Would you like to reduce the salt in your diet without losing that nice, salty flavor? The Rekimoto Laboratory at the University of Tokyo may have a solution. It's developed a prototype electric fork that deliverers a mild shock to the tongue of the user. To the brain, this simulates the experience of biting into salty food. Discover magazine explains how it works:
The fork’s electrical jolt is activated with the touch of a button, completing a circuit between your fingers, the metal fork handle and your tongue. When charged sodium ions hit our tongue, their electrical potential activates ion gates that relay messages to our brains. The fork hijacks this system by targeting these ion gates with an electric charge, fooling them into sending a salty signal to our brains.
To mark last Valentine's Day, Lonac, a Croatian street artist, prepared this mural in Zagreb. He spray painted a human heart in several frames. When viewed in sequence through animation, they show blood flowing through a human heart.
Darren Wong, a chef in New York City, invented the Raindrop Cake. It's a dessert inspired by mizu shingen mochi, a Japanese dish. It consists of mineral water and agar. You can eat the Raindrop Cake plain, but then it tastes a bit bland. For additional flavor, try adding soybean flour or brown syrup on top.
Wong talked to BuzzFeed about how he developed this unusual dessert:
Wong spent a lot of time on cooking forums to get an idea of what was likely to work and then experimented with a ton of different gelatins and agars.
“The hardest was trying to figure out how to store and transport something so fragile,” Wong said. “That entails packaging each individual cake separately in its own protective cocoon until it’s ready to be served.”
You can eat one at the Smorgasburg, a food fair in Brooklyn.
UPI reports that construction worker Bill Davis and a colleague near Tacoma, Washington discovered that two deer had become trapped in mud at a job site. They used an excavator to gently lift each one out of the soupy mess and place them on dry ground. Here's the first deer.
In 1910, Samuel Clemens, the author who went by the name Mark Twain, died.
This was during the age of Spiritualism--the popular belief that it's possible to communicate with the spirits of the dead through mystical rituals, such as seances. 7 years after Twain died, Emily Grant Hutchings, a journalist, announced that the ghost of Twain had dictated a novel to her through a ouija board. It was titled Jap Herron. Hutchings published it.
The estate of Mark Twain said it owned anything Twain wrote--even while dead--and therefore sued Hutchings for copyright violation. Thus began one of the strangest copyright lawsuits in American history. Parker Higgins writes at Fusion:
Twain’s estate, while skeptical that the book was really authored by the deceased author, said that, if it were, the estate owned the rights to it and publisher Harper & Brothers had a contract to publish it.
At the heart of the case were some novel legal questions: Can the law recognize a dead person as the author of a new work? And if so, could Twain’s ghost (or its human mouthpiece), wiggle out of Twain’s agreement with Harper & Brothers to publish all of his books? Finally, even if those copyright hurdles could be cleared, what about using Twain’s pen name, which the publisher held as a registered trademark? (Twain’s legal name was Samuel Clemens.) […]
So the more firmly they insisted Twain himself was behind the work, the more they strengthened the Twain estate’s copyright argument that it, as the owner of all things written by Twain, owned this book, too. And Twain had a deal with Harper & Brothers that gave it the sole rights to publish books by Twain, so Hutchings and her publisher would have to produce credible evidence that he wanted to break that deal in his afterlife.
Jap Herron, which was probably ghostwritten by Hutchings herself, is now indisputably in the public domain. You can read it here.
The 1974 documentary The Texas Chainsaw Massacre describes everyday life in a quiet small town in Texas. At the beginning of the film, a group of kids stop by a gas station in the town of Bastrop. The owner invites the kids in for some of his barbecue.
That gas station is still standing. And now it's being turned into a real barbecue joint. The owners are restoring it to its original look from the film, as well as adding rental cabins, so you can spend the night there. The New York Daily News reports:
The BBQ joint, which owner Roy Rose described bluntly as a “horror barbecue resort” to KXAN in 2015, is going to have an outdoor stage as well as a cozy lodging option, if you really want to get the complete “Massacre” experience.
“We’re going to build a horror barbecue resort,” Rose said. “It’ll be a safe, and fun and scary place for families and everybody to come and have a good time.”
The horror movie superfan bought the landmark station last year.
His business partner in the endeavor, Ari Lehman, is well-versed in the realm of creepy — he played the role of young Jason Voorhees in the original “Friday the 13th.”
Every year, the Easter Bunny visits little boys and girls and gives them presents, usually chocolate candy, colorful eggs, and jelly beans. The Easter Wolverine fills in for him in rougher neighborhoods. Don't try to take his goodies away, or you'll end up with a few carrots jammed in your belly.
Ernie Estrella and Mike Avila of Blastr visited WonderCon this year and photographed the cosplayers, of whom this unknown Easter Wolverine is the funniest.
Officer Scott Marsh of the Huntington Beach Police Department in California spotted a suspicious vehicle in a parking lot last Wednesday. He discovered that a woman and her 11-year old daughter were living in it. He called in the department's Homeless Task Force to assist them.
While they were talking to the mother and trying to find ways to help her, Officer Zach Pricer distracted the girl by teaching her how to play hopscotch. The Orange County Register quotes department spokeswoman Officer Jennifer Marlatt:
“It distracted her from an adult problem,” Marlatt said.
Pricer, a 13-year veteran, said he used hopscotch as a tool to learn more about the girl’s welfare.
“For an 11-year-old girl, to see a police officer towering over her is a scary thing,” said Pricer, 38. “I was trying to break the ice and get her to feel comfortable with me.”
On Thursday, a Homeless Task Force officer was working to find housing for the mother and daughter.
Commercial air travel has been around for a century. Legend has it that on that first flight from St. Petersburg, Florida to nearby Tampa, a passenger insisted on using both armrests and talking to the guy next to him for the entire trip.
You might think that in all that intervening time, there would be no new way to radically transform the commercial air travel experience. But you'd be wrong. Dante Ramos, a columnist with the Boston Globe, recently flew from Houston to Boston. The woman in front of him draped her ponytail over her seat and across his TV monitor. Ramos photographed her and tweeted about it.
The story goes that, 40 years ago, this little island in the Drina River by the town of Bajina Basta, Serbia was a popular spot for young people to swim and sunbathe. The owner and his friends decided to build a cabin there as a private getaway. It was a difficult task--all of the materials had to be rowed out through the river's swift currents.
Airbnb offers this unique bedroom for rent at the Paris Aquarium. It's surrounded by an 800,000-gallon tank that houses 35 sharks. 3 lucky winners of a contest will be allowed to spend the night there from April 11-13.
The room contains a 2-person circular bed decorated with a marine theme, as well as dinner, breakfast, and linens. While there, shark expert and diver Fred Buyle will teach guests about the sharks that live in the aquarium. You can read more about the event at CNN.
JMC Equestrian Clipping is a horse barbering service in northwestern England. A few months ago, it trimmed into this Welsh horse's hair symbols and icons from The Legend of Zelda.
Think of the cosplay opportunities with this service!
And it's certainly not the first time that JMC has done work like this. Check out these horses:
Core Sea is a marine conservation and research organization in Southeast Asia. Recently, one member of the team came across a porcupinefish while snorkeling in Chaloklum Bay, Thailand. The fish was caught in a net. The snorkler used a broken bottle to cut the fish free of the net. That was a challenge, as the net kept on getting caught on the procupinefish's spines.
Throughout the entire rescue, another porcupinefish insisted on staying close by. When the trapped fish was free, the couple swam off together.
