A watched pot never boils, but some pots can stir themselves.

Kurukuru Nabe, a pot developed in Japan, stirs its own contents, freeing you up to do better things with your time.

You'd think this is high-tech stuff, but no. It's a conventional saucepan with a grooved insert that produces a circular motion resembling a whirlpool in the water.

The design is fairly simple, as seen in this video of an aluminum pot with grooves that induce a spin.

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When the water in Kurukuru Nabe gets hot enough, things start to spin counterclockwise. Noodles, vegetables, and whatever else in the pot will go "round and round," as its Japanese name suggests.

Scum from boiling vegetables will accumulate in the center, making ... [Read more]

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Technology Green Energy: Environmentally Friendly Companies

Everybody is becoming environmentally conscious these days to lead a better life.  In general everybody considers themselves as environmentally friendly. For example recycling the trash, using the less energy consuming lights and etc are some eco-friendly methods.  Using less power and the eco-friendly products will result in a better environment and eco-friendly life style. Here is the list of some companies which you could opt for making your life style eco-friendly.

Host gator: This famous web hosting company has many renewable energy credits. It generates more electricity when compared to its take-in.

3M: This is a very popular company of the world which has beensupplying office supplies and tape throughout the world. The specialty of this company is that they use only the renewable products or recyclable products for the production of the office supplies and tapes. Thus you can prefer this company if you need any eco-friendly office supplies or tape. This is the world’s second popular eco-friendly suppliers.

Antheuser-Busch: This is the world’s famous beverages company which has been offering the eco-friendly and tasty beverages to the customers. If you are looking for a tasty beer which is eco-friendly do try this company definitely. In general making of beer involves in thousand tons of water. Busch, who is the founder of this company have implemented a new eco-friendly way and this way includes recycling and redirecting the water to the families located around its main operators.

Nike: This is a popular shoe company which has been offering eco-friendly shoes to its customers. Moreover, this company is well known for its excellence. This is the only company which produces shoe by using the recyclable products. Due to all these reasons, this company has stood in no.1 position in the world.

Yahoo: Yahoo is well known all over the world and it has been encouraging the people visiting their sites to go green since long back. In fact this brought a great change in the attitude of many people. It effectively turned the people’s lifestyle into eco-friendly. Many people stopped using A/c’s in their home after visiting the yahoo sites.

Adobe: This is a famous company which is awarded the prestigious platinum certification for their efforts towards following environmentally friendly practices and sound design practices. This company also diverts the 95% of its waste from its landfill projects.

General Motors:  It might be quite surprising that the general motors’ of this company are eco-friendly, but they are truly eco-friendly.

Intel: Intel is well known throughout the world as the largest purchaser of the green power. They not only use the environmentally friendly processes but also generate energy efficient products that are eco-friendly.

This is a very popular list of eco-friendly companies, and you can prefer the above list for purchasing the eco-friendly products to lead a safe and secured life. Using eco-friendly products will improve your lifestyle and also results in better environment too. Using the eco-friendly products will minimize your daily expenses, reduces pollution, and provides a better environment for the future generations and also for you. Using the organic products from your food items to bedding will result in a healthy lifestyle. You might be surprised but most of the beddings are getting manufactured by using various chemicals these days. For this reason, you need to make sure that you only use only the organic bedding.

Also make sure that you use everything green for your children’s too. As the babies will be sensitive to soaps and some other inorganic products, make sure that you use only the organic products for your babies too. Go green, stay happy!

Solar lanterns are a great idea for campers and scientists working in regions of the world where grid electricity isn’t as easily accessible. As wondrous and eco friendly solar lanterns are, many people just don’t find them practical enough for their outdoors excursions given the sheer size of the solar panel that is needed to keep the lamp juiced up. These panels are often hard to carry on backpack and take up a lot of space on smaller trailers as well. However, the Inflatable MPOWERD Luci Solar Lantern is a unique new innovation that is designed to be super efficient as well as super compact an ultra portable.

The solar lantern is also designed to work as a flashlight and a task light that adds to its versatility and makes it the perfect portable lighting solution for scientists and explorers. The inflatable solar lantern is completely waterproof and is designed to withstand weather conditions of all kinds. When not in use, the MPOWERD Luci collapses and can be easily stashed inside backpacks.

The lantern comes with a set of solar panels integrated within its exterior that serve as primary charging panels as well. To recharge, the lantern needs to be inflated and left out in the sunlight for roughly 8 hours to get a full charge. When fully juiced up, the solar lantern delivers a minimum of 6 hours of light when all 10 of the integrated LEDs are switched on though using fewer of these bright white high efficiency lamps can help the solar lantern provide up to 80 lumens light for 12 hours.

The lithium polymer battery used in the solar charge is also designed to retain the charge for longer durations which allows users to fully charge it and stash it away. The battery pack retains a full charge for as long as 3 months when not used.

Sports brand Nike has unveiled the first boots for American football players with 3D-printed studs (+ slideshow). (more...)

The MadiDrop is a cheap ceramic disk made of clay, sawdust and water, and impregnated with silver or copper nanoparticles. The non-profit that developed it says it is effective against 99.9% of pathogens that live in water.

The group, called PuriMadi, is a spin-off from the University of Virginia. Co-leader James Smith, a civil engineer, says each disk lasts 2-5 years (based on a family of six using it) and costs about $5.

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Israeli ceramics designer Shlomit Bauman combined white porcelain with the very last batch of clay from a local pit to make these stretched and distorted objects (+ slideshow). (more...)

Big picture trends in agriculture and population tend to make people pessimistic. And with good reason. With the environmental impact of agriculture today (soil depletion, water pollution, vast CO2 emissions) and the generally poor treatment of farm animals, it’s hard to be panglossian about a world with more people in it, and more people eating meat.

And yet, some people aren’t bearish. They point to shifts to sustainable farming, and, more importantly, several alternative foods with less nasty impacts: products like Beyond Eggs (see below), Beyond Meat, and, yes, test-tube steaks. Here’s what Bill Gates told the venture capitalist Vinod Khosla last year:

The fact that innovation will give [us] equivalent [food] without those negative effects at lower prices is an amazing example of how linear projection misses what innovators using science will be able to do. It’s completely not part of the mainstream dialogue. Five years from now, as these products get out there, the whole view of what agriculture needs to do..will be a lot more positive.

In other words, don’t imagine that just because we’re in trouble today means we’ll be in double-trouble tomorrow. Science will come to the rescue--and not in the shape of yet more antibiotics, and ever more industrial food-production processes. What these innovators are talking about are completely new ways of making food, and particularly protein: growing it in a laboratory or engineering it from plants, because it’s too harmful (and expensive) to produce the "natural way."

Sound disgusting? Maybe. But perhaps you haven’t seen the insides of a battery chicken shed recently, or imagined how much more antibiotics we’ll have to use as the world nears 9 billion. "Our food system is abysmally broken," says Josh Tetrick, CEO of San Francisco-based Hampton Creek Foods, maker of the Beyond Eggs egg-substitute. "It’s not about the morality of eating animals or not. It’s about the conditions that a lot of these animals raised in. These hens are kept inside a cage for two years, pumped full of feed and antibiotics, and it’s just cruel. We don’t all have to stop eating egg. But we should ask if we want to participate in that."

Tetrick’s team has deconstructed the egg, analyzed its 22 special functions, and replicated its with plant-stuffs like sunflower lecithin, canola, peas, and natural gums from tree sap. By all accounts, the substitute tastes just like the real thing--even if it doesn’t look like it. It’s sold as a gray-green powder that you need to hydrate before use.

Tetrick, who eats only plant-based food himself, insists he’s not on an anti-meat crusade. He applauds that companies like Chipotle are turning to sustainable sources of meat. The main idea is to replace the eggs currently used to make things like mayonnaise, ranch dressing, and factory-made muffins or cookies (i.e. not your Sunday fry-up). That’s about a third of the 79 billion eggs laid in the U.S. every year.

At the moment, Hampton has two major Fortune 500 customers--one of which plans to market that its products are egg-free, and another that wants to keep the fact quiet for now. "We’re just removing the eggs that we have an issue with. We don’t care if they want to just save money. That’s fine," he says. Beyond Eggs is 18% cheaper than battery-produced eggs.

Tetrick sees a smaller retail business selling to vegans, and the cholesterol-conscious. Beyond Eggs will be available online in the next two weeks, and probably from major retailers after that.

Beyond that, he wants to feed people who are likely to go hungry without interventions in the protein supply system. "I think the reason people like Bill Gates are interested in this is that the world population is expanding to 9 billion, and people are going to need good cheap sources of protein. Some of the economics of meat production, particularly around feed, aren’t good."