Titanium dioxide’s journey from the Earth’s crust to our lips is a long one.

The food additive—which is used in foods like candy, cottage cheese, and frosting—starts as a metal found in a handful of minerals. It’s mined via earth blasting and drilling, and then processed into titanium dioxide. Once in the form of a fine, white powder, it can be added as a pigment to foods to make them look brighter and more opaque.

The EU banned titanium dioxide in 2022 because there wasn’t enough evidence to prove it wasn’t toxic, but the US Food and Drug Administration allows it to be used in foods in quantities up to 1% of a product’s weight. Beyond its toxic uncertainty, the presence and use of titanium dioxide has far-reaching effects: Mining and processing the material is carbon-intensive, and creating it synthetically generates emissions, too.

That’s why Mirra is working to replace titanium dioxide and petroleum-based food dyes using structural color, a physical process found in nature (think the vibrant colors of butterflies and birds). The team of scientists and innovators recently won the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center’s Climatetech Studio Showcase with technology they originated at Northeastern University. According to COO Elizabeth Bridges, Mirra will be able to better color foods than alternative food dyes, which tend to fade in the harsh conditions of food processing, like high temperatures, UV exposure, and changing pH levels.

“We’re really focused on taking vegetables and foods and using them as food dyes,” Bridges said, “in a way that allows the food industry to continue the level of vibrant color and conditions that they’re using in their products today.”

Keep reading here.—TC

Like many human workers, AI agents might struggle to make a living off online gig work.

For these autonomous AI systems, however, it’s not for lack of work, but because they overwhelmingly fail to complete projects sourced from online freelance platforms.

That’s what researchers at the Center for AI Safety along with Scale AI found when they tested agents on their ability to perform economically valuable work as part of a new benchmark, the Remote Labor Index (RLI). (The “highest-performing agent” managed a piddly automation rate of just 2.5%.)

Plenty of existing benchmarks measure specific skills like coding or basic office tasks, and agents have come to master those. But the creators of the RLI wanted to see how those abilities translate into real-world settings where projects might encompass more complex work of greater variety.

The authors said their findings should serve to ground some of the more provocative claims around AI-fueled automation replacing human workers. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, for instance, has predicted that AI could wipe out half of all white collar jobs in the next few years.

“Currently, these agents can’t automate people’s jobs, but AI development moves fast, so things could look very different in five years,” Mantas Mazeika, lead researcher at CAIS, said in an email. “We hope RLI can help provide clarity here and enable policymakers and the public to proactively navigate AI-driven labor automation.”

Keep reading here.—PK

A little over a year ago, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay on what he saw as some best-case scenarios for AI. Much of it focused on potential scientific progress in biology, medicine, and neuroscience.

Now the AI company is making its first foray into that space with a new tool called Claude for Life Sciences, which upgrades the model to support biotech R&D labs with tasks like literature reviews, lab protocols, data analysis, and regulatory compliance.

The company is hardly alone in offering AI tools that specifically cater to scientists. Google rolled out a tool called Co-Scientist earlier this year; OpenAI is currently building a new team focused on AI for scientific discovery; and startup Lila Sciences has raised more than half a billion dollars as of last month to automate the scientific process.

Lab assistant: Eric Kauderer-Abrams, Anthropic’s head of life sciences, told us that what sets Anthropic’s tool apart is its compatibility with existing lab tools and its features across the entire scientific process.

“A lot of other players in the AI and bio space are focusing more on the early stage, you know, isolated research problems…In our experience, it’s only part of a much larger picture of developing something and bringing it to market and impacting patients,” he said.

Keep reading here.—PK

The way we watch: The era of streaming TV introduced ad-free watching, something that many of us are still unwilling to give up. (Personally, we’ll stop watching television before we allow ads to be inserted before the showstopper judging on The Great British Baking Show.) But increasingly more are accepting ad-supported tiers, Marketing Brew reported: In August, 45% of Netflix viewing happened on an ad tier, up from 34% in the same month last year, according to Comscore data.

A bit restless: Ever think about abandoning your home base and living (and working) from a van? Well, The Verge’s Thomas Ricker certainly did, and he detailed the tech and tricks he installed in a Sprinter cargo van to take his show on the road.

More focus, less fluff. CollabWORK filters out the noise and delivers jobs that actually match what Tech Brew readers are looking for. Click here to see the full board of curated roles.

• Technical Product Manager – Prosthetics at BrainRobotics (in person)
• Senior Software Engineer with Test Equipment at Raytheon (in person)
• Senior Software Engineer, Cloud Reliability Engineer at Home Depot (remote)
• Associate, Senior Technology Aviation Consultant at TYLin (in person)
• Sr. Manager of Product Management at Home Depot (in person)