Ipfini, Inc. has created a unique liquid container called the Choice-Enabled Packaging.
This container has "buttons" on the side of the container's surface that release additives (flavors, colorants, etc) into the liquid.
These additive buttons let the consumer choose different versions right at the point of consumption. A programmable cola bottle with buttons for lemon, lime, vanilla, and cherry flavors as well as a caffeine button allows for 32 possible choices of soda.
Connie Cheng and Leonardo Bonanni of the MIT Media Lab made this "smart" spoon:
The spoon is equipped with sensors that measure temperature, acidity, salinity, and viscosity, and is connected to a computer via a cable. The sensors evaluate the different properties of the food, and send them to the computer for further processing. Apart from consolidating measurements that are normally done by an array of equipments into a single spoon, the information obtained can be used to advise the users what their next step should be; for example, it tells the user if there is not enough salt in the brine prepared to make pickles.
This is the story about YouTube - the Internet's TV-killer.
A year ago, co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen were in between jobs, a pair of twentysomething geeks running up big credit card debts as they tooled around a garage trying to develop an easy way for people to share homemade videos on the web.
As April began, Hurley said people were posting about 35,000 new videos daily at YouTube.com, luring even more viewers to an audience that's already watching more than 35 million videos per day, most lasting 30 seconds to 2 1/2 minutes.
Just four months ago, YouTube's visitors were posting about 8000 videos a day while viewers were seeing 3 million videos daily.
The growth has been infectious, depending largely on referrals from users who alert their friends and family to a favorite video. Many of the viewers who discovered the site then decided to share their own videos, a factor that continually deepens YouTube's pool of content.
Congrats to those guys! YouTube rocks - although, like Neatorama, it can be slow at times... :)
The man on the left is Joshua Blahyi, a Liberian warlord from the 90's better known as General Butt Naked.
He's not a nice guy:
“So, before leading my troops into battle, we would get drunk and drugged up, sacrifice a local teenager, drink their blood, then strip down to our shoes and go into battle wearing colourful wigs and carrying dainty purses we'd looted from civilians. We'd slaughter anyone we saw, chop their heads off and use them as soccer balls. We were nude, fearless, drunk and homicidal. We killed hundreds of people — so many I lost count.”
From Wikipedia:
Apparently, Blahyi believed that his nakedness was a source of protection from bullets. In addition, his acts of violence have a Satanistic tinge: he claimed to a South African Star reporter that he "met Satan regularly and talked to him" and that he took part in monthly human sacrifices from age 11 to 25 (Ellis 268).
Blahyi's rampage ended in 1996, when the civil war in Liberia was coming to an end. "God telephoned me and told me that I was not the hero I considered myself to be," he said, "so I stopped and became a preacher."
The world's most expensive sandwich is for sale at Selfridges Department Store in London for £85 or $148. It is made from Wagyu beef, foie gras, black truffle mayo, brie de maux, roquet leaf, red peppers, mustard confit, British plum tomatoes, and sourdough bread.
Wagyu cattle are one of the most expensive breeds in the world. The Japanese cows are raised on a special diet, including beer and grain. They are supposed to be regularly massaged with sake, the Japanese rice wine, to tenderize the flesh.
It is called (ironically) the McDonald sandwich, after its creator Scott McDonald, the chef at the department store.
Muhammad Ali, one of the world's most recognized people, has sold 80 percent of the marketing rights to his name and likeness to a firm for $50 million.
The 64-year-old former heavyweight champion, who suffers from Parkinson's disease, will retain a 20 percent interest in the business. The new venture will be operated by a company called G.O.A.T. LLC, an acronym for "The Greatest of All Time."
A chunk of ice fell out of the sky and left a huge hole in the ground at Oakland's Bushrod Park.
From the website:
Jacek Purat saved a piece of ice chunk that originally measured three feet in diameter. He says it came out of the southwestern sky, slammed into the ground along Shattuk Avenue and exploded into pieces. ...
It burrowed about two-and-a-half feet into the ground, where Oakland firefighters retrieved it. ...
ABC7 aviation expert Ron Wilson believes the only possible way it could have come from an airplane is if the plane's valve for fresh water leaked at a high elevation. ...
The other possibility is that it is a chunk of ice from space.
Indians in this remote mountain village in southern Colombia are marketing a particularly refreshing soft drink that harks back to Coca-Cola's original formula, when "coca" was in the name for a reason.
Advertising posters here describe the carbonated, citrus-flavored Coca-Sek as "more than an energizer" — a buzz that just might be provided by a key ingredient, a syrup produced by boiling coca leaves.
Neatorama reader Dougall Meloney wrote to me about his daughter Cory Judge and her artwork - I particularly like this glass dragonfly she made. You can check out the rest of her artwork here: http://www.epiphanydesigns.ca/ (Thanks Dougall!)
Apparently, some people like to chase tornadoes - why, I don't know...
From the website:
The cone shape is generally part of the life cycle the tornado goes through on its way to another form, block, wedge or tube. This tornado kept the cone shape for about 5 minutes then changed to a dusty block of clouds on the ground. Shortly after this image was taken the tornado hit a small tank farm in open country igniting one of the tanks.
