eat

Looking for some motivation? Perhaps the epic short film "Move" will get your feet moving.

It's part of "Move, Eat, Learn," a series of short films that quickly flash between sequences of actor Andrew Lees exploring 11 exotic locations around the world. Directed by Rick Mereki and produced by Tim White, the three short movies show beautiful locations, people teaching, and delicious food in countries including Peru, Spain, Italy, France, and Chile. … Read more

A psychology professor and an electrical and computer engineering professor at Clemson University in South Carolina have teamed up to develop a watch-like device that tracks wrist-roll motion to count how many bites the wearer takes.

In the lab, they report, their Bite Counter has been more than 90 percent accurate in tallying bites regardless of the food, utensil, container, or user.

They say the device, which can be turned on and off at will, is something of a pedometer for eating. It's certainly not tracking types of food. But even if it's intended to monitor mere quantity of consumption, it can only be so accurate.… Read more

A group on MIT students developed an app that lets OnStar subscribers search for restaurants and make reservations without needing to talk to the maitre d'. The voice-activated app earned the four students the $10,000 Grand Prize for the OnStar Student Developer Challenge at the Where 2.0 conference last week.

EatOn is a restaurant discovery service that lets users locate restaurants, read ratings and reviews, make reservations on OpenTable, and get turn-by-turn directions to their destination using only voice commands. The app also ties into social media and lets users post their destinations on Twitter, or send invitations … Read more

In my head, I plan elaborate, healthy meals. And then I sit down to dinner, and I get distracted by the potatoes and overlook the string beans. I'm not alone; many people have great intentions that somehow fizzle away when it's time to actually, you know, bring it to the table.

The Design for Health plate, made by designer Jeffrey Harris, puts your meals back in proportion, with a visual cue reminding you that you want your meal to be a quarter protein, a quarter starch, and half vegetables. At 9.5 inches, this plate is smaller than … Read more

As one of the definitive arcade classics, Pac-Man needs little in the way of introduction. We're sure that many readers can still remember putting quarters up on a Pac-Man machine at the arcade waiting with anticipation for their turn to play. You may also have played on numerous other platforms since the game's release in 1980. Whether you're an old Pac-Man vet or you're one of the few who has never experienced the pill-eating arcade classic, the iPad version is very good, with only a few minor annoyances.

For the uninitiated, the object of the game … Read more

Wilson's made a fully recovery and is back on today's show, just in time to help us celebrate St. Patrick's Day! We're celebrating the best way we know how without actually drinking alcohol on the show--anyone else notice that Jeff looks eerily Irish today?

As usual, the episode collects the most random tech-related stories from the Internets, starting with a glimpse into the future of monitoring workday productivity. KDDI R&D Laboratory in Japan is testing a technology that lets managers check up on their drones using the accelerometer in corporate cell phones. The hardware tracks day-to-day movement and interactions and, in conjunction with desktop software, matches subsequent acceleration patterns and notifies managers if workers deviate from their regular tasks. Employers will also receive a notification e-mail if works attempt to skirt the system by "forgetting" their phones at home. We highly doubt that this will take off in the U.S., but I'm buying our IT guy a beer tomorrow just in case.

You'll notice watching today's video that none of us are wearing green, and that's partly because we're not 10 years old, and also because being green makes you mean! A new study suggests that eco-friendly consumers are more likely to cheat and lie, based on the idea that people have a "limited stock of goodwill" and that "being virtuous in one part of life leads to meanness in another." We all know a few entitled greenhorns, but what do you think? Do you buy this idea of "compensatory ethics?" Let us know in the comments below!

New Jersey might be the home of Jeff's favorite hockey team (and thanks to Che for the sticka pitcha you see over there <---), but it's also the home of Donna Simpson, a 600-pound woman attempting to break the record for world's fattest mother! We should note that she already holds the title but plans to reach 1,000 pounds with the support of her 150-pound husband.

Currently, her $750-per-week grocery bill is paid for by her Web site, where people pay to watch her eat via Webcam. This story has us all seriously questioning whether NDC and I should actually go through with this hot sauce competition.

We also have plenty of 404 stickers left, so send us a SASE and don't forget to send us a picture of where you stick them; there's a good chance I'll use it on a blog post! Unique, high-quality pictures in landscape are ideal. Send to the404(at)cnet[dot]com.

Happy St. Patty's Day, everyone! Be safe tonight, and don't drink and drive, dummy.

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This week has been big on Google. The company's Nexus One's pricing has gotten a few tweaks and The Woz declared it his favorite gadget--quite a statement coming from the co-founder of Apple, makers of the iPhone, the Nexus One's direct target.

Speaking of Apple, one of its lawyers accidentally let slip the fact that the infamous Apple tablet might someday exist even though it doesn't really exist. This is due to Gawker's $10,000 bounty on anything confirming that the nonexistent tablet exists. I hope he takes PayPal.

Speaking of people messing things … Read more

Mealformation is a multifunction food tracker that allows users to create meal plans, track their food intake, and analyze their nutrition. Overall it is a solid program, although some aspects of it could be more intuitive or better explained.

The interface is fairly straightforward, with various functions--personal profile, a food database, a recipe database, and so on--organized in tabs. The thing that threw us about the program is that it's never made clear what content is included and what content has to be user-generated. It turns out that the program does contain a fairly large database of foods, meaning … Read more

My CNET handler woke me early on Friday.

"It's those corpse-eating robot people," he barked down the phone. "They're after you."

"But I'm not dead yet," I replied. "I just look pretty rough first thing in the morning."

Still, he made me stagger to my laptop and the Robotic Technology site. There, I espied the words: "IMPORTANT MESSAGE CONCERNING EATR."

For those of you who have been asleep since Tuesday, the Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot, or EATR, is a steam-powered robot being developed for military purposes. Its … Read more