Watercone is a polycarbonate cone with the capacity to purify up to 1.5 liters of water a day with just a little solar energy.
All users have to do to create drinkable water is pour dirty or salt water into the cone’s black base, place the cone atop it in the sun. As the water evaporates upwards it condenses on the cone’s inner wall and tricles down into a seperate trough. To access the clean water simply lift the cone and pour.
Link – via treehugger
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And together, we smell like a quesadilla? OK, maybe not. But a company in Geneva that researches flavors and smells for the food and perfume industry did find that men and women smell like those respective foods when they sweat. Women release a compound containing sulphur that smells like onion when mixed with bacteria like that found in armpits, and men release high levels of a fatty acid that smells like cheese when mixed with the same bacteria.
Weird.
Self proclaimed mainstream-subversive art collective Superflex, decided they’d answer a question nobody had ever bothered to ask: "What does a McDonald’s restaurant look like as it slowly fills with water?"
Although we should thank them as they took the time to painstakingly recreate a McDonald’s and slowly flood it, filming it all for an exhibition at the South London Gallery.
It’s actually quite a satisfying thing to watch a generic boring fast food joint wash away, be sure to check out the video on the page.
Their latest work is a short film, “Flooded McDonald’s”, where they’ve (shockingly accurately) created a full-size replica of the inside of the ubiquitous fast food joint and then slowly filled it with water. Playing now in an exhibition at South London Gallery, the film is exactly what the title suggests and yet so much more.
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This fruit carving is fantastic. There are some truly amazing ones on the link as well, this one is certainly fun.
Link Via BoingBoing
Did your parents tell you not to play with your food? If so, you probably never created a photo op like this one!
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Why settle for chips and dip when you can watch the game noshing on Beer Ice Cream with Pretzel Crust and Dipping Sauces, or Puffed Sauerkraut, or Pizza Pebbles?
Wired Science asked leading molecular gastronomists for their own preferred finger foods recipes. Inspired by the experimental spirit of science, they’ve come up with new variations on old standbys, from Wylie Dufresne’s pizza pebbles to Homaro Cantu’s olive dipping chips.
Sometimes a little critter just can’t catch a break. This poor little man keeps trying to eat a cherry tomato, which keeps sliding just out of reach. Thank goodness for the kind Samaritan that finally holds the food in place for him.
Link Via GiggleSugar
Cake Wrecks, the blog devoted to photos of mistakes in cakes, has been featured on Neatorama in the past.
But with the Super Bowl imminent, this seemed like an appropriate moment to take another look at some sports-related cake atrocities.
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ueue, submitted by Marilyn Terrell.
It started in Lucca this week, when the town council banned any new ethnic food outlets from opening within the walls of the medieval city. And it quickly spread to Milan: a ban on ethnic foods, meaning foods that are not Italian. The Northern League party wants to protect regional specialties from the encroaching popularity of ethnic cuisines, like egg rolls and kebabs.
The Italian Minister of Agriculture, Luca Zaia, applauded the restrictions, saying ethnic restaurants should "stop importing container loads of meat and fish from who knows where" and use only Italian ingredients. Asked if he had ever tried a kebab, Mr. Zaia said no: "I prefer the dishes of my native Veneto. I even refuse to eat pineapple."
Is it gastronomic racism, or a legitimate attempt to preserve authentic Italian cuisine?
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ueue, submitted by Marilyn Terrell.
Whether its bad service or you just are not pleased with the product, you want to vent. A passenger on a Virgin Airlines flight not only wrote Sir Richard Branson, she also sent photographs just for good measure. The full letter is hilarious and can be found below.
“I’ll try and explain how this felt. Imagine being a twelve year old boy Richard. Now imagine it’s Christmas morning and you’re sat their with your final present to open. It’s a big one, and you know what it is. It’s that Goodmans stereo you picked out the catalogue and wrote to Santa about. Only you open the present and it’s not in there. It’s your hamster Richard. It’s your hamster in the box and it’s not breathing. That’s how I felt when I peeled back the foil and saw this.”
Link – via suburbanfood
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Printing an image on your latte is so 2008. Here’s what OnLatte decided to do with their Latte Art Printer: make images on a Guinness!
From the Upcoming
ueue, submitted by Lee.
Today’s shocking news that Kung Fu Panda had won 15 “Annie” Awards and shut out WALL-E led me to explore the DVD. The extras include a bonus video of Danny Yip, executive noodle chef at Mr. Chow making noodles by hand. I’ve never seen that done before, and it is magical.
*Previously: A pasta you can’t refuse.
A police officer in Brisbane, Australia, got into hot water for trying to claim … free donuts from a local Krispy Kreme:
A Brisbane police officer got into a holey row with Krispy Kreme staff, demanding to be served free doughnuts.
Shocked customers looked on as the officer argued with staff for several minutes in a bid to get his freebies, before finally storming off – empty handed and non-cinnamon-fingered. [...]
As the icing on the cake, Krispy Kreme has now decided to stop supplying Brisbane police with leftover doughnuts.
Turns out, it was a simple misunderstanding:
Before the incident, officers had been regularly popping in to collect free boxes of leftover doughnuts at the store in nearby Albert St at the end of the day. Staff were unable to sell the doughnuts and were only too happy to oblige.
A police source said the officer had become confused and thought the free doughnut arrangement applied at all times. "Everyone’s a bit annoyed because they were a nice treat at the end of the day with a coffee," he said.
Kellogg’s is testing out the idea of making cereal boxes shorter and wider to save room in your cupboard (and fit more on store shelves). What do you think? We don’t eat much boxed cereal, but I can see where it might be a handy size if you do.
Link via SeriousEats


Aleta Meadowlark of the cleverly named Omnomicon blogged about her recipe on how to make this awesomely psychedelic rainbow cake: Link – via Unique Daily
What I want to know is this: will it make you poo rainbow?
Two of our favorite things in the world are playing with electronics and playing with food, and so it is about time that someone finally got around to combining the two. We begin by gathering up appropriate snack-food building blocks and making food-based models of electronic components. From these components, you can assemble "circuitry snacks"-- edible models of functioning electronic circuits. You can make these for fun, for dessert, for your geek friends, for kids, and for teaching and learning electronics.
From the Upcoming Queue, submitted by zeo.
From the Upcoming Queue, submitted by larryfire.
Keep watching to where he starts licking his little tiny hands. It’s fantasmical.
Link Via GiggleSugar

Link, where you will find several other cool LOTR cakes
I like coffee – but not to the point that I need to grind my own roasted coffee beans (those Senseo coffee pods are just fine, thank you very much!) and certainly not to the point that I’d want to make my own coffee roaster! Not that I can anyhow …
Well, here’s Ed Bourgeois of eBlog Cafe describing his homemade coffee roaster contraption over at homeroasters.org (Now *these* people really love coffee!)
These cucumber growing molds from Japan are so fun! They would be great for bento boxes or in salads and sushi. I bet you could also use them for zucchini. I want one!
Archie McPhee is known for its weird stuff, but this is really weird. I’m sure Freud himself would have something to say about it. But hey, if fruity Austrian psychoanalysts on a stick aren’t for you, there’s always cherry-flavored Marie Antoinette severed heads, orange-flavored Abe Lincoln heads, blueberry-flavored Will Shakespeares and cola-flavored Vladimir Lenins. I love Archie McPhee.
By day Barry Snyder is an Erie, Colorado handyman. But in his spare time he is a unique artist who has garnered media attention from across the country. For over 30 years Barry has collected Price Look Up stickers to use as color chips in his own form of mosaic art. On average his creations take 6 months to complete and are comprised of up to 4,000 stickers.
Check out this short video from Food Network’s Unwrapped that profiles Barry Snyder and gives viewers a look into his world of sticker art.
Link – via whitespace
From the Upcoming Queue, submitted by whitespace.

Whoa! How awesome is this: a Hello Kitty Zombie birthday cake, made by Debbie Goard of Debbie Does Cakes. See more of the cake at Kristin and Sean’s website: Link – via Hello Kitty Hell (More Cake Geekery at this Food Geekery post)
Previously on Neatorama, another creation by the ever-talented Ms. Goard: Yoda Cake 2.0

Some of you might remember the phone order cake mishap post here at Neatorama. Obviously, ordering your cake online won’t guarantee that things will be any better.
Bob Johnson has tried everything to keep fruit bats away from his orchard. The Queensland, Australia fruit grower is so frustrated by bats eating his crop that he has even resorted to playing his bagpipe among the trees in an effort to scare the bats. Nevertheless, he has managed to harvest only 3,975 lbs. of fruit this year, compared to 36,327 lbs in an average year. He wants to be allowed to shoot the bats, but the government says he should cover his trees with netting instead.
The Johnsons are angry, arguing that the State Government is bending over backwards to appease environmentalists whose supporters last year successfully lobbied to stop orchardists from shooting bats.
And the couple has been backed by Independent federal MHR Bob Katter, who said the state should let orchardists apply his crocodile control system and “shoot them”.
“Even the most brainless greenie would have to say it is not unreasonable to cull flying foxes that carry diseases that can kill humans,” Mr Katter said.
Photo: David Martinelli
Have to take a breathalyzer test? Whatever you do, don’t eat ice cream beforehand. Here’s what one Australian man found out the hard way: Bubble O’ Bill ice cream treat will cause the test to come up positive for alcohol!
Prosecutors inquired why the machine had registered a "fail," which prevents the car from starting, despite the man’s claims that he had not been drinking.
The man claimed the alcohol reading was the result of eating a Bubble O’ Bill ice cream treat and Magistrate Rod Crisp ordered a test to be performed to back up the claim. Police recorded the man’s blood alcohol content as 0.00 and performed the test a second time after he took a few bites of Bubble O’ Bill, yielding a 0.018 reading.
Link – Thanks Denita!
Melting chocolate bunnies has never been as disturbing or creepy. And don’t get me started on the music used for this video! The creepiest one is the hairdryer scene. Brrrrrrr! Created by the Danish Dutch filmmaker Sander Plug.
Sander Plug’s website – Link
*Correction – Sander Plug is Dutch not Danish! Thank you tripleX!
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