Welcome to the dark history of the world’s favorite comfort food. It all begins with two arch-enemy nations, Japan and China. Though their mutual hatred stretches back over the years, when these countries first made contact around 400 A.D., they were friendly. The Chinese were much more advanced, and the Japanese played eager students, learning such skills as how to write and how to make paper. They even borrowed the Chinese calendar and the Buddhist religion. But by the late 19th century, Japan was feeling superior to its former teacher.
In 1895, the small nation dealt China a humiliating defeat in a naval battle. As spoils of war, they annexed the province of Taiwan and wrestled control of Korea away from Chinese influence. Flexing its empire-building muscle further, Japan soon took over more of China, and in the process, assimilated aspects of its culture. Most notably, martial arts, as well as parts of their cuisine.
And that’s where the Ramen enter the story, although by a different name. In 1910, two Chinese cooks at Tokyo’s Rairaken restaurant introduced a signature dish with salty broth and noodles. They called it Shina Soba.
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The Nissan Leaf can run 70-plus miles on a single charge. Now, it can also power a family home for two days if it needs to. The “Leaf to Home” project Nissan is rolling out in Japan allows the electricity stored in the Leaf’s lithium-ion battery to be fed back into a home, running major appliances for up to two days.
The “Leaf to Home” system simply allows for a quick charging port to be mounted on the home’s electricity distribution panel to receive energy from the car. Those 24 kilowatt hours stored in a fully energized Leaf can run the average Japanese household for two days, even when the refrigerator, climate control, and other large appliances are running at the same time.
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According to industry trade journal Ward’s, which added up both reported vehicle registrations and historical trends, the total crossed 1 billion sometime last year.
The vehicles include passenger cars, light-, medium-, and heavy-duty trucks, and buses, but not off-road or heavy construction vehicles.
The total at the end of 2009 was about 980 million, and with strong growth in emerging regions–particularly China, now by far the world’s biggest car market–the number powered past the 1-billion mark sometime last summer.
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Have you ever stopped to contemplate the existence of rubber barf? It opens up enough philosophical quandaries to make your head spin. Who would ever think of such a thing? Why would he feel the need to manufacture it?
Fortunately, Stan and Mardi Timm, the foremost experts on famed novelty company H. Fishlove & Co., have the answers to these vexing questions. The couple even got a personal tour of the factory where “Whoops,” the original fake vomit, is still churned out.
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An international team of astronomers, led by Australia’s Swinburne University of Technology professor Matthew Bailes, has discovered a planet made of diamond crystals, in our own Milky Way galaxy.
The planet is relatively small at around 60,000 km in diameter (still, it’s five times the size of Earth). But despite its diminutive stature, this crystal space rock has more mass than the solar system’s gas giant Jupiter.
Researchers from institutions in the UK, Australia, Germany, Italy and the USA used a variety of radio telescopes — including the Australian Parkes CSIRO, the Lovell in Cheshire and the Keck in Hawaii — and 200,000 Gigabytes of celestial data to find the nifty diamond-esque planet.
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