The Fruit Fuzz

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I kid you not, but just a week back I ended up buying rotten fruit. Mangosteen (an Indonesian fruit) has a tough outer skin that looks the same whether raw, ripe, or rotten. Needless to say, I bought a whole bunch of them, and reached home to find that each and every one of them was overripe. You need to be a seasoned fruit eater to be able to tell whether the fruit’s fit for eating or not. Or just get yourself the Kiki Fruit Investigator and it’ll do the job.

Kiki works in a way that senses what gases are being emanated from the fruit. There’s a way of telling by the aroma that a fruit is perfect for eating, and Kiki does just that. At the moment, you’ll have to select which fruit Kiki has to inspect, so that the sensors keep a check of the gases. Just pop the device into your fruit basket and switch it on. It’ll beep and light up to tell you that the fruit’s nearing its spoil date. Kiki is not just perfect for fruit-noobs like me, but also for fruits like melons and pineapples, that look the same on the outside even if the insides are beginning to get funky.

Designer: Raffaele Pontillo

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Pioneering astronaut Neil Armstrong dies at 82

Pioneering astronaut Neil Armstrong dies at 82

It's a story that we hoped we'd never have to report. Neil Armstrong, the first man to set foot on Earth's Moon, has died at the age of 82 after complications from heart surgery three weeks earlier. His greatest accomplishment very nearly speaks for itself -- along with help from fellow NASA astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins, he changed the landscape of space exploration through a set of footprints. It's still important to stress his accomplishments both before and after the historic Apollo 11 flight, though. He was instrumental to the Gemini and X-series test programs in the years before Apollo, and followed his moonshot with roles in teaching aerospace engineering as well as investigating the Apollo 13 and Space Shuttle Challenger incidents. What more can we say? Although he only spent a very small portion of his life beyond Earth's atmosphere, he's still widely considered the greatest space hero in the US, if not the world, and inspired a whole generation of astronauts. We'll miss him.

[Image credit: NASA Apollo Archive]

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Pioneering astronaut Neil Armstrong dies at 82 originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 25 Aug 2012 15:45:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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