Instant ramen is a well-known ally of students and bachelors, but it’s also pretty popular with travelers in Japan. Since it has a long shelf life and it’s easy to prepare, it’s not uncommon for a dinner away from home to be a cup of instant noodles in a hotel room, especially if you’re staying in a remote location without a lot of local dining options.And since you can’t get much farther away from the restaurant rows of the big city than outer space, Nissin is now producing multiple types of space ramen, so that astronauts can enjoy the familiar and comforting flavor as they orbit Earth.Naturally, the company’s flagship foodstuff, Cup Noodle, is accounted for, in a variant now known as Space Cup Noodle, which features dried shrimp, ground pork, scrambled egg, and green onion, just like the terrestrial Cup Noodle you can get at the grocery store (and also the terrifying Cup Noodle ice cream that we keep trying to scrub from our memory).However, the starches of Space Cup Noodle’s noodles are specially formulated so that they’ll reconstitute with 70-degree Celsius (158-degree Fahrenheit) water, the temperature readily supplied to astronauts on the International Space Station, as opposed to the boiling 100-degree Celsius water that normal Cup Noodle requires. The noodles are also thicker and the broth more viscous, to prevent them from swirling around and causing problems in the ISS’s microgravity environment.
The new logo for the 2025 Expo was designed by a team led by graphic designer Tamotsu Shimada, who borrowed elements of the 1970 Expo and re-imagined them as chain of DNA. The ambiguous form and all its many cells are breathing, moving and dancing. It’s a design that will surely breath life into the Expo.
When the world’s first atomic weapon exploded in New Mexico in July 1945, the energy from the blast formed a new mineral called trinitite from the desert sand. For his 2015 Trinity Cube project, artist Trevor Paglen took irradiated glass gathered from the area around where the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster occurred in 2011 and combined it with trinitite to form a blue cube. He then installed the cube in the Fukushima Exclusion Zone to continue to be irradiated.
The artwork will be viewable by the public when the Exclusion Zone opens again, anytime between 3 and 30,000 years from the present.
Ever wonder what everyone who has to evacuate Tokyo-3 while the Evangelions are fighting Angels is eating?
There’s no shortage of sci-fi anime settings that get regularly wrecked whenever the heroes sortie out in their robots to fight for humanity’s survival, but few get wrecked as hard as Evangelion’s Tokyo-3. With the mysterious organization Nerv’s Japanese headquarters keeping the very thing the invading alien Angels want in their basement below the city, extraterrestrial intruders attack the community with alarming frequency, and it’s not like the team of adolescent pilots in often uncooperative mecha ever manage to keep the collateral damage especially low.
So with urban evacuations part of the basic rhythm of life, there must be a lot of emergency rations being handed out to people eating them in shelters while Shinji is out there in his Eva punching Angels, right? And now you can experience such fine dining for yourself with an entire line of Evangelion emergency rations that’s just gone on sale in Japan.
Instant ramen is a well-known ally of students and bachelors, but it’s also pretty popular with travelers in Japan. Since it has a long shelf life and it’s easy to prepare, it’s not uncommon for a dinner away from home to be a cup of instant noodles in a hotel room, especially if you’re staying in a remote location without a lot of local dining options.And since you can’t get much farther away from the restaurant rows of the big city than outer space, Nissin is now producing multiple types of space ramen, so that astronauts can enjoy the familiar and comforting flavor as they orbit Earth.Naturally, the company’s flagship foodstuff, Cup Noodle, is accounted for, in a variant now known as Space Cup Noodle, which features dried shrimp, ground pork, scrambled egg, and green onion, just like the terrestrial Cup Noodle you can get at the grocery store (and also the terrifying Cup Noodle ice cream that we keep trying to scrub from our memory).However, the starches of Space Cup Noodle’s noodles are specially formulated so that they’ll reconstitute with 70-degree Celsius (158-degree Fahrenheit) water, the temperature readily supplied to astronauts on the International Space Station, as opposed to the boiling 100-degree Celsius water that normal Cup Noodle requires. The noodles are also thicker and the broth more viscous, to prevent them from swirling around and causing problems in the ISS’s microgravity environment.
