3 MILLION dollar food scanner: BUSTED! (Tellspec and SCiO)

Video Statistics and Information

Video

Captions Word Cloud

Captions

hi I'm Isabelle Hoffman and I'm Stephen Watson we've invented tell spec a device that tells you what's in your food molecular scanners for smartphones are making their way to an iPhone near you it's hard to know what's in our food this Apple for instance does it have pesticides Messiah replaces your grandmother squeeze test sorry grandma to tell you the best cucumber or tomato to pick but what the heck is a molecular scanner is it like one of those tricorder things that mr. data used in Star Trek well actually yes there's this amazing little scanner what you do is push a button Queens you that your food and it'll give you a complete breakdown of your food and how healthy it is tells Becky's easy to use I simply weigh little speck back and forth and weed in a few seconds we should receive in our smartphone some information about the solid its totally Star Trek just as the fictional tricorder could give the crew of the enterprise useful information about their surroundings real-life molecular scanners analyze the chemical makeup of objects without the need for uber expensive lab equipment I'm Damien and I'm more excited to do science sorrow is the first molecular sensor that fits in the palm of your hand now of candies Apple let's see what it says this Apple has no pesticides now I'll scan this Chaka truffle ah my tell spec tells me that this chocolate truffle is guten as well as egg and artificial vanilla with these apps you can begin exploring the world around you with any app the more you scan the most I'll learn about the things you really want to know sigh oh is our latest design and we're ready to take it to mass production after 9 months of hard work we're ready to move to the production of tail spec so the retarding devices what unraised about 3 million dollars on Kickstarter and the other raised about three hundred thousand dollars on IndieGoGo so cool it's totally like Star Trek that's cool that's really and you can Star Trek and it's totally bullshit the thing is if something like this did exist it would make hundreds of million dollar pieces of scientific it obsolete overnight non-invasive multi component scan in seconds all for our hundred and fifty dollars the fact that this hasn't happened that these million dollar pieces of kit are still in use might be your first clue as to why it's bullshit seriously this piece of kit alone cost about $60,000 and it would be completely outclassed by this a hundred and fifty dollar scanner all for that matter buy this $250 handheld scanner if only it will legit and this really is a lesson how you can have dozens of scientists actually working on a project without one of them stepping back and saying hang on a sack even if this all works out perfectly it's still gonna be almost useless as a food scanner seriously this is how fundamentally flawed the whole venture is now these spectrometers claim that they work off the red end of the spectrum and off into the infrared at that point you start seeing absorber from various vibrations of the molecules but that we're all kinda falls apart now it's true enough that there were some good optical windows for certain materials in the infrared say for instance like polyethylene which you can very easily see through with the thermal camera it's almost transparent this is just one of the nice examples if you get a black polythene bag and of course it completely obscures things to the visible but the infrared it makes almost no difference whatsoever however most foods are an unholy mixture of many compounds and really not that transparent to the infrared the point is really quite clear if you just get an infrared camera and pointed at food and you've realized you really can't see what the interior of the Apple looks like there aren't many infrared photons coming out from the middle of the Apple okay and hey you've got two apples which have been their slightly cooler room so they appear very dark as you can see there's much difference between a red apple and a green apple in the infrared plus this object here is actually been in this room for some time so it's absolutely wonderfully symbolized with everything else in the room but of course if I hold it for a bit you'll see that there's fingerprints on and similarly I grandma have an apple you'll see there's fingerprints on it if I grab hold of another Apple you'll see there's fingerprints on it and those fingerprints will vanish as the Apple equilibrates to room temperature in fact let's just take another step back for a second the visible spectrum is about 0.3 to 0.7 microns in wavelength where a micron is a millionth of a meter the shorter the wavelength the higher the energy the photon so the infrared on this scale is basically everything with a wavelength longer than point seven microns infrared spectroscopy is typically down in the region between 3 and 20 microns because that's where most of the interesting molecular vibrations take place now there's a region between 1 and 2 microns which is a rather special region which we'll come back to later called the near-infrared and here my thermal camera worked in the range between about 7 and 13 microns now with a thermal camera what you're doing is just counting up all the photons in a certain region and an idea of what the temperature is with this spectrometer in this case we're only dealing with a reflection what you're doing is you're shining a light on something and seeing what light comes back so a analogy here would be if you were to shine white light on something say for instance a green object like an apple it's gonna absorb everything else and the only light that's gonna come back is green and if you're trying on a red object the only light that's coming back to you is red and that's what you'll be getting if you were to do an infrared spectrum of an apple so when you take a look at a fruit in the infrared the one thing that you notice easy is not transparent you cannot see through the skin it's point you really are just looking at the surface of the food nothing more your scanner even if it worked perfectly wait we'll come back to why it won't later would only scan the very top layer of your food if you scan a hamburger it's just gonna tell you what the surface is like you scan the bun it'll say it's bread you scan the burger meat scan a banana it'll tell you the composition of this skin not the actual edible fruit inside yet these people advertise themselves as being able to scan what watermelons are gonna be like imagine if there was a way to know which watermelons would it further if you were to go on to scan something like Ann Curry it'll never be able to give you the composition because all you're ever gonna get is the composition of this sauce scallop pizza when you scan food with tell spec the spectrum is uploaded to our server we're a program analyzes it within seconds information about what's in the food appears on your smartphone and it won't even be able to tell you there's a doughy crust underneath which brings us on to the other thing most people just care about what the food tastes like rather than the technical composition if you're interested in the technical composition you're almost always better getting it off the nutritional data from the label trying to work it out for yourself with some handheld scanner with terrible resolution if he's very hard work and really won't tell you much so let's start with tell spec it had a team of scientists they claimed they were gonna make a key fob sized piece of that would instantly tell you about your food I simply weigh little speck back and forth and weed in a few seconds we should receive in our smartphone some information about this salad they even went on to tell you that it would work on a rather expensive variant of infrared spectroscopy called Raman spectroscopy they did a Kickstarter and got $300,000 way back in mid 2013 let's see how they got on shall we well of course initially they promised this Star Trek food scanner we've invented tell spec a device that tells you what's in your food when you back this project you'll be part of a revolution for a healthier world so please join us thank you and they go amazing wall-to-wall positive media coverage who wouldn't want a Star Trek food scanner naturally even at these points over the skeptically minded among you might have been thinking really you're gonna get all of that in something this site of a key fault a tell speck is small so you can take it with you everywhere it's fast it's easy to use tell speck was first tested on a prototype with a large spectrometer then we adapted it to the nano chip yeah their Kickstarter has it there with this that is key for with almost no space in it is what they're gonna put the scanner in then they said it was gonna weigh 80 grams again really for frame of reference this is what 50 grams of silver looks like and silver is bloody dense stuff tell spec a device that tells you what's in your food I present to you our first beta prototype it's a working beta prototype I will be damned in there today then we adapted it to the nano chip it's called the tail spec food sensor and of course it's gonna work off Raman spectroscopy cool turns out that's not really a new idea I mean handheld Raman spectrometers have been around for a while now like say for instance this one which new cost about $60,000 fortunately I cut this one secondhand for the bargain price of about six thousand dollars let's see how it does on something simple like say for instance vodka which is basically a a water alcohol mixture how does this thing work well it's got a laser here and this laser is kind of focused down to a point and that point there is where all the excitations happen and the light is then the light comes out of there and these thing goes back into the spectrometer and this is the real key point if the light from that point there can't get back into the spectrometer then this whole thing is kind of pointless so first ones you can I show you where about this this point is initially there's the point what you see is that it's further diffuse point here the focus is about here somewhere and then as I come out the other side of the focus it becomes deep focused again so where it's focused is really the critical bit that's where you're going to get your spectrum from now at the moment this is not too bad because the paper is reflecting a lot of the energy of that however if you take something it's not going to reflect a lot of that energy that it catches fire fairly quickly yeah so there's actually quite a lot of power in this thing you can of course turn down the power each just it means that the scan times go up the first thing I do is just gonna scan some vodka not even gonna bother putting it in a vial or something I'm just gonna scan that so you can see the focus of this is actually going to be within the alcohol and we go good molecular signal and not fluorescence that means that we're not losing many of those photons which as you'll see later becomes really important that you're actually getting the photons back and it comes straight back with ethanol and ethanol with sweetener so let's take a look at that and we view the spectrum black is what we've actually got for it is basically ethanol so she can see all the peaks line up that's basically what it is that's dead simple here's something else this is just regular sugar and what you'll find is if I scan this and it's not actually at the focus of the beam I'll get almost no signal back what I got to do is I've got to get it right on the focus and if I get it right on the focus for the the red spot you'll get a signal almost instantly there and it tells me after a bit of thinking what the unidentified white powder is which is sugar so we actually take a look at that and it's pretty smach between the stock spectrum for sugar and what i've just measured great so let's try the same thing with an ibuprofen tablet right so again we're gonna have to scan this and I'm gonna have to get that right on the point there we go beautiful signal and what we find is my ibuprofen tablet is actually sugar yeah he the thing is it only scans what's on the surface and yeah the ibuprofen tablet is coated with sugar so it tells you that it's sugar let's try another one that I just randomly had which is actually a multivitamin tablet so we know to scan this thing and of course I did the same deal look at that point oh there we go perfect and we instantly have a a result I have titanium for oxide sighs take a look at that one for you the spectrum there we go three beautiful Peaks all of which are in our measured spectrum so this is the real problem easy it will only tell you if it's a liquid it's got to be it's got to allow the infrared light to get out of it if it doesn't it's kind of pointless if it's a solid you've really got to get it right on the surface otherwise you just don't get a signal don't let's now try it with an orange actually quite difficult yet the pearl did we get a molecular signal super Oh excellent and there is no match found for orange and when we view the spectra we get this huge background which is basically fluorescence and we've got a few peaks in there which might be anything okay so let's try and actually go inside of our orange and just take a single piece out so this is the real problem is you just get no molecular signal it's just all fluorescence which basically means all right it's just getting scattered somewhere I'm getting no useful photons back into the spectrometer in fact this machine pretty much excels in single component samples or maybe in main component mixtures you know mixtures of two or maybe three simple compounds at that what these things are sold for rapid identification of unknowns like nerve agent things like that it would have a good go at identifying or explosives for that one you might want to tell the legs pad down a bit but it would still be pretty good at identifying it or any small simple molecules but once you get on to complex mixtures like say for instance food you're kind of screwed especially if y'all want to know what's a for instance the content of an oranges because you can only scan the very skin of the orange even more amazing I made some inquiries about this scanner and I asked about its sensitivity and they were pretty honest they said for binary mixtures say sugar and cocaine their example not my the detection level for this advanced Raman spectrometer was about 5% and what did tell speck promised detection levels not a 5 percent but of micrograms that's a millionth of a gram and it's not just a millionth of a gram that's on weekly food intake so let's take say for instance one kilo of food for a week that's starvation level food intake they're talking about detection thresholds of parts per billion in short not a snowball's chance in hell cool so they have a time line for their third of a million dollar Kickstarter whether we're gonna deliver these magic beans for two hundred and fifty dollars some five years later on tell spec now looks like this a really low resolution version of this that doesn't cost the original $250 predicted but one and a half thousand dollars yes you can now order tell spec of their website or should I say pre-order it with curiously enough all pre-orders be final poll singular scan which really doesn't tell you much about your actual food really even with their working device just to scan a simple cheese sandwich you have to scan the bread today we're gonna do a quick demo on the spec technology so we're gonna scan these cheese sandwich separately we're gonna scan the bread and the cheese separately so the skin is now skin is now sending information to the brain and receiving it so that's the bread so now we're going to assign how much I think I think it's more than 15 grams maybe a hundred grams grams then scan the cheese and let's just assume for the moment that their device is 100% accurate in working and the mass balance these things which it won't be so again the information is sent to the cloud the cloud does interpretation right so again we go in our silent say 50 grams this time you need to keep track accurately of each component yeah that's gonna make keeping track of what you eat so much easier to scan something like this cake we would need to scan the different components of the cake sorry little scandal the cream cheese as well as the cake itself and ideally be able to contribute to the disappearance of epidemics such as obesity hey here's a tip from someone who's actually been fairly successful in losing weight and keeping it off if you want to lose weight just eat less it really is that simple it doesn't require a one half thousand dollar piece of scanning equipment which is utterly pointless because you can't guess the exact weight of the food that you're eating look in essence the best they could hope to do is to match the ability of a machine like this which as you've seen even though it's an amazing piece of kit has the real limitations if you try and use it for something like analysing food which brings us on to SIA which more or less promises the same thing which is that it will do everything let's say you've got some pills in your cabinet lost the box you don't know what they are you can scan them with zyo and it'll tell you the app would just pop up and say hey this is advil this is definitely one of the more impressive things that we've seen at CES to tell you the best cucumber or tomato to pick in an instant it displays the food's calorie fat and sugar content and it can tell real medicine through fake pills there's a ton of stuff and people are telling us today when they use it to carry them around right away it's designed more for over-the-counter and prescription medicines so you can tell exactly what's in them as people go around zapping things with the sigh oh the objects get put into a database this then becomes a giant log of all the materials in our world but this one is in the infrared spectrometer rather than a Raman spectrometer and for certain these things also exist so for about a thousand bucks you can get one of these a spectrometer that goes from about point two till one micron so for a thousand bucks you can get a spectrometer like this and she records about two thousand points over the visible region of the spectrum bit of the ultraviolet but of the infrared and how it works is there's a fiber optic here and whatever light comes in to the fiber-optic goes into the spectrometer and you get an intensity versus wavelength plot here so the higher it is the more intense so if I point it directly at the light its auto-scaling so it's very smooth now here are lots of photons that's the spectra of an LED light any of these Peaks in the in the blue and so forth so if I take my spectrometer I pointed something red you should see you get a peak sort of in the red if I point to some in green you get a peak in the green if I pointed something purple you can see that sometimes colors a little more complex that you might use give it credit for so what we've got here is just an intensity versus wavelength plot and the critical part is there are no photons down here in the infrared part of the spectrum because you don't get much in the way of infrared photons of LED lights so what I'm going to need to do is I'm gonna have to go and get an incandescent bulb so I've got lots of photons in this part of the spectrum so that now just off screen is our incandescent bulb and of a point my I spectrometer right it's saturating about yeah I can see that we've got lots of photons in this part of the spectrum so this is exactly what we want so we're going to shine that light onto an object and we're gonna see how many photons come back but of course we've got lots more photons in this part of the spectrum than this one so we're going to have to divide through by a sort of white spectrum as it were and so the the next of the spectrum you see is in reflection mode where if all light comes back I'm gonna use a standard white for that if all the weight comes back then it's gonna be 100% and if none of the light comes back it's gonna be 0% and bear in mind the visible is about 0.4 0.7 microns that sort of thing so this thing will cover a bit of the ultraviolet the whole visible spectrum and a bit of the infrared whilst the Scioto Tector only covers the red and a little bit of the infrared part of the spectrum and therein lies the problem this thing is crude as hell by thousand-dollar spectrometer here has about a thousand pixels over the entire spectral range and turns out someone stripped one of these sails and it has 12 pixels over the entire range the resolution on this thing is abysmal although you got to be a little careful on publishing things for not having enough pixel depth of color the human eye runs on about 3 pixel depths of color perception you've got a red centre a blue centre and a green sensor and from that you put together all of the color space that you see but of course it is a lie if you actually say put a LED on and a fluorescent bulb on at the same time to your eyes they look the same they both look like white light because your eyes are giving the same number of red green and blue photons from both of these lights however if you put a real spectrometer on them you get a feeling for just how crude your vision is that you can't tell the difference between these two spectra and that's basically what you're looking at here these are all the discreet electron transitions that are actually going on on the fluorescent coating of the fluorescent bulb so yeah I just want these fascinating things that your eyes they look the same I really do but not to the spectrometer they don't some so has a better number of pixel depth color than the human eye but it's still crap compared $4000 spectrometer Oh they're selling it now for about $300 but of course that just gets you the device if you actually want the software that allows you to get the wavelength out it'll cost you just sigh of a thousand dollars almost exactly what this thing cost in fact Co is quite amazing its ability to only be able to scan food once you've told it what it is hi guys I'm embrace you here your help renegade I want to do another video down it's funky new gadget I've just guys cool-ass IO and it is a pocket molecular sensor made by a company called consumer physics ok so all I need to do is go into my Co app and you can see the different foods is even you can even do your body found here but I'm gonna go down to fruits and vegetables well let's try it produce selector grapes it says it lets me choose between different types of things I can scan I'm going to do the grapes right now yes you just scan food you have to tell it what type of food it is before you're scanning and then you get your dietary facts from the scan and of course if you're scanning an apple you can see on here that it's scanning [Music] gives you a little bit of information and this is the spectral fingerprint of that particular Apple and of course if you were to scan a completely different type of Apple I'm sure it's gonna have an incredibly unique molecular fingerprint again gonna count for there a little press in the application right now and again this one's cut a little bit higher in sugar and it does give you some really cool information and again like the spectral fingerprint of each Apple the molecular composition of it's going to be different in everything are you serious dude let me just try something yeah let's see how unique these spectral fingerprints are which brings us on to the harsh questions like put this spectral fingerprint say tell me the difference between an apple and a potato well let's build a near infrared spectrometer of our own and fry it so here I've turned my spectrometer into a reflection mode spectrometer very much similar to theirs so the way the spectral model now works is I've got my light here which shines through the hole there and gives you a standard illumination on the target and then I've got my fiber-optic cable here which is pointing directly at the sample and that's what's gonna give me the spectrum here now the spectrometer is currently set up such that if it's no photons coming in it's got a straight line at zero and if all the photons from this standard light are actually coming back which is basically I'm using a white cup to calibrate it it's going to be 100% illumination I came so that basically that that's what a standard white thing looks like that's what black looks like and so if I give it a red object you'll see that virtually everything in this part of the spectrum is absorbed everything in this part of the spectrum is about its page partially reflected if you take something that's green your nice green sort of reflection but also in the near-infrared a lot of the photons are coming back cool so let's try this with sugar okay so this is just standard tabletop sugar right to see what we got in the way of near infrared bands and as we come down onto the sugar well we actually say yes this is really quite characteristic battened at 980 it's a fairly sharp absorption there we go beautiful okay so that's the sort of neat that's the I've got so far twenty-eight infrared signal and to show you that really is sugar you'll recall that the ibuprofen tablet was actually coated with sugar so if we put if we can get our spectrometer onto our sugar pill there we go so again you see the this really quite characteristic absorb isn't about 980 almost everything in this region is is coming back and of course most of it's coming back in the red which is why it looks red to the eye okay and just to show that we're not completely deluding ourselves let's try our other pill which was titanium dioxide and here you see that there is no absorption whatsoever in the sugar part of the spectrum Suba so what does an orange look like to my amazing spectrometer and first of all it's orange then you see that there is this absorption band in the near-infrared here it's at about oh it shifted this way from sugar its 970 ish and it's also much broader they work all that with sugar the absorption band was really quite sharp and it's more 980 ish yeah so there is this thing I've come across on line that says deficiency through the skins of these things in the near-infrared so let's see if that's true for this portion of the infrared spectrum what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna put that orange skin over that sugar and see if you can see the sugar through this piece of skin my suspicion is no but we will see so actually first of all let's just do a comparison that what orange looks like which you know the actual fruit itself absorbs a bit more strongly than the the skin's hints much more reflective but in terms of what the spectra looks like they're pretty generic I mean there's no real difference there I think it's just because you know you might see it with a naked eye that the light is actually going into this thing and just diffusing right whereas it's mostly bouncing back off the skin okay right so if we've got just sugar all right we get a beautiful spectrum like that so what I'm going to do is I'm going to measure the orange skin and I'm just going to put it on top like that and now we see what we say and you really can't see this sugar if I move it off to the side you'll see what I mean that's what sugar looks like and that's what the orange skin looks like so from this experiment alone it looks pretty conclusively like in this part of the spectrum you can't see through the skins of your fruit here I've got a chocolate coated mint which I've cut in half now the inside of the mend of course is mostly sugar so if we put our mint on there you can see the absorption rounded about it actually took two of them there's a sharper one here and a less sharp one here right so now the question can we actually see that sugar through the thinnest of layers of chocolate and the answer is a conclusive No now I'll scan this Chaka truffle ah Mitel spec tells me that this chocolate truffle is gluten as well as egg and artificial vanilla so a thin layer of chocolate will Alba blot out the entire near infrared signal for getting a spectrum off these sorts of things here I've got some chicken chicken meat which is you chains and seemed to do an awful lot and on the other side of edge but it's breaded bear in mind you're looking for this is the fingerprint region of the spectrum are calling to the whatever these say oh guys there as I see your molecular fingerprint you're looking at and here I've got a crumpet which yeah anything looks like a very very weak form of orange it's quite possible with the oranges looking at something like dye in the skin there's a sort of keratin in here or something that you know very small quantities of it can absorb lots of light right so eats mostly useless but let's try it on some fruits so what do we go we go green apple and a Apple these part green part red so if we try on the green apple we should of course get a nice green band and in the near-infrared it looks almost exactly like an orange and for the red apple a the green bands gone so I can just shift from green apple red apple and both of them look basically identical in this portion of the spectrum in fact what I can do is I can take just a red apple the Apple I've got red on one side green on the other so actually just scroll it round and you should see it go from red to green but there really isn't an awful lot of change in the near infrared portion of the spectrum from the fingerprint of the near-infrared it's rust citrus fruit so you should be yellow and again they look yeah this badly is almost ubiquitous okay bananas again mostly the same a pear sure your pear is gonna be different we've got green and brown portions of the pet let's try brown portion of the pear and it's exactly the same absorption rather than their infrared and let's try the green portion of the pear which is kind of the same but I mean okay there is a difference in the levels of light coming back here actually no there isn't and let's full let's just for kicks do a potato and surprise shock and horror there's the single Ward absorption band for basically everything [Music] apart from pure sugar which has a is is the only thing that I've really come across that has this sort of characteristic signature wow that's just that's just sugar actually let me let me try one last so here I've got a little baby camembert sliced in half and the first one I'm just gonna scan the skin is whip right that's back it off a bit okay and it's basically completely flat in the near-infrared so let's try and scan the middle bit now and it's slightly different but hard you yeah you really don't have a lot to go for in the way of signals in the near-infrared right butter slash marjorine are you gonna get anything useful of this and yeah you do you do actually get a different pan there's one it about 9:20 there is actually a band there amazing but you can see what the problem is that you really don't have an awful lot of signal to play with with this stuff now I know what many of you will be thinking hey these people got three million dollars of Kickstarter money they must just have something way better than what I've got some some amazing way of giving these superb spectral fingerprints to mean they'll be able to identify almost anything well actually that's until you watch the detail of some of the reporting like this utterly shameless piece by Bloomberg in an instant it displays the food's calorie fat and sugar content it's the quickest way to finding the perfect potato yeah that's an amazing spectral fingerprint they're a completely flat lie or even better this stunning spectral fingerprint of a dog even sees a future for this device in your bathroom you can measure teeth you can measure salami finish your hair you can measure your and if you think that's bad these is the actual current CEO website whether they should a scanner being used to get the spectral fingerprint for sugar beet and weed its looked all but identical and under the title introducing the next agricultural revolution instant animal feed analysis with revolutionary near infrared sensor so my reckoning is if you could tell a basic food groups apart with SIA you'd actually be doing ok especially when you keep it in context to that this is the spectral range my thousand dollar spectrometer and this was this spectral range of SIA and didn't get full into thinking either any of those bumps and wheels at about one micron or a fingerprint of some sort because these are scans from a group from Tufts who evidently got hold of the developers kit and these are three scans of the same sample just to give you some idea of the reproducibility of this thing at about one micron yet in report after report you would find people freezing this device like it was measuring absolute truth and it was way more accurate than the actual nutritional labels good ol American twenty three or twenty five [Music] whole beautiful that's beautiful you tell it's cheese and it tells you some pretty generic soft cheese values so for instance let's compare it to the king of cheeses rock for thirty grams fat instead of twenty five twenty two grams of protein instead of nineteen yes this device that would struggle to tell you the difference between the king of cheeses and Velveeta what got a pair thousand bucks for one of those you know it just bugged me that they were promising that they would detect things like pesticides and allergens which are present in miniscule proportions all that they could identify unlabeled drugs when you think of health care actually it's not about what you're buying is actually tracking your well-being over time and instead of sending stuff to the lab you'll actually be able to measure it on yourself they've also announced that there will be support for drug identification right out of the box and no not those kinds of drugs so don't expect the cops to carry them around right away hell no even with my way more advanced kit I would have struggled to tell the difference between ibuprofen and M&Ms I'm not even social I would trust I out to a difference between apples and oranges let alone heart medication or illegal drugs like ecstasy now both these companies seem to have failed to deliver to their crowdfunders and have instead just to set up independent companies selling their products online for about a thousand dollars a pop but maybe the most damning thing here is if you just take a quick read of this scio app reviews so on iTunes it's got an amazing rating over one and a half stars with reviews like this overpriced over-promised under-delivered crappy product this is perhaps one of the worst things I've come across in my life not just in terms of the product but also in terms of customer service profits to everything two years late when I asked to return the product I can get my money back they said they had no obligation to do any such thing so in summary save your money because this company and everything about it is fraud really a useless expensive piece of that I can't get rid of the ad on Kickstarter looked too good to be true and as I realized many times in my life if it sounds too good to be true it most likely is really there is absolutely no use for it I had hoped it would provide some chemical composition spectral analysis but it does not and on Google Play it does a little better most of the reviews are still scathing completely useless device open dev database for free or affordable yeah I think they want $600 for it I want quantifiable not squiggly lines app does not show wavelength or absorption / transmission levels using data users are not allowed to access the data from their scans without purchasing additional licenses company ripped off those who pre-ordered this device with the understanding that it would do the things they advertised and it doesn't a scientific tool that is no more than a fancy toy because they do not allow users access to their own data does not function as promised can't even tell what sugar is I have yet to fully explore it but very disappointed I don't want something to help me select fruits I want something that will tell me the molecular content of various substances which is what it was advertised as and so it goes on the sad thing is that just like Raman spectroscopy is a real science a real spectroscopy that you can do useful things with so is near-infrared spectroscopy but it just so happens that most of the interesting stuff happens below about 1 micron where this sensors get a lot more expensive jumping for the entry-level machines from about $1,000 to $4,000 and I wasn't keen on doing that because I've spent quite a lot of money on this video so far the but there are machines that use Danny infrared to actually analyze food substances with accuracy and precision as good or better to a OAC approved reference methods Rooker's mpa ft NIR spectrometer is one of the most well established products in industry for quality control and research and development applications they just specialized machines that focus on one type of material say for instance milk analysis not only that but they're large machines and secondhand Co for over ten thousand dollars yeah putting all that into a key fob and selling it for 250 bucks it almost sounds too good to be true scanners for smartphones are making their way to an iPhone near you shut up Wesley but what the heck is a molecular scanner is it like one of those tricorder things that mr. data used in Star Trek well actually yes [Applause] and if you think that I'm crazy for playing $6,000 on a spectrometer here he's a moment of Zen foyer for the three or so million dollars that was raised by these crowdfunders you could have bought 500 such spectrometers or if you're a typical guy who weights about 75 kilos it's your body weight in solid gold that's enough to make about 75 solid gold hammers hmm you're cool so if you liked this video be sure to give it a thumbs up and subscribe and of course if you really like the stuff I want to financially support this channel I'll leave the links for patreon below [Music]

Info

Channel: Thunderf00t

Views: 519,988

Rating: 4.8181252 out of 5

Keywords: food, scanner, kickstarter, indiegogo, scam, scammer, busted, thunderf00t, spectroscopy, near infrared, infrared, light, spectrometer, science, chemistry, thermal, camera, satire, tellspec, scio, fail, 3 million, million, health, wellbeing, raman, detector, laser

Id: VHjmlQdzpW4

Channel Id: undefined

Length: 48min 16sec (2896 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 05 2018

Reddit Comments

Hotdog: Not hotdog

👍︎︎ 69 👤︎︎ u/i_appreciate_you 📅︎︎ Aug 05 2018 🗫︎ replies

People are so retarded. But Thunderfoot takes these things far too far. It only takes 6 minutes to debunk this bullshit, but somehow he makes it go for 48 minutes.

👍︎︎ 86 👤︎︎ u/M0b1u5 📅︎︎ Aug 05 2018 🗫︎ replies

Great content, but it suffers a bit from the science communication aspect. He repeats the same basic explanations over and over while testing his devices with several foods all to demonstrate the same simple point. I feel like these 40+ minutes could've easily been a 7 minute video.

👍︎︎ 35 👤︎︎ u/Vowker 📅︎︎ Aug 05 2018 🗫︎ replies

What's with that Linus Techtips guy always appearing in Thunderf00t's busting videos shilling for those scams. How gullible can one dude be?

👍︎︎ 15 👤︎︎ u/madarchivist 📅︎︎ Aug 05 2018 🗫︎ replies

This guys just needs a good video editor who can make these 2 hour feature films into 5 minute informationals.

👍︎︎ 2 👤︎︎ u/Sejes89 📅︎︎ Aug 06 2018 🗫︎ replies

There's a face on the apple at 5:29 https://imgur.com/SkgIEB2

👍︎︎ 2 👤︎︎ u/TacoTimebomb 📅︎︎ Aug 06 2018 🗫︎ replies

He's right, but for the wrong reasons. The agricultural nutrition field uses Near infrared spectroscopy systems for an insanely large number of different nutrients. The lab I worked at actually compiled data for the black ones. They are good for determining dry matter, but the spectrum they detect is rather small. More sophisticated systems are about the size of a microwave and at our lab are compared to thousands of samples by validated wet chemistry methods. The spectra are actually fairly reliable on samples that are ground to pass through a 1 mm (this is the key) screen.

👍︎︎ 3 👤︎︎ u/BeanTacos 📅︎︎ Aug 05 2018 🗫︎ replies

So obviously fake. I can see so many problems with how this is supposed to work that I don't even know where to start.

👍︎︎ 4 👤︎︎ u/analsexpert 📅︎︎ Aug 05 2018 🗫︎ replies

People complaining about how thunderfoot videos are too long. I like them, it's something different and good to see him go into deep detail on many topics.

Yes he repeats himself, I don't mind that as it helps drive the point home. These videos are more suited to watching in bed at night than trying to slack off at work.

👍︎︎ 3 👤︎︎ u/IntelligentComment 📅︎︎ Aug 06 2018 🗫︎ replies