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Stage fright is not a term youd associate with Elvis Presley, but in 1968 he was all shook upwith nerves. Ahead of his make-or-break comeback special after years floundering in Hollywood, the King had cold feet. He told the specials director, Steve Binder, he was terrified, adding, “I dont know if I can do this . . . just me and a guitar in front of people?” He half-joked to his entourage about retreating to Hawaii. Apart from a few close confidants, no one has ever witnessed these intimate moments of reservation. But starting July 17 in London, guests at Elvis Evolution will see an AI-generated Elvis play out these fears, and other key moments of his life. The immersive event will be powered by various types of tech, but the creators want to ensure that none of them get in the way of the magic of being transported back in time. Layered Reality puts on experiential events comprising three layers: tech, theater, and physical elements. The tech is multifaceted, from augmented reality to 3D audio effects; the theater comprises traditional sets and live actors; the physical elements are sensory stimulants like touch and taste. Thats a really intoxicating combination, says founder and CEO Andrew McGuinness. Often they’re kept in separate worlds. We firmly believe they belong together. The company has deployed this mix of elements for Londoners three times before, including in retellings of War of the Worlds, and The Gunpowder Plot, hosted in the eerie vaults below the Tower of London. The new endeavor is far from a 17th-century plot against a kingthough, this one also has a king, or rather, the King. Elvis records the soundtrack to Love Me Tender in a Los Angeles studio in August 1956. [Photo: Courtesy of Elvis Presley Enterprises, LLC/Layered Reality] Back in time with theater and tech Guests will be escorted through a story-based experience of Presleys life, from a young boy, through the rebellious leg shakes of the 50s, through the opulent Vegas years, all on purpose-built sets at Immerse LDN, a new immersive entertainment complex on the River Thames waterfront. Groups will walk through scenes like a 50s diner and a dressing room. At times, walls and sets will move around them. Theyll take on different points of view. You are literally going to walk in his shoes at one point, says Simon Reveley, head of studios, not indicating if those shoes are blue suede. [Image: Courtesy of Layered Reality] Different scenes will employ different tech tactics. We are very deliberately technology agnostic, McGuinness says, stressing that tech is simply a tool to enhance the experience. When it’s at its best, the technology gets out of the way. In past Layered Reality shows, tech ranged from subtle to sensory: in one scene in The Gunpowder Plot, for example, guests hide in pitch dark from priest hunters, with spatial audio and LED floor lights simulating creeping footsteps; in another, a VR-enhanced boat ride layers motion effects with water sprays, cool air, and the salty scent of the seablending physical cues with digital immersion to trick the brain into believing the experience. [Image: Courtesy of Layered Reality] For Elvis, they dont want to give away too much to ruin the element of surprise. Of course, music will be central. Through it all, artificial intelligence helps to remaster sounds, and upscale fotage quality. AI Elvis But AIs starring role is in AI Elvis himself. Guests will come face to face with the recreation of Presley. Layered Reality trained the AI on hours and hours of footage, feeding an algorithm concert clips, Cine 8 films, and thousands of photos. AI Elvis has been done before in 2022, on Americas Got Talent. An actor served as Elvis deepfake double, creating movements to make it look as if Presley were performing Devil in Disguise (with a deepfake Simon Cowell). Reveley explains that with more advanced facial generative AI, you can now tune the algorithm to lean more into the original source material than the human actor. AI can pick up on minute nuances, vital for someone whose expressions, like the lip curl, were so iconic. We all know them so well, and so does the machine learning algorithm, Reveley says. Much of the purpose of AI Elvis is to unearth footage that happened but wasnt capturedlike the nerves before the 68 TV special. Ethics and delays Recreating imagined scenes raises ethical questions, of whether a person no longer living would want to share their most intimate moments with the world. But the team insists its project is different from the Simon Cowell duetor the AI Anthony Bourdain that was controversially made to narrate part of a documentarybecause they arent fabricating something that never happened. AI [is] being a digital archivist rather than an originator, McGuinness says. The Presley estate is also heavily involved, and granted the team access to all the footage. (The Presley estate did not respond to Fast Companys request for comment.) Still image from Singer Presents ELVIS, known as the Kings 1968 comeback special. [Photo: Courtesy of courtesy of Elvis Presley Enterprises, LLC/Layered Reality] To create AI Elvis, Layered Reality partnered with the Mill, a visual effects agency that won an Oscar for bringing Oliver Reed back to life in Gladiator. The Mill was a subsidiary of the postproduction giant Technicolor Group, which since 1915 set the industry standard for color entertainment. But in February, after years of financial struggles, Technicolor went bust. (Fast Company reached out to the Mill to confirm it was also affected, but didnt hear back.) That caused delays; though Layered Reality had ownership of AI Elvis, it had work to finish. They scrambled to hire artists from The Mill on contract to complete the final phases. They pushed back the start date twice, from the original planned date of March. A post-pandemic events boom Its now on course to welcome guests, to experience what McGuinness views as part of a live entertainment revolution. It views its competitors not as other tech or AI companies, but anything else you could be doing that night, from a musical, to mini golf, to that Italian restaurant on the corner of your street [where] youll end up spending 130 pounds. Given that comparison, McGuinness thinks 75 pounds ($102) for a standard ticket is fair. Were in the memory business, [and] too much of our money is still spent on immemorable things, he says. The business banks on a rising demand for these types of events. The term experience economy has existed since 1998, when it appeared in Harvard Business Review, but COVID-19 accelerated the allure, boosting the popularity of experiences like Cosm in Los Angeles and the Sphere in Las Vegas. With that backdrop, Elvis Evolution hopes it can usher in a modern-day comeback. Of course, the 68 one turned out to be a tour de force, full of raw vocals and black leather. Nerves dissipated, and gave way to humor. “I sang to turtles and palm trees for years, Elvis told the audience about his movie career. This is a lot better, dont you think?”
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E-Commerce
When he was 38, Fast Company senior editor Jon Gluck was diagnosed with an incurable blood cancer, multiple myeloma, and given just 18 months to live. Unbelievably, he has survivedand managed to thrivefor more than 20 years. In his new book, An Exercise in Uncertainty: A Memoir of Illness and Hope, Gluck details how he has lived with chronic illness for the past two decades. Gluck joined the Most Innovative Companies podcast to discuss getting diagnosed, how working helped him cope with his illness, and the workplace accommodations that enabled him to keep going. Your book follows your journey with a rare type of blood cancer. What is the condition? I have a blood cancer alternately referred to as a bone marrow cancer called multiple myeloma. It’s an incurable cancer but one that has fortunately, in my case, been treatable. I will never not have it, but fortunately I’ve been in a position where my doctors have been able to manage and control it quite nicely. There have been times when I’ve been very sick and then I’m treated and I go into a remission and then I’m sick again and I go into a remission. That’s been the story of the last 20 years. A portion of my book proceeds are going toward multiple myeloma research. In the book, you mention that the first person you called after your initial diagnosiswhen you were given less than two years to livewas your boss. Why? I think I was trying to create a sense of normalcy for myself. I think part of it was denial. I just didn’t want to really admit that anything was so wrong that I had to do anything differently than I normally would. Part of it was just the strange sense of duty I have sometimes as an individual. I was like, well, I better report to the boss that I won’t be there today, even though I’ve just received life-changing information. Its very Boy Scout behavior. I was also avoiding calling people for whom it would be a much bigger deal. You write that you encounter three types of responses when you disclose your cancer diagnosis. Some say they know someone who died from the same condition. Others immediately try to help and find solutions. Then theres a third type who just listens to you and is empathetic. What advice do you have for people whose friends or relatives share a diagnosis with them? It’s a tricky thing. Most everybody is well intentioned, and so whatever people say or do I understand. That said, I’m going to give a never, sometimes, always answer to your three buckets. So the never is, Boy, I just knew somebody who had that and they died yesterday. I think it’s pretty unhelpful. Probably the person who just told you they’ve been diagnosed with the same disease is not the best person to talk to about that. Sometimes I think wanting to help is complicated. The criteria I’d use there after 20 years of dealing with this is . . . are you offering something that’s genuinely helpful and that the person probably hasn’t already heard? If you are, then go for it. I think there’ve been people I know who said, Listen, I happen to know my wife’s uncle is really close friends with an amazing myeloma doctor at such and such a hospital. If you ever want to reach out to them, I can put you in touch. That’s helpful. Then the always category of basic empathy or sympathy. I’ve been really struck over the years by how powerful just somebody simply saying, I’m really sorry to hear that [can be]. Honest to God, those words alone are wonderful and more powerful than you think they are. One of the first people I told in my office, a colleague I remember very vividly simply said, You poor guy. I am really sorry. That was so moving and it wasn’t even someone I was particularly close with. It was just somebody who knew the right thing to say. While many people, when they get a diagnosis like this, rethink their whole lives, you looked back on your life and realized you were pretty happy with your job and your situation. How has work helped you throughout your illness? I have been working this whole time. I’ve hardly missed a day of work, even when I’ve been hospitalized, [thanks to] remote work and Zoom. Sometimes people say, That’s so brave or courageous or wonderful of you to have worked the whole time. Believe me, it has nothing to do with bravery in my case, its just an incredibly great distraction. The pressure and deadlines we deal with in our business were great for me because it was like whatever the problem is here at work, it’s not as big as that [cancer] problem. People often talk about getting that kind of perspective when they’ve received a diagnosis like mine. That’s absolutely been true in my case. I really came to see that I love what I do, and so there was just pleasure and enjoyment in doing the work. When you’re sick and not feeling well all the time or getting treatment and feeling even worse, pleasure and enjoyment are in short supply. You can still get burned out though. You wrote about leaving New York magazine after a while because you needed a break. I happened to be working at a place that was extremely demanding and I had been there for more than 10 years. As my disease became more complicated and my treatment became more aggressive and the side effects therefore were more debilitating, many people said to me, Do you really want to work this hard? Stress is bad for you. I was like, well, stress is bad for you if it’s bad stress or if it’s an excessive level of stress, but as I was saying a minute ago, a certain amount of stress I found really good in the sense that it kept my mind off of my illness. But that reached a tipping point somewhere in my 10th year of working. I realized I need a job that’s not so demanding minute to minute, day to day. There are constant layoffs in the media industry, which can be stressful when your medical insurance is tied to your job. What kind of insurance battles have you had? I’ve become an unwilling example of this new category of people I call cancer zombies. And what I mean by that is people who are half sick and half well. Theres a growing number of us because of the advancements in biomedical research and the treatments for many kinds of cancers. Instead of either you’re treated and you survive and you’re good to go for the rest of your life, or you’re treated and unfortunately the treatments don’t work and you pass away, there’s this whole cohort of us who are living for really long periods of time with varying degrees of illness and debilitation. Unless you’re independently wealth, that means you need to work for a lot of years and you need insurance for a lot of years, even while you’re struggling with your illness and your treatments. I learned that the leading cause of personal bankruptcy is unexpected medical expenses. Because of all that [my wife and I] felt like we really needed a sort of belt-and-suspenders approach, and for both of us to have insurance in case either of us got laid off because we were both in the media business and layoffs had been happening for many years at an alarming rate. In terms of dealing with insurance companies, it’s maddening. The system is so broken that what it comes down to is just getting lucky. What I mean by that is getting somebody on the other end of the phone who’s a human being, not a machine, and who actually cares and wants to help solve your problem. Whether that happens or not is just a crapshoot. You just have to keep going at it. What was the pandemic like for you? It was tough. Part of both my illness and my treatment have left me quite immunocompromised. We were in the city and we had no other logical place to go. We didn’t want to move in with family and expose them to extra risk. We followed all the precautions to a T. But then oddly enough, we went back to living the way most people were living. At some point I just decided, what’s the point of staying alive if you don’t live your life? One of the interesting things that happened toward the end of the first, most serious wave of the pandemic is that I wrote an op-ed for The Washington Post. The title was something like, It’s great that everybody’s getting back to normal. Now, please keep in mind that there are some of us who are immunocompromised who still need to take these precautions. Most of the comments I got were lovely and supportive, but [it was also] met [negatively] by some people. One of the comments I think was, That’s the luck of the draw. We don’t owe you anything, stop whining. How important are accommodations, like the ability to work remotely, for you? It’s been tremendously important. One of the other things that is interesting about the pandemic is that in some ways, people sort of sympathize more with everybody who has ever been through [illness] and has to worry constantly about germs. That was normalizing in a strange way. The best part was being able to work remotely. It allowed me to keep my job without going on disability. It allowed me to keep the constant distraction of working in place so that I didn’t lose my mind. It became a lifeline. Have you experienced any workplace discrimination? It’s a really tricky question. I’m not the kind of person to knee-jerk see that sort of thing everywhere, but I’ve had glimpses of it. When I was getting ready to leave New York magazine and interviewing for jobs at other places, a recruiter said to me, I read the story you wrote [about your illness] in New York magazine. How are you doing? On the one hand, she seemed like an extremely nice person and I’m the kind of person who’s inclined to give people the benefit of the doubt. On the other hand, I wondered, Is she fishing for information about my health status so she can figure out if Im a wise hire? I’ll never know. I’m not here to give people advice [about] whether or not they should share information about their illness. I will say once you do decide to, there’s no putting it back in the bottle. So just be super sure that if you want to share this information, you are potentially opening yourself up to what can be a very serious problem. [Photo: Oscar Gluck]
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Goodreads just got its first-ever logo redesign, and its taking a page straight out of BookToks aesthetic catalog. Since the book tracking and reviewing platform debuted in 2007, its generally used the same logo: A brown wordmark featuring the word good in a skinny sans serif and the word reads in a slightly thicker sans serif, all set on a cream-colored background. While the ultra-simple look was probably designed to evoke the warm atmosphere of a bookstore or library, it also veers perilously close to the corporate blanding aesthetic that ruled the 2010s. But in 2025, bland is the opposite of how one might describe emerging aesthetics in the book community. Online platforms like Instagram and Tiktok have shaped the way publishers approach book cover design, which increasingly relies on eye-catchingly bright dopamine colors, chunky text, and swirling shapes to stop readers in their scroll. Carly Kellerman, then an associate publisher for Zondervan Books at HarperCollins, explained in 2022, Instagram has made everything more aesthetic, from lattes to fashion trends to book covers to travel. Im very cognizant of the shareability of book covers as I craft the direction. As these eye candy covers continued to populate users Goodreads shelves over the past several years, the sites own branding was quickly becoming incongruous with the book design of the times. On July 14, Goodreads announced a new logo that ditches the former staid look for a touch of modern whimsy. [Images: Goodreads] A new logo with a hint of whimsy Launched in 2007, Goodreads was acquired by Amazon in 2013 in a move that swept the book reviewing platform away from a potential deal with Apple. Since then, Amazon has routinely been criticized for neglecting the book tracker, whichon both its app and websitelargely looks the same as it did more than 10 years ago. Just this June, Amazon announced layoffs impacting Goodreads, though the company declined to share specific numbers with Fast Company at the time. In 2023, Jane Friedman, a publishing industry consultant, told The Washington Post that Goodreads hasnt been all that well maintained, or updated, or kept up with. She added, It does feel like Amazon bought it and then abandoned it. Now it looks like Amazon is finally turning a bit of attention to the platform with both a new logo and a few added features. The logo swaps its former minimalist font scheme for a chunky, rounded serif font with a bit more character. While the logo is still all lowercase, its significantly more bold, allowing it to stand out better on a screen. Our new logo is designed to better represent Goodreads and is optimized for accessibility so it looks clear and sharp no matter where you see itfrom your phone to a billboard, a blog post on the update reads. The logos g character, which serves as a stand-alone symbol for the Goodreads app icon and social media profile pictures, has been fully reworked to incorporate a few bookish Easter eggs. According to the blog post, the upper half of the character is meant to evoke a magnifying glass, while the bottom half represents an open book, symbolizing the book discovery and sharing of perspectives that are at the heart of the Goodreads experience. Platform updates improve flow and drive sales Alongside the fresh logo, the blog post also shares a few updates to the Goodreads platform. Starting this week, the Want to Read sectionwhich lets users compile books they hope to read in the futurewill now also appear in Your Books on Amazon for readers who have linked the two accounts. [Image: Goodreads] Essentially, its a way for Amazon to drive customers to acquire their reading materials through Amazon rather than an outside seller. (This might be a turnoff for some readers, given that a chunk of Goodreads users jumped ship and joined the competitor StoryGraph earlier this year to protest Amazons ownership of the platform). In addition, he blog post notes that Goodreads is expanding its book catalog to include more than a million audiobooks, as well as building out its Reading Challenge feature to help readers meet their annual reading goals. On Reddit, fans are tentatively hopeful that the new logo and accompanying updates hint that Amazon is planning to modernize its broader UI. I guess its a good sign that theyre trying to implement some changes that I hope to be for the better, one Reddit user wrote. The site (and app) were practically frozen in time! The logo update, while admittedly subtle, signals that the platform might finally be a higher priority for Amazonand that, to imagine what a future revamped Goodreads could look like, the bright new landscape of book cover design is one place where Amazon appears to be pulling inspiration.
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E-Commerce
For much of the AI era, intelligence has been on-demand: a user issues a prompt, and the model responds after reasoning through the request. But as AI systems grow more autonomous and expectations rise for real-time reasoning, low latency, and cost-efficiency, the definition of intelligence is shifting. Were entering a new phase where AI is expected to stay ready for the next requesteven during downtime. The key to unlocking this proactive AI future may lie in an unexpected moment: when the AI is “asleep,” a phase now called sleep-time compute. The term was coined in an April 2025 white paper by Letta, a Berkeley-born AI startup spun out of UC Berkeleys Sky Computing Lab, founded by researchers Charles Packer and Sarah Wooders. Developed in collaboration with Databricks and Anyscale cofounder Ion Stoica and others, the sleep-time compute framework aims to shift AI from reactive to proactive intelligence. Instead of waiting for prompts, AI agents use idle time to precompute answers, refine memory, and anticipate user needs. Wooders says the idea draws inspiration from neuroscience. Just as humans consolidate memories during sleep and reflect beyond immediate tasks, AI should be able to do the same. We might think about a conversation that we had with someone yesterday and make new conclusions from it, or spend time learning new things even if there is no immediate job to be done. AI Agents, on the other hand, dont spend any time thinking outside of the scope of a task, she tells Fast Company. With sleep-time, the idea is to give AI agents the same ability to think and process offline just like we do as humans. The result is an always-on AI system thats faster, more cost-efficient, and remarkably responsive. The paper reports accuracy gains of up to 18% in certain reasoning tasks, and a 2.5-times reduction in cost per query. By spreading computation across related queries and reducing redundant processing, response times and operational costs fall significantly. Why Wait When Your AI Can Think Ahead? Lettas approach uses a dual-agent model. One agent handles live interactions; the second, the sleep agent, activates during downtime to analyze past conversations, parse uploaded documents, and reorganize memory. This division allows the system to maintain context without reprocessing everything in real time. Wooders says the goal is to let agents learn offline by generating learned context, or consolidated insights from prior data. As context windows grow larger, an agent might have a ton of tokens dedicated to storing this learned contextincreasing the likelihood that any new task or question is about a topic that its already thought about, she says. For his part, Packer calls sleep-time compute a successor to test-time compute (TTC), and the next big direction for scaling AI. Rather than only adding compute during inference, systems can now scale intelligence during downtime. Sleep-time compute builds on the idea that the longer a model can reason . . . the better the final answer, says Packer. By staying active during downtime, AI agents can refine their memory, precompute likely responses, and redistribute compute resources more efficiently to improve both performance and cost. Stoica, the Anyscale cofounder and UC Berkeley professor, sees this shift as pivotal, noting that vast quantities of compute will be spent on reasoning at training time or sleep time to create shared context, unlocking greater efficiency when models are in use. Test-time compute, or inference, refers to a models ability to apply knowledge to generate outputs. Allocating more resources at this stage improves output quality but increases latency and back-end costs. Always-on tools like chatbots and coding assistants need fast, low-latency responses to serve users effectively. As these systems grow more complex, they require significantly more compute, says Anyscale cofounder Robert Nishihara, driven by sophisticated agentic systems that demand significant computational resources. Lettas research shows that sleep-time compute also boosts model power. In benchmark tasks like GSM-Symbolic and American Invitational Mathematics Examination (AIME), shifting computation to downtime reduced test-time workload by up to five times without hurting accuracy. Agents can update knowledge, refine memory, and improve performanceall without human input or added GPUs. Sleep-time Compute is Already Reshaping Billion-dollar Stacks The concept may sound theoretical, but major tech companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, and Google are already building with sleep-time principles. During an interview panel in June, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman previewed how our future AI interactions will shift. Im excited about a future where multiple copies of AI models like o3 run constantly in the backgroundreading Slack, checking emails, acting like a team of helpful agents, said Altman. Id love to wake up to drafted email replies and a summary of unfinished tasks like heres what you didnt finish on your to-do list yesterday with suggested next steps. OpenAIs AI coding tool Codex now enables asynchronous code refactoring in cloud environments. Moreover, AI code editor Cursor recently launched background agents that operate in parallel cloud environments. Developers can deploy a fleet of agents that run test suites, refactor code, and generate new features in the background, guided by context. Anthropics Claude Code SDK offers similar functionality. Developers can deploy subprocesses that function like backstage assistants, handling testing or debugging without interrupting the main workflow. Googles “Project Naptime” and “Big Sleep,” an internal collaboration between Project Zero and DeepMind, is also exploring principles similar to sleep-time compute for code vulnerability detection. Building the Future of Ambient Intelligence Letta has embedded sleep-time compute in MemGPT 2.0, an open-source framework that equips AI agents with persistent, efficient long-term memorywhat it calls infinite context. By offloading memory tasks to sleep-time phases, the framework improves context management and reliability. Here, sleep-time compute acts like a silent housekeeper, running continuously to stay organized. Through asynchronous memory consolidation and simulated scenarios, Letta is advancing a long-standing goal in AI: agents that prepare for the future, not just react in the moment. Test-time scaling often slows down the user experience, with tasks lke Deep Research taking minutes to complete. “But with sleep-time compute, the time the agent can spend thinking is unlimited, says Wooders. Its about creating a new dimension of scaling compute, which historically has led to improvements in AIs capabilities. Letta says its framework is already making an impact, from financial chatbots summarizing earnings reports overnight to medical agents analyzing patient histories while the system is idle. Lettas model-agnostic infrastructure lets developers mix and match models within a single agent. For example, a chat agent might run on OpenAI while a sleep-time agent handles memory on Anthropic. This makes it easier to build AI that feels stateful, always-on, and proactive, says Packer. As AI evolves toward multi-agent systems, the ability to think ahead could define the next wave of tech breakthroughs. The most powerful systems wont just be those with the largest models, but those that know how to process information quietly and efficiently, even in their sleep. In the future, vast quantities of compute will be spent on reasoning at sleep time by agents to make sense of new information and context that the agents encounter, says Stoica, the UC Berkeley professor. I expect this direction to be a major driver of progress in AI. Engineering the right shared context through reasoning at training time or sleep time will allow for far more efficiency at test time.”
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E-Commerce
Inside a greenhouse in the English countryside, one of the newest inventions from Dyson just went through its first large-scale test: an 18-foot-tall rotating wheel of strawberry plants, designed to ensure each plant gets its share of sunlight. Dyson, the multibillion-dollar brand, is best known for designing products like vacuums and ultra-high-end hair dryers. But the company also bought a farm in 2013, and now owns 36,000 acres of land across the U.K. James Dyson, who grew up in rural Englandand hauled potatoes as one of his first jobsrealized that engineering and design could play a role in helping solve some of the challenges of the food system. There is a real opportunity for agriculture to drive a revolution in technology, and vice versa, he says. Dyson Farming, a subsidiary within the larger family-owned business, is focused on sustainability and food quality. Some of its practices are low tech, such as using crop rotation to improve soil health, or letting wildflowers grow on the edge of fields to support pollinators. But it also continuously incorporates new technologies like sensors and drones. [Photo: Dyson Farming] At a farm in Carrington, England, the company started using an anaerobic digester to turn manure into electricity nearly a decade ago. (The equipment can generate roughly as much power as 10,000 homes use; some of it goes into the grid and the rest is used on the farm.) The process also generates a lot of heat, which is why the farm initially added a greenhouse: The strawberries can make use of the heat to grow in cooler weather. But the team recognized that they could go farther. [Photo: Dyson Farming] As engineers, were never satisfied, Dyson says. We constantly ask how things can be improved, achieving better results with the same resources. Instead of relying on traditional rows, we have designed and built a system in which strawberry plants are arranged on rotating wheels which are over 5 meters high, fully utilizing the glasshouses vertical space. This dramatically increases the number of plants we can grow in the same footprint, significantly boosting yields by 250%. [Photo: Dyson Farming] In a typical vertical farm, plants sit on shelves or on walls under artificial light. On the Dyson farm, as the Ferris-wheel-like design rotates, the strawberries get as much access as possible to natural light under the roof of the greenhouse. The farm supplements this with LED bulbs. (A sensor detects the wavelengths of light that the strawberry plants need, and then adds more as necessary.) Making better use of sunlight means that the mechanism also uses less energy. [Photo: Dyson Farming] The system is automated, with robots that use vision sensing to pick berries when theyre perfectly ripe. Other robots distribute predatory insects to fight aphids without insecticide. Another robotic system shines UV light on the berries to prevent mold. Though the system is still in the early stages, the first crop of strawberries was harvested in May and June, and sold at a premium in U.K. grocery stores because of the quality of the fruit. Eventually, the new tech will be growing strawberries year-round. Apart from during a few weeks in the summer, the strawberries available in British supermarkets will have been trucked over from North Africa or Spain, Dyson says. There is a significant carbon footprint associated with that movement. Plus, the strawberries themselves are small, colorless, and not at all sweet. Our crop is the opposite of that. [Photo: Dyson Farming] Most of Dyson Farmings food i still grown outside. But there are advantages to growing indoors when its possible, especially as the climate changes. While some other vertical farms have struggled with cost, its possible that Dysons efficient new invention could help, particularly its model of generating electricity and heat from farm waste on-site. Right now, the biggest cost for vertical farming comes from energy use. [Photo: Dyson Farming] Dyson is interested in scaling up the tech, and potentially sharing it more widely when its fully developed. We are experimenting at this stage, but weve unlocked significant efficiency gains for our glasshouse, he says. And for others toowhile we have to be relentlessly vigilant with confidentiality and secrecy at Dyson due to competitors stealing our innovations, in farming its not like that. British farmers have been woefully under-supported by successive governments for years. They need a level playing field with their foreign counterparts. Im in a fortunate position to be able to take on risk and invest in experimenting with new ways of farming. And I hope it is eventually to the benefit of all farmers. We need to stand together. Working on the food system, he says, is not so different from the rest of his lifes work. Farming shares a lot with engineering and manufacturing, Dyson says. You create something, you take pride in it, and you supply it to people who need it. Just as a factory should be efficient, well-designed, and run using the latest technology, the same principles apply to farming. You must get the fundamentals right: drainage, access, boundaries, machinery, buildings, soil health, weed control, and biodiversity. Its about making everything work together, in the most effective and high-quality way possible. That’s how progress is made.
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E-Commerce
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