Austrian-based food-tech startup Revo Foods announced this week that its 3D-printed vegan fish filet (素食鱼片) was heading to European grocery store shelves — a first for 3D-printed food. According to the company’s September 12 press release, the arrival of the “Filet” represents a key moment in sustainable food, with 3D-printed consumables ready for industrial mass production. Revo Foods Filet is likely to be just the first of many other such 3D-printed edible (可食用的) products to soon hit the market.

“Despite dramatic losses of coral reefs and increasing levels of poisons and micro plastic polluting fish, consumer demand for seafood has skyrocketed in recent decades,” the company announcement explains, “One promising solution to provide consumers with sustainable alternatives that do not contribute to overfishing is vegan seafood. The key to the success of these products lies in recreating a real taste that appeals to consumers.”

The composition of the Filet provides a meat-like texture (口感). 12 ingredients (成分) compose Revo’s Filet, such as pea proteins, plant oils and algae extracts. With its high protein and Ornega-3 contents, eating a Revo Filet is still very much like eating regular salmon. And thanks to its plant-based ingredients, the Filet has a three week shelf life, a significant improvement over regular salmon products.

“With the milestone of industrial-scale 3D food printing, we are entering a creative food revolution, an era where food is being made exactly according to the customers’ needs,” Revo Foods CEO Robin Simsa said via this week’s announcement.

While Revo’s products are currently only available for European markets, the company says it is actively working to expand its availability across the globe, with Simsa telling PopSci the company hopes to enter US markets around 2025.

This week, Google researchers published a paper describing results from an AI tool built to create music. The tool, called MusicLM, is not the first AI music tool to be launched. But the examples Google provided demonstrate musical creative ability based on a limited set of descriptive words.

Several different music examples produced by MusicLM were published online. Some of the generated music came from just one- or two-word descriptions, such as “jazz”, “rock” or “techno (高科技舞曲)”. The tool also created other examples from more detailed descriptions containing whole sentences.

The MusicLM model operates similarly to the machine-learning systems used by ChatGPT. ChatGPT and MusicLM both require powerful computers to operate complex machine-learning models. The San Francisco-based company OpenAI launched ChatGPT late last year. ChatGPT has recently received a lot of attention because of its ability to generate complex writings and other content from just a simple description in natural languages. Such tools can produce human-like results because they are trained on huge amounts of data. Many different materials are fed into the systems to permit them to learn complex skills to create realistic works.

However, the MusicLM researchers said there were some risks linked to the new tool. One of the biggest issues the researchers identified was biases (偏好) present in the training data. A bias might be including too much of one side and not enough of the other. The researchers said this raised a question about appropriateness for music generation for cultures underrepresented in the training data.

Turtles have a problem. They are delicious. And so are their eggs. That has led to the eggs of marine turtles being poached (偷猎).

To deal with the problem Kim Williams-Guillen and Helen Pheasey of the University of Kent, have come up with a handy gadget (小装置). It is a global-positioning-system (GPS) transmitter (发射机) enclosed in a plastic shell made by 3D printing. The result looks like a turtle's egg and weighs about the same. Dug up and carried away by poachers, it can lead the police to those poachers' bases of operation.

As they report this week in Current Biology, Dr Williams-Guillén and Dr Pheasey have now tested their invention in Costa Rica. They placed a decoy egg into each of 101 turtle nests on four beaches where poaching is a problem. The decoys remained inactive until their shells were exposed to the air. At that moment—presumed to signal the arrival of poachers—the “egg” in question starts broadcasting its location once an hour.

In all, 25 of the decoys were poached. They told different stories. Some travelled just a few kilometres, with one ending up at a bar 2km away from the nest it was taken from, where its signal abruptly ended. Others went quite a distance. One, for example, was carried 137km inland, to a supermarket.

To make sure that they, themselves, were not harming what they were intending to protect, the researchers monitored all of the decoy-laden nests which had survived the attentions of poachers and compared these nests' outputs of hatchlings with those of 44 other surviving nests that had no decoy in them. Both sorts of nest had the same hatching rates, suggesting that adding a decoy did not affect the development of the eggs it was hidden among.

Given the success of their project, Dr Williams-Guillen and Dr Pheasey propose that the idea should be used more widely for turtles. They also suggest that similar decoys might help protect the eggs of other endangered reptiles—and birds—that are collected and traded illegally.

A．It may cause widespread damage to turtle eggs.

B．It will help raise people's environmental awareness.

C．It can be applied to more wildlife conservation fields.

D．It needs further improvement before being put into practice.