"inventions" news and stories

Want your kids to crave vegetables? Maybe the veggies need to be shaped like robots or race cars.

Or so goes the thinking of Oklahoma man Lee Bayless. His latest invention, Veggie Bots, is a set of tools that turns vegetables like carrots, celery, cukes and radishes into building blocks, The Oklahoman reported.

If you can get a kid interested in vegetables and healthy eating, Bayless believes, maybe, just maybe, childhood-obesity rates will drop. "I think we have the right product at the right time," he told the paper.

I went to college in a small town. Most local establishments closed up long before the nightly urge to snack hit strong and so often, we'd be forced to head for vending machines to satisfy our hunger. The chips and crackers did the trick, but if we wanted a little interaction along with our snack we were simply out of luck. The students at Carnegie-Mellon University are quite familiar with the unconventional dining hours that they and the rest of their cohort keep and so are working to address the situation in a new and unique way. They're creating a Snackbot.

The Snackbot will be a social and autonomous robot that will roam the halls of a multiple campus buildings, selling snacks and interacting with students. It is still in development, but project leaders expect that completion of the first fully functional Snackbot should come in 2009.

What do you think of this project? Would you want to buy a late evening snack from an interactive robot?

[via Eat Me Daily]

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Sir Benjamin Thompson, Count von Rumford (March 26, 1753 - August 21, 1814) was an American-born physicist best known for his work in the field of thermodynamics. A Loyalist during the Revolutionary War, he was rumored to be a spy for the British and ended up having to flee to Europe, where he spent most of the rest of his life.

But let's give the guy some slack, as he invented the pressure cooker, the kitchen range and the technique for making Baked Alaska (though the dish was not named until 1876 at Delmonico's in New York in honor of the newly acquired territory), as well as a double boiler and a drip coffee pot. Rumford Baking Powder is named after him, as it was invented by a professor in the endowed Rumford professorship in physics at Harvard.

Rumford demonstrated that beaten egg whites acted as a good insulator for ice cream. He called the resulting dish 'omelette surprise.' I'm gonna venture to say that 'Baked Alaska' has a nicer ring. So let's honor the Count today with some ice cream, sponge cake, and meringue. Here's a recipe.

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