How a veggie burger stole the show at CES 2019

The Impossible Burger 2.0 AFP/Getty Images

LAS VEGAS — The most impressive product launch at CES 2019 isn’t a drone or smartphone.

It’s a veggie burger.

Impossible Foods unveiled its latest recipe for its famous faux-meat burger, and The Post was on hand to take a bite before it hits a restaurant near you.

And, yes, the Impossible Burger 2.0 made a believer out of this veggie burger skeptic. The new blend is made with soy protein, is gluten- and cholesterol-free, and has significantly less fat and fewer calories than a regular burger.

The surprising part? I could hardly taste the difference from the real thing.

Examining the slider that Impossible Foods gave me, everything looked right. The “meat” was browned and charred, it was juicy when squeezed, and it even smelled like a real burger.

After biting into it, I would have believed it if they told me I was eating a prime 80/20 blend.

“This is the plant-based ‘meat’ that will eliminate the need for animals in the food chain and make the global food system sustainable,” Impossible Foods CEO and Founder Patrick O. Brown said.

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Elsewhere during CES, firms are vying to present their visions for the future of car transportation.

Hyundai unveiled a concept car sure to turn heads if it ever hits the streets. The Elevate, as it is called, is a car with robotic legs that allow it to reach areas that no car has gone before.

The South Korean automaker ginned up artwork of the Elevate working as an emergency response vehicle in rocky mountainous terrain, with the legs nimbly climbing over treacherous rocks. It also envisions a future in which New York City cabs will be able to climb the front steps of a brownstone to help a mobility-impaired rider easily enter the vehicle.

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Kia, meanwhile, is looking even further into the future, designing a concept car for a day when self-driving vehicles are the norm. The automaker worked with MIT to design a system that it says can monitor your emotions during the ride and adjust accordingly.

In a demo, an AI-powered camera with “bio-signal recognition technology,” scanned my face as it simulated a drive through Midtown. When it determined that I looked 11 percent bored, it queued up a video of an upbeat concert to entertain me.

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A sex toy company found itself making headlines at CES after it was revealed that the trade show had initially given it an innovation award, before taking it back when it realized it had given a prize to a high-end vibrator.

Osé, which uses “intricate engineering and robotics” to provide its users with the “elusive blended orgasm,” was deemed “obscene” and “immoral” by CES judges after it received a prize for robotics.

Lora DiCarlo, the startup that makes the vibrator, slammed CES for an “obvious double standard” against female sexuality, pointing out that the show has had no issue with sex robots and VR porn in the past.

Teens are now getting drunk on boiled tampon juice

Composite; iStockphoto

Kids these days will try just about anything to catch a buzz, from “boofing” beer to vaping vodka. Their latest cheap thrill? Feminine hygiene products.

Teenagers in Indonesia are collecting menstrual pads and tampons — often of the used variety — and boiling them, allowing the mixture to cool and then imbibing the resulting liquid.

Police have already arrested several minors caught making this menstrual-pad moonshine.

One 14-year-old confessed that he and his buds swig it “morning, afternoon and evening,” the Daily Mail reports.

The National Narcotics Agency in Indonesia says it’s the chlorine used to sanitize menstrual products that’s getting kids tipsy, giving them hallucinations and a feeling of “flying.”

As it turns out, this has been going on for at least a couple of years, as this phenomenon was first reported by Indonesian authorities back in 2016.

“I don’t know who started it,” Jimy Ginting, an advocate for safe drinking in Indonesia, tells the Jakarta Post. “There is no law against it so far. There is no law against these kids using a mixture of mosquito repellent and [cold syrup] to get drunk.”

Please, Mr. Ginting, don’t give them any more ideas.

Google moved $23 billion to Bermuda in 2017 to avoid taxes

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AMSTERDAM — Google moved 19.9 billion euros ($22.7 billion) through a Dutch shell company to Bermuda in 2017, as part of an arrangement that allows it to reduce its foreign tax bill, according to documents filed at the Dutch Chamber of Commerce.

The amount channeled through Google Netherlands Holdings BV was around 4 billion euros more than in 2016, the documents, filed on Dec. 21, showed.

“We pay all of the taxes due and comply with the tax laws in every country we operate in around the world,” Google said in a statement.

“Google, like other multinational companies, pays the vast majority of its corporate income tax in its home country, and we have paid a global effective tax rate of 26 percent over the last ten years.”

For more than a decade the arrangement has allowed Google owner Alphabet to enjoy an effective tax rate in the single digits on its non-US profits, around a quarter the average tax rate in its overseas markets.

The subsidiary in the Netherlands is used to shift revenue from royalties earned outside the United States to Google Ireland Holdings, an affiliate based in Bermuda, where companies pay no income tax.

The tax strategy, known as the “Double Irish, Dutch Sandwich,” is legal and allows Google to avoid triggering US income taxes or European withholding taxes on the funds, which represent the bulk of its overseas profits.

However, under pressure from the European Union and the United States, Ireland in 2014 decided to phase out the arrangement, ending Google’s tax advantages in 2020.

Google Netherlands Holdings BV paid 3.4 million euros in taxes in the Netherlands in 2017, the documents showed, on a gross profit of 13.6 million euros.

There’s an Antarctic lake ‘twice the size of Manhattan’ buried under 3,500 feet of ice

Antarctica Getty Images

Scientists in Antarctica got a unique gift this holiday season: access to a mysterious lake buried under more than 3,500 feet of ice.

It took about two days of drilling to reach Mercer Subglacial Lake on Dec. 26, the Subglacial Antarctic Lakes Scientific Access (SALSA) announced in a blog post.

A team of researchers — which includes 45 scientists, drillers and other staff members — with the organization were able to send an instrument down a borehole the next day, capturing rare footage of the body of water which is “twice the size of Manhattan,” according to the journal Nature. They will also lower a remotely operated vehicle down the hole to capture more footage and take more extensive measurements.

The group plans to study the depth, temperature and cleanliness of the lake over the next few days.

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“We don’t know what we’ll find,” John Priscu, chief scientist for SALSA, told environmental news site Earther Monday. “We’re just learning, it’s only the second time that this has been done.”

The SALSA team flew to Mercer Subglacial Lake on Dec. 19 and began drilling days later, on Dec. 23.

“Part of the drilling process involves sampling the drill water to test its cleanliness. The water has been tested twice thus far, and both tests showed the water was ‘as clean as filtered water can get’, in the words of SALSA PI Brent Christner,” SALSA explained. “The drill water is run through filters that catch 99.9 percent of bacteria and particles.”

The organization has scheduled at least eight days dedicated to sampling the lake’s water and sediment, a previous blog post states.

Priscu told Earther researchers hope to gain more information about life that exists thousands of feet under ice, noting it will take years to study all the samples they collect.

“We’re knee-deep right [now] sampling the deepest standing water body humans have ever accessed beneath Antarctica,” Matt Siegfried, a glaciologist and SALSA member, told Earther. “[So] it’ll take some time to process what the ‘most’ exciting part [is].”

Mercer Subglacial Lake was first discovered via satellite more than a decade ago, according to Nature. There are reportedly around 400 lakes hiding beneath Antarctica’s ice sheets.

Soulja Boy kills off gaming console after controversial tweet

Soulja Boy Getty Images

Nintendo, it wasn’t.

Soulja Boy has pulled his video game consoles from the market a week after he defended the consoles with a tweet containing a slur.

Released earlier this month, the self-named SouljaGame Console and SouljaGame Handheld were hyped by the rapper as containing more than 800 and 3,000 built-in games, respectively.

But those devices are no longer available on the “Crank That” rapper’s website, Rolling Stone reports. Soulja Boy announced the death of his gaming devices Monday, tweeting, “I had to boss up, I didn’t have a choice.”

A week prior, the rapper had reportedly said his consoles weren’t going anywhere in a controversial, since-deleted tweet.

“For anyone who thinks that Nintendo is going to sue me you’re retarded,” he wrote. “Nothings going to happen everything is legit. My console isn’t going anywhere trust me.”

To many, the news didn’t come as a surprise. One Twitter user posted, “It wasn’t even his console. Its a Chinese knockoff that he bought wholesale.”

Gaming publication GamesRadar had questioned the existence of the consoles, saying they appeared to be the same as previously released devices from Abernic, but sold at a markup.

NASA spacecraft survives flyby of most distant object ever explored

An artist's rendition of NASA's New Horizons spacecraft as it approaches Pluto. EPA

NASA rang in 2019 in stellar style by celebrating a successful excursion to the most distant world ever explored — some billion miles beyond Pluto.

To a thunderous round of applause on Tuesday, the space agency announced that it received a series of “phone home” signals around10:30 a.m. indicating that New Horizons spacecraft made it intact to the planet Ultima Thule.

“We have a healthy spacecraft,” said mission operations manager Alice Bowman, as cheers erupted in the control rooms at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland.

Racing through the universe at a speed of 32,000 miles per hour, New Horizons passed within 2,200 miles of the tiny planet, located about 4 billion miles from Earth in a dark, frigid region of space known as the Kuiper Belt.

It was impossible to watch the celestial encounter in real time, since it takes more than six hours for a signal sent from Earth to reach the spaceship and another six hours for the response to arrive.

Until now, Pluto was the most faraway world ever visited up close by a spacecraft.

Alan Stern, the lead planetary scientist for New Horizons, said exploration of Ultima Thule could provide answers about the origins of other planets.

“The object is in such a deep freeze that it is perfectly preserved from its original formation,” he said. “Everything we are going to learn about Ultima — from its composition to its geology to how it was originally assembled, whether it has satellites and an atmosphere and those kinds of things — are going to teach us about the original formation conditions of objects in the solar system.”

Ultima Thule was first discovered in 2014 with the help of the Hubble Space Telescope. It is believed to be 12 to 20 miles in size.

A fuzzy photo released Monday — taken from 1.2 million miles away — appears to show the planet as an elongated blob, not a round space rock.

New Horizons is expected to capture some 900 images of Ultima Thule with clearer images arriving in the next three days. It will take a nearly two years for New Horizons to beam back all its observations.

The spacecraft launched in 2006 and completed its mission of flying by Pluto in 2015, returning the most detailed photos of the dwarf planet.

Scientist didn’t even know the Kuiper Belt, a vast ring of relics dating back to the formation of the solar system, existed until the 1990s.

“In addition to being the first to explore Pluto, today New Horizons flew by the most distant object ever visited by a spacecraft and became the first to directly explore an object that holds remnants from the birth of our solar system,” tweeted NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine. “This is what leadership in space exploration is all about.”