Researchers at the Biotherapy Development Research Center Co. in Kanazawa, Japan, have come with a 100%-natural solution to the age-old problem of melting ice-cream. By using polyphenol found in strawberry, they can keep a popsicle from melting for hours, on a hot summer day.

Believe it or not, the secret ingredient for “unmeltable” ice-cream was discovered by mistake. The Kanazawa research center had asked a local pastry chef to create new confectionery using strawberry polyphenol, in an attempt to find new uses for strawberries not good enough to be sold as fresh fruit. However, the chef later reported that  that “dairy cream solidified instantly when strawberry polyphenol was added”. That made it redundant in confectionery, but researchers at the center realized that polyphenol could be used to make ice-cream melt a lot slower.

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21-year-old Dane Nash, from Bristol, UK, gets around 80% of his daily calorie intake from bananas, consuming up to 150 yellow fruits every week. Despite doctors’ warnings, the young “fruitarian” claims that the banana-heavy diet provides “amazing health, endless energy and fantastic all-round well-being”.

Dane embraced the vegan lifestyle two years ago, as a way to solve his acne problem. Before that, he had tried vegetarianism, but after doing some research, he decided that going raw was the way to go. He says that all other species consume raw food for a reason – it’s good for them – but people at one point started cooking various foods, which really isn’t very good for us. For about half a year, Nash has been on a raw-only diet, with only a few slip-ups, like the occasional cooked rice. He gets most of his nutrients from ample quantities of bananas, mixes with lots of spinach and other leafy vegetables, as well as berries.

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Tyrion Lannister isn’t just one of the most beloved characters on HBO’s hit series “Game of Thrones”, he is also the inspiration behind one of the most expensive cakes ever made – a 70-pound work of art showing the Halfman sitting on the Iron Throne.

The Broadway Bakery, in Dubai, recently celebrated the new season of “Game of Thrones” by creating an incredibly detailed cake featuring everyone’s favorite imp, Tyrion Lannister. Made primarily of sugar paste and fondant, the edible masterpiece stands four feet tall and weighs a whopping 70 pounds, making it large enough to feed a crowd of 100 – 120 people. But who, apart from his sister Cersei, would have the heart to take a knife to this realistic model of Tyrion?

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If anyone ever puts together a list of the world’s most unappetizing dishes that actually taste great, they should definitely consider this version of the popular fish and chips cooked in an activated charcoal batter. It looks like a scorched stick, but reportedly tastes amazing.

Activated charcoal is commonly used in cosmetic products and toothpaste, for its ability to trap toxins in its micro-pores and clean the body, but people have also been using it as an eye-catching food ingredient for a few years now. Back in 2014, we wrote about a jet black Cheddar cheese that got its unique coloring from activated charcoal, and last year, black ice-cream almost broke the internet after photos of it went viral on Instagram and Twitter. Now, a cafe in Melbourne, Australia is getting its five minutes of internet fame for combining the classic fish and chips with activated charcoal to create one of the least appealing dishes in history.

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Most people have never even seen, let alone tasted, white strawberries, but they’ve been a staple of the Japanese luxury fruit market for years. The Asian country actually has several varieties of white strawberries, among which the White Jewel, or Shiroi Houseki stands out as the rarest and most expensive.

White Jewel strawberries were created four years ago, by Yasuhito Teshima, and his farm in Japan’s Saga Prefecture remains the only one in the world that produces this unique fruit. Teshima-san claims he spent years cross-breeding different types of strawberries and perfecting his growing technique in order to come up with a large strawberry that was white both on the inside and the outside.

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When they hear the phrase “ice cream sandwich”, most people think about creamy ice-cream squeezed between two waffers or cookies, but in Mexico, it can mean a regular bun stuffed with scoops of ice-cream.

Street vendors in various parts of Mexico have been selling “tortas de nieve” for a few years now, but they’re once attracting attention on social media, after an older video of a man preparing the bizarre snack recently went viral. In it, you can see the ice-cream man slicing a bun usually filled with ingredients like meat,vegetables and sauces, and stuffing it with six scoops of ice cream.

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Sila Sutharat, a roasted chicken street vendor from Phetchaburi, Thailand, has come up with an ingenious way of cooking chicken. Instead of an oven or a charcoal barbecue, he uses 1,000 mobile mirrors that concentrate sunlight into a strong beam. He basically cooks meat with over 300 degrees Celsius of natural sunlight.

Like most other street vendors, Sila used to cook his chicken over a charcoal fire, but that all changed in 1997, when a mundane observation gave him a brilliant idea. One day, he was hit by the sunlight reflected off the window of a passing bus, and he felt its heat. “I could possibly change it into energy,” Sila told himself, and started working on a contraption to capture the sunlight and use it to cook his chicken.

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Eduardo Donato is one of the many pig farmers in Spain who specialize in “jamón”, a traditional cured ham recognized for its delicious taste and nutritional value. However, his jamón is special. It is widely recognized as the most delicious ham in the world, and, at €4,100 ($4,600) per leg, also the most expensive.

Up until 1989, Eduardo Donato owned a profitable construction company in the city of Tarragona, and specialized in the restoration of 15th and 16th century buildings. Everything was great, he had a good, comfortable life and business was booming. But then, one of his closest colleagues succumbed to cancer, and, soon after, another one died of a heart-attack. He realized that, with all the stress of life in the big city and managing his business, he could be next. To make matters worse, his beautiful city had been “disfigured” by petrochemical and nuclear plants built nearby. Donato realized he didn’t want to live there anymore, so he sold his business and his home, and went looking for paradise.

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If you’re really short on cash and haven’t eaten anything in about a week, you may want to head over to Gold Curry, a restaurant in Japan’s Ishikawa prefecture, where you can earn up to $900 if you can finish one of their giant dishes in the allotted time.

We’ve featured some outrageous restaurant challenges in the past, like eating a bowl of the world’s hottest curry, feasting on a 4-pound taco, or finishing a giant bowl of Pho soup, but, while definitely extreme, completing them still seemed possible. That’s not the case with the ultimate challenge set by Japanese restaurant Gold Curry. They are offering a grand prize of $900 to any person that can eat over 20 pounds of rice and curry in just one hour, which I for one don’t think is humanly possible without rupturing your stomach.

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Thanks to genetic engineering, pink pineapple isn’t just a product of Photoshop, anymore. It’s an actual product and it’s coming to a grocery store near you, very soon.

Del Monte Fresh Produce, one of the world’s largest produce suppliers, has been working on pink pineapple for over a decade, and in December of last year, the company got permission from the FDA to sell them in the United States. Del Monte has already partnered with Dole, to have the new pink fruit grown in Costa Rica and Hawaii, and while it hasn’t reached store shelves just yet, photos of the unusual-looking pineapple have been popping up on online social networks lately.

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If you’re looking for a new and interesting way to enjoy your daily cup of java, try dumping a lump of hot coal into it. The trick worked for a small coffee stall owner in Indonesia who has become famous for his sizzling charcoal coffee.

The Indonesian city of Yogyakarta is perhaps the only place in the world where you can have your coffee served with a piece of red-hot coal. It’s called “Kopi Joss” and it was apparently invented back in the 1960s, by a local coffee stall owner known only as Mr. Man, to help him deal with a troubled stomach. The current stall operator, Alex, says that Mr. Man, who has since past away, was making his coffee as usual, when he laid eyes on the burning coal that he used to boil the water, and an idea popped into his head. His stomach was giving him problems and thought that the coal could make it better. So he took a piece of hot coal and dumped into a cup of coffee. It worked, and he since started selling it to brave customers as well.

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Coconut cream puddings are very popular in Thailand, but while they usually come in flower shapes, one dessert shop in Pathun Thani, north of Bangkok, decided to shake things up a bit by using puppy-shaped molds instead. Photos of the realistic-looking edible puppies made quite an impact online, sparking a heated debate.

Within six hours of posting photos of their new treats on Facebook, Thai dessert shop Wilaiwan had already gotten over 10,000 shares and hundreds of comments. But that was only the beginning, as the photos soon started making the rounds on blogs and news sites, and even attracted the attention of international news networks. Some people loved them and said that they would love to eat a slimy puppy, while others said they looked too much like their pets, and couldn’t even think about sticking a spoon in one.

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Named in honor of the giant spider from the Harry Potter books, Aragog is an unusual cocktail made with a drop of tarantula venom, which numbs the tongue, tickles your lips and causes a sensation “between tingling and cramping” in the throat.

Aragog was created two years ago, by Romeo Palomares, chief mixologist at the Luciferina Bar, in Mexico City, after being challenged by his boss to come up with a cocktail that would impress patrons. The popular Day of the Dead was approaching, and the famous witchcraft market of Sonora was in full swing, so he decided that it was the best place to look for a special ingredient.

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Not everyone’s a morning person, so if having a cup of coffee with your morning bagels just isn’t enough to give you that much-needed boost, maybe these caffeinated bagels can help.

Called “Espresso Buzz Bagels”, the world’s first caffeinated bagels were unveiled last week by the Einstein Bros Bagel chain. Each bagel contains 32 milligrams of caffeine, which is roughly a third of the amount found in an eight ounce cup of coffee, plus 13 grams of protein. That’s obviously not enough to justify replacing your morning coffee with one or even two caffeinated bagels, but as an extra source of energy, the combination of caffeine and carbohydrates might actually help.

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It turns out we no longer need cows to produce cow milk, we can just brew it with yeast, just like beer. Well, it’s actually a bit more complicated than that, but that’s how a company called Perfect Day explains the basics of their innovative new product – a “synthetic milk” that looks and tastes a lot like cow milk.

Perfect Day was co-founded by Ryan Pandya and Perumal Gandh, two young scientists with a background in biomedical engineering. Three years ago, one was working on next-generation vaccines in Boston, and the other on tissue engineering, in New York. They didn’t know each other but they had a mutual acquaintance who knew that they both had this crazy idea about making milk without cows, and he put them in touch. They hit it off and started working on a way of making their dream a reality.

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