Valued Taste Buds

The tongue of the chief coffee taster for a worldwide chain of coffee shops has been insured for £10m ($13.95m).
Gennaro Pelliccia personally tastes a sample of each batch of raw coffee beans at its London plant before they are roasted and shipped to its stores.
“My 18 years of experience enable me to distinguish [...]

Something fishy this way comes
Something fishy is going on in northern Spain. The waters of the port of Gijon are shortly to be invaded – by robots.

 
Another corporate failure
Advertisers have this problem: Kids today want things that are “dark” and “edgy” and “not retarded,” but some products just have nothing to do with any of those things at all. So how in the world do you shape a marketing campaign for cereal or eye liner that somehow makes it badass?
You don’t. [...]

Can you say terminator
Researchers at Cornell University in New York have created robotic cubes that can create copies of themselves in under three minutes which, surprisingly, the scientists purport are simple machines. Self-replicating robots are simple? That’s because that’s all the cubes do – at the moment. They could easily be outfitted with tools for [...]

Its about time
The military just took one huge step toward making a laser weapon a functional reality. Northrop Grumman just announced a successful test of a 100-kilowatt laser, considered battlefield strength.
This solid-state laser is not as powerful as a chemical laser, but it can be powered by a jet or tank engine, and is much [...]

 
“Al, take me. I wanna have sex on the kitchen table.”
Kitchen is the top romp spot outside bedroom for people, a new survey has revealed. According to the survey in Britain, more than one in five people prefer to get saucy in the kitchen, just like movies such as ‘Nine And A Half Weeks’ and [...]

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Here is spectacular footage of an underwater volcano erupting near Tonga.

International Disturbed People’s Day
I don’t normally pass along forwards, but when I checked my e-mail and found the following, I couldn’t help but pass it along. So, here’s to celebrating International Disturbed People’s Day. And, yes…I am a disturbed person.  Here are some disturbing and crazy photos that came along with the email about Interational Disturbed [...]

“Oh Lord. Bless this hand grenade, that with it thou mayest blow thine enemies to tiny bits, in thy mercy.”

 
Buildings were evacuated, a street was cordoned off and a bomb disposal team called in after workmen spotted a suspicious object.
But the dangerous-looking weapon turned out to be the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch, made famous [...]

 
Cambridge-based researchers provide new evidence that the human brain lives “on the edge of chaos”, at a critical transition point between randomness and order. The study, published March 20 in the open-access journal PLoS Computational Biology, provides experimental data on an idea previously fraught with theoretical speculation.

GLOW BABY GLOW!

 
Jellyfish expert Lisa Gershwin found a new species off Tasmania that has a rainbow attached! It’s not bioluminescent, but shows reflected light in lovely colors. And it doesn’t sting. The unnamed jelly is very fragile, and will fall apart as soon as it touches a net, so don’t even try…

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First test flight of the Terrafugia Transition
The Terrafugia Transition is a two-seat aircraft that converts into a Volkswagen Beetle-like automobile.  The vehicle successfully completed its first test flight earlier this month. (Videos)