Saba sushi (Saba-zushi) is Kyoto's signature pressed mackerel sushi, historically made by preserving mackerel from the Sea of Japan with salt and vinegar, then pressing it with rice, often wrapped in kelp or bamboo leaves for transport along the "Mackerel Highway" to the inland capital. This distinct, tangy, and flavorful delicacy is known for its cured fish, generous rice portion, and traditional preparation, with famous shops like Izuu and Hanaore offering classic versions.
What it is:
Type: A type of oshizushi (pressed sushi).
Ingredients: Salt-cured and vinegar-marinated mackerel fillet layered over vinegared rice.
Distinctive Features: Often includes a layer of kelp (kombujime) for added umami, wrapped in bamboo leaves, and served without soy sauce due to its inherent flavor.
Historical Significance:
Developed in Kyoto as a way to enjoy fresh fish far from the sea.
Mackerel was salted and transported from the coast via routes known as the "Mackerel Highway".
How it's served:
Pressed into rectangular blocks or logs (bo-zushi).
Served in larger, sometimes rustic, portions than typical nigiri sushi.
Where to try it in Kyoto:
Izuu: Famed for sugata-zushi (fish shaped like a mackerel).
Hanaore: Specializes in classic sabazushi near Shimogamo Shrine.
Asahiya: A long-standing favorite near Iwashimizu-hachimangu Shrine.
US spies were secretly listening to a Chinese intelligence asset, and the American on the other end was Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, The New York Times reports.
The asset was Alice Huang, also known as Huang Le, a Chinese citizen and top executive at Megaspeed, a little-known data center firm that US officials suspected of steering Nvidia’s AI chips to China.
The Times reports that US officials concluded she was funneling information to Beijing.
Weeks after she and Jensen were photographed drinking whiskey at a Taipei bar in June 2024, Megaspeed’s affiliate began buying what eventually totaled at least $4.8 billion in Nvidia-powered equipment.
Trump was briefed roughly a year ago, the Times says.
He did nothing.
According to the Times, he was wary of hurting Nvidia’s chip sales, which are boosting the economy and Wall Street, and of complicating trade with China.
Jensen, one of Trump’s most influential allies, was never even given the standard defensive briefing for Americans targeted by foreign spies.
Megaspeed kept buying Nvidia products this year, and its top customer is Alibaba.
Investigators suspect some chips were smuggled into China, and a Commerce official found the equipment at its Malaysia site still sitting in boxes.
Nvidia still lists Megaspeed as a cloud partner on its website.
Officials initially did not believe Jensen knew her role, but the Times says some senior Trump administration officials doubt he could have been unaware.
China had a source inside the inner circle of America’s most important AI company, and the chips kept flowing.
Google DeepMind is working towards a generic technology that could tackle any medical condition thrown at it. Register for free to read our interview with Sir Demis Hassabis谷歌DeepMind正在研發通用技術，旨在應對任何已知的醫療問題。免費註冊即可閱讀我們對德米斯·哈薩比斯爵士的採訪。
.Sir Demis Hassabis (born 27 July 1976) The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence is a 2026 biography by Sebastian Mallaby.書評見The Economist等；
About the Subject: Demis Hassabis is portrayed as a unique, driven figure focused on scientific discovery rather than mere wealth, leading DeepMind (now Google DeepMind) in an intense race to build AGI.
Author's Access: Author Sebastian Mallaby, a two-time Pulitzer finalist, conducted hundreds of hours of interviews with Hassabis, his team, and rivals over three years to create this comprehensive portrait.
Core Themes: The book explores the high-stakes, expensive, and sometimes controversial nature of AI development, including the potential for AGI to reshape humanity, often drawing parallels to the development of the atomic bomb.
Unique Perspective: Unlike many Silicon Valley narratives, this book highlights Hassabis's decision to remain in Britain and his critical view of the tech industry, emphasizing his goal of, as described in this NPR interview, "scientific enlightenment".
Content: The book covers the journey from AlphaGo, the creation of AI systems that can learn like humans, to the broader implications for society.
The Infinity Machine provides a detailed look at the tension between controlling AI and being controlled by its rapid advancement.
Working in the field of imagination, memory, and amnesia, he co-authored several influential papers published in Nature, Science, Neuron, and PNAS.[48] His very first academic work, published in PNAS,[49] was a landmark paper that showed systematically for the first time that patients with damage to their hippocampus, known to cause amnesia, were also unable to imagine themselves in new experiences. The finding established a link between the constructive process of imagination and the reconstructive process of episodic memory recall. Based on this work and a follow-up functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study,[50] Hassabis developed a new theoretical account of the episodic memory system identifying scene construction, the generation and online maintenance of a complex and coherent scene, as a key process underlying both memory recall and imagination.[51] This work received widespread coverage in the mainstream media[52] and was listed in the top 10 scientific breakthroughs of the year by the journal Science.[53] He later generalised these ideas to advance the notion of a 'simulation engine of the mind' whose role it was to imagine events and scenarios to aid with better planning.[54][55]
