them: that the AI industry built its foundation on an unfathomably large pile of stolen intellectual property.
Hecht, for his part, is quoted calling the AI buildout the “largest theft of labor in human history.” It’s a damning admission as the NYT accuses the two AI labs of copying “millions of [the] Plaintiffs’ copyrighted articles in their entirety without permission to produce substitutive commercial AI products.”
Brockman, for his part, is quoted saying that “publishers” face an “existential threat” from generative AI, which “are largely substitutive, period, [and] will get more and more substitutive as they get better.”
As the plaintiff’s counsel argues, these admissions “eviscerate” any claim to fair use — a statement with which Hecht evidently agrees.
“For Defendants to prevail on this defense ‘would,’ the same Microsoft executive recognized, arguably “make a complete mockery of the idea of ‘fair use,'” the motion reveals.
The damning documents come during the middle stretch of a case that began in 2023, when the NYT accused the two AI labs not only of vacuuming up its original news content, but of using that content to train AI products meant to compete with traditional news outlets.
As Axios recently reported, the battle is far from over, as the presiding judge is expected to decide whether to allow the case to proceed to trial by sometime in 2027.
The post Microsoft Director Privately Admitted AI Was the “Largest Theft of Labor in Human History,” Unsealed Court Documents Show appeared first on Futurism.
It’s always a good idea to carefully consider the company you keep — especially if you happen to work for one of Elon Musk’s massive companies.
According to local channel FOX7, SpaceX manager Kyle Gonzalez has been arrested over the alleged stabbing of a Tesla contractor during a team-building exercise gone horribly wrong.
During the night out with a group of co-workers and friends, Gonzalez reportedly got into a heated argument with the Tesla worker over a game of pool at the Waterhole Saloon, a roadside honky-tonk just outside of Austin, Texas.
Court documents viewed by the Austin American-Statesman claim that the SpaceX manager became irate after one of the women he had entered the bar with went to compliment the Tesla contractor’s performance on a karaoke song. When the Tesla worker asked the woman to join him for a game of pool, Gonzalez allegedly became angry, saying he was “going to kill” the contractor.
That’s when Gonzalez allegedly pulled out his pocket knife and stabbed the man in the neck, leaving him with a one-inch puncture wound, the Statesmen recounts.
The unnamed contractor was then rushed to the hospital for life-saving surgery, and is expected to pull through.
Gonzales was reportedly found hiding out in a nearby parking lot, still holding the bloody knife. Court documents note that the SpaceX manager said he hid “for his safety,” though he later apologized for the attack three separate times. He was charged with felony assault with a deadly weapon, with a bond set at $25,000.
More on SpaceX: SpaceX Vows to Keep Poisoning Nearby Towns With Its Fume-Belching Data Center For Another Year
The post SpaceX Manager Arrested for Allegedly Stabbing a Tesla Contractor Over Karaoke Performance appeared first on Futurism.
In Austin, a man’s attempt to be chauffeured out of his hotel in style was foiled when his confused ride couldn’t even pull out of the building.
His ride, of course, was a Tesla Cybercab — Elon Musk’s self-driving, steer-wheeling free robotaxi.
“The Robotaxi arrived… and then couldn’t get out of the hotel parking lot,” the man, who claims to be a computer engineer, wrote on X, posting brief footage of his trip.
As he went on to explain, construction workers had blocked off one of the lanes. And the gleaming gold Cybercab, in all its canny computing power, couldn’t see the other lane that was left open.
He never made it to his destination, but he did arrive at a destination, albeit rather unceremoniously. The Cybercab “drove back and forth four times,” he said, “and then stopped and said I had arrived!”
“Not a great first experience!” he concluded. “Clearly this technology is nowhere close to being ready for large scale deployment.”
So I arrived in Austin and decided to take a robotaxi ride into work..
— PK (@paul_k_0907) September 15, 2026
The Robotaxi arrived… and then couldn’t get out of the hotel parking lot. There was construction in one lane.. but it couldn’t see the other open lane. It drove back and forth 4 times and then stopped and… pic.twitter.com/101F04Al9n
Tesla rolled out its two-seater Cybercabs in Austin earlier this month, after years of anticipation. The company had already operated a Robotaxi service in the city for over a year using modified Model Ys, but the Cybercab represents its first purpose-built robotaxi — and with its complete lack of driver controls like steering wheels and pedals, its no-turning-back commitment to pursuing genuine human-free driving. (Many of its Robotaxis still requiring a human safety monitor inside the car, something the company is clearly conscious about.)
It hasn’t made quite the splash that Tesla may have hoped, however, with many investors underwhelmed by the Cybercab’s launch. While the golden cars haven’t been involved in any high profile incidents yet, the software’s autonomous capabilities haven’t stacked up impressively next to robotaxi leader Waymo. The company is also being investigated by federal regulators over how it self-certified that the vehicles were safe for the road despite their lack of conventional controls.
The Cybercab’s hotel misfire is part of a long chain of weird behavior by Tesla’s robotaxis. Customers — many of whom are Tesla enthusiasts and boosters — complain that they often pick up and drop them off at inconvenient locations, ranging from the middle of busy intersections to hidden alleys, or at absurd distances from their actual destination.
Still, Tesla boosters have been hard at work trying to hype up the cars. Roughly a week before a Cybercab got trapped at a hotel, another Tesla account posted a video bragging about how a Cybercab picked them up from their own hotel.
“You’ll feel like a VIP getting into this car!” he extolled.
More on Tesla: Cybercabs Are Taking Psychotic Routes That Turn Tiny Trips Around the Neighborhood Into Hour-Long Nightmares
The post Bumbling Cybercab Gets Trapped in Hotel Parking Lot, Drops off Passenger Right Where He Started appeared first on Futurism.
After only a few months on the market, Meta’s new AI-integrated smart glasses are already being exploited for nefarious purposes.
Dubbed “pervert glasses” for their incognito ability to film anybody in public, the new specs have enabled voyeurs and content creeps the world over, leading to widespread harassment, bullying, and privacy violations.
And now the pervert glasses are also feeding another grim genre of content: joybait.
You may have heard of ragebait, which is online content deliberately designed to piss people off, therefore driving clicks and views. Joybait is ragebait’s seemingly innocent twin: content designed to stir up those warm fuzzies and make you smile.
A now-viral clip uploaded by public prank content creator Levese shows that a user of Meta’s AI glasses shows how the scheme unfolds. The video, first spotted by journalist James Vincent, shows Levese catch a glimpse of the author Travis Schick as he shops with his partner in a Walmart.
Crucially, Levese doesn’t approach Schick right away, but rather uses his phone to snap a photo of Schick’s face, which he then searches using a facial recognition site. After the service uncovers Schick’s social media accounts — revealing the random man as an aspiring novelist — Levese makes his approach, recording with his Meta glasses as he catches the unassuming writer off guard.
“Wait, Travis?” Levese asks as Schick tries to check out. “You wrote the book ‘The Readhead?'”
“Yeah?” the confused writer confirms.
“No way I love that book man! Yo I love that book bro,” Levese replies disingenuously. “It was a really good novel.”
“Yeah that was me,” Schick says, trying to contain a smile.
@1evese Let’s Make His Book #1 . . . . | #author #caught #digitalfootprint #fyp |
♬ original sound – 1evese
As positive as the interaction seems on its surface, it’s all based on a false premise constructed through use of facial recognition software, without which Levese never would have known who Travis Schick actually was. Of course, Schick himself is ancillary to the entire scheme, which was really about making some content — joybait — for Levese to post to his 225,000 TikTok followers.
And as content, the stunt was wildly successful. The reel has over 60 million views and 30,000 comments on Levese’s TikTok page alone, and has become easy fodder for content farms on every social media feed you can think of.
On uncovering the clip, the journalist James Vincent remarked that it embodies “individualized surveillance culture posing as feelgood content.”
Falling for the original premise of the bait, some excused the privacy violation, arguing the exposure is boosting Schick’s work.
Sure enough, comments under Schick’s novel “The Redhead” on the creative platform Quotev are flooding in by the hundreds, full of well wishers and supporters who otherwise never would have found his work. Schick’s TikTok page has likewise exploded, going from around 150 followers to well over 12,700 in just a few short days.
But Schick’s viral moment is beside the point, as Vincent observes: “there may be positive outcomes from this one video (which stem from its novelty as short form content) — but the larger effect is creating a society where we monetize kindness, exploit the goodwill of strangers, and destroy the right to privacy in public,” he wrote in a comment on X-formerly-Twitter.
And the aspiring novelist is far from alone. Levese has dozens of videos following the exact same format, each with millions of views. For his part, the content creator is well aware that he’s crossing a line. The first one, in which the content creator stalks a man buying bananas, prominently features pinned text reading “day 1: stealing people’s digital footprint.”
“This app is dangrous [sic],” Levese wrote in the video caption.
More on Meta: Mother Horrified When Meta’s AI Scours Instagram and Facebook for Invasive Information About Her Young Daughters
The post Influencers Are Using Meta’s AI-Glasses to Film Manipulative Feel-Good Slop of People in Public appeared first on Futurism.
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