Skip to Content
Uncategorized

A Nutty Solution

Today’s marvel of technology comes courtesy of New Scientist magazine: a solution to the age-old problem of unopened pistachio nuts. In every handful of pistachio nuts there are a few whose shells are completely closed, indicating they’re unripe and unopenable…
November 19, 2004

Today’s marvel of technology comes courtesy of New Scientist magazine: a solution to the age-old problem of unopened pistachio nuts. In every handful of pistachio nuts there are a few whose shells are completely closed, indicating they’re unripe and unopenable anyway. Mechanical pickers try to separate out the open-shelled nuts, but some that are closed invariably make their way into the pile.

But this is a country built on great ideas, and along comes the next one: separating the two types of nuts by sound. Tom Pearson, an engineer at the U.S. Agricultural Research Service in Manhattan, Kansas, has developed a sound-based sorter after noticing that closed nuts sound differently when they’re dropped than do open nuts. He is able to drop 25 nuts a second and differentiate the open from the closed, using a wisp of air to keep the closed nuts from the good pile. His method is 97% efficient, versus 90% for the mechanical pickers–a difference that could save at least one company a half million dollars a year.

It’s a wonderful world, nuts and all.

Keep Reading

Most Popular

The inside story of how ChatGPT was built from the people who made it

Exclusive conversations that take us behind the scenes of a cultural phenomenon.

Sam Altman invested $180 million into a company trying to delay death

Can anti-aging breakthroughs add 10 healthy years to the human life span? The CEO of OpenAI is paying to find out.

ChatGPT is about to revolutionize the economy. We need to decide what that looks like.

New large language models will transform many jobs. Whether they will lead to widespread prosperity or not is up to us.

GPT-4 is bigger and better than ChatGPT—but OpenAI won’t say why

We got a first look at the much-anticipated big new language model from OpenAI. But this time how it works is even more deeply under wraps.

Stay connected

Illustration by Rose Wong

Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review

Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.

Thank you for submitting your email!

Explore more newsletters

It looks like something went wrong.

We’re having trouble saving your preferences. Try refreshing this page and updating them one more time. If you continue to get this message, reach out to us at customer-service@technologyreview.com with a list of newsletters you’d like to receive.