Powdered supplements and meal replacements have existed for years, but over the recent months, they have taken merged and unified to answer the question: “Can we survive on artificial substance alone?”

Rob Rhinehart, the creator of Soylent, appeared on the Colbert Report to discuss his open source product. That’s when I first heard about it. In the course of the interview, Stephen Colbert tastes Soylent, adds chocolate sauce, and receives commendation from Rinehart:

This intrigued me. I figured Rinehart would have grimaced or demured when Colbert augmented his carefully crafted food replacement. But he didn’t. Something about this made me jump to the thought: This could work for athletes.

First in high school and then in college, I had weight problems. I was too light in high school (a 185 lbs. offensive lineman) and too heavy in college (a 210 lbs. five-seat rower). One of the greatest difficulties I faced was in the cafeteria. In high school, there was insufficient good food, so I couldn’t bulk up healthily. In college — with a Sodexho buffet — I had unlimited access to decent food and even more non-decent food. Part of the college problem was self control, but just as much of it was, let’s say, digestibility. The healthy options — the salads and vegetarian quiches — were often unpleasant or cold, but the pizza and the cheesy pastas and the cookies tasted warm and vaguely reminiscent of delicious (and more importantly, the pizza and pasta went well with the salad dressings and hot sauces that provided a much-needed variety).

In other words: Eating right was hard. Eating like an athlete — when I was burning 1000+ calories every day, and thus was 1000+ calories more hungry every day — was even harder (this, of course, is to say nothing of when your coaches actually want you to be obese).

Perhaps something like Soylent could be a solution? Not only does it meet the hard-to-hit nutritional standards, but it can provide 2000 calories and do so for around $10 a day — or $3.33 per meal.

One of the best resources I have found for learning about Soylent and Soylent-like products is the Soylent Subreddit on Reddit.com. In a recent conversation about the efficacy of the diet entirely on Soylent, user eviljolly pointed out one of the key advantages of a liquid diet — not that it trumps a standard balanced diet, but that it can bring a balanced diet to more people:

Soylent has come along and made nutrition easy for people, and people (like me) that would probably never devote themselves to eating perfectly healthy, can now do so without little to no effort involved.

The current problem for many athletes is a combination of incorrect calorie amount and poor calorie types.

“Americans are not lacking in calories,” Rob Rhinehart said to Stephen Colbert. “They’re lacking in balance.”

Athletes can be disciplined sorts. It’s not unthinkable a diet composed 2/3rds or 100% of liquified nutrition could be viable — especially if it comes cheap. I think Soylent and its sisters might be able to offer that balance.

God Save The Queen! Esports is coming to London in the form of a specific arena designed for tournaments, league play and ladder competitions. Gfinity, a company whose mission statement is “to help push esports within the UK to a professional level, to raise awareness and to provide an arena for gamers to showcase their talent” is working on the first building of its type in the country.

No stranger to the realm of esports — Gfinity hosted G3 and its $145,000 prize pool spread across four different games — the arena is already slated to hold an astonishing 30 live events next year. With seating for up to 500 spectators to view the competitions unfold, the building may not be as large as Major League Gaming’s (MLG) new Ohio event building, it is nonetheless a great first step. The confirmed events include games such as StarCraft II, Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Halo, FIFA 15, League of Legends and Hearthstone. Gfinity has set aside $500,000 for these tournaments in addition to their weekly cups (weekly tournaments) plus six “open” events where anyone can come to the arena to chase their professional gaming aspirations.

Though this is new to the United Kingdom, mainland Europe is no stranger to hosting massive local area network (LANs) games and live tournaments. From DreamHack to Electronic Sports World Cups (ESWC), esports have spread across Europe as quickly as their internet connections will take it. The UK has hosted previous annual large-scale LANs before, notably the yearly Insomnia events, however nothing in the same scale as what Gfinity has planned for 2015 and beyond.

With new venues, tournaments and competitions, esports — despite recent controversies — continues to grow around the world. With a multitude of streaming platforms ranging from Twitch.TV to YouTube to MLG.TV, the way to watch and esports at home is wide open. The live-and-in-person options are finally catching up.

(Header image via Gfinity)

“We can rebuild him. We have the technology. We have the capability to make the world’s first bionic man…We can make him better than he was. Better, stronger, faster.”

Classic science fiction aside, there has been a recent announcement by Tufts University regarding the world’s first wireless electronic implant to fight staph infections then automatically dissolve into the body when the job is finished. Working with a collection of talent from Tufts as well as the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, the research group has successfully shown an absorbable chip that eliminated a bacterial infection in mice by applying heat to infected areas after receiving a wireless signal via remote. The devices themselves are made from silk — where the antibiotics are loaded for dispersal — and magnesium, allowing them to be safely absorbed in testing animals after 15 days.

The large scale implications of such a chip in humans is grand, as professor of biomedical engineering at Tufts Fiorenzo Omenetto believes

“This is an important demonstration step forward for the development of  on-demand medical devices that can be turned on remotely to perform a therapeutic function in a patient and then safely disappear after their use, requiring no retrieval.”

Frank C. Doble, a professor at Tufts School of Engineering, believes this could drastically change the aftermath of surgical procedures in hospitals.

“These wireless strategies could help manage post-surgical infection, for example, or pave the way for eventual ‘wi-fi’ drug delivery.”

As per a study conducted by the Center for Disease Control in 2011, as many as 1 in 25 hospital patients were hit with a healthcare-associated infection, or HAI. The same study showed approximately 721,800 and HAIs were responsible for an estimated 75,000 deaths.

With something as simple as a patch the doctor places and remotely monitors, some of the guesswork in post-surgery complications can be removed. While there is no timetable for the implant to begin human trials, the hope would be to cut down on not only HAIs but also infections of any other type. The implant managed to handle staph infections as well as E. coli and S. aureus bacteria. There may come a day where rather than seeing the doctor about a prescription and then driving to the pharmacy, the doctor or nurse could apply something as simple as a patch and then send you on your way.

(Header image via NIAID)