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EDUCATION
LEARNING
THROUGH PLAY
Kiri Toys
For centuries, children
managed to entertain
themselves with simple
toys like wooden
blocks—but times
have changed. “Kids
now spend between
four and six hours per
day in front of screens,
which has only been
exacerbated during
COVID,” says Nick Porfilio,
CEO of Kiri Toys, which
manufactures a new
kind of toy block aimed
at screen- exhausted
families. Designed to
teach a range of skills
to kids ages 1 and up,
each kit contains a set of
tiles printed with images
that interact with the Kiri
block through a RFID
chip. Place the block
atop a tile’s color ful,
kid- friendly illustration,
and it will pronounce the
associated word, while
giving off a pleasant glow.
Kits are available for
preorder starting at $99.
—MATTHEW GAULT
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
A GUIDE
TO CANCER
TRIALS
TrialJectory
In 2020, cancer
diagnoses will thrust
nearly 2 million
Americans into the often
bewildering world of
treatments and clinical
trials. TrialJectory aims
to help. The service
uses AI to read through
thousands of clinical
trials and extract
information about the
sorts of patients the
researchers are looking
for. Its algorithm then
matches users with the
clinical trials —like the
one a patient found for
her Stage IV metastatic
breast cancer—based on
the users’ responses to a
series of questions about
themselves and their
disease progression.
Since launching in 2018,
TrialJectory’s researchers
have expanded the
system to cover more
types of cancer, adding
lung cancers this
summer. —ALEJANDRO
DE LA GARZA
DESIGN
A MORE CONVENIENT CUP
Cuzen Matcha
There’s a beautiful—if
time-intensive—method of
preparing traditional matcha,
which involves whisking sieved
ground tea with hot water
using a heated whisk in a small
bowl. Cuzen Matcha ($369)
gives tea drinkers the high-art
tea experience via a high-tech
automated system. A grooved
ceramic plate grinds premium
tea leaves, dispenses them into a
carafe and uses a magnetic mixer
to create optimum
foamy matcha. Sip
it cold or at room temperature,
add milk over ice for a matcha
latte, or pour in hot water for a
“matcha Americano.” Founder
Eijiro Tsukada wants to help people
drink matcha with the same ease
that they drink coffee, and offers a
similarly convenient replacement
for plastic bottled matcha. Cuzen
Matcha works with a tea farm in
Japan’s Kagoshima prefecture to
buy leaves that are only partially
crushed—not ground—which
makes for a smoother and fresher
cuppa. —MARJORIE KORN
TRANSPORTATION
READY FOR
TAKEOFF
NASA Ingenuity Helicopter
The coolest helicopter on earth is
actually nowhere near the Earth.
It’s nestled in the belly of NASA’s
Perseverance rover, set to land on Mars
early next year. The little machine—
dubbed Ingenuity—is equipped with
two counter- rotating blades that spin
at 2,400 revolutions per minute. That’s
a lot faster than earthly helicopter
blades—and it has to be, since it takes
a lot of muscle to get any purchase in
Mars’ thin air. Ingenuity is a prototype,
intended to find an easier way to get
from place to place on Mars. It’s a job
that rovers do slowly but a helicopter
could do speedily and nimbly, climbing
to elevations even the best Mars car
could not reach. —JEFFREY KLUGER
The Ingenuity
helicopter
weighs 4 lb.
and measures
just 19 in. tall
ILLUSTRATION BY CHRIS PHILPOT FOR TIME
