Chances are you or somebody you know has recently become the owner of an Instant Pot, the multifunction electric pressure cooker that can produce fork-tender pot roasts in less than an hour, as well as brown meat, cook beans without soaking, and even do the job of a rice cooker or crockpot. The Instant Pot isn’t advertised on TV or in the newspapers, and yet it’s become a viral marketing success story, with owners often describing themselves as “addicts” or “cult members.” That’s the kind of word-of-mouth publicity Instant Pot founders dreamed of when they first began designing the countertop appliances.
The Instant Pot electric pressure cooker has been around since 2010, but really became the buzz during the last six months of 2016. While the company’s electric pressure cookers are sold at Wal-Mart, Target and Kohl’s, the bulk of its sales come from Amazon, driven by social media. Deep discounts on Amazon Prime Day and again on Black Friday, along with the viral online sharing of these sales, turned Instant Pot into a household name. With 215,000 units sold on Prime Day alone, the Instant Pot Duo is Amazon’s top-selling item in the U.S. market. Not bad for a company that does no TV or print advertising and only recently began the process of hiring a marketing agency.
Photo: Grace Hwang Lynch
GUYS https://twitter.com/AltNatParkSer/status/824054953404669953 http://www.scientistsmarchonwashington.com/ THE NATIONAL PARK SERVICE IS IN OPEN REBELLION
Cool! Go theoretical -and experimental-physics!
Fashion is changing in the avant-garde world of next-generation computer component materials. Traditional semiconductors like silicon are releasing their last new lines. Exotic materials called topological insulators (TIs) are on their way in. And when it comes to cool, nitrogen is the new helium.
This was clearly on display in a novel experiment at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) that was performed by a multi-institutional collaboration including UCLA, NIST and the Beijing Institute of Technology in China.
Topological insulators are a new class of materials that were discovered less than a decade ago after earlier theoretical work, recognized in the 2016 Nobel Prize in physics, predicted they could exist. The materials are electrical insulators on the inside and they conduct electricity on the outer surface. They are exciting to computer designers because electric current travels along them without shedding heat, meaning components made from them could reduce the high heat production that plagues modern computers. They also might be harnessed one day in quantum computers, which would exploit less familiar properties of electrons, such as their spin, to make calculations in entirely new ways. When TIs conduct electricity, all of the electrons flowing in one direction have the same spin, a useful property that quantum computer designers could harness.
Read more.
A pioneering new technique that encourages the wonder material graphene to “talk” could revolutionise the global audio and telecommunications industries.
Researchers from the University of Exeter have devised a ground-breaking method to use graphene to generate complex and controllable sound signals. In essence, it combines speaker, amplifier and graphic equaliser into a chip the size of a thumbnail.
Traditional speakers mechanically vibrate to produce sound, with a moving coil or membrane pushing the air around it back and forth. It is a bulky technology that has hardly changed in more than a century.
This innovative new technique involves no moving parts. A layer of the atomically thin material graphene is rapidly heated and cooled by an alternating electric current, and transfer of this thermal variation to the air causes it to expand and contract, thereby generating sound waves.
Read more.
Never be afraid to fail.
Watch all of ‘It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’s" Charlie Day’s inspiring commencement speech here.
Jeremy Miranda (American, b. 1980, Newport, RI, based Dover, NH, USA) - 1: Nectar, 2014, Oil on Panel 2: Waves Of Winter, 2014, Oil on Panel 3: Recording, 2014, Oil on Panel 4: Untitled, 2013 5: Know Your Garden, 2014, Oil on Panel 6: Renovation No. 2, Oil on Panel 7: Sea Foam, Oil on Panel 8: Salt Marsh, 2014 9: Untitled, 2014 10: Overgrown Path, 2013, Acrylics on Canvas
Juliet - Marshall Beach, San Francisco
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Burlington Mayor Bernie Sanders picks up trash on his own in a public park after being elected in 1981, his first electoral victory
via reddit