Why beer tastes good to us

London: The importance of yeast in beer brewing has long been underestimated but researchers from University of Leuven in Belgium now report that beer yeasts produce chemicals that mimic the aroma of fruits in order to attract flies that can transport the yeast cells to new places.

Interestingly, yeasts are essential for the flavour of beverages such as beer and wine.

“In fact, yeasts may even be responsible for much of the 'terroir', the connection between a particular growing area and wine flavour which previously often was attributed to differences in the soil,” said Kevin Verstrepen from University of Leuven, also known as KU Leuven.

The new collaborative study from VIB, a life sciences research institute, and KU Leuven shows that the fruity volatiles produced by yeast cells are highly appealing to fruit flies.

This attraction allows some yeast cells to hitch a ride with the insects who carry the otherwise immobile microbes to new food sources.

Flies are strongly attracted to normal yeast cells when compared to mutant yeasts that do not produce esters.

“Knowing that esters make beer taste good, it seems that the same flavours that allow us to enjoy our beer probably evolved to attract flies and to help yeast disperse into broader ecosystems,” explained neuroscientist Emre Yaksi from Neuro-Electronics Research Flanders (NERF), an academic research initiative.

The team believes that their findings have far-reaching implications.

“We all know that flowers attract insects by producing aromas. But there is also a lot of microbes living inside flowers and the chemicals they produce may also play an important role,” added Joaquin Christiaens from VIB who performed the experiments with yeast cells.

New app enables smartphones to understand gestures

London: Scientists have developed a new app enabling users to operate their smartphone with gestures.

The app developed by Professor Otmar Hilliges and his staff at ETH expands the range of potential interactions with such devices and the gesture control significantly expands the range of smartphone functionality.

The app lets the smartphone understand gestures such as movement of your index finger to the left, or right or spreading out of your fingers, or imitate a pair of pliers or the firing of a pistol.

This gesturing wizardry is made possible by a new type of algorithm that uses the smartphone's built-in camera to register its environment and then executes the gesture command associated with the gesture it observes.

The program also recognizes the hand's distance from the camera and warns the user when the hand is either too close or too far away and currently recognizes six different gestures and executes their corresponding commands.

The researchers are convinced that this new way of operating smartphones greatly increases the range of interactivity. The researcher's objective is to keep the gestures as simple as possible, so that users can operate their smartphone effortlessly.

Now, a veggie burger that tastes like actual meat cheeseburger

London: Scientists have now created a veggie burger that has the taste of the actual cheeseburger.

Stanford professor, Patrick Brown has crafted The Impossible Cheeseburger, which is made by using "plant blood" that holds the secret the replicate the taste of meat, the Independent reported.

The sanguine liquid has the same consistency and metallic taste of blood and comes from the same molecule found in haemoglobin, which plays a big part in steak's distinctive taste.

The Wall Street Journal said after a taste test that it has the consistency of animal tissue and isn't overly spongy like tofu.

Brown said that the system that is used for the production of meat and cheese was totally "unsustainable" and had awfully harsh environmental consequences.

Should we engineer animals to be smart like humans?

Human beings have long believed that it is our unique level of intelligence that separates us from other animals. Our ability for higher learning, creative thought, and – perhaps most importantly – our sophisticated communication via speech and language, defines us as a superior species. However, as we expand our understanding of how the brain works, and use animal experiments to learn more about the genes involved in intelligence, will we reach a point where we can pull other species onto our intellectual plane?
The idea of enhancing animal intelligence may not be as far-fetched as it sounds. Consider a study published last month by Ann Graybiel and colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology about the relationship between intelligence and genes. The team genetically engineered mice to produce the human form of FOXP2 – a gene known to be linked to the human brain's capacity to learn and process speech – to see whether it would improve the rodents’ ability to learn. Sure enough, when the boosted mice were made to navigate a maze in order to get a reward of chocolate milk, they learned the route faster than the mice without the added human gene.
The results are exciting for anyone interested in understanding the genetic changes in our prehistory that helped us become the wise – or “sapient” – ape. But the nature of this study speaks to another question: whether through fundamental alterations and improvements to mouse brains we could create sentient animals with levels of intelligence to rival our own – a concept known as “uplifting”.

Mice engineered with a certain human gene showed they could learn quicker (Elena Gurzhiy/Flickr/CC BY 2.0)

In the past, uplifting has been explored mainly in science fiction. One of this summer's biggest movies was Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, which depicts a civilisation of intelligent primates descended from test subjects altered by scientists hoping to find a cure for Alzheimer's.
And yet the movie has parallels with real research now under way. In 2011, a research team led by Sam Deadwyler of Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, used five rhesus monkeys to study the factors that lead people with diseases like Alzheimer’s to lose control of their thought processes. The researchers trained the monkeys in an intelligence task that involved learning and identifying images and symbols. They were then given doses of cocaine in order to dull their intelligence and made to repeat the test, with predictably less impressive results.
What happened in the next stage of the research was remarkable. The same monkeys were fitted with neural prosthetics – brain implants designed to monitor and correct the functions of the neurons disabled by the cocaine. These implants successfully restored normal brain function to the monkeys when they were drugged – but crucially, if they were activated before the monkeys had been drugged, they improved the primates’ performance beyond their original test results. The aim of the experiments was to see whether neural prosthetics could theoretically be used to restore decision-making in humans who have suffered trauma or diseases such as Alzheimer's – but as far as these specific tests were concerned at least, the brain prosthetics appeared to make the monkeys smarter.

(Getty Images)

All this means we may have already entered the era of animal uplifting, says George Dvorsky of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, a think tank that focuses on the implications of future technology. "But as for more substantive, impactful augmentations, that's still a way off,” he says. “The kind of uplift that appears in science fiction will require technologies far more advanced than anything we have today.” This doesn’t mean we won’t eventually develop these technologies, he adds, particularly as they will primarily help us use animals to learn about cognitive problems in humans, including neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer's.
It’s an important point: even if the idea of uplifting may seem fantastical – and not the sort of goal we should be pursuing – the potential medical benefits in terms of combating human disease and injury suggest further progress down a path that leads to uplifting is inevitable. Certainly such manipulation of animals has advanced enough to become a serious matter to bio-ethicists: in 2011, the Academy of Medical Sciences in the UK reported on the ethics of research involving animals containing human material, and devoted an entire section to brain and cognitive manipulation.
The matter has also become a passionate debate for theorists. Some, like Dvorsky, suggest that the debate should be pushed even further, beyond considering just the medical and scientific advances. He believes in an “ethical imperative to uplift”, arguing that if the technology is developed it should be shared with animals in order to free them from the anguish of 'survival of the fittest' as much as it is to free humans: "As the stewards of this planet, it is our moral imperative to not just remove ourselves from the Darwinian paradigm, but all the creatures on Earth as well. Our journey to a post-biological, post-Darwinian state will be a mutual one."

(Getty Images)

For David Brin, a science fiction author whose novels helped popularise the concept of uplifting, the reasons to pursue the idea are slightly more pragmatic. He hopes that newly intelligent species would help us share the responsibility of protecting the environment. "The oceans of planet Earth are a vast mystery, filled with both physical wealth and unique treasures to preserve,” he says. “We are trying to learn to be good planetary managers, but I doubt we could fill that role all by ourselves, anywhere near as well as if sapient dolphin partners (and critics) were by our side. The same holds for countless other opportunities for both profit and wisdom."
For others the whole idea is far more problematic. Paul Graham Raven, a researcher at the University of Sheffield, believes the pro-uplifting stance represents biological and scientific arrogance and a misguided belief in human superiority over nature, where human intelligence is viewed as the pinnacle of evolution.
This is perhaps the biggest moral dilemma of the whole uplifting debate: even if Dvorsky, Brin, and others believe granting intelligence to other species would be for their benefit, Raven questions whether we possess the moral authority to make that decision for them without their consent. "It assumes we know what's best for species other than ourselves. Given we show little evidence of knowing what's best for our own species, I'm inclined to mistrust that assumption, however well intended," he says.
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How toys will shape future robots

At a recent car boot sale in the UK, Mark Tilden stumbled on something he often looks for at second-hand markets – one of his famous creations. Tilden, formerly a roboticist the Los Alamos National Laboratory, is a toy designer and he was now holding in his hands one of the humanoid bots he invented for children, “Robosapien”. Delighted with his find, he bought it for, “something like five quid”. The bot would give him the perfect opportunity to see exactly how it had been used.

“This toy had been played with to death. I was amazed,” he says. “It was filled with sand, it was filled with Plasticine, it had make-up still on it, rusted batteries – it had obviously been taken into the bath-tub – and that was fascinating because all of a sudden you realise that someone had loved this toy to the absolute extent.” Sure, it had been up for sale, but this bot had a good life.

What was it about this robot that had appealed so much to its owner? It’s a question that Tilden and other roboticists think is important – not just for toy design, but the future of robotics. For too long, robots have suffered from an image problem. They are often perceived as mechanical, cold and threatening in our culture and it’s difficult to reverse that impression. But this view of robots could be changed if they were designed to appeal to us with the same familiarity and, indeed, personality that our childhood toys once possessed.  

Robosapien burps, raps and dances - the secret of its success? (WowWee)

Children’s affection for Robosapien could be explained by the bot’s ability to display these characteristics, argues Tilden. His robot was never designed to seem super smart or unreasonably clever, but to have foibles and quirks that would entertain children and engage their imaginations. For instance, the toy’s 67 pre-programmed functions include belching, rapping and dancing. Seeing the Robosapien as a pal was far more important than seeing it as a hyperintelligent, futuristic machine.

Could other successful toys provide similar cues for robot designers? Perhaps – and it needn’t even be toy robots. Take Cabbage Patch Kids, for example. A highly successful line of dolls, Cabbage Patch Kids appealed to children’s emotional intuition through their insistence on being taken seriously as infants that required love and attention. They needed their nappies changing, as one advertisement explained, and came with documentation like birth certificates and adoption papers which positioned them within a mock bureaucratic world of parenting. As entertainment scholars have noted, it was the emotional responsibilities of owning a Cabbage Patch doll that made them persistent as toys – kids couldn’t put them down because they had a duty to look after them, a duty which they understood instinctively.

Cabbage Patch Kids: deeper than they look (Getty Images)

How do we get from here to robots? A few other toys will help to explain. In the 1990s, the electronic sophistication of toys was burgeoning and offered new opportunities to exploit children’s empathetic instincts. Tamagotchis were small egg-shaped mini computers with a square LCD screen displaying an animated pet.

The onus was on the child to look after this pet by feeding and playing with it. More than 76 million Tamagotchis have been sold worldwide since their arrival in 1996. The phrase “Tamagotchi effect” was coined to describe the strong emotional attachment to virtual agents exhibited by Tamagotchi owners.

Tamagotchis demanded care and attention from their owners (Joi Ito/Flickr/CC BY 2.0)

Newspaper reports at the time marvelled at how children expressed extreme outpourings of grief when their “cyberpet” finally succumbed to that great leveller of all, death. Tamagotchis required children to carry out a duty of care, like Cabbage Patch Kids, but the difference was that the consequences of bad parenting would actually be played out.

The Furby, launched in the 1990s, was designed to evoke similar emotions. Furry, talkative and exhaustingly needy, Furbies yearned for love and care. In this Radiolab podcast, Furby co-creator Caleb Chung explains that Furbies were designed to appeal to human beings’ innate sense of compassion by sounding scared when held upside down, or by quivering at loud noises.

Quaint, you might think, and something that only small children would do. But consider the soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan who gave funerals to combat robots when they were irreparably damaged. That machines provoke strong emotional connections with us is not the preserve of children.

Could robots be designed to evoke the same affection as toys? (Getty Images)

All of this is now directly informing the work of robot designers around the world. Aldebaran Robotics, headquartered in Paris, has learned a lot from the world of toys.

“When we saw that children were able to have a very strong connection with a Tamagotchi, a very simple device, we knew that it would be possible to create a much stronger connection with a robot that had a humanoid shape, an expressive voice and expressive gestures,” explains Aldebaran’s research director, Rodolphe Gelin. “Toys demonstrated to us that this was possible.”

The company’s most famous bot is Nao – a humanoid robot used in educational settings. Nao is intentionally the size of a teddy bear, says Gelin, so as not to be too large and “invasive”. Nao also has LEDs around its eyes and on the sides of its head that animate to provide further cues, such as blinking, which suggest it is alive. Even simple things, like making sure Nao didn’t have a lot of visible metallic parts, helped to naturalise it.

The Nao robot was designed to be the size of a teddy bear (Yoshikazu Tsuno/AFP/Getty Images)

Aldebaran has also crammed the robot full of sensing capabilities which mean its behaviour can subtly adapt to the needs of human companions. Cameras and image analysis can distinguish your gender, or mood, for example, and 3D scanners read body language.

Studies that explore how children interact with robots have shown that this level of social intelligence is crucial for supporting long-term relationships with machines. Lola Canamero, a researcher in adaptive intelligent behaviour at the University of Hertfordshire, UK, agrees that children are generally very willing to initially suspend their disbelief when greeting a robot. However, that suspension of disbelief may not last very long unless the variety of interactions can continue to engage the child.

Children soon get bored if toys or robots fail to surprise them (Getty Images)

“If children see that the robot is actually responding to what they do and not just performing random actions, that keeps their interest for much longer and persuades them to continue interacting with the robot,” she says.

The results of all these efforts to improve the social capacities of robots speak for themselves. For instance, Gelin recalls visiting a nursing home in France to ask if the residents there, who had never seen Nao, would be interested in a robot companion. The elderly people scoffed at the idea. Gelin told them he of course understood – but before he left, he pulled Nao out of his bag. The mood in the room transformed. Suddenly the nursing home residents were fascinated and intrigued. “Can he sing? Can he talk to me?” they asked.

It’s this eagerness for companionship that Gelin says robot manufacturers must now appeal.

“What is most important for us is to have a robot which understands your emotion and which can itself express emotion,” explains Gelin. “What one generally imagines for a robot, that he will perform tasks, clean the house, bring you a beer – for us these things will come later. The first thing is to have robots which are accepted at home.”

After all, when we were children, we had a special connection to our toys. They had personalities, could follow us on adventures and proved to be the ultimate companions. Perhaps the most promising robots of the future, then, will just be toys all grown up.

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The secret to staying safe online

Why should I care about online security?
It’s tempting to assume that only big businesses or big celebrities have to worry about their online security. After all, personal information like our photographs aren’t as interesting to anonymous hackers as compromising pictures of Jennifer Lawrence and other Hollywood A-listers, are they?

But the truth is we all have photos and messages we would prefer to keep private, and information like credit card details we would like to keep safe. According to a report by security software-maker McAfee and the Washington think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies, more than 40 million people in the US had their personal information stolen last year, as well as 54 million in Turkey, 20 million in Korea, 16 million in Germany and more than 20 million in China.

While it would be a mistake to think that the data we store online can ever be 100% safe, it would also be an error to assume that we can’t make our email accounts and the data – including photographs – that we store in the cloud a little bit more secure with very little inconvenience.

I’m pretty sure I don’t store anything in the cloud, thanks…
Many of the celebrities at the heart of the recent leaks may have thought the same. But as cloud services grow it’s becoming common for devices like smartphones to upload user data to remote servers by default. If you’re at all worried about some of your photos falling into the hands of malicious parties it’s probably not a bad idea to check your phone settings to see what data is being automatically backed up to the cloud, and disable automatic uploading.

Still, there’s no doubting that the cloud can be very useful – ask anyone who has lost all their photos and contact information because they lost or broke their phone. Fortunately there are other actions you can take to keep your data in the cloud safe. Probably most importantly, you’ll want to consider using a strong and secure password.

So what makes a good password?
For starters, some computer security experts say that password length is more important than complexity, which means that a 16-character memorable password like “ilovemysportscar” is more difficult to guess than an eight-character unmemorable password like “T9$ey!!q”. This is because there are far more total possible combinations of 16 characters than eight, meaning malicious software must take longer to hunt through all the possible options to find the correct password. One survey found that 22% of “strong” eight-character passwords that contained numbers and symbols could be cracked after 10 billion guesses – compared with only 12% of 16 character passwords.

(Thinkstock)

In his book How to Predict The Unpredictable, the author William Poundstone proposes other tips, such as including avoiding obvious number substitutions – most people substitute the letter “I” with a “1”, for example, which creates a false sense of security. Better would be to create a seemingly random string from the first letters of a phrase you have memorised. (As an illustration, the previous sentence in this paragraph could become: “bwbtcasrsftfloapyhm”).

Alternatively, you might choose a random string of letters and numbers, and use it to create a nonsense sentence. So, the (admittedly too short) password “RPM8t4Ka”, explains Poundstone, might become “Revolutions Per Minute, 8 track for Kathy”.

“I don’t know what it means,” he writes, “but I do know it’s fairly easy to remember.

OK, that’s my email password changed. Am I safe now?
Not completely. Even a 16-character password is useless if you inadvertently hand it over to a hacker. Unfortunately, that’s all too easily done. Use an unsecure wi-fi hotspot, for example, and an eavesdropper on the same hotspot can easily monitor your internet activity and read your passwords. If you’re not prompted to enter a password to access a wi-fi hotspot, there’s a good chance it isn’t secure. It’s probably best to restrict your online activity to basic browsing on these wi-fi hotspots, and perform more sensitive actions (checking email, uploading data to the cloud) on your home wi-fi or using your phone’s secure data network – look for the 3G or 4G symbol on your screen.

(Thinkstock)

You can actually go one step further for minimal extra fuss. Install a virtual private network (VPN) app on your phone, switch it on when you’re on a wi-fi hotspot and it will essentially make it more secure: the app scrambles all of the data from your online activity – including the passwords you use to check email – in a way that makes it unintelligible to eavesdroppers. VPNs aren’t free, though, so privacy comes with a price.

And that should protect me from data theft?
It’s a start – but you’ve still got work to do. We don’t know for sure how hackers compromised the online accounts of the celebrities at the centre of the recent leak. There’s some evidence that they exploited a vulnerability in Apple’s iCloud service to repeatedly guess the user password until they found the correct one. But there is another way to gain access to someone’s account, no matter how strong their password is. If you know the person’s username, you can ask the service provider to reset their password using the “forgot my password” function. To work this particular trick a hacker needs to know a little information about the person whose account they are trying to access – things like their date of birth, their mother’s maiden name, or the first school they attended – so they can guess the answers to the security questions that must be answered to reset the password.

Of course, celebrities will find it difficult to keep this kind of personal information secret, which makes them particularly vulnerable to this form of attack – Sarah Palin’s email account was hacked this way in 2011. But many of us are all too willing to publish online the personal information we rely on to protect our passwords – many of us display our full date of birth on a social network profile, for instance. Navigating the privacy settings on social networks to hide this data is often not easy, but in the interests of keeping your data secure, it’s probably worth taking the time to make sure this sensitive information is kept out of sight of potential fraudsters.

Some people even advocate using false information on social networks – like an incorrect date of birth or ‘un-birthday’ – to keep your identity elsewhere secure.

(Thinkstock)

OK, I’ve done all that. Am I finally safe?
Sadly, probably not. But you’ve certainly made life more difficult for hackers. And there’s one final trick you can use to add an extra layer of security. Many email and cloud services now offer two-factor authentication. With this service enabled, simply entering your correct password on a website won’t immediately offer you access to your account – instead it might trigger an automated call or text message to your mobile phone that requires you to punch in a PIN to complete the sign-in process. The idea is that confirming your identity twice is more secure than making you confirm it just once.

So I have to memorise, or do, yet another thing, then?
As with almost all of these security measures, two-factor authentication adds a little bit of inconvenience every time you want to access your account. Not everyone is prepared to trade convenience for security. But the bottom line is that we each have to make a personal decision about just how seriously we value our online privacy.

Is my personal information ever going to be more secure?
As The Economist noted earlier this year “Securing cyberspace is hard because the architecture of the internet was designed to promote connectivity, not security.” And this will get harder over the next few years and decades, as the “internet of things” begins to flourish – where billions of devices, from cars to household appliances to medical equipment, will be connected to the web.

“The tactic of pumping out new software as fast as possible and then issuing patches later to fix flaws in the code may be tolerable if all that is lost is data, but if it involves personal safety, consumers will be less tolerant,” noted The Economist. And if we want companies to be more proactive in keeping our information safe, then it’s all the more reason why we need to make sure we take enough precautionary steps ourselves.

To find out more about online security, check out at the World-Changing Ideas Summit in New York on 21 October. BBC Future will be covering the event in full – so watch this space.

Intel gains a new ally in China's chip wars - Beijing

(Reuters) - Intel's investment of up to $1.5 billion in two fast-growing Chinese mobile chipmakers has effectively aligned the U.S. giant with a third party - a Beijing government intent on producing a viable domestic challenger to the likes of Qualcomm and Samsung.
For more than a decade, China has targeted semiconductor design and manufacture as a major focus of its industrial policy. Activity has picked up markedly over the past year with a spate of cross-border mergers and cooperation deals.
"We've entered an inflection point where government policy has started to work - it's started to help the local semiconductor industry," said Nomura analyst Leping Huang.
The deal hashed out by Intel Corp Chief Executive Brian Krzanich over 24 hours in Beijing in early August extends Intel's beachhead in China, the biggest battleground in the smartphone industry, and boosts the company's years-long effort to catch up to leading mobile chipmaker Qualcomm Inc.
A key visit during the trip was to Yang Xueshan, the deputy chief of China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), who gave his blessing for the deal.
The agreement, unveiled on Sept. 26, gives Intel a 20 percent stake in Spreadtrum Communications and RDA Microelectronics through shares in a Tsinghua University holding company, with the aim of jointly developing and marketing smartphone chips.
China is the world's largest consumer and manufacturer of smartphones yet relies heavily on imported chips - particularly the processors that power the latest devices - made by San Diego-based Qualcomm, South Korea's Samsung Electronics Co, or MediaTek Inc of Taiwan.
China's ramped-up activity also arrives on the heels of revelations about the U.S. surveillance programme PRISM, which has prompted Beijing to undertake a slew of actions to enhance the security of its information technology industry.
For Intel, the world's leading manufacturer of chips for personal computers, the Tsinghua deal offers an additional path into the world's biggest chip market after it was slow to recognize the mobile revolution and design new processors for smartphones and tablets.
Intel spokesman John Mandeville declined to comment.
NATIONAL TARGETS
The China Semiconductor Industry Association estimates that revenue from China's chip industry reached 251 billion yuan($40.98 billion) in 2013, while domestic demand for chips amounted to 917 billion yuan, representing more than half of global semiconductor consumption.
Deng Zhonghan, a member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and National People's Congress, said in March that China's $210 billion worth of annual chip imports exceeds the value of the country's entire yearly petroleum imports.
In June, the State Council offered the country's most comprehensive guidelines for the development of the semiconductor industry, outlining specific revenue targets for 2015 and 2020, with chip revenue set to grow at a better-than 20 percent annual clip, to reach 350 billion yuan by 2020.
An important part of Beijing's effort, analysts and industry insiders say, was consolidation of Spreadtrum and RDA, two companies formerly trading independently on Nasdaq.
The two companies were acquired a year ago for $1.7 billion and $900 million respectively by Tsinghua Unigroup, government-affiliated private equity group controlled by Tsinghua University in Beijing.
As part of its recent deal, which is expected to close early next year, Intel and Unigroup will form a new holding company that contains Spreadtrum and RDA.
Beijing wants the Unigroup companies to become competitive with Taiwan's MediaTek within five years and overtake Qualcomm within 10 years, according to a person familiar with Unigroup.
TRUE PARTNERS
Since taking over in 2013, Krzanich has aggressively positioned Intel to catch up with Qualcomm, the leading mobile chipset maker.
A central part of that strategy is China, where consumers are snapping up low-end smartphones made with low-cost chips from local suppliers like Spreadtrum and MediaTek.
Intel started investing in local operations 20 years ago, and presently operates factories across the country for manufacturing, assembling and testing microprocessors. Intel also has research and development operations in Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen.
In May, Intel said it reached an agreement with Fuzhou-based Rockchip to produce chips for tablets based on Intel's architecture.
"With China, what they want is for you to be a true partner," Krzanich told reporters in September. "We go in and we partner, we build factories, we build R&D and we help local companies."
Intel's deal with Tsinghua Unigroup comes three months after Qualcomm agreed to partner with Shanghai-based Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC), China's largest foundry, to produce some of Qualcomm's smartphone chips.
As part of the agreement, Qualcomm will help SMIC implement its first high-end 28 nanometre manufacturing technology.
It also coincides with a year-long Chinese anti-monopoly investigation into Qualcomm. Critics say the probe unfairly targets foreign companies in order to help domestic companies, which Chinese authorities flatly deny.
Krzanich first discussed ways to collaborate with the Chinese firms during a visit to Tsinghua University in April, where he and Intel China head Yang Xu met Tsinghua Holding's Xu Jinhong, Unigroup's Zhou Weiguo, Spreadtrum founder Li Liyou, who is also a Tsinghua University alumnus.
He made a second trip to Beijing, the whirlwind visit in August, after which the deal fell into place.
"Tsinghua University is an important driving force for the development of national science and technology, and Tsinghua Holdings is a key part of that effort," Tsinghua Holdings Chief Executive Xu Jinhong told Reuters by email.
    Xu characterized the Intel investment as "a new model for cooperation between Chinese and U.S. companies in the chip industry."
Analysts say that Intel's deal will give the Santa Clara-based company a moderate boost by gaining a partner with strong relationships with local phone manufacturers.
The deal should also give Intel enough protection of its intellectual property through licensing arrangements and other conditions, said Scott Kennedy, director of the Research Centre for Chinese Politics and Business at Indiana University.
"There's potential benefits for everyone," Kennedy said.
(1 US dollar = 6.1250 Chinese yuan)
(Additional reporting by Michael Martina and Beijing Newsroom; Editing by Alex Richardson and Emily Kaiser)