It used to be that if something looked, felt and tasted like beef steak, it was probably beef steak, but with the advent of 3D-printing technology as well as meatless meats, that’s no longer the case.

Spanish startup NovaMeat claims to have created the world’s first 3D-printed plant based beef steak, which allegedly has the same texture and appearance as a real beef muscle cut. The Barcelona-based company was reportedly able to achieve this by “finely tuning” the structure of plant-based proteins at a microscopic level. The novel plant-based meat not only matches the unique texture of beef steak, but also its color, which should make it more appealing as a sustainable alternative to real beef steak.

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Bauhutte, a Japanese retailer who specializes in furniture designed for gamers, recently launched what many are calling the ultimate gaming bed – a crazy contraption that includes a mattress, an elevated headboard, a desk,  snack holder and even a flexible smartphone holder.

If you’ve been asking yourself what the best solution for gaming was, a normal desk or a standing one, the right answer is neither. In fact, after feasting your eyes on Bauhutte’s amazing gaming bed, you won’t even be considering desks anymore. Why sit or stand, when you can lie down, relax, and even enjoy a tasty snack without bothering getting up. That flexible smartphone holder even allows you to text or surf the web while lying down. If you hate ending a gaming marathon because of a pesky back ache, this bed is certainly a solution worth considering, if you can afford it…

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Turtles may be cute, but they are also slow and clumsy, which doesn’t really help them when they are trying to cross train tracks. Luckily, for the turtles in Japan’s Hyōgo Prefecture, railway operators and a local aquarium teamed up to find a solution.

Between 2002 and 2014, disruptions of train operation caused by turtles were reported 13 times, with many more probably going unreported. That is why, in 2015, West Japan Railway Co. and Suma Aqualife Park in Kobe joint forces to prevent tragic turtle deaths on the tracks and unnecessary train delay. After running a series of tests and experiments, they came up with a U-shaped ditch that collects the turtles, preventing them from getting stuck between the metal tracks and getting squashed to death.

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A professor of experimental psychology recently unveiled a wearable patch infused with bacon flavor that is supposed to help curb meat cravings.

Charles Spence, a professor of experimental psychology at the University of Oxford, teamed up with plant-based food company Strong Roots to create a patch that, when scratched, produces a smell similar to that of cooked bacon. The idea behind this strange invention is that the human mind is connected to our senses of taste and smell, and that certain smells can significantly reduce food cravings.

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A group of scientists from ETH Zurich and FHNW University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland recently filed a patent for a process that makes chocolates shimmer in rainbow colors without using food coloring.

The story of shimmering rainbow chocolate began on the corridors of a university building, when food scientist Patrick Rühs, materials scientist Etienne Jeoffroy and physicist Henning Galinski started chatting about chocolate during their coffee break. The main focus of their discussion is whether it would be possible to make chocolate in other colors than brown and white, and if so, how. Intrigued by the complexity of the topic, they started looking into chocolate, its properties and what makes it brown. Then they started conducting playful experiments in the kitchen of ETH University.

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Square Off, the world’s smartest, most connected chess board, gives the centuries-old sport of chess a 21st century touch by allowing players halfway around the world to interact with physical pieces without actually touching them.

Chess has been available as a digital game for years, but true fans know that there’s nothing like playing on a high-quality physical board. That’s hard to do when your opponent is thousands of miles away, or at least it was until someone came up with away to allow people halfway around the world to play chess on a physical board made of rosewood. It looks like a magical set out of a Harry Potter movie, but it’s actually a wonder of technology that harnesses robotics and internet connectivity to make the impossible possible.

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Dutch brand Vollebak recently unveiled what it calls the “world’s strongest jacket”. With an exterior made out of 100 percent dyneema, the strongest fiber known to man, the Indestructible Puffer can allegedly withstand whatever abuse you subject it to and last a lifetime.

Adventure clothing brand Vollebak has been creating cutting edge adventure sports clothes for years, and has become known for making some of the toughest garments on the planet. In the past, we’ve featured their virtually indestructible hoodie and a pair of pants designed to last at least 100 years, so we know than when they say their latest creation, the Indestructible Puffer, is the strongest jacket ever made, they mean it! Its outer layer is said to be 15 times stronger than steel and 40% stronger than high-strength aramid fibres, which makes it impervious to shearing, tearing, and blunt-force traumas.

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Earlier this year, San Francisco businessman Richard Ma spent $10,000 on a dress created by The Fabricant, the world’s first digital-only fashion house. The problem is that the dress didn’t really exist outside the digital world.

Digital-only clothes are so new that most people haven’t even heard about them, but some experts believe they will one day be a flourishing industry. But why would anyone be interested in fashionable garments that don’t exist in the physical world? If you can’t put them on and show them off, what’s the point? Well, that’s what makes them so interesting, you can actually put them on (sort of) and show them off on social media, in fact that’s actually their main purpose.

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Just a week after Brooklyn-based startup Air Co. unveiled its carbon-negative, air-based vodka, a California start-up announced a new type of “meatless meat” made from air.

Appropriately named Air Protein, the Bay Area company allegedly used technology developed by NASA, to transform carbon dioxide (CO2) into protein, the same way plants do. During the 1960’s, the U.S. space agency started looking for a way to feed astronauts on a year-long mission by relying on the one resource its crew produced in abundance – CO2. During their research, scientists discovered a class of microbes called hydrogenotrophs able to convert carbon dioxide into protein. The resulting powder could be used to create pastas and shakes, but Air Protein now wants to use it to create a meat alternative.

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Brooklyn-based startup Air Co. claims to have created the world’s first “carbon negative vodka” by capturing carbon dioxide captured from the air and using a solar powered machine to turn it into ethanol.

According to Air Co. co-founder Gregory Constantine, each bottle of carbon negative vodka sucks a pound of carbon dioxide from the air in its entire life cycle, or as much as eight full-grown trees. Unlike traditional vodka, which is made by fermenting starch-rich grains like wheat, or potatoes, in a process that can create around 13 pounds of greenhouse gases, Air Co. vodka is made only with water and carbon dioxide, and its production process actually removes carbon dioxide from the air.

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Onion hardly seems like the best vegetable to base a soft drink on, but Onionade doesn’t contain the kind of onion you’re used to, but a new type that not only doesn’t make you cry when you chop it, but it unusually sweet as well.

Back in 2016 we reported on one of the most interesting inventions to come out of Japan in the past few years – a tear-free onion named “Smile Ball”. Developed over a period of 14 years by scientists at House Foods Group, Smile Ball onions release almost no tear-inducing compounds when chopped or eaten raw, and have a much sweeter taste than regular onions. Available in Japanese grocery stores for the past two years, Smile Balls have been marketed mainly as tear-free alternatives to the common onion, but now its producers want to promote the vegetable’s sweetness and pleasant flavor as well. And what better way to do that than by producing an onion-based drink called Onionade?

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A team of researchers from the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Nanjing University recently unveiled an innovative display that is thin and flexible enough to be worn on skin, like a type of temporary tattoo.

Having to check a stopwatch to see your time while running, or looking at your smartphone screen to see who is calling may soon be things of the past thanks to a new and revolutionary human-machine interface that allows information to be displayed directly on human skin. Called alternating-current electroluminescent (ACEL) display, this new invention consists of an electroluminescent layer made of light-emitting microparticles sandwiched between two flexible silver nanowire electrodes. The ceramic nanoparticles embedded in stretchable polymer make this ACEL display brighter than any other, allowing it be clearly visible even in a well-lit room.

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Called an “e-broom”, Toyota’s latest mobility platform looks like a futuristic witch’s broom that users can ride to get around. Apparently, quidditch fans found the concept very intriguing.

Unfortunately, Toyota’s e-broom isn’t yet able to make quidditch players airborne, like in the popular Harry Potter books, but they are capable of propelling people on the ground, as long as they are wearing roller-skates. The e-broom is meant to be ridden like a witch’s broom, only instead of relying on magic to whisk its users towards the sky, it relies on an electrical motor and a wheel at the bottom to propel its rider forward at moderate speed. It’s not as impressive as we’d like it to be, but at least it’s a step toward a real life quidditch broom.

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Developed by Spanish fashion brand Sepiia, the Ultimate Smart Shirt 3.0 is a special men’s garment that can allegedly reduce the wearer’s stress, improve blood flow and increase energy levels.

Sepiia has been developing smart clothing for years now. Its first generation garments incorporated staining-resistant fabric around the cuffs and neck, thus requiring less frequent washing, while the second generation introduced a more breathable fabric that prevented excessive perspiration and sweat patches, while also being odor resistant. For its latest generation of smart clothing, Sepiia introduced the concept of wellness, by developing a fabric that has all the characteristics of previous generations, as well as new bioceramic nanoparticles that improve the wearer’s well-being.

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Skinny Japanese men looking to get that coveted “slim and macho” look without putting in the work and breaking a sweat at the gym now achieve their goal pretty much instantly. All they have to do is put on the Super Macho T, a special undershirt that instantly gives them a buff physique.

Developed by a Japanese company named “His Company Group”, the Super Macho T features inflatable air bags that go into small pockets located around the chest and upper arm areas and visually enhance the wearers chest, biceps and triceps. The cool thing about this system is that you can inflate the air bags as much as you want, allowing you to go for an inconspicuous moderately toned look, or an absolute gym addict.

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