Interactive pond with fish made of light

Tokyo, Japan, is hosting a dazzling display of light and interactive technology at the Odaiba Minna no Yume-Tairiku 2016 festival. One especially gorgeous and incredible installation comes from the amazing minds at teamLab, who have crafted a kind of infinity pool illusion featuring interactive digital koi fish.

Visitors are encouraged to ‘wade’ through the shallow pool that sits in the centre of a darkened room surrounded on all sides by mirrors. As you walk around, various light effects will take place and respond to your movement. Thousands of computer-generated koi fish made from light prowl the waters and respond to movement and interaction.

The ‘fish’ will change speed from time to time and if they make contact with you, they will burst into a colourful flower of light; you will leave a rainbow road in your wake. Just be sure not to slip, as the water is very real.

Two-year-old whiz kid

Here is two-year-old girl who can recite the capital cities of 196 countries in the world from memory. And yes, she can do it in under five minutes too!

Rakshitha Kumar, from Edinburgh, can even tell you the capitals of some of the world’s most obscure and little heard of countries. For example, she can tell that the capital of Lesotho in Africa is Maseru, while the capital of Mauritania in the Sahara is Nouakchott. And she can cite the cities alphabetically too, continent by continent, while other children her age are still learning to walk.

Rakshitha’s impressive skill comes from an 11-hour plane journey when her parents Ramesh and Kavitha Kumar tried to keep her occupied by learning the capitals of major world countries. They were shocked when she was able to memorise every capital they mentioned. So the family decided to buy her a colourful children’s book listing 30 of the world’s better known capital cities.

Within a week, the adorable two-year-old had learned all 30 off by heart.

And now, she can recite the capital cities of 196 countries after just three months of learning and memorising.

First pizza ATM

Xavier University, Ohio, the US, announced the Pizza ATM installed at Fenwick Hall allows students to use credit cards, debit cards or student IDs loaded with money to purchase pizzas that are then cooked on demand for three minutes at 500 degrees.

The pizzas are then placed in boxes and dispensed through a slot in the machine.

“It can store 70 pizzas at any one given time,” Jude Kiah, an assistant vice president at Xavier University, told WKRC-TV.

“We were looking for a way to solve this problem of having a late-night pizza option on campus,” Kiah told. “This meets our students where they’re at in their residence hall. We like the idea of being first and innovative and trying something new. There’s one Pizza ATM in the U.S. and this is it.”

A 12-inch diameter medium pizza costs $9 from the machine.

Published in Dawn, Young World, August 27th, 2016