Month: March 2022

Enlarge / Don’t you hate it when ice crystals form and make your ice cream all crunchy? Scientists at the University of Tennessee found that plant cellulose could work better than the additives manufacturers currently use to slow the growth of ice crystals. (credit: Sally Anscombe/Getty Images)

We’ve all made the mistake of leaving a container of ice cream on the kitchen counter for a bit too long. Sure, you can refreeze the half-melted treat, but you may find that the texture is far more crunchy than delectably creamy afterward. The culprit is overly large ice crystals. Scientists at the University of Tennessee think they’ve found a plant-based additive to stop the formation of these crystals, and it’s more effective and cheaper than the additives currently used by ice cream manufacturers. The researchers presented their work at this past week’s meeting of the American Chemical Society in San Diego.

“Food science is not cooking,” Tao Wu, a food scientist specializing in carbohydrate chemistry, said during a press conference. “It’s a multi-disciplinary field that uses chemistry, biology, and engineering to solve real-world problems in the production of food. For instance, we must use good chemistry knowledge to produce high-quality ice cream.”

The basic science involved in making ice cream is well known. (Physics students have even been known to use liquid nitrogen to make their own ice cream in the lab.) Just heat milk, cream, and sugar until the sugar dissolves; cool the mixture; and add any flavorings. Then slowly churn that mixture as it freezes. This adds air to the mixture, inflating the volume (overrun). The best ice creams, including gelato, have an overrun of less than 25 percent compared to cheap commercial ice creams, where the overrun can be as high as 100 percent. That higher overrun is why cheap ice creams melt more quickly and don’t store as well. Finally, pack the soft ice cream mixture into containers for the final step in the process (hardening).

Enlarge / Eugene Kaspersky, CEO and founder of Moscow-based Kaspersky, at the 2020 World Internet Conference (WIC) at Wuzhen, China. (credit: Getty Images)

The Federal Communications Commission on Friday determined that security products from Kaspersky posed an unacceptable risk to US national security and added the company to a covered list of other firms not eligible for FCC funds.

The move adds Kaspersky to the same covered list that Huawei and ZTE landed on in 2021. Besides its Moscow headquarters, the company’s founder, Eugene Kaspersky, attended a KGB-sponsored technical college and has long been accused of having ties to Russian military and intelligence services.

Kaspersky, which was already banned from all US government networks, was one of three firms added to the covered list on Friday. China Mobile and China Telecom were the other two.

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  iFixit removes the Mac Studio’s SSD. [credit:
  iFixit
  ]

iFixit’s teardown of the Mac Studio found a monstrous thermal management system attached to a relatively small computer, among other things.

The teardown video depicted a somewhat complicated but not insurmountable process for getting inside that little metal rectangle, and there weren’t too many surprises. The video identified some ports, showed the removal of the logic board, and perhaps most notably, uncovered a dual-fan cooling system inside the machine.

Further, iFixit talked about the much-discussed SSD swapping situation. It is possible to swap out of the storage provided you’re using storage of the same size and type, at least—but that requires using a device firmware update (DFU) restore. (Read our article on the subject for more about that.)

Enlarge / A woman wearing a face mask leaves a pharmacy in the town of Podolsk some 40 kilometers outside Moscow on November 12, 2021. (credit: Getty | YURI KADOBNOV )

As Western countries continue to ratchet up sanctions and boycotts against Russia, the country’s citizens are panic-buying medicines, such as antidepressants, sleeping pills, and contraceptives, according to Reuters.

Between February 28 and March 13, Russians bought 270.5 million pharmaceutical items worth about $104 billion, according to sales data compiled for the Russian business newspaper Vedomosti. That two weeks’ worth of buying was comparable to what Russians bought at pharmacies for the entire month of January, which saw purchases of 280 million pharmaceutical items worth about $100 billion.

The analysis, carried out by Russian analytics company DSM Group, found that demand increased sharply for medicines, including antidepressants, sleeping pills, insulin, cancer and heart drugs, hormones, and contraceptives.