France's prestigious Michelin Guide is among the world's most influential references on gourmet dining, its star ratings highly coveted and sometimes controversial.
- More than 120 years old -
French tyre manufacturer Michelin brought out a travel guide in 1900, the early days of the automobile, to encourage motorists to take to the road and so boost its business.
The free, red guidebook included maps, instructions on how to change tyres and lists of mechanics and hotels along the route.
The first run of 35,000 copies was such a success that guides for Belgium, Germany, Portugal and Spain followed.
In 2021, in a small revolution, an edition was published for those wanting to discover France by regional train, rather than by car.
- Star rating -
The guide included restaurant listings from 1920, when it started charging for the publication. It began sending out undercover inspectors, and from the early 1930s introduced its famous star ratings.
Michelin says it issues up to three stars based on the quality of the ingredients used; mastery of flavour and cooking techniques; the personality of the chef in his cuisine; value for money; and consistency between visits.
One star indicates "High quality cooking, worth a stop"; two stars is for "Excellent cooking, worth a detour"; and three rates "Exceptional cuisine, worth a special journey".
Of about 20,000 international restaurants listed, only around 130 have attained the highest distinction.
In 2021, the Guide was criticised for keeping its selection in France going, despite the fact that restaurants were closed due to the Covid pandemic. Its competitors had decided to cancel their awards.
- Michelin goes global -
In 2005, the Michelin Guide branched out of Europe with a New York guide, followed in 2007 by editions for San Francisco then Las Vegas and Los Angeles.
It moved to Asia with a Tokyo version in 2008 when 90,000 copies, in English and Japanese, flew off the shelves in 48 hours.
Michelin published its first Shanghai guide in 2016 and today there are versions for several Asian cities, with Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo also covered.
Having long been criticised as biased towards formal dining, the guide in 2016 awarded a star to a Singapore street food outlet known for a braised chicken dish.
A famed Tokyo sushi restaurant, where Barack Obama is said to have enjoyed the best sushi of his life, was meanwhile dropped in 2019 after it stopped accepting reservations from the general public.
- A lot of pressure -
A handful of French restaurateurs have relinquished their Michelin status because of the stress of being judged by its inspectors, including Joel Robuchon (1996), Alain Senderens (2005), Olivier Roellinger (2008) and Sebastien Bras (2017).
The suicide in 2003 of three-star chef Bernard Loiseau was linked, among other reasons, to hints that his restaurant was about to lose its three stars.
Star Swiss chef Benoit Violier took his life in 2016, a day ahead of the release of the Michelin Guide, although his restaurant maintained its three-star rating.
The guide was taken to court for the first time in 2019 when celebrity chef Marc Veyrat sued it for stripping one of his restaurants of a third star and suggesting -- wrongly, he insists -- that he had used cheddar cheese in a souffle.
His lawsuit was rejected.
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American pop artist Jeff Koons is to send sculptures to the Moon later this year on a spacecraft blasting off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, his gallery said.
Koons, one of the most celebrated and expensive living artists, is famed for kitsch pieces such as "Ballon Dog" and "Rabbit," and his work is exhibited in galleries around the world.
His latest project "Moon Phases" consists of physical sculptures that will be left permanently on the lunar surface in a transparent, thermally coated miniature satellite, the Pace Gallery in New York said.
Koons will also make unique digital versions of the sculptures -- marking his entry into the lucrative new world of NFTs (non-fungible tokens).
The sculptures will travel on the "Nova-C Lunar Lander," designed by private company Intuitive Machines, and will be placed on the surface of the Moon in the Oceanus Procellarum.
"I wanted to create a historically meaningful NFT project," Koons, 67, said. "Our achievements in space represent the limitless potential of humanity."
The gallery released no details on the number or size of sculptures heading into space, but said the location will become a lunar heritage site.
It added the project would mark 50 years since America's last crewed trip to the Moon.
NASA is targeting May for a test flight of Artemis-1 -- an uncrewed lunar mission -- ahead of an eventual crewed landing, likely no sooner than 2026.
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As urban traffic gets more miserable, entrepreneurs are looking to a future in which commuters hop into "air taxis" that whisk them over clogged roads.
Companies such as Archer, Joby and Wisk are working on electric-powered aircraft that take off and land vertically like helicopters then propel forward like planes.
"'The Jetsons' is definitely a reference that people make a lot when trying to contextualize what we are doing," Archer Vice President Louise Bristow told AFP, referring to a 1960s animated comedy about a family living in a high-tech future.
"The easiest way to think about it is a flying car, but that's not what we're doing."
What Archer envisions is an age of aerial ride-sharing, an "Uber or Lyft of the skies," Bristow said.
Neighborhood parking garage rooftops or shopping mall lots could serve as departure or arrival pads for electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft.
Commuters would make it the rest of the way however they wish, even synching trips with car rideshare services such as Uber which owns a stake in Santa Cruz, California-based Joby.
Joby executives said on a recent earnings call that its first production model aircraft should be in the skies later this year.
That comes despite a Joby prototype crashing early this year while being tested at speeds and altitudes far greater than it would have to handle as part of an air taxi fleet.
Joby has declined to discuss details of the remotely piloted aircraft's crash, which occurred in an uninhabited area, saying it is waiting for US aviation regulators to finish an investigation.
"We were at the end of the flight test expansion campaign at test points well above what we expect to see in normal operations," Joby executive chairman Paul Sciarra told analysts.
"I'm really excited about where we are right now; we have demonstrated the full performance of our aircraft."
Its eVTOL aircraft have a maximum range of 150 miles (241 kilometers), a top speed of 200 miles per hour and a "low noise profile" to avoid an annoying din, the company said.
Joby has announced partnerships with SK Telecom and the TMAP mobility platform in South Korea to provide emissions-free aerial ridesharing.
"By cooperating with Joby, TMAP will become a platform operator that can offer a seamless transportation service between the ground and the sky," TMAP chief executive Lee Jong Ho said in a release.
Joby has also announced a partnership with Japanese airline ANA to launch air taxi service in Japan.
And Toyota has additionally joined the alliance, with an aim to explore adding ground transportation to such a service there, Joby said.
- Rethinking required -
Hurdles on the path include establishing infrastructure and adapting attitudes to make air taxis a part of everyday life.
"For mass adoption, people need to have a mindset change," Bristow said.
"Getting people to want to travel in a different way will take some rethinking."
The need for the change, though, is clear, she reasoned.
Roads are congested with traffic that wastes time, frays nerves and spews pollution.
"There is nowhere else for traffic to go," Bristow said.
"You have to go up."
Miami and Los Angeles are already exploring the potential of aerial ridesharing, and Archer is hoping to have a small air taxi service operating in at least one of those cities by the end of 2024.
"It's a monumental task that we're taking on," Bristow said.
"It's going to take a while before the infrastructure supports the mass expansion of what we're trying to do."
Archer last month announced that it teamed with United Airlines to create an eVTOL advisory committee.
The US airline has pre-ordered 200 Archer aircraft with an eye toward using them for "last-mile" transportation from airports, Bristow told AFP.
"Imagine flying from London to Newark, New Jersey, then getting in an Archer and being deposited somewhere in Manhattan," Bristow said.
- More time for life -
Silicon Valley startup Xwing specializes in making standard aircraft capable of flying safely without pilots, with an aim of turning commuting by air into a cheaper and more efficient way to travel.
"We're strong believers here that the industry is going through a pretty dramatic transformation," Xwing chief and founder Marc Piette told AFP.
"In a few years you'll start seeing taxi networks of electric aircrafts regionally or on long hauls and it's going to be quite a different landscape."
Thousands of regional airports used mostly for recreation could become part of aerial commute networks, air mobility consultant Scott Drennan told AFP.
To Drennan, the primary reason for taking to the skies is to "give people back their time."
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The days of playing your favourite game for hours at a time to stay competitive in eSports are gone, with gamers now focusing on brain development, if one leading team is to be believed.
At the Team Liquid training centre in the Dutch city of Utrecht, coach David Tillberg-Persson, alias "Fuzzface", frowns and scratches his beard, focused, eyes glued to a screen.
Using the keyboard, the 28-year-old former Swedish player must recognise shapes and "catch" red dots, anticipating, identifying and reacting with increasing speed.
Tillberg-Persson is testing a new training program before it is made available to the Team Liquid players themselves.
Team Liquid is one of the biggest in the professional eSports leagues and they are keen to keep their edge, with the focus on brain training adding to the use of coaches.
The image of the overweight teenager locked in his room is a distant memory in a sector that has rapidly professionalised, with prize money worth millions of dollars, and players leading disciplined lifestyles.
With new generations of gamers adding to the pool of talent, competition is fierce and teams are now seeking to optimise the cognitive aspect, which is crucial in a field where every millisecond counts.
- 'Revolutionary'
Described as "revolutionary" by Team Liquid, the new training program, dubbed The Pro Lab, has also been implemented in California where the team is based.
"We believe The Pro Lab will make waves in the eSports industry and beyond,” Dutchman Victor Goossens, founder and co-CEO of Team Liquid, said in a statement.
"The Pro Lab is a first-of-its-kind training space backed by eSports science, fundamentally changing not only the way these athletes train but how they grow and evolve along with the industry", said Team Liquid.
The Team Liquid players, young people living all over the world, will be subjected to cognitive tests involving relatively simple games, the results of which will then be analysed to target both shortcomings and qualities.
There are four main types: attention, memory, control and anticipation.
“We are trying to use technology and data to make our practice more efficient and more focused than what we are used to, sitting behind a PC for eight hours," explains Brittany Lattanzio, senior athletics manager at Team Liquid.
"At the very, very top level it's a game of inches. The smallest detail can make your team perform so much better than other teams", the 32-year-old Canadian tells AFP.
The goal is to determine training activities for each player to improve concentration, reaction speed or memory.
- 'Future of eSports' -
"All Team Liquid athletes are going to play the games and based on that, we're going to get a lot of data from which we create profiles," says Rafick de Mol, 28, an analyst at BrainsFirst, the Dutch company that helped develop the software for Pro Lab.
"It's a fairly recent development -- and we're at the forefront of that -- that can add so much value because it provides information that other tests or conversations don't provide," observes De Mol.
"It's part of the future of esports," he said.
"Fuzzface", the coach of a team that plays PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds (PUBG), a multiplayer combat and survival video game, is eagerly awaiting the first results.
"Historically, training has been very focused on just game performance" but the new tests will give them much more data to work with, says the coach, who is already a veteran in a "very young" industry.
Lattanzio said it made sense to use technology in a such a tech-based field.
"There are so many more tools that you can use on a computer than you can with like running around on a football field," she said.
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US President Joe Biden named Karine Jean-Pierre as the next White House press secretary, the first Black person to hold the high-profile post.
Jean-Pierre, who will also be the first openly LGBTQ+ person in the role, will replace Jen Psaki, under whom she served as deputy, from May 13.
Biden in a statement praised Jean-Pierre's "experience, talent and integrity," saying he was "proud" to announce her appointment.
The outgoing spokeswoman, bringing Jean-Pierre behind the podium for the traditional briefing of accredited journalists at the White House on Thursday, praised, in a voice sometimes choked with emotion, the qualities of her deputy, whom she hugged several times.
Jean-Pierre "will be the first Black woman, the first out LGBTQ+ person to serve in this role," said Psaki, who said from the outset that she would step down during Biden's term.
Jean-Pierre's promotion is "amazing because representation matters and she is going to give a voice to so many and show so many what is truly possible when you work hard and dream big," Psaki added, opting not to comment on media reports that she will be joining TV channel MSNBC after leaving the White House.
Also visibly moved, the future press secretary said: "This is a historic moment and it's not lost on me. I understand how important it is for so many people."
The 44-year-old Jean-Pierre, who has a daughter with her partner, a CNN journalist, has already taken to the famed podium in the White House's James S. Brady Press Briefing Room as Psaki's number two.
From May she'll take center stage at the daily White House press conference, which is broadcast live and highly scrutinized.
Before her, only one other Black woman, Judy Smith, had been deputy White House press secretary, during George H.W. Bush's presidency in 1991.
- 'American dream' -
A long-time advisor to Biden, Jean-Pierre worked on both of former president Barack Obama's campaigns in 2008 and 2012 and then on Biden's campaign in 2020 before joining his team at the White House.
She also served under Biden during his tenure as Obama's vice president.
Jean-Pierre was previously chief public affairs officer for liberal advocacy group MoveOn.org and worked as a political analyst with NBC and MSNBC, the White House statement said.
Raised in New York, French-speaking Jean-Pierre was born in Martinique to Haitian parents who emigrated to the United States, where her father drove a taxi and her mother was a home health worker.
It was in New York that she took her first steps into politics before also becoming a leading figure in the non-profit sphere, having graduated from the prestigious Columbia University.
Jean-Pierre has often said her family's background, emblematic of the "American dream," was a determining factor in her career.
But she has also written of "the pressure of growing up in an immigrant household to succeed" in a book published in 2019.
An advocate for combatting mental health stigma, the new White House spokeswoman has also shared her own stories of being sexually abused as a child as well as suffering from depression and at one point attempting suicide.
On Thursday, when asked about the message she wanted to deliver to American youth, she said: "If you are passionate about what you want to be, where you want to go, and you work very hard to that goal it will happen.
"You'll be knocked down and you'll have some tough times and it won't be easy all the time but the rewards are pretty amazing, especially if you stay true to yourself."
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With his hand pushed firmly into his cheek and his eyes fixed on the table, Garry Kasparov shot a final dark glance at the chessboard before storming out of the room: the king of chess had just been beaten by a computer.
May 11, 1997 was a watershed for the relationship between man and machine, when the artificial intelligence (AI) supercomputer Deep Blue finally achieved what developers had been promising for decades.
It was an "incredible" moment, AI expert Philippe Rolet told AFP, even if the enduring technological impact was not so huge.
"Deep Blue's victory made people realise that machines could be as strong as humans, even on their territory," he said.
Developers at IBM, the US firm that made Deep Blue, were ecstatic with the victory but quickly refocused on the wider significance.
"This is not about man versus machine. This is really about how we, humans, use technology to solve difficult problems," said Deep Blue team chief Chung-Jen Tan after the match, listing possible benefits from financial analysis to weather forecasting.
Even Chung would have struggled to comprehend how central AI has now become -- finding applications in almost every field of human existence.
"AI has exploded over the last 10 years or so," UCLA computer science professor Richard Korf told AFP.
"We're now doing things that used to be impossible."
- 'One man cracked' -
After his defeat, Kasparov, who is still widely regarded as the greatest chess player of all time, was furious.
He hinted there had been unfair practices, denied he had really lost and concluded that nothing at all had been proved about the power of computers.
He explained that the match could be seen as "one man, the best player in the world, (who) has cracked under pressure".
The computer was beatable, he argued, because it had too many weak points.
Nowadays, the best computers will always beat even the strongest human chess players.
AI-powered machines have mastered every game going and now have much bigger worlds to conquer.
Korf cites notable advances in facial recognition that have helped make self-driving cars a reality.
Yann LeCun, head of AI research at Meta/Facebook, told AFP there had been "absolutely incredible progress" in recent years.
LeCun, one of the founding fathers of modern AI, lists among the achievements of today's computers an ability "to translate any language into any language in a set of 200 languages" or "to have a single neural network that understands 100 languages".
It is a far cry from 1997, when Facebook didn't even exist.
- Machines 'not the danger' -
Experts agree that the Kasparov match was important as a symbol but left little in the way of a technical legacy.
"There was nothing revolutionary in the design of Deep Blue," said Korf, describing it as an evolution of methods that had been around since the 1950s.
"It was also a piece of dedicated hardware designed just to play chess."
Facebook, Google and other tech firms have pushed AI in all sorts of other directions.
They have fuelled increasingly powerful AI machines with unimaginable amounts of data from their users, serving up remorselessly targeted content and advertising and forging trillion-dollar companies in the process.
AI technology now helps to decide anything from the temperature of a room to the price of vehicle insurance.
Devices from vacuum cleaners to doorbells come with arrays of sensors to furnish AI systems with data to better target consumers.
While critics bemoan a loss of privacy, enthusiasts believe AI products just make everyone's lives easier.
Despite his painful history with machines, Kasparov is largely unfazed by AI's increasingly dominant position.
"There is simply no evidence that machines are threatening us," he told AFP last year.
"The real danger comes not from killer robots but from people -- because people still have a monopoly on evil."
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Bionaut Labs plans its first clinical trials on humans in just two years for its tiny injectable robots, which can be carefully guided through the brain using magnets.
"The idea of the micro robot came about way before I was born," said co-founder and CEO Michael Shpigelmacher.
"One of the most famous examples is a book by Isaac Asimov and a film called 'Fantastic Voyage,' where a crew of scientists goes inside a miniaturized spaceship into the brain, to treat a blood clot."
Just as cellphones now contain extremely powerful components that are smaller than a grain of rice, the tech behind micro-robots "that used to be science fiction in the 1950s and 60s" is now "science fact," said Shpigelmacher.
"We want to take that old idea and turn it into reality," the 43-year-old scientist told AFP during a tour of his company's Los Angeles research and development center.
Working with Germany's prestigious Max Planck research institutes, Bionaut Labs settled on using magnetic energy to propel the robots -- rather than optical or ultrasonic techniques -- because it does not harm the human body.
Magnetic coils placed outside the patient's skull are linked up to a computer that can remotely and delicately maneuver the micro-robot into the affected part of the brain, before removing it via the same route.
The entire apparatus is easily transportable, unlike an MRI, and uses 10 to 100 times less electricity.
- 'You're stuck' -
In a simulation watched by AFP, the robot -- a metal cylinder just a few millimeters long, in the shape of a tiny bullet -- slowly follows a pre-programed trajectory through a gel-filled container, which emulates the density of the human brain.
Once it nears a pouch filled with blue liquid, the robot is swiftly propelled like a rocket and pierces the sack with its pointed end, allowing liquid to flow out.
Inventors hope to use the robot to pierce fluid-filled cysts within the brain when clinical trials begin in two years.
If successful, the process could be used to treat Dandy-Walker Syndrome, a rare brain malformation affecting children.
Sufferers of the congenital ailment can experience cysts the size of a golf ball, which swell and increase pressure on the brain, triggering a host of dangerous neurological conditions.
Bionaut Labs has already tested its robots on large animals such as sheep and pigs, and "the data shows that the technology is safe for us" human beings, said Shpigelmacher.
If approved, the robots could offer key advantages over existing treatments for brain disorders.
"Today, most brain surgery and brain intervention is limited to straight lines -- if you don't have a straight line to the target, you're stuck, you're not going to get there," said Shpigelmacher.
Micro-robotic tech "allows you to reach targets you were not able to reach, and reaching them repeatedly in the safest trajectory possible," he added.
- 'Heating up' -
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) last year granted Bionaut Labs approvals that pave the way for clinical trials to treat Dandy-Walker Syndrome, as well as malignant gliomas -- cancerous brain tumors often considered to be inoperable.
In the latter case, the micro-robots will be used to inject anti-cancer drugs directly into brain tumors in a "surgical strike."
Existing treatment methods involve bombarding the whole body with drugs, leading to potential severe side effects and loss of effectiveness, said Shpigelmacher.
The micro-robots can also take measurements and collect tissue samples while inside the brain.
Bionaut Labs -- which has around 30 employees -- has held discussions with partners for the use of its tech to treat other conditions affecting the brain including Parkinson's, epilepsy or strokes.
"To the best of my knowledge, we are the first commercial effort" to design a product of this type with "a clear path to the clinic trials," said Shpigelmacher.
"But I don't think that we will be the only one... This area is heating up."
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Devotees of French food and wine can flock to a new temple following the opening Friday of a gastronomy and wine complex in the capital of France's central Burgundy region, Dijon.
"It's astounding. It's a marriage of gastronomy, wine, culture and education," said former French president Francois Hollande during whose tenure the project was launched.
"It's not unique in France. It's unique in the world," he added at the inauguration.
The city famed for its mustard and rolling vineyards hopes to lure one million visitors a year to the site resembling a village with expositions, a culinary school, shops, restaurants and even a cinema.
"I have no doubt that one million is a completely attainable objective," Socialist Dijon mayor Francois Rebsamen told AFP, adding that Dijon boasted 3.5 million annual visitors before the Covid-19 pandemic hit.
The project began after UNESCO added the "French gastronomic meal" to its intangible cultural heritage list in 2010.
The inclusion on the prestigious list sparked the launch of sites in Paris, Lyon, Tours and Dijon designed to showcase different aspects of the country's rich food and wine culture.
Meals are a big deal in France, where 2,000 books on wine or cooking are published every year.
The French will typically sit down together to tuck in unlike Americans "who often eat standing next to the kitchen counter" and alone, says Tours University sociologist Jean-Pierre Corbeau.
The gastronomic meal is "this ritual good food that brings together the French to celebrate the good life together", said European Institute for the History and Cultures of Food founder Francois Chevrier in his book on the Dijon complex.
-'Experimental kitchen'-
The massive Dijon site spreads across 6.5 hectares and combines modern structures with buildings with glazed tiles from the mediaeval times.
"We wanted to enhance the existing heritage while adding contemporary architectural touches to it," architect Anthony Bechu said.
The overall project cost 250 million euros ($265,000) with the private sector financing 90 percent.
Visitors can meander through four sections on the history of French meals, baking, Burgundy's vineyards and the art of cooking.
Once an appetite is worked up, tourists can eat to their heart's content in two restaurants run by triple-starred chef Eric Pras.
And they can wash the meal down with wine from a cellar that offers "one of the widest selections in the world, with 250 wines by the glass among more than 3,000 references," according to its director Anthony Valla.
The site also includes a butcher's shop and a bakery, an "experimental kitchen" offering demonstrations and workshops, and a branch of the world-renowned Ferrandi culinary school.
Such a huge project has raised some eyebrows, especially after the Lyon site closed down only nine months after its inauguration.
"We learned our lesson from the failure of Lyon, which offered something a little down-market and very expensive," Dijon mayor Rebsamen said.
The Dijon site includes "a whole cultural and heritage section that is free", he added.
The French-style meal is in danger because "people think cooking is a waste of time", according to Paris-Sorbonne professor Jean-Robert Pitte.
Pitte is one of the architects of the campaign that led to the UNESCO inscription, designed to restore "the taste for cooking".
He believes "eating well is not superfluous, but necessary for health, sociability, the economy and culture".
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