Sunday, October 27, 2013

StarPath: Glow-In-The-Dark Coating Lights Up the Walkway After Dark


Unless you're on a sidewalk next to a well-lit road, walking at night can be a bit frightening. With no light to see where you're going, sometimes you may need to carry a flashlight. This luminescent coating called Starpath solves that problem, by turning dark pathways into a glowing blue ribbons of light.

The coating is applied in three layers, with a middle aggregate stage that absorbs UV energy during the day, which is then released as a blue glow when it's dark. It's kind of like a high-tech version of those glow in the dark stickers you put on the walls of your room when you were a kid.

Manufacturer Pro-Teq Surfacing sees Starpath as a way for municipalities to save money, by replacing costly electric pathway lighting with the low-maintenance coating. Installing the surface takes only a few hours, leaving a durable coating that's slip and rain resistant.

So far Pro-Teq Surfacing has applied Starpath to a few walkways near their home base in Cambridge England. No word on whether they plan to market the system worldwide, or if something similar could be applied to roads in addition to footpaths. Personally, I'd like to see a yellow version so we could make a sparkly path to Emerald City.

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Japanese Garlic Beer


Here’s some interesting news: a Japanese company has combined its popular dark beer with the pungent, intense flavor of black garlic, thus creating the unique and rather bizarre Aomori Garlic Black Beer.

Featuring a sleek black label with elegant golden writing, the black garlic-flavored beer bottle – which costs 630 yen ($6.5) – looks very appealing to any avid dark beer lover. The first sip of Aomori Garlic Black Beer doesn’t taste very different from any other quality black beer, but as the dark goes down your throat and into the stomach, the potent black garlic flavor starts to take over your mouth. Incredibly, those brave enough to actually try the Aomori Garlic Black Beer say the spicy, potent aftertaste is very addictive, making you want to drink more and more of the strange beverage.

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Lose weight with this sausages and beer diet


What if you could eat your favorite food every day and still be able to lose weight? Believe it or not, such a thing is very much possible, and Evo Terro, and average guy from Arizona, is living proof. Despite stuffing his face with sausages and drinking cold beers all day, he is actually shedding his extra pounds.

Terro’s miracle diet consists of consuming only sausages and drinking up to six beers a day for the entire month of October in celebration of the popular Oktoberfest. Evo discovered the offbeat diet three years ago and has been using it to shed extra weight ever since. Last year, he managed to lose about 6 kg (14lbs) by munching on his favorite bratwursts and gulping beer – which add up to about 15,000 calories per week. “Most of it was body fat,” Terry Simpsons – his doctor, says. “His cholesterol went down by a third.” To make sure the diet is not harmful in any way, Terro’s health is being monitored by the supportive doctor. “We will do the labs to make sure your liver is doing fine, your lipids aren’t out of wack and your cholesterol is fine, blood chemistries are fine and I thought that was good supervision. We knew if something bad happened we would just shut it down,” the doctor explains.

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Thursday, October 17, 2013

Here's a scientific proof why you should eat popcorn in the cinema


A study by researchers at the Cologne Institute has determined that eating popcorn makes moviegoers at least somewhat immune to advertisements—for example, those godawful commercials that you’re forced to sit through before the movie starts. “Thank you for watching Regal FirstLook” my tuchus. Not like I have a choice, Regal.

The idea behind the study, published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology, is that whenever we hear a new name our tongue subconsciously practices its pronunciation, and that’s how commercials manage to imprint brand names onto our brain. But if we’re eating popcorn our mouths are already moving, so that process is interrupted. The researchers invited 96 people—half of whom got free popcorn, half of whom only got a small sugar cube that dissolved instantly in their mouths, poor guys—to watch a commercial/movie combo. The ads left no psychological impact on the popcorn group, but the sugar cube group found themselves with warm, fuzzy feelings toward Coke or Toyota or whatever the ads were for.

“The mundane activity of eating popcorn made participants immune to the pervasive effects of advertising… This finding suggests that selling candy in cinemas actually undermines advertising effects, which contradicts present marketing strategies. In the future, when promoting a novel brand, advertising clients might consider trying to prevent candy being sold before the main movie.”

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A restaurant in Moscow only hires twins


A restaurant owner in Moscow promises you will have such a great time in his establishment that you are going to see double, not because of the strong vodka, but because the staff is made up exclusively of identical twin brothers and sisters.

Aptly called Twin Stars, the Russian restaurant employs only twin bartenders and wait staff as a gimmick to attract more customers and prides itself on being the only such restaurant in the world. Alexei Khodorovsky, the owner of Twin Stars, says he was inspired by a 1960s movie where a girl finds herself in a parallel universe and discovers there’s another version of her – her twin. The idea seems fun and both the customers and the twin staff say they’ve enjoyed the experience thus far. “We worked as barmen before this summer in a different establishment. It was an internship for us,” Artyem, who works with his identical brother Roman at the bar, says. We really liked that internship. That’s why we decided this profession suits us and we came here to work.” Finding people like Artyem and Roman was a true challenge. Identical pairs with experience working in a restaurant were very hard to track down, but the effort was worthwhile because as Nika, another member of the unique staff, says “One pair (of twins) is already fun – when there are two, it’s even more fun.”

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Silent Dining Restaurant in New York


Do you remember how you always had to be quiet at the dinner table when you were young but never understood why? Now that you’re all grown up, with children of your own, you probably wish you could have just one more of those quiet dinners. If quiet is what you seek, you’re in luck, as now you can enjoy a four-course meal in complete silence at the Eat restaurant in Greenpoint, Brooklyn where you have to be quiet and enjoy the food, whether you like it or not.

Nicholas Nauman, head chef and curator of the silent-dinner experience, got the idea for the event during a trip to India where he admired the Buddhist monks having their breakfast every morning without uttering a word. In a competing market where restaurant owners are coming up with the most unusual concepts to attract customers – such as dining in pitch-dark, the 28-year-old thought this idea would gain popularity. “It’s just an opportunity to enjoy food in a way you might not have otherwise,” he says. This way, he hopes to “reconfigure the relationship between a space and food” by forcing customers to focus on their plates rather than on the countless distractions that occur while sitting at the dinner table.

The restaurant has already held two such monthly events which were fairly successful. When talking about the first experience, Nauman says “The energy of the presence of the people involved was really palpable and motivating to make the food really good. I didn’t know if afterwards people would say ‘Woah, dude – that was weird’ or be displeased and not want to pay.” Nobody really knew what to expect from this test run but Nauman was somehow positive everything would go well. The customers didn’t break the silence; one man even left the room when he felt like sneezing which is understandable since they were told they had to finish their meals on a bench outside if they didn’t respect the strict no talking rule/if they made so much as a noise. Furthermore, some customers found creative ways of communicating such as using facial expressions. “It’s kind of like a meditation,” Jordon Colon, the owner of Eat, says. “The silence speaks for itself.”

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Living on $5000 a year in this Hobbit House


Meet Dan Price, a real life hobbit who has been living in his underground hole in Oregon for the past twenty years. He manages to survive with only $5,000 a year – $100 of which goes on the rent for the land he resides under – and doesn’t believe in “houses or mortgages.”

Dan used to be an office job type of guy, working as a photojournalist in order to support himself, his wife and their two kids and pay the mortgage on their house. He didn’t really give his life too much thought until he read a book by Harlan Hubbard which described an existence without the everyday commodities of modern life. After reading the book, Dan soon packed his bags and moved to a peaceful meadow where he tried out various housing options- a cabin, a flophouse and a tepee, before settling in the hobbit house he lives in today. The 8-foot hole in the ground barely accommodates Dan, a stove, his books, a CD player and some clothes, but it’s everything he really needs. Price, who wants to live a life without stress says “everything is at arm’s length when you are sitting there. It’s human scale. The idea is that you can see everything, no fumbling for stuff – that creates stress.”

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