Melody roads that play music as you drive

A Japanese engineer by the name of Shizuo Shinoda accidentally scraped some markings into a road with a bulldozer and drove over them, and realized that it was possible to create tunes depending on the depth and spacing of the grooves. In 2007, the Hokkaido National Industrial Research Institute refined Shinoda’s designs to create the […]

In Japan, fake food (called sampuru from the…

In Japan, fake food (called sampuru from the English “sample”) is a multi-billion yen industry. The replicas, which are made of plastic and typically cost 10 or 20 times the amount of the food they imitate, are mostly handmade by trained artists in an almost century-old tradition.