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Love ramen? Got a sweet tooth? Listen up! You can now eat cake that's shaped like the delicious noodle dish. "Ramen cake" (ラーメンケーキ), it's called. But that's not the only food in Japan that's getting caked out.

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Acclaimed sushi restaurant Ushiwakamaru has a secret noodle operation called Benkei Ramen. Josh Beckerman (AKA the Foodie Magician) reports that the ramen is served from midnight till 4 a.m. Tuesday through Saturday, and from 5 p.m. till midnight on Sunday. After one visit, Beckerman declares that it "could very well be the BEST ramen in NYC." [NYC Foodie]

Starbucks is opening its first-ever tea bar at 1142 Madison Avenue tomorrow. Teavana Tea Bar will have teas as well as pricier versions of Starbucks foods, but absolutely no Frappuccinos, venti mochas, or coffee of any kind. The cafe is the result of Starbucks' acquisition of Teavana, a retail chain that sells looseleaf tea and accessories. [DNAinfo]

Spanning more than 25 miles of shoreline and covering 41 square miles, the Port of Rotterdam is largest shipping berth in all of Europe, the fifth-busiest in the world, and a major interchange for the region's energy supplies. But keeping the North Sea's fury in check is no easy feat. So to keep the port open for business, the Netherlands has installed two monumentally mammoth surge barriers. Huge doesn't even begin to cover it.

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It seems like something out of Halo, but this new futuristic soldier helmet discovered by KitUp! is now being tested by the US Army. Called the Helmet Electronics and Display System-Upgradeable Protection, it's a modular variation of the current head gear, with face-protective 9mm plating and Heads Up Display powered by an Android phone.

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It's not "why" the chicken crossed the road, but how safely she did it.

One would think that the admittedly specialized field of urban chicken safety would have grown proportionally with urban farming and homesteading movements, but it hasn't. That's why it's great that someone's introduced the "High-Vis Chicken Jacket," made with made with "NASA-approved" Flectalon. This is the perfect holiday gift for all the Brooklyn egg layers in your life. It has an inner lining for colder weather and comes in crossing-guard yellow and hot-pink versions, both indications that people are beginning to take urban chicken safety very, very seriously. Expect the Etsy version any day now. [Atlantic Cities via Consumerist]

Read more posts by Hugh Merwin

Filed Under: playing chicken, chicken safety, urban chickens

A few years ago Google had the opportunity to buy Twitter but passed on the opportunity because they were developing Google+ and didn’t think they needed it.

Today Google+ is supposedly the no. 2 social network after Facebook, but I don’t buy it. No one I know uses Google+ much, if at all. And I certainly don’t see people giving out their Google+ names on the cable news networks and other TV shows. Twitter dominates there.

Google+’s user numbers are juiced simply because Google forces the product on everyone, and if you use Google to authenticate yourself to third parties, you are using Google+.

Frankly I don’t see Google+ as being any more successful than Google Video was in competing with YouTube. I might be wrong, there might be a real base of hard core Google+ users out there who start and end their day on Google+, but I just don’t see it making any kind of mark on our culture at all.

Twitter, on the other hand, is the only really massive social network where the network effect has really kicked in. It is less than Facebook in some ways, and better than Facebook in some ways.

Google needs to buy Twitter just like they bought YouTube.

It won’t be cheap.

Twitter filed a surprisingly low range for its upcoming IPO today – $17 – $20 per share. That works out to a $11 billion valuation on the high end.

That’s lower than most people expected. And it’s just pocket change to Google. The company has added around $45 billion in market cap in just the last couple of months.

At the very least it would be a hedge against Facebook if Google+ fails (which I think it has). And on the upside Google could really let Twitter blossom, much like they have with YouTube.

Also, many people I’ve spoken with think that Twitter’s data alone would be worth tens of billions of dollars to Google’s search team.

Of course even if Google did make an offer to buy Twitter, Twitter would have to accept before it could happen. And Twitter’s current executive team is probably more interested in going it alone. “Giving up” and selling just prior to an IPO would feel like losing to them, I’d imagine.

But Twitter would still have to consider the offer because the board of directors has a fiduciary duty to shareholders. If Google offered substantially more than $11 billion, the board would find it difficult to justify turning them down.

As a user I’d like to see Twitter stay independent. But I’ve thought for years now that Google is crazy for not doing anything it could to buy Twitter. Who knows, maybe there really is something interesting going on at Google+. But I doubt it.

Disclosure: CrunchFund owns shares in Twitter. I personally own Google and Facebook stock.

In an interview accompanying a Frontline episode on drug-resistant bacteria, an associate director for the CDC, Dr. Arjun Srinivasan, says that "we're in the post-antibiotic era".

The more you use an antibiotic, the more you expose a bacteria to an antibiotic, the greater the likelihood that resistance to that antibiotic is going to develop. So the more antibiotics we put into people, we put into the environment, we put into livestock, the more opportunities we create for these bacteria to become resistant. ...We also know that we've greatly overused antibiotics and in overusing these antibiotics, we have set ourselves up for the scenario that we find ourselves in now, where we're running out of antibiotics.

We are quickly running out of therapies to treat some of these infections that previously had been eminently treatable. There are bacteria that we encounter, particularly in health-care settings, that are resistant to nearly all -- or, in some cases, all -- the antibiotics that we have available to us, and we are thus entering an era that people have talked about for a long time.

For a long time, there have been newspaper stories and covers of magazines that talked about "The end of antibiotics, question mark?" Well, now I would say you can change the title to "The end of antibiotics, period."

We're here. We're in the post-antibiotic era. There are patients for whom we have no therapy, and we are literally in a position of having a patient in a bed who has an infection, something that five years ago even we could have treated, but now we can't.

You know how when you first hear a joke it's the funniest thing ever and then you hear it a second time and it's less funny and then a third, fourth, and fifth times and it just keeps getting less and less funny until you're not laughing at all and it actually becomes annoying? That's how antibiotics work across the entire human population. And if Dr. Srinivasan is correct, we're transitioning into the not laughing stage and the annoying stage where lots of people start dying can't be far behind (unless we get some new jokes/treatments).

Yesterday, Mark Sample tweeted about disasters, low-points, and chronic trauma:

"Low point" is the term for when the worst part of a disaster has come to pass. Our disasters increasingly have no low point.

After the low point of a disaster is reached, things begin to get better. When there is no clear low point, society endures chronic trauma.

Disasters with no clear low point: global warming, mass extinction, colony collapse disorder, ocean acidification, Fukushima.

To which I would add: drug-resistant infectious diseases. (via digg)

Tags: Arjun Srinivasan   Mark Sample   medicine   science

The SBUV3 is a self-balancing, motorized electric unicyle that you steer by shifting your center of gravity. They cost about $1800, feature regenerative braking, and have a top speed of 12.5mph. The steering software adapts to you (and vice-versa), fine-tuning its responsiveness based on your riding-style.

One Wheel. ∞ Fun (Thanks, Rob!)

Who among us hasn't secretly wished to find themselves suddenly mutated into a crime-fighting chimera, despite the risk of becoming another Dr. Baxter Stockman? Now you can live out your Ninja Turtle fantasies—without having to skinny dip in Ooze—thanks to this radical TMNT backpack.

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Authorities suspect that JPMorgan Chase turned a blind eye to Bernard L. Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, and they are said to be pursuing a type of prosecution deal that is nearly unheard-of for a large American bank.

Amazon has gained initial approval for its plan to build a huge greenhouse in the middle of Seattle. The proposal has three transparent domes intersecting to form a five-story complex that will contain offices, dining areas, and retail stores. It's nestled between the company's giant new campus, which consists of three office towers all larger than 70 storys.

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Even by Apple standards, the video showing how the new Mac Pro is made is a great little piece of cinema. Product designer Greg Koenig does some forensic analysis on the video and opens the curtain a bit on what manufacturing techniques Apple is using.

What makes Apple fascinating is not that they are using some wiz-bang alien technologies to make things -- even here in Portland, Oregon, all the technologies Apple shows in this video are in-practice across numerous local factories. What makes Apple unique is that they perform their manufacturing with remarkable precision and on a scale that is simply astonishing, using techniques typically reserved for the aerospace or medical device industries.

(via ★interesting-links)

Tags: Apple   Greg Koenig   video

Federico Viticci:

A subset of users asked Apple to reduce the motion of the OS as it was causing motion sickness for them; a setting that the company had included in the Settings app wasn’t enough, as it disabled the parallax effect of iOS, but not the new animations.

Apple has listened, and in iOS 7.0.3 the Reduce Motion setting (available in General → Accessibility) now truly reduces animations: switching to apps and back to Home screen, unlocking the device, and moving between folders is now a cross-fade that is much faster than Apple’s animations with Reduce Motion turned off.

Apple's worst-kept secret and one of its most momentous announcements of the day has just been made: the iPad mini is getting upgraded with a new Retina display. The new screen's resolution is 2048 x 1536 — matching that of the latest 10-inch iPads — and the processor powering it is the same 64-bit Apple A7 chip as in the iPad Air and iPhone 5S.

Available in November for $399 with Wi-Fi or $529 with mobile data, the new mini is more expensive than its direct predecessor, but the first-gen device is being kept around as well. The 2012 iPad mini gets a price cut, now costing $299 and acting as Apple's entry-level tablet device.

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The New York Times dining section Twitter account just dropped this juicy nugget of information about David Chang's Momofuku Ko. There's no story online about this major shift in the Momo universe at the moment, but presumably, there will be more information this evening, or in tomorrow morning's dining section. Eater sources whispered about the relocation last winter, and the rumors haven't stopped since then. Word on the street is that he's looking for a large space by the water — think "destination restaurant." Stay tuned for more details as they become available.

[Photo: Google Plus]
In this week's Off the Menu column, Flo Fab writes that Chang will move Ko to "an odd little East Village alleyway, possibly by the end of the year." According to the Times, this weird alleyway is Extra Place, near the corner of First and Bowery. This alleyway was previously home to sister restaurants Heidi and Extra Place, both of which closed after less than a year. Ko might possibly be taking over this space. Hopefully Team Momo will have better luck than the previous tenants.

Sean Grey will still be the chef, and the new space will have tables and a counter. Chang tells Flo: "Our original lease is up and this new space will give Ko the kitchen it deserves and a waiting room for customers." As you may recall, Eater co-founder Ben Leventhal called this move last December.
UPDATE 2: And here's a rough sketch of Ko 2.0 from David Chang's Instagram:

The caption: "Productive day chef @seanalexgray & me sketched out new @momolongplay Ko."
· @NYTdining [Twitter]
· All Coverage of Momofuku Ko [~ENY~]

Titanfall, the mech mayhem shooter from Respawn Entertainment, is due out on March 11 for Xbox One, Xbox 360 and PC in North America. Titanfall hits Europe on March 13.

Pre-orders of Titanfall are live now in standard and collector's editions; check out your options here. The collector's edition runs $250 and includes an 18 inch statue with diorama and LED lighting, a 190-page art book and a schematic poster of the Atlas titan. Take a look at these goodies below.

We got to play around with the mechs of Titanfall at Gamescom and had a grand ol' time.

Continue reading Titanfall lands on March 11 for Xbox One, Xbox 360, PC

Titanfall lands on March 11 for Xbox One, Xbox 360, PC originally appeared on Joystiq on Tue, 22 Oct 2013 12:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Three veterans of the San Francisco restaurant scene are opening Lucky Luna, described as a "Mexican and East Asian street-style" restaurant, with fruit-forward cocktails, at 167 Nassau Avenue in Greenpoint. Chef Howard Jang met bar man Ken Ho while working at Boulevard, while partner Marisa Cadena met Ho at Palomino. Lucky Luna, we're told, is reflective of their backgrounds, and the menu will riff on street food served in Oaxaca and Taipei, with South America and Asian influences — think Peking-style duck baos and sweet bowls of dulche de leche rice topped with roasted apples. The gang is almost halfway to their fund-raising goal on Kickstarter, with three weeks to go. Check out more on the food and the space, straight ahead.

Lucky Luna: Restaurant, Bar, Art, and More! [Kickstarter]

Read more posts by Hugh Merwin

Filed Under: coming soon, greenpoint, howard jang, ken ho, kickstarter, lucky luna, marisa cadena, video feed

Earlier this month, street artist Banksy held an impromptu sale of his stencils on canvas in a New York street. He only managed to sell eight works to three customers across a full day of trading. Yesterday, a fake Banksy held an impromptu sale on a New York street. He sold all 40 of his works in one hour.

The sale was created by artists Dave Cicirelli and Lance Pilgrim. They copied Banksy's own sale from a week earlier, setting up a stall in the same location, with the same signage, selling copies of Banksy's works for the same price — $60 — as the original artist. The only difference: the stall was clearly marked as a fake. Salesman Michael Pilgrim posed for pictures with buyers holding a sign clearly marked "Fake Banksy," and...

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Food substitute Soylent has secured $1.5 million in investment. The nutrient-dense semi-goo has been backed by investors including Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian and venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, who previously invested $80 million in Twitter and helped sell Skype to Microsoft for $8.5 billion.

Soylent is made from rice protein, olive oil, starch, and a host of vitamins and nutrients theoretically balanced to provide a healthy human diet. The concept was dreamt up by entrepreneur Rob Rhinehart while he was working on a new wireless networking system for the developing world and found himself considering food efficiency. The food substitute has already secured more than a million dollars through an online...

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Amazon has offered free shipping to US customers for over a decade now on all eligible orders above $25, but that's changing today as the online retailer bumps up its minimum order requirement to $35. Amazon notes that this is the first time it's increased the order requirement for its "Free Super Saver Shipping" option in more than 10 years, and that members of the $79 per year Prime service will still receive free shipping on all orders. While Amazon doesn't detail why it chose to increase the order minimum, the decision could be a matter of increased shipping costs and an interest in positioning its Prime service as a more attractive option. Now that buyers will need an even bigger order to get free shipping, it's possible that...

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You may soon have a less expensive way to get into space. A new space tourism venture plans to bring visitors 30km (about 100,000 feet) into the stratosphere in what is essentially a space-ready air balloon for $75,000. That's not high enough for weightlessness, but there should be a wonderful view of the curvature of the Earth, the blue atmosphere around it, and the dark void beyond. Those joining in on the trip won't have to undergo training, and they'll spend two hours up at that height, where they'll be free to stand and walk about the cabin. Trips could start as soon as 2016.

The new project comes from World View, which is a subsidiary of Paragon, which makes equipment for the International Space Station and other space...

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Respawn Entertainment's Titanfall, one of the most anticipated Microsoft-exclusive titles in recent years, is coming to North America on March 11th 2014 and Europe on March 13th. The first-person-shooter sees you fighting — and piloting — large mechs, with a heavy focus on online integration. The developer's intention is to mesh a traditional online multiplayer experience with huge cinematic set pieces usually saved for single-player campaigns.

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Brian Krebs:

An identity theft service that sold Social Security and drivers license numbers — as well as bank account and credit card data on millions of Americans — purchased much of its data from Experian, one of the three major credit bureaus, according to a lengthy investigation by KrebsOnSecurity.

Nice feature by Ron Amadeo at Ars on just how much of Android Google is releasing as open source. (Spoiler: not much.)

After suffering defeat this spring, the controversial legislation aimed at preventing cyber threats, CISPA, may be returning to the Senate. According to Mother Jones, two senators are now working on a new version of the bill that looks to curb some of the concerns that kept it from initially passing. The goal of the bill will still be to make it easier for private companies to share information with the government regarding cyber threats, however the type of information that can be shared will reportedly be narrower in scope this time around.

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Since launching on Thursday, The Stanley Parable has sold more than 100,000 copies, much to the happy surprise of its developer, Galactic Cafe. Though the quality of the game undoubtedly had at least something to do with its success, so did a clever combination of free Stanley stuff.

In a postmortem, Galactic Cafe ruminated on the triumphs and failures of launching The Stanley Parable, including the demo, which dropped on Steam a week prior to the full game's launch and enjoyed an estimated 150,000 to 200,000 downloads. "Essentially we got the press equivalent of two video game launches," the post reads.

Then there was the cadre of Let's Play videos on YouTube and social media posts that bolstered coverage. "Give people a reason to talk, that's all we aimed for, and the rest sorted itself out. Release a whole bunch of things for free in fairly quick succession, then at the end of it put a price tag on the last one," Galactic Cafe suggested. "It was a lot of extra work, but the results feel very much worth it."

The Stanley Parable is a first-person exploration game in which players assume the role of Stanley, a worker drone who one day finds all his coworkers have upped and vanished. In our review, we called The Stanley Parable an "attempt to help you discover who you are" - a personal experiment conducted on players that is "something we should all celebrate."

The Stanley Parable sales exceed expectations by a lot originally appeared on Joystiq on Mon, 21 Oct 2013 19:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Monaco: What's Yours is Mine has picked the Linux lock today. The free update implements a smattering of new content, including a Zombie mode and new mini-campaign.

To celebrate this new update and platform, Andy Schatz's co-op stealth game is down to $6 on Steam. A four-pack, which includes one copy for you and three copies you can gift to Steam friends (not only generous, but also useful given the game's multiplayer nature), is $18. The Steam sale ends on Wednesday, October 23 at 10am PT.

Monaco, which is presented in a highly-stylized top-down view, stars eight crooks with varying abilities who team up to infiltrate secure locations and rob them of precious goods. Security cameras, guards and locked doors are just a few of the obstacles impeding player progress.

Monaco celebrates successful Linux infiltration with Steam sale originally appeared on Joystiq on Mon, 21 Oct 2013 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Crytek's free-to-play multiplayer fragfest, Warface, is available online now through PCs across North America, Europe "and Turkey." Access to the game can be found at the conveniently titled warface.com site.

Warface has been localized for English, French, German and Turkish. Yes, we understand that not having Luxembourgish is an outrage, but we're sure there's an appropriately tempered internet petition for that. There isn't? Well, start one!

Continue reading Warface live now in North America, Europe

Warface live now in North America, Europe originally appeared on Joystiq on Mon, 21 Oct 2013 22:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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