This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.

In the fall of 2025, Jeff Dodge served hungry students steaming marinara sauce and meatballs. The students loved them: 92% of those who tried them wanted them on the menu. Few could guess that mushrooms had been mixed into the meat.

Dodge was testing a new product called 50/Cut from the company Joyn. The blend of seemingly simple ingredients—available as meatballs, burgers, and ground meat—could help solve one of the biggest challenges of the climate crisis: getting people to eat less meat, particularly beef.

Joyn is among a wave of startups creating “blended meat,” which combines plant proteins with the real deal. The logic: The best meat replacement is … better meat.

More than 5 million people have an advanced form of age-related macular degeneration (AMD) called geographic atrophy, in which retinal cells die off. Until now, no treatment could restore their vision. A system called PRIMA changes that.

It combines a retinal implant with camera-equipped eyeglasses to improve sight in patients who develop a blind spot in the middle of their vision. After training sessions, more than 80% of recipients could read, do crosswords, and use their phones.

In 2001, a decade after inventing the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee articulated a new vision: an internet navigated by autonomous software agents that address our every need, without requiring us to muck about with browsers and search engines ourselves.

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