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Engineering a better salad for Silicon Valley

Published Mon, 16 Dec 2024 13:48:13 GMT

It’s late morning, and the salad orders are rolling in, keeping several kitchen staffers busy behind the Santa Clara walls where a large painted radish has sprouted. That’s the branding for The Good Salad, a takeout and catering concept so popular and so highly rated that it’s landed on Yelp’s list of the Bay Area’s top 100 places to eat.The culinary venture was launched in 2021 by founder-CEO Sanad Al Souz, an engineer who decided to jump into entrepreneurship after six years in tech. He brought his skill set — expertise in process, quality control and user experience — to the business and hired a chef to help create the menu of meal-size salads that feature regional produce, dressings made in-house and an astonishing 42 customizable ingredients.The Blazing Bird, with Halal Cajun chicken breast, is the top seller at The Good Salad kitchen, which offers meal-size salads for pickup and delivery. This example shows the addition of scallions an...

California craft beer: Fresh beer and the Freshtival

Published Mon, 16 Dec 2024 13:48:13 GMT

Fresh beer has a vibrancy and brightness that’s simply unmatched. “Fresh beer is like live music,”  Moonlight Brewing founder Brian Hunt once said. “Stale beer is like listening from the parking lot.”The best beer hits a sweet spot shortly after being brewed, allowed to ferment and mature to peak perfection. For some beers, that’s fresh off the tank, while others may take a little longer. When it’s ready, you just know. But that perfect window only lasts about three weeks, before the flavors begin to change.Of course, beer is made to remain tasty for as long as possible. Hops have preservative properties. Pasteurization can help extend the life of your beer and so does refrigeration. But even with modern brewing technology, a beer’s shelf life is finite. Your beer starts to degrade the moment it’s bottled, canned or kegged, even before it’s trucked to a distributor, who in turn delivers it to a bar, restaurant or market. Once it’s in your ha...

Woman wins $5M from lottery scratcher after overcoming homelessness

Published Mon, 16 Dec 2024 13:48:13 GMT

(KRON) -- One of California's newest millionaires was homeless just six years ago. Lucia Forseth recently bought a California 2023 Scratchers ticket at a Walmart in Pittsburg while getting an oil change when she scratched the top prize, lottery officials announced Wednesday."I only bought one ticket,” Forseth told the California Lottery. “I closed my eyes and picked that one, and it won! I first thought I’d won a free ticket, but I checked, and it said I won $5 million!” Mega Millions drawing tips offered by lottery expert Back in 2017, Forseth said she was homeless. This year she said she plans to get married and her associate degree. She also said she plans to buy a house and then invest the rest of her winnings."You never think you have a chance to win it. It is just random. Being homeless just six years ago, I never thought it would happen to someone like me,” Forseth said.

4 dangers that most worry AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton

Published Mon, 16 Dec 2024 13:48:13 GMT

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Geoffrey Hinton, an award-winning computer scientist known as the “godfather of artificial intelligence,” is having some serious second thoughts about the fruits of his labors.Hinton helped pioneer AI technologies critical to a new generation of highly capable chatbotssuch as ChatGPT. But in recent interviews, he says that he recently resigned a high-profile job at Google specifically to share his concerns that unchecked AI development could pose danger to humanity.“I have suddenly switched my views on whether these things are going to be more intelligent than us,” he said in an interview with MIT Technology Review. “I think they’re very close to it now and they will be much more intelligent than us in the future…. How do we survive that?”Hinton is not alone in his concerns. Shortly after the Microsoft-backed startup OpenAI released its latest AI model called GPT-4 in March, more than 1,000 researchers and technologists signed a letter calling ...

3 Colorado teens charged with murder in rock-throwing death

Published Mon, 16 Dec 2024 13:48:13 GMT

DENVER (AP) — Three teens accused of killing a 20-year-old woman while throwing large rocks at passing cars have been charged with murder and other crimes, prosecutors said Wednesday.Nicholas “Mitch” Karol-Chik, Joseph Koenig and Zachary Kwak, all 18, each face identical charges of first-degree murder, attempted first-degree murder, second-degree assault and attempted second-degree assault in the death of Alexis Bartell — and alleged attacks on six other cars in suburban Denver, First Judicial District Attorney Alexis King announced. Two other drivers suffered minor injuries, according to investigators. The office of Karol-Chik’s lawyer, Holly Gummerson, declined to comment. A message left for Kwak’s lawyer, Emily Boehne, who was in court, was not immediately returned. Koenig is represented by a lawyer from the public defender’s office, which does not comment to the media on cases.According to the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office, Bartell was talking on the phone ...

Rights groups call for probe into shooting of Lao activist

Published Mon, 16 Dec 2024 13:48:13 GMT

BANGKOK (AP) — Human rights groups on Wednesday called for an investigation into the shooting of a political and social activist in Laos whose posts on Facebook criticized the Southeast Asian nation’s communist government.It wasn’t immediately clear whether Anousa Luangsuphom, 25, was killed in the attack Saturday night at a coffee shop in Vientiane, the capital.Amnesty International said in a statement calling for an investigation of the shooting that it had not been able to independently verify whether Anousa had died.Video from security cameras uploaded onto a state media website and then circulated on social media shows a gunman in a cap and mask make a tentative entrance into the cafe, step out, walk back in again, and brush past a woman to fire two shots from a handgun into the sitting victim. Another video released online shows paramedics attending to him.Reports in Lao media and from fellow activists said Anousa later died. But a Lao activist in exile in Paris who knew...

Texas Democrat Allred says he’ll run against Cruz for Senate

Published Mon, 16 Dec 2024 13:48:13 GMT

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Democratic Rep. Colin Allred of Texas said Wednesday he will run for the U.S. Senate in 2024, becoming an early challenger to Republican Sen. Ted Cruz. Allred, a three-term congressman and former NFL player, enters the race a heavy underdog. No Democrat has won statewide office in Texas in nearly 30 years, although Cruz only narrowly beat Beto O’Rourke in 2018 during what was a strong midterm election cycle nationally for Democrats. “Some people say a Democrat can’t win in Texas,” Allred said in a campaign launch video. “Well, someone like me was never supposed to get this far.”Democrats currently hold a narrow 51-49 majority in the Senate and face a tough electoral map in 2024, when their party will be defending 23 seats compared with Republicans’ 10. Three of those Democratic seats are in states that then-President Donald Trump, a Republican, won in the 2020 election.Allred doesn’t have a large profile in Texas beyond his Dallas district. He ...

Critics say huge coronation security operation goes too far

Published Mon, 16 Dec 2024 13:48:13 GMT

LONDON (AP) — The coronation of King Charles III involves one of the most important and complex security operations in U.K. history, Britain’s security minister said Wednesday, as rights groups accused the authorities of stifling civil liberties in their attempt to ensure events run smoothly.Security Minister Tom Tugendhat said the coronation involves “one of the most important security operations that the country has put into plan,” with scores of foreign royals, dignitaries and heads of state expected to attend Saturday’s Westminster Abbey service.“This is an enormously important moment for the country,” Tugendhat told Times Radio. “The police are, to put it mildly, all over it, and our intelligence and other security forces are extremely aware of the challenges that we face and ready to deal with them — as the police did quite brilliantly yesterday.”As thousands of police began to be deployed across London, officers arrested a man and blew up a suspicious bag outside ...

Allardyce after joining Leeds: ‘There’s nobody ahead of me’

Published Mon, 16 Dec 2024 13:48:13 GMT

Sam Allardyce has built a managerial career largely out of being a survival specialist in the Premier League.At 68 years old, he is back — somewhat surprisingly — in England’s top division with one of his toughest assignments yet.The former England coach was hired by Leeds on Wednesday until the end of the season as a replacement for Javi Gracia, who was fired with the team in fourth-to-last place in the standings and only out of the relegation zone on goal difference with four games remaining.Allardyce’s last coaching role was at West Bromwich Albion for the second half of the 2020-21 season, when he failed in his short-term mission to keep the team in the Premier League.That hasn’t stopped Leeds from turning to one of English soccer’s most charismatic managers, with Allardyce saying he was “shocked” to get the opportunity of being the club’s fourth manager in 15 months.“I never thought at this stage of the season there would be jobs offered,” he said, “R...

Goochland’s Greenswell Growers seeing ‘exceptional growth’

Published Mon, 16 Dec 2024 13:48:13 GMT

After taking the time to develop a new product, Goochland indoor farming company Greenswell Growers is seeing “exceptional growth,” according to President Carl Gupton.The company grows lettuce and other leafy greens in a greenhouse operation. Greenswell launched a co-branded product last month with Ukrop’s Homestyle Foods. That product is available at around 90 Kroger stores in the Mid-Atlantic region, and Gutpon said the company is about to make a Greenswell-only branded product available in two more grocery chains in the next month or so.“We are at such a front end of this industry,” Gupton said. “By being located centrally in the Mid-Atlantic, we can hit 70% of the U.S. population within a day’s drive.”Chuck Metzgar, John May and Doug Pick founded the company after looking into ways to provide healthy, locally sourced food to people who were food insecure. During his research, Pick, the president and CEO of Central Virginia nonprofit FeedMore, saw how efficient…Read the full stor...