Hi, I'm Vijay, Creative at dffrnt.com. My work has been featured on Lifehacker and I used to run the extremely popular Gintama daisuki blog under the pseudonym vijei.
Your body keeps track of how much fat you have through a chemical called leptin and makes you hungry if you’re starting to lose weight. Thus, if you skip a meal in the morning, it’ll be sure to make you extra hungry in the evening, so that your overall weight doesn’t change.
— Aaron Swartz
Eggs were often beaten in copper bowls. Why copper bowls? Chefs might have been able to give you some kind of reason, but it would have sounded silly to scientific ears. But the modernists discovered that the ions in the copper ended up forming complex bonds with the conalbumin in the eggs.
- Aaron Swartz, co-founder of Reddit
The reason why copper bonding with conalbumin is desirable is that the conalbumin-copper complex is more stable than the conalbumin alone, so egg whites whipped in a copper bowl are less likely to denature (unfold).
Rough calorie expenditure estimates for running (90/mile) and just lying down (100/hr).
Sooshi app for iPhone is coming soon
“France is Bacon”: The story of a decade-long misunderstanding.
iOS - autocomplete text has the same typeface and style as the underlying text field
/via Idan Gazit
Not centered. Phail!
Super neat trick to separate the egg-yolk from the egg-white.
Japanese Takayama sake with salt — Brain Kemper
Summer Sushi by Chow Hon Lam
American service constantly presses on its diners. Can I show you to your seat? Here’s some menus. How’s the meal? Would you like the check?
In Barcelona, once you’re done with the meal your server comes by to take your plates away and asks if you’d like some coffee. Encouraging you to stick around and enjoy the surroundings.
He makes a solid point at the end of the piece. Go read it.
Just 16 and recently released from a naval academy, Kenji Ekuan witnessed Hiroshima’s devastation from the train taking him home. “Faced with that nothingness, I felt a great nostalgia for human culture,” he recalled from the offices of G. K. Design, the firm he co-founded in Tokyo in 1952. “I needed something to touch, to look at,” he added. “Right then I decided to be a maker of things.”
One of the most enduring objects in his 60-year design career — which includes the Akita bullet train and Yamaha motorbikes — is the Kikkoman soy-sauce dispenser. Introduced in 1961, it has been in continuous production ever since. Traditional in its grace yet modern in its materials, the bottle’s design drew on Ekuan’s experiences at war’s end.
Beautiful.
MIT PhD candidate Dave Smith and his team of mechanical engineers and nano-technologists at the Varanasi Research Group spent two months devising a solution.
Burger fan Smith said: ‘We were really interested in - and still are - using this coating for anti-icing, or for preventing clogs that form in oil and gas lines, or for non-wetting applications like, say, on windshields.
‘Somehow this sparked the idea of putting it in food bottles - it could be great just for its slippery properties.
‘Plus, most of these other applications have a much longer time to market - we realised we could make this coating for bottles that is pretty much ready. I mean, it is ready, as you can see.
‘We had a limited amount of materials to pick from - I can’t say what they are, but we’ve patented the hell out of it.’
Naturally, the team had to research their market before getting to work.
Smith, who is is pursuing a PhD in mechanical engineering and a minor in entrepreneurship, and already holds nine patents, told the FastCo website: ‘It was never really a personal pain point for me, but I do hate struggling to get sauce out of the bottles.
‘I didn’t know about the tapping of the ‘57’ until I started looking into this. It was all news to me.
‘We have all types of sauces, jellies, and jams everywhere in our lab - It’s like a closet full of condiments.’
So why did the team pick sauces for their award-winning product?
Dave said: ‘It’s funny: Everyone is always like, “Why bottles? What’s the big deal?”
‘But then you tell them the market for bottles - just the sauces alone is a $17billion market.
‘And if all those bottles had our coating, we estimate that we could save about one million tons of food from being thrown out every year.’
The secret ingredient to the liquid coating is a heavily-guarded secret, but the team promise it is non-toxic and will be FDA approved.
Related reading: How non-stick coating is made to stick to the pan.
