WSJ’s The Future of Everything

What makes for a luxury strawberry? Is it the taste? Texture? Color? Around five years ago, berry company Driscoll’s released a new, premium line of berries with a higher price tag. Some consumers are shelling out almost 70% more to get their hands on this fancy fruit. But what are the qualities of a premium berry? On this Science of Success, we delve into the food science behind breeding and selling Driscoll’s Sweetest Batch, from creating more objective benchmarks for the highly subjective experience of taste to how the company works with supertasters and sensory analysts to create the best possible berry.

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Further reading:

Why America’s Berries Have Never Tasted So Good 

How Designer Fruit Is Taking Over the Grocery Store 

Trying to Breed Better Fruit 

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Restaurants are a tough business with tight margins, from the cost of food to paying for staff. Kernel, the new venture by Steve Ells, the founder and former CEO of Chipotle Mexican Grill, is trying to fix that by introducing food-making robots and a "digital-first" approach to restaurants. In this conversation from the WSJ Global Food Forum in June, reporter Heather Haddon talks with Ells about his new bet on consumers’ desire to eat less meat, and on a business model that could solve some of the industry’s thorny challenges.

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Further reading:

Rise of the Restaurant Robots: Chipotle, Sweetgreen and Others Bet on Automation 

How Chipotle’s Founder Is Moving Beyond Burritos 

Chipotle’s Labor Costs Are Rising. Customers Will See It in Pricing. 

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To hear proponents talk about it, seaweed could solve a whole lot of problems. It could feed people, restore polluted habitats and be an economic boost for fishermen. Though seaweed aquaculture has grown in the U.S. in recent years, the country produced less than 1% of the global seaweed crop in 2019. Now, some companies are trying to get seaweed aquaculture to scale in the U.S. But there are regulatory hurdles to overcome, and researchers have questions about how a scaled industry would affect existing ecosystems. WSJ’s Alex Ossola looks at what it will take to make seaweed a bigger part of the American diet in the future.  

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Further reading:

Inside the Quest for a Super Kelp That Can Survive Hotter Oceans 

Cows Make Climate Change Worse. Could Seaweed Help? 

A Sargassum Bloom Is Hitting Florida: What to Know About the Seaweed Mass 

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No more mealy apples and flavorless oranges. There’s a growing category of produce available in your local grocery store: fruits and vegetables that have been carefully bred with flavor in mind. But these more delicious varieties tend to come in premium packaging—with a premium price to boot. WSJ contributor Elizabeth G. Dunn tells host Alex Ossola how this produce is bred and whether we can expect to see more of it in the future. 

What do you think about the show? Let us know on Apple Podcasts or Spotify , or email us: [email protected] 

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Further reading:

This Strawberry Will Blow Your Mind: Inside the Startlingly Delicious World of Designer Produce 

The Race to Save Ketchup: Building a Tomato for a Hotter World 

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They’re ugly. They’re clunky. They’re loud. And, worst of all, they spike your energy bills every summer. The window air conditioner is a dreaded summer staple in many homes. But one company is redefining how an AC functions by thinking outside the typical window box. For Science of Success, WSJ’s Ben Cohen tells the story of Midea’s U-shaped window AC that captured the collective consciousness for its noise reduction and energy efficiency.

What do you think about the show? Let us know on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or email us: [email protected] 

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Further reading:

How Did the World’s Coolest Air Conditioner Get So Hot? 

The Race to Build a Better Air Conditioner

Does Turning Off Your A/C When You’re Not Home Actually Save Money? 

My Love Affair With Air-Conditioning 

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Our climate is changing. In the last 100 years, the planet has warmed about 1.5 degrees Celsius, according to NASA. But how can we learn more about our planet’s climate and what we can do to slow the changes? Gavin A. Schmidt, a top NASA climate scientist and director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, spoke with WSJ reporter Emily Glazer at the Future of Everything Festival on May 22, 2024 about the future of climate science and the data NASA is collecting on the Earth by looking at it from space.

What do you think about the show? Let us know on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or email us: [email protected] 

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Further reading:

2023 Was the Hottest Year on Record 

Extreme Heat, Floods, Fire: Was Summer 2023 the New Normal? 

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2023 was the world’s hottest year on record, and temperatures are expected to continue heating up. Cities, where more than half of the world lives, are contending with this extreme heat. But some places, such as Singapore, are looking for ways to modify aspects of their cities to make them more comfortable for people to live. The Cooling Singapore project is creating a hyper detailed digital twin of the city-state to be able to test the effectiveness of new methods the city would want to implement. WSJ’s Alex Ossola explains what they’ve learned, and how it can help us understand how more cities in the future might make changes to combat heat. 

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Further reading:

The Cooling Singapore 2.0 project, funded by the Singapore Nat ional Research Foundation, is led by the Singapore ETH Centre in partnership with Cambridge CARES, the National University of Singapore (NUS), Singapore Management University (SMU), the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), and TUMCREATE (established by the Technical University of Munich).

2023 Was the Hottest Year on Record 

Earth Just Had Its Hottest Month Ever. How Six Cities Are Coping. 

How Reflective Paint Brings Down Scorching City Temperatures 

These Photos Show How Urban Growth Fuels Extreme Heat 

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What good is a future without ketchup or pasta sauce? These are just two potential casualties of a changing climate, as tomato growers face shrinking harvests due to hotter and drier weather. WSJ reporter Patrick Thomas takes us behind the scenes of how seed breeders are trying to make a tomato that can thrive with less water, and how that highlights the efforts going into protecting crops against the effects of climate change.

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What do you think about the show? Let us know on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or email us: [email protected] 

Further reading:

The Race to Save Ketchup: Building a Tomato for a Hotter World 

How to Eat Your Way to a Greener Planet 

Sustainable Agriculture Gets a Push From Big Corporations 

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 How did a sandal that originally entered the U.S. market as a health product become a fashion staple and the crowning shoe of a multibillion dollar company? Margot Fraser originally brought Birkenstocks to the U.S. thinking that the comfort of the German sandal would appeal to women. But she couldn’t get shoe stores to sell them. They finally made it into the U.S. market through health food stores. Now, the seductively ugly shoe is a cultural icon and was valued at about $8.6 billion when the company went public last year. WSJ’s Ben Cohen explores the history of Birkenstock and how it paved the way for the future of women’s feet.

What do you think about the show? Let us know on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or email us: [email protected] 

Further reading: 

Why Americans Are Obsessed With These Ugly Sandals 

A Key to Birkenstock’s Billion Dollar Success? Its Frumpiest Shoe 

A Visual History of Birkenstock’s Rise, From Insoles to IPO 

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How does your doctor know that a drug or procedure will work to treat a condition before they try it? Often, they don’t. Researchers are looking to create “digital twins,” digital versions of individual organs, to see how a patient will respond. Eventually there could be digital twins of entire bodies that are updated in real time with patient data. WSJ’s Alex Ossola speaks with WSJ senior special writer Stephanie Armour about how that might change the way we treat diseases in the future. 

What do you think about the show? Let us know on Apple Podcasts or Spotify , or email us: [email protected] 

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Further reading: A ‘Digital Twin’ of Your Heart Lets Doctors Test Treatments Before Surgery  

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