A visitor from the future has landed on my refrigerator door. Its name is SmartShopper. It's an electronic shopping list, and catalogs like Sur La Table and The Sharper Image are pushing it this holiday season. And if your idea of fun is getting into a screaming fight with your fridge, I highly recommend you pick one up. SmartShopper is about the size of a Big Grab of chips and weighs a pound. It's solidly built, takes four AAs, and sticks firmly to our refrigerator. It has a built-in thermal printer. And it's easy to use. Just press the blue "Record" button and say what you want to add to your list. SmartShopper will present you with its three best... More

In the future, sidewalks won't be covered with black spots of ancient gum, nor will students hands unintentionally brush against hardened gum wads hidden underneath their seats. Chemists at the University of Bristol have invented a less sticky chewing gum called Clean Gum that can be simply removed with water. Professor Terence Cosgrove explains that by adding a special polymer, the typically hydrophobic gum becomes hydrophilic, allowing water to disintegrate the gum over time or to form a film around the gum, releasing it from whatever surface it would normally stick to. Taste tests have already proven Clean Gum, which is expected to be released commercially in 2008, to taste as good or better than conventional gum. It won't be... More

Johnny from Popgadget discusses how beef with a pedigree could make us safer: "TraceBack is a new system for DNA testing cattle and swine, and then recording the movements of the butchered meat. A butcher would be able to take a small sample of beef and cross-reference the DNA against an IdentiGEN database to verify that the meat is from a healthy animal." Alternately, health departments can use TraceBack to identify the source of contamination during outbreaks, from the point of sale all the way back to the farm and to which particular animal was sick.... More

Coffee shops offer one of the last vestiges of community in this day and age of isolation, iPods, and Internet. To my single friends, I say, "Don't go to a bar, go to a coffee shop. Read a book and drink some coffee and you'll meet someone." More

You know tele-conferencing? Chicago-based Accenture, the Telegraph reports, is working on bringing it to dinner. The virtual guest's image is then projected on to the screen, and the solitary diner no longer feels that she is eating alone. Sad or fantastic?... More