Human-Powered Grill Makes You Work for Your Food

A tech-savvy Japanese youtuber recently unveiled a special grill that requires users to actually burn some calories to power up the device and cook the meat.

Japanese youtuber Bomb_tamio specializes in wacky inventions that put a smile on viewers faces, but his latest creations actually intrigued a lot of people, especially those looking for creative ways to lose weight. In a video posted last month, the young inventor can be seen preparing to cook strips of bacon on an electric grill, only instead of turning it on via its knob, he starts running in place with one foot over a yellow pad. It’s this fast movement that powers the grill, so the user needs to keep moving until the meat is cooked.

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Goodyear’s Long-Forgotten Illuminated Tires

American tire manufacturer Goodyear once created tired illuminated car tires that glowed from the inside thanks to multiple lightbulbs.

In the early 1960s, Goodyear employees William Larson and Anthony Finelli worked together to create the world’s first neothane automobile tires. Neothane was just a fancier name for urethane, the chemical compound invented three decades earlier by German chemist Otto Bayer. Unlike traditional tires, which required multiple layers of rubber as well as fabric and a laborious process to manufacture, neothane tires were grippy, squishy, responsive and easy to make. But the advantages didn’t end there. Neothane tires were also translucent, could be dyed in various colors, and, as Goodyear demonstrated, they could even be fitted with lights for a unique visual effect.

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Screambulance Offers Haunted House Scares on the Go

The Screambulance is a new haunted house experience in Japan designed to offer the most terrifying experience in a very tiny space, while abiding by social distancing rules.

The Covid-19 pandemic has really taken a toll on the entertainment business, and haunted house experiences are no exception. So now companies are coming up with creative workarounds to stay in business and offer people the scares they crave while abiding social distancing protocols. One such ingenious service is the Screambulance, a mobile haunted house experience in the form of a bloody, beatdown ambulance with an even scarier interior, and a zombie-like staff to boot.

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Suck-On Gadget Promises to Give Women a Coveted V-Shaped Face

A small, oval-shaped face with a well-defined and pointy V-line chin is one of the most coveted female beauty features in many Asian countries, and they can apparently get it by simply sucking on a bottle-shaped gadget for 10 minutes a day.

You can buy pretty much anything online these days, but every once in a while we stumble upon products so bizarre that they make us scratch our heads an wonder who would ever pay money for them. Case in point, this weird beauty accessory on Chinese shopping platform TaoBao, which is supposed to help reshape users faces, if they suck on it for just 10 minutes a day. Marketed as an electric facial exerciser, the bottle-shaped gadget apparently vibrates up to 880 times per minute and it’s these high-frequency vibrations that somehow stimulate facial muscles and reshape your face.

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Want to Take Your Pet Fish for a Walk? There’s a Bag for That!

A Japanese company is working on a quirky container-like bag for live fish, suitable both for pet owners wanting to take their favorite fish on walks, and fans of super-fresh sashimi…

Known as “katsugyo bag” this portable fish tank is shaped like a long tube with a transparent middle section, a handle and a gauge, which, if I had to guess, monitors the oxygen saturation of the water. It is being developed by “Ma Corporation”, and aims to become a more elegant, efficient and environmentally-friendly alternative to the old water-filled plastic bag.

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Japanese Ballpoint Pen Comes With a Live Parasitic Worm

The pen you’re about to see is one of those shocking products that makes people say they’ve seen it all. This Japanese souvenir actually comes with a live nematode parasite swimming inside it…

Anisakis is a genus of parasitic nematodes that infect various species of fish and can cause anisakiasis  – a parasitic infection of the gastrointestinal tract – in humans who consume raw or undercooked seafood containing larvae of the aforementioned nematode. Some people can also suffer an acute allergic reaction like anaphylaxis after eating fish infected with anisakis. In short, this aquatic parasite is not the kind of thing you’d want anywhere near you, so why would anyone create a pen with a live anisakis worm encased inside?

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Cascatelli – The Ideally Shaped Pasta You Didn’t Even Know Existed

Inspired by the firm belief that spaghetti is far from the ideal shape for pasta, a man set out to create a perfectly shaped pasta. The result of his hard work is now known as cascatelli.

The story of how cascatelli came to be began in 2018, when Dan Pashman, the host of the James Beard and Webby Award-winning “Sporkful” podcast, made some harsh remarks about spaghetti, on the stage of the Caveat Theater, in front of a live audience. His comments got a lot of attention and inspired him to dedicate a lot of his time to researching pasta shapes in a quest to create the ideal pasta design, which needed to have an appealing texture, have the perfect bite, and, most importantly, hold the right amount of sauce. Believe it or not, he spent almost three years on this project.

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NASA-Inspired Bicycle Tires Never Go Flat, Could Last a Lifetime

A tire startup has teamed up with NASA to bring the world’s first space-age alloy bicycle tires to the mainstream market.

The SMART Tire Company recently announced an innovative airless bicycle tire originally developed and tested by NASA for future Mars Rover missions. Dubbed METL, the revolutionary tire is made from smart memory metal that ,unlike stretching, rearranges its molecular structure when you bend it, but instantly goes back to its original shape. It basically has the flexibility of rubber but is as strong as titanium, which means that you probably won’t have to change another bicycle tire in your lifetime.

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BioClip – The Alternative Wool Harvesting System That Never Quite Took Off

Did you know there was a way to simply pull off the wool of sheep as you would a sweater, thus making classic shearing obsolete? It’s actually been around for decades, but for some reason, it never caught on.

When BioClip was first introduced in the early 1990s, it was supposed to completely replace sheep shearing in a matter of years. To be honest, it was a truly revolutionary product that relied on an effective biological agent to harvest sheep wool in a totally different way. A singly injection of BioClip caused a temporary break in the wool
follicle fiber synthesis process, essentially detaching the wool coat from the animal, and allowing owners to remove it as they would a piece of clothing. Videos of the process have been doing the rounds online for years, and they just never get old.

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Funny Air Filter Gives You a Dog Nose Filter in Real Life

Nosy, an wearable air filter you put on your nose, has been getting a lot of attention because it makes wearers look like they activated the dog nose filter in real-life.

Designed to protect against airborne particles, Nosy is a slick and compact air filter and purifier that fits on your nose. Its patent-pending dual filtration system (Activated Carbon and HEPA filters) allegedly break down  toxic gases from fossil fuel emissions and volatile organic compounds (VOCs), while at the same time from particles down to 0.03 microns in size, like pollen, dust, mold spores, smoke, and more. But all anyone seems to be talking about these days is how funny people look wearing it. 

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Self-Cleaning Underwear Can Allegedly Be Worn for Weeks Without Becoming Smelly

A Minnesota company has created what it calls “the world’s cleanest underwear”, an innovative self-cleaning undergarment that can be worn daily for weeks, even months, without becoming smelly.

HercLéon, a material innovation group known for creating the world’s first self-cleaning socks, t-shirts and bedsheets, is now taking on the underwear industry with Kribi, a line of undergarments made from a bacteria-fighting fabric. This revolutionary material, called HercFiber continuously destroys all bacteria and stays clean without needing a wash. All you have to do is let the underwear “air out” for a bit after wearing them, and you can safely put them on again the next day.

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This Insane Laptop Has Seven Foldable Displays

The Expanscape Aurora 7 prototype is being marketed as the world’s first seven-screen laptop, a 17.3-inch behemoth designed with IT professionals and content creators in mind.

Having more than one display is quite common for PC workstations, but multiple screens have obviously been more difficult to implement on laptops. Well, until today, that is, as laptop manufacturer Expanscape has recently released the world’s first seven-screen mobile workstation, monster of a rig that unfolds into a mobile powerhouse. The London-based company has yet to announce a price for its unconventional device, but the company’s official website mentions that the prototypes are already available for sale.

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Company Launches Realistic Airplane Window Lamp for Grounded Travelers

Are you stuck in quarantine? Do you miss staring out the window at the clouds below while flying to your next vacation destination? Apparently, there’s a lamp for that!

The Covid-19 pandemic has impacted all facets of daily life, but traveling has been particularly hard hit. For globetrotters used to frequent flying from destination to destination, the last year has been nothing short of a depression-inducing nightmare, but luckily, there are ways to treat your wanderlust. One solution, this clever lamp that perfectly imitates an airplane window and the view from above the clouds.

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Japanese Company Creates “Smart Glasses” That Can Allegedly Cure Myopia

Japan’s Kubota Pharmaceutical Holdings claims to have developed smart glasses that, if worn just an hour per day, can allegedly cure myopia.

Myopia, or nearsightedness, is a common ophthalmological condition in which you can see objects near to you clearly, but objects farther away are blurry. To compensate for this blur, you have the option of wearing eyeglasses or contact lenses, or the more invasive refractive surgery. But a Japanese company claims to have come up with a new non-invasive way of dealing with myopia – a pair of “smart glasses” that project an image from the lens of the unit onto the wearer’s retina to correct the refractive error that causes nearsightedness. Apparently, wearing the device 60 to 90 minutes a day corrects myopia.

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This Premium Gin Is Made From Distilled Elephant Dung

It’s hard to believe that elephant dung could be the main ingredient of a premium spirit drink, but it’s true. South African gin Indlovu is made with botanicals harvested from the pachyderm poop.

Paula and Les Ansley, both former professors in different fields of biology, decided to moved from the UK to South Africa, after retiring, and come up with a way to contribute to conservation efforts in the region and support the local community. Neither of them had any idea that elephant dung would play such a big part in their plan, it just sort of happened. Today they run a distillery that uses “botanicals foraged by elephants” and harvested from their poop to create Indlovu gin, a unique spirit that doesn’t taste anything like you’d imagine.

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