Tag: video

Heirloom Beans

Then 1 day, in 2003, Thomas Keller came by. His restaurant, the French Laundry, which would later earn 3 Michelin stars, happened to be in Yountville. “I remember, he had probably 10 different beans on the table. To get something that freshly dried was a revelation.” The bean that caught Keller’s eye was a greenish-yellow thing with a red-rimmed eye, like a soybean with a hangover. Called the Vallarta, it was on the verge of extinction when Sando found it, but it had a dense, fudgy texture and gave a good broth. “Steve had taken something that used to be just a dried bean and raised it to a new level, where the flavor was really intense and it cooked so much more consistently”. Within 1 month, it was a staple of the French Laundry. Within 1 year, every chef in California seemed to be serving beans.

2022-03-10: A huge bean collection

We have 36k different types of bean collected. Every single one has a story to tell and could be the solution to so many of our planetary challenges out there. Many of these beans have been collected over the last hundred years from around the world. And what’s really fascinating is most of these beans have never been characterized. The researchers don’t know how these beans grow what they look like, what environments they would thrive in. So, we’ve partnered with them to use our technology to understand those beans’ capabilities for the first time. It took us 30 years to produce a drought-tolerant bean where we found the trait for drought tolerance in one of these beans in the collection. With the technology of Mineral, we can move into absolute precision in finding these types of traits much quicker, much cheaper and much more efficiently.

Brahms and Radiohead

The most breathtaking musical event this spring will bring together one of the most successful concept albums of all time — Radiohead’s OK COMPUTER — with one of the most important symphonies ever — Brahm’s 1st — in an epic performance. Brahms V. Radiohead is the newest opus from Stereo Hideout Orchestra, whose composer Steve Hackman has married other modern and classical maestros before, like Björk and Bartók, Bon Iver and Aaron Copland. This will be Stereo Hideout’s first NYC performance, and they have hired some of Brooklyn’s most brilliant musicians for the 55-piece orchestra and 3 vocalists who will be seamlessly layering Radiohead’s motifs and lyrics into Brahms’ masterpiece.

ASMR

W Magazine recently recruited Parks And Recreation and Legion star Aubrey Plaza for its ongoing, aurally uncomfortable video series, “Celebrity ASMR,” which is exactly what it sounds like. But where folks like Jake Gyllenhaal, Margot Robbie, and Gal Gadot only paid loudly-smacking lip service when they sat down way too close to W’s mics—posting videos a mere 2 or 3 minutes in length—Plaza approached the task with the same intensity with which she appears to tackle pretty much everything in her life, laying down a 36-minute sonic odyssey in search of “the tingles.” Also, a lot of it was about how much she still hates Jerry.

The shushing sound of voices whispering, or clothes rustling—and then a tingling feeling begins on the scalp, and spreads down into the neck, shoulders, and limbs, and along with it comes a state of calm, or even euphoria. This is how people who experience autonomous sensory meridian response, or ASMR, describe the peculiar phenomenon. ASMR is “similar to the deep relaxation someone might feel if they’re getting a massage”. It’s a form of auditory-tactile synesthesia; “brain tingles.”