Rexfeng

Gilead Sciences reported $2.3 billion in sales of Sovaldi, a new hepatitis C drug that has raised an outcry over its $1,000-a-pill price.

Amid a list of errors that appeared to have contributed to the disaster, South Koreans are expressing shame and anger at how far their country still has to go to address inadequate safety measures and lax regulation.

Phil Jackson, the team president, left little doubt on Wednesday that Steve Kerr was his top choice as coach and made a case for players sacrificing financially to upgrade the roster.

Starbucks is offering 1 Free Bonus Star for My Starbucks Rewards when you watch a short video on their site.

1. Click here and log into your Starbucks Rewards account.
2. Scroll to the the bottom of the Rewards+ Dashboard.
3. Click "Start Now" button and then click watch the C.A.F.E. Practices video to receive the bonus.

Video games now have more online spectators than traditional sports. Crazy, right? It's crazy. According to Qwilt, a company that provides video caching services to content creators, Twitch is now the most popular live streaming site in the US. The...

Exploring a city on foot is one way to get a feel for the place, but there's always tons of history hidden behind the street-side facades that you'd never really get just by looking at them. Those whose hearts beat for Barcelona are going to love Big Time BCN, a new interactive map which allows users to zoom in and learn more about over 10,000 sites and monuments in the Catalonian capital.

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This past weekend, hundreds lined up to get into an art exhibit in Lower Manhattan. But this wasn't a typical gallery opening. There were no hors d'oeuvres or cocktails, and well-heeled patrons weren't shopping for artwork to hang in their multimillion-dollar lofts. No, on this Saturday night a small Tribeca gallery was the nexus of Ghostbusters fandom.

Children of the ’70s and ’80s came out in droves to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the film and peruse an incredibly eclectic collection...

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If you've eaten great ramen in New York or LA, chances are you've eaten Sun Noodle. With three factories—their original in Hawaii, one in LA, and their newest in New Jersey—they produce almost 100,000 servings of noodles daily, supplying hundreds of restaurants. They've been called the Pat LaFrieda of noodles, for their willingness to work with restaurant chefs on perfecting their own noodle blends, offering complete control over everything from thickness and waviness to color and flour type.

Those wonderfully springy noodles in the broth-of-the-night at Yuji Ramen? Sun Noodle. The thick, wavy noodles in David Chang's pork broth at Momofuku? Sun again. The rye-flavored noodles that grace Ivan Orkin's bowls at Slurp Shop? You guessed it, Sun.

We've been following their adventures in the restaurant world for quite some time now, with a behind the scenes tour at the Sun Noodle factory, and a ramen crawl through LA, and we're waiting with bated breath for their ramen lab to open this spring.

But here's something you may not know: Sun Noodle produces refrigerated packs of fresh ramen noodles paired with concentrated sauce bases intended to be cooked just like instant ramen. They aren't the most widely distributed things in the world—I've only spotted them in specialty Asian grocers in New York and San Francisco—but we've got wind that they may soon expand distribution or take the mail-order route.

I headed over to Mitsuwa in New Jersey and got my hands on their four flavors—shoyu, tonkotsu, tan tan, and miso—and gave 'em a taste to see how they stack up to the local ramen shops and other instant noodle brands.

First things first: the noodles are awesome. But that's no big surprise. They're the same noodles that are shipped to all the best ramen shops in the city. So long as you cook them right—and that means boiling water followed by immediate, rigorous draining, and serving with no delay—they come out perfectly springy with just the right amount of chew.

Depending on the flavor you get, the shape, size, and color of the noodles varies, from wide, yellow, wavy noodles with the miso flavor to thin, straight, white noodles for the tonkotsu.

The soup bases are also dissimilar from most instant ramen brands. Instead of a packet of powdered soup base and a separate liquid seasoning pack, you get a single, large pack which includes the whole shebang. To prepare each bowl, you do it the same way as they do at the ramen shop: pour the concentrated tare into the bottom of a pre-warmed ramen bowl, then add the water and stir it up in the bowl.

Pro-tip: Don't make the mistake of simmering the soup bases on the stovetop; the miso, tonkotsu, and tan tan flavors will separate and form distinct and unappetizing curds.

Once the noodles are cooked and drained, you add them to the bowl, top as desired, and slurp up.

Truth be told, the soup bases don't really compare with anything you'd get homemade or at a shop, but that's to be expected; it's like comparing Wii bowling to the real thing. That said, they're markedly better than any dehydrated ramen on the market, including my beloved Myojo Chukazanmai, both in terms of noodles and broth. Here's what I thought of each flavor, from favorite to least favorite.

Tan Tan Ramen

Relatively thin, yellow, wavy noodles in a broth flavored with sesame, soy sauce, miso, garlic, ginger, clams, fish, and chilies. The broth comes out rich and cloudy with plenty of heat.

I garnished my bowl with some soft boiled eggs, sliced scallions, and ground pork that I seasoned with soy sauce and chili oil before piling it on top of the noodles.

The chili oil and sesame add richness and mouth-coating texture to the broth, making it taste almost as if it could have come from a real restaurant. Adding the ground pork was a good idea, too.

Miso Ramen

These noodles are even wider and springier than the tan tan noodles. The package recommends a full 2 1/4 minutes to cook the noodles, but I preferred the more chewy bite you get from after around a minute and a half of cooking. Plus, I can never slurp them fast enough that they don't soften up a bit in the broth.

The broth is flavored with a ton of miso paste, along with carrots, ginger, garlic, onions, and a touch of chili-sesame oil.

You can see the nice pockets of oil glistening on the surface of the rich, cloudy broth. This is the flavor to grab when the weather takes a dip.

Shoyu Ramen

I had high hopes for the shoyu ramen, since it's one of the flavors I find fares best with instant noodles and the thinner broth seems like it should be easier to replicate out of a packet. The noodles here are identical to those in the tan tan ramen, relatively thin and slightly wavy.

Though the broth looks great in the bowl—a nice rich brown color with golden circles of fat floating on the surface—the fat is mostly flavorless (it's straight up vegetable oil), and the color comes from caramel coloring. Though there is "fish extract" listed on the ingredients, I wish there was a richer seafood aroma to it.

Still, not a bad bowl of noodles all around. That is to say, there were no leftovers.

Tonkotsu Ramen

As a lover of things porky, rich, creamy, and noodle-y, I was particularly excited to give this flavor a shot. It was, unfortunately, the most disappointing of the four.

The soup base comes out as a thick, peanut butter-colored paste, which tastes plenty porky if you eat it plain.

Once diluted, it has a nice milky white color, but it lacks the intense richness you expect from a really good bowl of tonkotsu. It's still flavorful (not to mention mega-salty), but it's a pretty far cry from a real bowl of long-simmered pork broth.

Those thin, straight noodles, though, are as killer as ever.

Wanna know my wish? I wish that Sun Noodle would start selling all varieties of their noodles in ready-to-cook form so that I could add them to my own bowl of tonkotsu or miso ramen. Who's with me?

About the author: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt is the Chief Creative Officer of Serious Eats where he likes to explore the science of home cooking in his weekly column The Food Lab. You can follow him at @thefoodlab on Twitter, or at The Food Lab on Facebook.

Farms in upstate New York and elsewhere are using automatic milkers that scan and map the underbellies of cows, extract the milk, and monitor its quality, without the use of human hands.

Sure, plenty of people think they can survive New York City on the delicate wings of a dream and a freelance paycheck, but if you're planning to, say, find fancy shelter with four walls and a roof, you may be out of luck. Or so says a dire new housing report out of Comptroller Stringer's office, which notes that skyrocketing rents in all five boroughs have contributed to a serious dearth of affording housing—so much so that households earning under $40K per year "literally may not be able to find an apartment they can afford." This Norwegian uninhabited subantarctic volcanic island sounds nice, though. [ more › ]

A revamped website for Destiny, Bungie's upcoming sci-fi shooter, has spilled the proverbial space-beans on player classes Titan, Hunter and Warlock. The new info also details the various enemies players will no doubt be 360-noscoping in the face, as...

 The U.S. government has approved Facebook's $2 billion acquisition of Oculus VR, following the Federal Trade Commission's examination of the deal. The FTC has determined -- not all that surprisingly -- that the deal would not violate U.S. antitrust laws. This will allow the two companies to move forward in combining forces, though Facebook previously promised that Oculus would "continue to operate… Read More

Meme generation might never be the same again. Project Naptha is a browser extension that lets users select, copy, edit and translate text from any image — so long as it is under 30 degrees of rotation. The plug-in runs on the Stroke Width Transform algorithm Microsoft Research invented for text detection in natural scenes. It also provides the option of using Google's open-source OCR engine Tesseract when necessary. Project Naptha utilizes a technique called "inpainting" to reconstruct images after they've been altered by the extension. According to the website, this entails using an algorithm that fills in the space previously occupied by text with colors from the surrounding area. Right now, the program is only compatible with Google...

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The US Justice Department is beginning a big initiative to commute the sentences of some inmates serving drug convictions with overly long sentences. Announced this morning, the initiative will allow non-violent inmates who have served at least 10 years of a long drug sentence that would have been shorter if given today to apply for their sentences to be reduced by the president. "Some [defendants], simply because of the operation of sentencing laws on the books at the time, received substantial sentences that are disproportionate to what they would receive today," deputy attorney general James Cole said at a press conference announcing the initiative. "Even the sentencing judges in many of these cases expressed regret at the time at...

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Illiteracy isn't a major issue for much of the Western world, but it remains endemic in many developing countries, where incomes are low and books are scarce. That may be changing, though, thanks to the spread of mobile technologies that have made books more accessible than ever before — something that UNESCO, in a new report, describes as a veritable "reading revolution."

The report, released today, examines the reading habits of nearly 5,000 mobile-phone users in seven countries — Ethiopia, Ghana, India, Kenya, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Zimbabwe — where the average illiteracy rate among children is 20 percent, and 34 percent among adults. (The US, by comparison, has an adult illiteracy rate of around three percent.) UNESCO describes the...

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Bungie's promising to put players in an huge sci-fi universe with their next game. The new glimpses at Destiny's classes that debuted on the game's official site? Those are very, very small.

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The film that plays when you visit interactive life jacket awareness website Sortie En Mer begins optimistically. You watch from the first-person perspective of a man sailing on a calm, blue ocean. Your friend, coming up from below deck, notes the beautiful weather. You ask him to take the wheel, and steps to the front of the boat to adjust the sails. It's there that the story takes a darker turn: you're knocked into the sea by a swinging boom, and left to flounder as your friend tries, and fails, to bring the boat around.

Sortie En Mer's forced perspective makes for a harrowing experience as you try to prolong the time before your character drowns. Scrolling up keeps your head above the water, but with your friend disappearing into the...

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Daredevls Fred Fugen and Vince Reffet broke the world record for the highest BASE jump earlier this week by flinging themselves off the top of the 2,717-feet tall Burj Khalifa skyscraper in Dubai. The jump was sponsored by the skydiving resort Skydive Dubai, which constructed a small platform at the top of the building in order to make the jump possible. The gentleman jump together and curve around the building like flying squirrels, trailing red plumes behind them for effect.

People have jumped before from the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world, but this is the first time anyone's done it from the very top.

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Samsung users aren't interested in the company's branded messenger, voice-activated search, or app store Samsung Hub, according to a new report. Samsung users vastly prefer Facebook, WhatsApp, YouTube, and the Google Play store to their Samsung counterparts. They spent an average of seven minutes a month using Samsung apps, according to the market research firm Strategy Analytics. That's compared to 11 hours on Facebook alone.

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Eye candy.

It's perhaps not so much of a surprise that the success of The Lego Movie means a bunch more family-friendly movies based on toys are in the pipeline, and now it seems the brightly colored marshmallow chicks, bunnies, and assorted other Peeps-iverse creatures manufactured by Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, company Just Born are headed to the big screen. The forthcoming Peeps epic will be set "the night before a Peeps diorama contest, when a wayward Peep gets misplaced and must adventure through the fantasy lands of different-themed dioramas before the contest’s judging begins." Sounds great, but we're still holding out for the Cadbury Creme Egg movie, which promises to be a much quieter affair. [Vulture]

Read more posts by Hugh Merwin

Filed Under: carry on wayward peep, cinema, peeps

Culatello!

Citing sources close to the deal, New York Post real-estate columnist Lois Weiss reveals — somewhat mind-blowingly — that a branch of Mario Batali and Joe Bastianich's Eataly will open in the base of 4 WTC when the shopping-centric portion of the building debuts in the summer of 2015. The restaurateurs' first U.S. outpost of the Turin-based Slow Food mega-grocer opened four years ago, in advance of expansion nationwide (and world domination).*

If true, it's unclear if Eataly NYC No. 2 would match the 50,000 square feet of the Flatiron original, but the sprawling market at Le District, described as the French-food counterpart to Eataly, is expected to open in parts beginning later this year, just across the street at Brookfield Place.

Update: A rep for Eataly tells Eater NY that "nothing is set in stone" for WTC 4 as of this morning, adding "we still don't know where the next Eataly will find its home in the United States."

Eataly to ‘ciao down’ at 4 World Trade Center [New York Post]
Related: Jordi Vallès Named Chef at Le District in Brookfield Place

*This post has been updated throughout.

Read more posts by Hugh Merwin

Filed Under: rumors, 4 wtc, eataly, eataly world, joe bastianich, malls and markets, mario batali

Last night, President Obama had dinner at Tokyo's Sukiyabashi Jiro with Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe. This is the tiny sushi parlor featured in the documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi. Apparently, the President said "That's some good sushi right there" as he was leaving the restaurant. [Eater National]

Google Street View is quite useful when you need to get a sense of place, but now you'll be able to get a sense of place and time: Starting today, Google Street View is formally offering users the chance to travel back in time to see how a location has changed, thanks to images dating all they way back to... 2007. For you millennials in the audience, that was the year of the Great Midtown Steam Explosion (you probably won't find it on Google Street View). [ more › ]

Last night, David Letterman greeted his successor to the Late Show, calling him the "very talented and always entertaining Stephen Colbert." Colbert appeared in black, Warby Parker-ish glasses and promised, "I'm gonna do whatever you have done!" to which Letterman said, "No, no, no." [ more › ]

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Monument Valley programmer Manesh Mistry posted this footage of Monument Valley being played in first person.

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Pete Wells misses the days when restaurants gave you bread and ice water when you sat down: "When restaurants withhold bread, they can make us feel like children who can't be trusted or guests who have overstayed their welcome. Bread is loaded with emotional meanings not shared by, say, turnips or peekytoe crab." [NYT]

Speaking of Greg Christie, I neglected to link to this fascinating piece by Daisuke Wakabayashi for the WSJ last month. It’s a very rare behind-the-scenes look at Apple’s design process. My favorite tidbit: they simulated the iPhone’s performance by using a then-years-old G3 Mac to run the software while it was in development.

Apple made Christie available to Steve Henn of NPR’s All Things Considered, too. To me, that Apple chose Christie for these profiles is a telling sign that his upcoming retirement from Apple is on nothing but the best of terms. The intention was to let Christie — who is extremely well-liked personally and highly-regarded for his work within the company — go out on top, with well-earned credit where credit is due.

Can I get some extra blue glop on the side, please?

Spain already boasts the world's top restaurant and probably its most exclusive (the single-table Mercès One, a "restaurant only for you"), so why not the planet's most overpriced, too? The new Hard Rock Hotel opening in Ibiza next month has that covered with Sublimotion, an "unparalleled gastro-sensory venture" brought to life by Michelin-starred Spanish chef Paco Roncero, which will feature a 20-course tasting menu that costs its 12 diners more than $2,000 apiece.

As its Freudian name suggests, Roncero is going for dramatic — an "emotional experience" and "theater of the senses" are teased in the advance materials. Video shows a space that's completely white, so crazy light-patterns and exotic landscapes can project onto the table and walls in true Ibizan discoteca style. There are some edible roses and tiered brownie-cake things here, which may turn out to be made from brownies and crushed roses, respectively, all of which is to say there's no word yet on the actual food. If prospective diners really care about such things, there's this statement/threat from a spokesperson: "Diners will be wandering through a world of sensations, from the North Pole where they will enjoy a cold snack that they carve on their own iceberg, or to the baroque Versailles where the elegance of a rose is sure to melt in their palate."

New Hard Rock Hotel in Ibiza to Open Sublimotion—the Most Expensive Restaurant in the World [Daily Mail]

Read more posts by Clint Rainey

Filed Under: sparkle motion, hard rock hotel, ibiza, paco roncero, sublimotion

Nathan Pyle has written and illustrated a book about the unwritten rules for how to behave on the streets of NYC. It's called NYC Basic Tips and Etiquette (only $6!).

In NYC Basic Tips and Etiquette, Pyle reveals the secrets and unwritten rules for living in and visiting New York including the answers to such burning questions as, how do I hail a cab? What is a bodega? Which way is Uptown? Why are there so many doors in the sidewalk? How do I walk on an escalator? Do we need be touching right now? Where should I inhale or exhale while passing sidewalk garbage? How long should I honk my horn? If New York were a game show, how would I win? What happens when I stand in the bike lane? Who should get the empty subway seats? How do I stay safe during a trash tornado?

In support of the book, Pyle animated a few of the tips and put them on Imgur. Also, the Apple ebook contains the animated versions of the illustrations. You fancy!

Tags: books   Nathan Pyle   NYC   NYC Basic Tips and Etiquette

A reader saw my post about UPS drivers seldom taking left turns and sent in this story from 2006. In it, Michael Gartner shares the secret to long life relayed to him by his father: no left turns. Among other things:

My mother was a devout Catholic, and my father an equally devout agnostic, an arrangement that didn't seem to bother either of them through their 75 years of marriage. (Yes, 75 years, and they were deeply in love the entire time.) He retired when he was 70, and nearly every morning for the next 20 years or so, he would walk with her the mile to St. Augustin's Church. She would walk down and sit in the front pew, and he would wait in the back until he saw which of the parish's two priests was on duty that morning. If it was the pastor, my father then would go out and take a 2-mile walk, meeting my mother at the end of the service and walking her home. If it was the assistant pastor, he'd take just a 1-mile walk and then head back to the church.

He called the priests "Father Fast" and "Father Slow."

(thx, gloria)

Tags: crying at work   Michael Gartner