Fermentation is key to coffee beans gleaned from civet feces

Fans of kopi luwak claim the coffee has a unique aroma and taste. A new chemical analysis backs them up.

In 2007’s The Bucket List, Jack Nicholson’s billionaire magnate is a fan of a luxury coffee called kopi luwak, only to be informed that the beans first pass through the digestive tracts of civets and are harvested from their feces prior to roasting. The implication is that the billionaire just liked drinking gimmicky expensive coffee without realizing its less-than-luxurious origins. It’s one of the most expensive coffees in the world, ranging from $45 per pound to $590 per pound, depending on whether the beans are farmed or collected in the wild.

Whether kopi luwak is worth that hefty price tag depends on who you ask. A Washington Post food critic once compared the beverage to stale Folgers, memorably describing the flavor as “petrified dinosaur droppings steeped in bathtub water.” Yet kopi luwak has many genuine fans who claim the coffee has a unique aroma and taste. Based on a new chemical analysis, they might have a point, according to a paper published in Scientific Reports.

Technically, kopi luwak is a method of processing, not a specific coffee bean variety. Asian palm civets hang around coffee plantations because they love to feast on ripened coffee berries; the berries constitute most of their diet, along with various seeds. The consumed berries undergo fermentation as they pass through the animal’s intestines, and the civets digest the pulp and excrete the beans. Coffee farmers then collect the scat to recover the excreted beans and process and roast them to produce kopi luwak.

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Nvidia hits record $5 trillion mark as CEO dismisses AI bubble concerns

“I don’t believe we’re in an AI bubble,” says Huang after announcing $500B in orders.

On Wednesday, Nvidia became the first company in history to reach a $5 trillion market capitalization, fresh on the heels of a GTC conference keynote in Washington, DC, where CEO Jensen Huang announced $500 billion in AI chip orders and plans to build seven supercomputers for the US government. The milestone comes a mere three months after Nvidia crossed the $4 trillion mark in July, vaulting the company past tech giants like Apple and Microsoft in market valuation but also driving continued fears of an AI investment bubble.

Nvidia’s shares have climbed nearly 12-fold since the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, as the AI boom propelled the S&P 500 to record highs. Shares of Nvidia stock rose 4.6 percent on Wednesday following the Tuesday announcement at the company’s GTC conference. During a Bloomberg Television interview at the event, Huang dismissed concerns about overheated valuations, saying, “I don’t believe we’re in an AI bubble. All of these different AI models we’re using—we’re using plenty of services and paying happily to do it.”

Nvidia expects to ship 20 million units of its latest chips, compared to just 4 million units of the previous Hopper generation over its entire lifetime, Huang said at the conference. The $500 billion figure represents cumulative orders for the company’s Blackwell and Rubin processors through the end of 2026, though Huang noted that his projections did not include potential sales to China.

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Man accidentally gets leech up his nose. It took 20 days to figure it out.

Leeches have a long medical history. Here’s what happens if one gets in your nose.

Since the dawn of civilization, leeches have been firmly attached to medicine. Therapeutic bloodsuckers are seen in murals decorating the tombs of 18th dynasty Egyptian pharaohs. They got their earliest written recommendation in the 2nd century BC by Greek poet and physician Nicander of Colophon. He introduced the “blood-loving leech, long flaccid and yearning for gore,” as a useful tool for sucking out poison after a bite from a poisonous animal. “Let leeches feed on [the] wounds and drink their fill,” he wrote. Ancient Chinese writing touted their medicinal potential, too, as did references in Sanskrit.

Galen, the physician for Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, supported using leeches to balance the four humors (i.e. blood, phlegm, and yellow and black bile) and therefore treat ailments—as initially outlined by Hippocrates. Leeches, doctors found, provided a method for less painful, localized, and limited bloodletting. We now understand that leeches can release an anesthetic to prevent pain and a powerful anticoagulant, hirudin, to prevent clotting and keep blood flowing.

In the centuries since the Roman era, leeches’ popularity only grew. They were used to treat everything from gout to liver disease, epilepsy, and melancholy. The very word “leech” is derived from the Anglo-Saxon word “laece,” which translates to “physician.”

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New physical attacks are quickly diluting secure enclave defenses from Nvidia, AMD, and Intel

On-chip TEEs withstand rooted OSes but fall instantly to cheap physical attacks.

Trusted execution environments, or TEEs, are everywhere—in blockchain architectures, virtually every cloud service, and computing involving AI, finance, and defense contractors. It’s hard to overstate the reliance that entire industries have on three TEEs in particular: Confidential Compute from Nvidia, SEV-SNP from AMD, and SGX and TDX from Intel. All three come with assurances that confidential data and sensitive computing can’t be viewed or altered, even if a server has suffered a complete compromise of the operating kernel.

A trio of novel physical attacks raises new questions about the true security offered by these TEES and the exaggerated promises and misconceptions coming from the big and small players using them.

The most recent attack, released Tuesday, is known as TEE.fail. It defeats the latest TEE protections from all three chipmakers. The low-cost, low-complexity attack works by placing a small piece of hardware between a single physical memory chip and the motherboard slot it plugs into. It also requires the attacker to compromise the operating system kernel. Once this three-minute attack is completed, Confidential Compute, SEV-SNP, and TDX/SDX can no longer be trusted. Unlike the Battering RAM and Wiretap attacks from last month—which worked only against CPUs using DDR4 memory—TEE.fail works against DDR5, allowing them to work against the latest TEEs.

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