Goggles may trick the appetite.
Updated: July 20, 2012 - 3:19 PM
Researchers at the University of Tokyo's Graduate School of Information Science and Technology have developed goggles that can enlarge the image of a bite of food so that the eater might fool himself into thinking he has consumed more than he has. The theory is the goggles may help a person's hunger dissipate sooner.
The software is so sophisticated, the researchers said, that the food carrier (a fork, or the eater's hand) is not transformed and appears at normal size. In basic tests, according to a June Agence France-Presse report, a 50 percent increase in imagined cookie size reduced actual consumption by 9 percent.
Road rage karma?
Jerry Patterson suffered a road-rage pummeling on June 12 at the hands of three men who beat him into unresponsiveness on the side of Interstate 5 in Los Angeles. The incident was captured on cellphone video by a passing motorist. Six days earlier, Patterson had himself been arrested for allegedly administering his own road-rage beatdown of another motorist, who suffered two black eyes.
Remarkable legal fees
As the court-appointed trustee seeking as much of Ponzi-schemer Bernard Madoff's ill-gotten gains as possible to pay back his victims, Irving Picard has secured $330 million to distribute, according to a May New York Times report. During the same time, Picard and his associates have billed the court, in fees that run as much as $850 per hour, $554 million.
Lawsuit-happy
America's most prolific litigant, Jonathan Lee Riches, was released in April after serving 10 years in prison for stealing credit card numbers. Riches is infamously known in Guinness Book for having filed at least 3,800 fanciful lawsuits, mostly involving public figures.
Within days of his release, he had sued the Kardashian women for a variety of imagined ills including their forcing Riches to steal clothing for them from Saks Fifth Avenue and Target.
Kim Kardashian was also sued for allegedly having spilled Riches' McFlurry drink on his head, and Khloe for stealing Riches' Whopper sandwich and ramming Riches' Aston Martin car with her Volvo. Other post-release litigation initiated by Riches implicated Kanye West, Bruce Jenner, Charlie Sheen and an Al-Qaida training camp in West Virginia.
When cats fly
In June, Dutch artist Bart Jansen showed off his latest creation, which was quickly an Internet sensation: He had his pet cat Orville (which had recently been run over by a car) stuffed, with arms spread like an airplane. A radio was mounted on the carcass so that Jansen could control its flight. Jansen showed off Orville at the Kunstrai art festival in Amsterdam in June.
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