Rice

Behold These Incredible Artworks Grown from a Rice Field in Japan

It’s like a reverse crop circle. The people of Inakadate, a village in Japan with only 8,000 inhabitants, found an artistic way to lure tourists: in 1993, they planted a rice field behind the town hall. Over the years, they’ve used different types of heirloom rice to grow art in the paddy. 1993-2001 – The…

It’s hard to top the holy shit news that Antarctica is, as we’ve long feared, irreversibly melting, but this week’s Landscape Reads is chock full of other great stories. Could the difference between rice and wheat farming also explain cultural differences? (By the way, those are rice terraces above!) What’s a 19th-century map doing in…

This Gorgeous Stained Glass Landscape Is Actually a Rice Field

Who knew growing rice on a mountain could be so beautiful? The Ailao Mountains in Yunnan, China, have been carved into thousands of gradual steps, each a paddy growing red rice. The rice terraces stretch out over some 400 square miles of mountains and valleys. The Hani people moved into the area and began carving…

Watch JFK’s iconic Moon speech, delivered fifty years ago today

Today marks the fiftieth anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s legendary clarion call to the United States, to invest its heart, hopes and mind in the exploration of space. An enduring message of audacity and spirit, it remains as rousing (and, arguably, as relevant) today as it did when Kennedy delivered it at Rice University in…

Eating Rice Oozed from a Tube Sounds Efficient and Delicious

Taking some inspiration from the sucker-in-a-sleeve known as a Push Pop, Takara Tomy’s Smart Han bento lunchbox lets busy office drones enjoy sticky rice lunch extruded from a large tube. It’s not unlike the Sushi Bazooka, except that this contraption is designed to pump the food directly into your mouth. https://gizmodo.com/sushi-bazooka-5926339 A screw on cap…

Watch the Moment that Defined America’s Most Epic Quest In History

50 years ago today, on September 12, 1962, President John F. Kennedy delivered one of his best and most inspiring speeches. Arguably, one of the best in the history of the United States. The year before, in front of a special joint session of the US Congress, he announced a plan to put a man…

McDonald’s Miracle Flavored Rice Will Either Be the Most Delicious or Disgusting Thing You Eat in Your Life

The creativity that went in inventing McDonald’s miracle flavored rice is so beyond my little human brain that I’d have to be high as a kite to understand the magic. But oh the magic. The culinary geniuses at RocketNews24 cooked rice with a Big Mac, fries, chicken nuggets, sauce and coke to deliver what has…

Mutant rice could help Japanese farmers bounce back from tsunami damage

Japan is still struggling to recover from the devastation caused by the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami that hit the country last March. One of the long-term problems is reclaiming farmland ravaged by the tsunami. And mutant rice might be the solution. The tsunami deposited huge quantities of saltwater over the agricultural land of northeast Japan.…

DUPE: Non-Mad Scientists Say They’ll Turn Rice into Blood

It sounds like an act of witchcraft, but it’s actually the cutting edge of medicine—on paper, at least. Researchers at China’s Wuhan University say they can grow genetically engineered rice that yields blood. Human blood. Blood rice. The trick lies in embedding human genes within the rice DNA, the Telegraph reports, which creates a protein…

Researchers Squeeze Blood Proteins from Rice

Human Serum Albumin (HSA) is a protein commonly used in vaccines and often administered for serious burn injuries and liver disease and commonly in short supply due to a lack of donors. That’s why researchers from Wuhan University have figured out how to grow it—not in people, but in rice. The researchers have genetically engineered…

New Study Suggests We Really Are What We Eat

Scientists at Nanjing University made a startling discovery about the food we eat. Not only do we ingest the nutrients from our food, we incorporate some of the genetic material as well. The research team discovered abundant levels of rice microRNA in the bloodstream of Chinese test subjects. And this miRNA isn’t just sitting there…

Hey You! Why Everyone Should Own a Rice Cooker

Don’t take it from me, a guy who was basically birthed, then incubated inside a rice cooker, take it from Roger Ebert, whose love of the rice cooker translated into a full-length book on why everybody needs one. His book focuses as much on the philosophy of eating—a feat for food-fan who hasn’t eaten in…

Feed This Machine Rice And It’ll Spit Out A Fresh Loaf Of Bread

If you want to make delicious bread out of rice, you normally have to get rice flour and work from there. But with the Sanyo Gopan rice bread machine, all you have to do is pour in handfuls of rice. Of course you need to pour in the other bread ingredients too, but the point…

Friendly fungi could revolutionize rice farming

By engineering a strain of symbiotic fungus, researchers have massively increased the growth rate of rice, and may help stave off the specter of global shortages of phosphates, which are essential minerals for plants. Mycorrhiza fungi are those that live in a mutually beneficial arrangement with the roots of plants. Found in just about every…

Rice Bra: The Only Logical Deterrent to Food Shortages

Before you dare think this idea is even remotely sexy, I want you to consider something: There are hundreds of billions of microorganisms in a handful of soil…and a lactating rice paddy can only be worse. [NYDailyNews via Gawker] http://gawker.com/5538470/new-rice+growing-agriculture-bra-to-become-michelle-obamas-favorite?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+gawker%2Ffull+%28Gawker%29

Accidentally Take Your Gadget Swimming? Rice Might Be Your Best Friend

Who hasn’t accidentally left a phone, camera or MP3 player in a swimsuit pocket and gone swimming? It’s a harrowing experience, but there’s hope: Dunking the gadget in rice is a somewhat surprising yet very effective drying method. We’ve all soaked a not-so-waterproof gadget or two, and we know that lots of them can come…

Rice-Sized Solar Panels Produced Noodle-Sized Power

Researchers from the University of South Florida have developed a minuscule solar panel that’s just 1/4 the size of a grain of rice. Yet when you combine 20 or so of the cells, they can create 7.8 volts of electricity. Sounds good so far, right? It gets better.The solar cells could easily be incorporated into…

Wired: Rice Cookers Reviewed, Asians Everywhere Surprised

Chris Null of Yahoo! Tech and Mark McClusky, one of my old mentors at Wired, did a side by side shootout of Rice Cookers. They actually went and dethroned what I always considered the king of the long grain, short grain, and everything in between: The Zojirushi, known to me as the Hattori Hanzo in…

Microwave Rice Cooker

College students and lonely singles who enjoy rice, but don’t want to make a whole bunch can use this Micro Rice Cooker from Japan to make rice for one. The rice washing is still necessary, but this allows you to use the microwave instead of a rice cooker, and comes in a small bowl—perfect for…