The Download: blended meat, restored sight, and the agentic web

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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. These startups hope “blended” food will cut our appetite for red meat 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. Get a taste of the startups betting on greener beef. —Meghan McCarron This implant can restore sight for patients with macular degeneration 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. Find out how the sight-restoring implant works. —Linda Marsa MIT Technology Review Narrated: The agentic web is here 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. At the time, the idea seemed far-fetched. But a quarter-century on, AI agents are beginning to make