Your first lab-grown burger is coming soon—and it’ll be "blended"

Will you have to carry a vaccine passport on your phone?

The Download Your daily dose of what's up in emerging technology Happy holidays! ❄️🎄 12.22.20 Good morning and welcome to the final edition of The Download this year. And what a year it has been, eh?! A huge thank you for reading the newsletter, and most of all, thanks for your tweets, emails, and messages. The regular influx of “nice things” from readers has been a daily joy during this tough time. Let’s keep it coming in 2021. The Download will now take a break until January 4. We hope you have a good break if you’re taking one too, and can’t wait to see you on the other side. Now, onto today’s news… why we’ll soon be able to eat “blended” lab-grown burgers, and we look at how and whether vaccine passport apps would work.  Give your friends a free Christmas gift Get them to sign up here to get The Download every day. Your first lab-grown burger is coming soon—and it’ll be “blended” In terms of industry buzz, cultured meat has never been hotter. At the end of 2016 there were just four firms working on it. By early 2020, that number had jumped to more than 50 startups around the world trying to re-create at least 15 different types of animal flesh, including pork, shrimp, chicken, duck, lamb, even foie gras—all without killing a living creature.  But the product is still exorbitantly expensive compared with old-­fashioned meat, you can’t yet buy it at the supermarket, and for the most part it doesn’t look or taste much like the real thing. At least not on its own.  While lab-grown meat was busy trying to find its way out of the petri dish, plant-based meat substitutes were undergoing a revolution. Firms such as Impossible and Beyond Meat broke through to the mainstream by cleverly mimicking the flavor and texture of ground beef, pork, and chicken using vegetable proteins and fats. These days you can pick up an Impossible Whopper at Burger King and Beyond Meat sausages in supermarkets in dozens of countries. That kind of competition could be seen as bad news for cultured-meat startups. But a number of other entrepreneurs think it’s the opening they need to finally bring their creations to market—in the form of “blended meat,” melding the best of the plant-based and cultured-meat substitutes. Even the world’s biggest fast-food firms are interested: KFC has announced it will be working to produce blended chicken nuggets that could be available this year.  Regardless of who gets there first, blended meat is coming, and it might not be long before you get a chance to taste it. Read the full story. —Niall Firth This article is from the latest issue of MIT Technology Review, all about food. Read the full magazine, and if you haven’t already, you can subscribe to MIT Technology Review for the year for as little as $50. Will you have to carry a vaccine passport on your phone? The idea: Now that vaccinations have started, there’s a growing debate over the need for “vaccine certification” or “immunity passports,” analog or digital tools to prove you’re vaccinated. Some experts champion them as a way to get back to normal life, while others warn about privacy risks and the potential for discrimination and abuse.  Will I need one? There’s nothing new about needing to prove you’ve had a vaccine. This use case is just a lot more urgent, given governments, airlines, employers, universities, and many other groups are intensely debating how and why people will need to show verified health records. Hold up there: Until we know whether vaccines stop people from catching and spreading the virus asymptomatically, vaccination credentials only prove that you received a vaccine on a particular date—not that you do not have and cannot catch the disease.  In the meantime, a negative covid-19 test remains the best evidence that you’re not contagious. Vaccine passports can also be easy to forge, and it’s hard to link them up with existing healthcare systems, for example. These are just two of many reasons to be skeptical of a high-tech solution to this question. Read the full story. —Lindsay Muscato and Cat Ferguson We can still have nice things A place for comfort, fun and distraction in these weird times. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet 'em at me.)   + If you didn’t catch the great conjunction yesterday… check out these photos.   + Make a gingerbread house.   + How to cope with the blues this Christmas.   + It doesn’t get much more wintry than northern Sweden at this time of year. Check out these beautiful photos. (NYT $)   + You know there’s a crisis when the fashion world starts embracing velour tracksuits and Ugg boots.   + It’s tough right now. But it will pass. (NYT $)   + Some virtual options for New Year’s Eve.    + The photographer who set out to capture herself getting older on camera. (New Yorker $) The top ten must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 Biden’s been vaccinated 💉 He was injected with the Pfizer/BioNTech covid-19 vaccine yesterday, the same day Moderna’s vaccine arrived in the US. (AP)   + The EU has approved the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine. (Axios)  2 More than 40 countries have banned UK arrivals over the new covid-19 variant There’s pressure to further suppress travel inside the UK, too. (BBC)   + Researchers are investigating if the variant spreads more easily in children. (BBC)   + How the UK government’s failures helped cause this crisis (The Guardian)   + The UK is spooking everyone with its new covid-19 strain. Here’s what scientists know. (TR)  3 Apple has promised to produce a self-driving car by 2024 🚗 Though at this stage we can take deadlines for autonomous vehicle projects with a giant pinch of salt. (Reuters)   4 These apps help you to work out your risk of catching covid-19  If it’s another useful tool in the fight, bring it on. (Nature)   5 Mistletoes are different to virtually all other multicellular life Something to think about while you’re enjoying that kiss. (Quanta)   6 Tech giants are turning on spyware maker NSO Group Microsoft, Google, Cisco, and VMWare have joined forces with Facebook to sue the company over its hacking tools. (Reuters)   + How China used stolen data to expose CIA operatives overseas. (Foreign Affairs)   + How Facebook is enabling censorship in Vietnam. (The Intercept)   + The Treasury was also breached in the giant Russian hacking operation. (NBC)   + Inside NSO, Israel’s billion-dollar spyware giant. (TR)  7 Students are suffering with loneliness It’s surely the worst time to be in college, pretty much ever. (The Verge)   8 Can you train your ears to become more sensitive? 👂 I’m planning to do exactly the opposite over the next couple of weeks, but do go on. (Gizmodo)   9 The US stimulus bill is also a significant piece of climate legislation More of this, please. (Quartz)   10 What if life was just one giant video game? 🎮 That’s the premise of a wildly popular subreddit. (WP $)   + A computer scientist built an app to randomize his life. (Debugger)   + The best games of 2020. (Engadget) Quote of the day “The real mystery is the endgame. It seems like no one knows anything beyond the fact of it, and that, I guess you could say, is alarming.” —Daniel Halpern, founder of the publishing company Ecco Press, tells the New York Times what it's like to be the victim of an international phishing scam that tricks writers, editors, and agents into sharing unpublished book manuscripts. Top image credit: Kate Dehler Please send velour tracksuits to hi@technologyreview.com. Follow me on Twitter at @charlottejee. Thanks for reading! —Charlotte Was this newsletter forwarded to you, and you'd like to see more? Sign up for free Intelligent computing Join us virtually | February 10-11, 2021 Follow us: MIT Technology Review One Main Street Cambridge, MA 02142 Subscription Information Want to change how you receive these emails? You can *update your preferences or *unsubscribe from this list.  This email was sent to Webmaster220 Bible Study Blog   *the blog owner has deleted the hyperlink intentionally