Month: June 2023

Enlarge (credit: mikroman6 / Getty Images)

Those gummy bears from last Halloween might be hard as rocks, but a new study has used physics and chemistry to find out what factors put gummies at risk of becoming almost impossible to chew—and how to keep them gummy for as long as possible.

Keeping a gooey consistency

Gummies are all about texture. They shouldn’t be too hard, soft, or sticky, but they can become any of those things depending on ingredient content or storage (often both). Keeping them fresh means preventing changes to their internal chemistry that would otherwise occur over time. The ingredients that go into gummy candy, and how much of each is used, will inevitably affect the chemical reactions that occur, as will the temperature they are stored at and how long they stay in storage. So a team of researchers experimented with different formulas and storage methods to come up with the ultimate gummy.

The main ingredients of a gummy are glucose syrup, sucrose, starch, gelatin, and water. Led by Suzan Tireki of Ozyegin University in Turkey, the research team mixed eight batches with varying amounts of those main ingredients (flavor and color were low priorities for this work). The ratio of glucose syrup to sucrose turned out to be especially important because it has the most influence on gummy texture. Glucose is also responsible for sweetness and acts as a preservative by absorbing excess water that could otherwise attract microbes. Gelatin and starch are polymers and gelling agents that help give gummies their iconic texture.

Enlarge / Screenshot from Ron DeSantis ad shows a collage of real and fake images.

A Ron DeSantis presidential campaign video shows three pictures of Donald Trump hugging and kissing Anthony Fauci, all of which seem to be fake images generated by artificial intelligence. One professor told Ars today that there is "no doubt" the ad uses fake AI images.

As reported by AFP yesterday, media forensics experts say the images, which the DeSantis ad passed off as photographs taken during Trump's presidency, have telltale signs of AI. Even non-experts may notice oddities, such as incomprehensible text on a sign that should say "White House" and "Washington."

Of course, another giveaway is that then-President Trump and Fauci weren't really on hugging and kissing terms. Trump repeatedly attacked Fauci and resisted measures to slow the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. Fauci, who is now retired, was the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Enlarge / Surgical implements are seen on a tray during a surgery. (credit: Getty | Ritesh Shukla)

More than 70 staff members of a San Diego-area hospital are calling for a halt of all surgeries at the facility due to unidentified black, brown, and gray specks on surgical trays, the San Diego Union-Tribune reported.

The objecting staff have signed a petition to spur hospital officials to pause procedures until the issue is resolved. But officials at the facility, the Kaiser Permanente Zion Medical Center, have rejected the call, according to the Union-Tribune. A spokesperson for the facility did not respond to voicemails from Ars.

"Providing safe, quality, and timely care to our patients is our top priority, and we will continue to schedule surgeries at Zion that can be safely performed," Kaiser told the Union-Tribune in a statement. "We have confirmed that all measures we are taking to clean, process and transport surgical equipment to our Zion Medical Center for use [are] safe and medically appropriate."

Enlarge / NVIDIA's GH200 "Grace Hopper" AI superchip. (credit: Nvidia)

Early last week at COMPUTEX, Nvidia announced that its new GH200 Grace Hopper "Superchip"—a combination CPU and GPU specifically created for large-scale AI applications—has entered full production. It's a beast. It has 528 GPU tensor cores, supports up to 480GB of CPU RAM and 96GB of GPU RAM, and boasts a GPU memory bandwidth of up to 4TB per second.

We've previously covered the Nvidia H100 Hopper chip, which is currently Nvidia's most powerful data center GPU. It powers AI models like OpenAI's ChatGPT, and it marked a significant upgrade over 2020's A100 chip, which powered the first round of training runs for many of the news-making generative AI chatbots and image generators we're talking about today.

Faster GPUs roughly translate into more powerful generative AI models because they can run more matrix multiplications in parallel (and do it faster), which is necessary for today's artificial neural networks to function.

Enlarge / This box on wheels is capable of charging several EVs at once. (The press release says five, but the text on the side of the trailer says four.) (credit: Lightning eMotors)

One unanswered question about the shift to electric vehicles is how we'll bring EV charging to existing parking infrastructure. Between permitting delays and shortages of qualified workers, charger installation is often a slow endeavor. But that doesn't mean people aren't trying to find solutions.

Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, for example, is testing a number of ideas over the next few months. One of them is a new mobile DC fast-charger from Lightning eMotors, which will be put through its paces June 19–23 charging EVs for staff and customers.

Regular readers might be feeling a sense of deja vu, as we just reported on a mobile charger being tested at DFW in the coming weeks. In that case, it was a robot charger on wheels called Ziggy, which can shuttle between EVs in a parking lot.

Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto / Contributor | NurPhoto)

Instagram has emerged as the most important platform for buyers and sellers of underage sex content, according to investigations from the Wall Street Journal, Stanford Internet Observatory, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass) Rescue Lab.

While other platforms play a role in processing payments and delivering content, Instagram is where hundreds of thousands—and perhaps millions—of users search explicit hashtags to uncover illegal "menus" of content that can then be commissioned. Content on offer includes disturbing imagery of children self-harming, "incest toddlers," and minors performing sex acts with animals, as well as opportunities for buyers to arrange illicit meetups with children, the Journal reported.

Because the child sexual abuse material (CSAM) itself is not hosted on Instagram, platform owner Meta has a harder time detecting and removing these users. Researchers found that even when Meta's trust and safety team does ban users, their efforts are "directly undercut" by Instagram's recommendation system—which allows the networks to quickly reassemble under "backup" accounts that are usually listed in the bios of original accounts for just that purpose of surviving bans.