Would you pay $2,300 for a hot dog?

A fancy rooftop bar in New York City, 230 Fifth, has created a “haute” dog with a price tag of $2,300.

What goes into such a wiener? More than mustard, we can tell you courtesy of Zagat’s:

• Marbled Wagyu beef, dry aged and laced with black truffles
• Brioche bun smeared with white truffle butter
• Fancy saffron-infused catsup and French mustard
• Onions caramelized in Dom Perignon champagne and 100-year-old balsamic vinegar that costs $389 a bottle (the vinegar is pricier than the champagne, folks)
• Sauerkraut with platinum osetra caviar
• Relish made with $10 pickles
• Edible gold leaf

This dog has been created for a good cause: City Harvest, a charity group dedicated to feeding underprivileged men, women and children in the New York City area, according to msnbc.com.

To put this charity event into perspective, just one hot dog sold will help feed a whopping 9,200 people.

The haute dog will be available next week, when a photo of it will also be available, according to spokeswoman Shelley Clark. If you’re in Manhattan next week and want to order one, call 212-725-4300 and give them 48 hours notice. Or email info@230-fifth.com with “Hot Dog” in the subject line.

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Houston is the ‘coolest’ city in America, according to Forbes

Move over Austin, L.A. and the Big Apple.

Forget Dallas and San Antonio.

Stuffy old Houston is now the “coolest” big city in America, according to Forbes.

The business website used seven “data points” in ranking 65 of the largest metro areas in the U.S.

Those criteria include entertainment, arts and culture, restaurants and bars, median age and employment stats.

The Bayou City’s growing job market and a younger median age of 33 helped make it No. 1, beating out D.C., Los Angeles, Dallas and Seattle in the top five. No. 9 San Francisco edges out New York, followed by San Antonio as the 11^th coolest city.

Austin ranks No. 19, sandwiched between Minneapolis and No. 20 Denver. The only other Texas winner in the Top 20 was Fort Worth, at 13^th.

See the Top 20 list here, with photos.

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Moon flags likely lost their stripes

Despite harsh conditions and the ravages of time, the U.S. flags planted on the moon in the past 43 years are still standing and casting shadows at all but one of the landing sites. This remarkable fact comes to us via images made recently by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera, a robotic spacecraft orbiting the moon on a 3-D mapping mission.

Scientists have long speculated that all the flags except for one planted during the Apollo missions were still there, based on their shadows, reports rawstory.com.

But the flags are probably not red, white and blue anymore, as Paul D. Spudis pointed out for symbolism in his airspacemag.com blog post about the end of the shuttle era a year ago:

Over the course of the Apollo program, our astronauts deployed six American flags on the Moon. For forty-odd years, the flags have been exposed to the full fury of the Moon’s environment – alternating 14 days of searing sunlight and 100° C heat with 14 days of numbing-cold -150° C darkness. But even more damaging is the intense ultraviolet (UV) radiation from the pure unfiltered sunlight on the cloth (modal) from which the Apollo flags were made. Even on Earth, the colors of a cloth flag flown in bright sunlight for many years will eventually fade and need to be replaced. So it is likely that these symbols of American achievement have been rendered blank, bleached white by the UV radiation of unfiltered sunlight on the lunar surface. Some of them may even have begun to physically disintegrate under the intense flux.

America is left with no discernible space program while the Moon above us no longer flies a visible U.S. flag. How ironic.

The only Apollo landing site with no standing flag is the first one, Apollo 11′s. Astronaut Buzz Aldrin reported that the flag was blown over by the exhaust from the ascent engine during liftoff.

In this April 1972 photo, astronaut John W. Young, commander of the Apollo 16 lunar landing mission, salutes the U.S. flag at the Descartes landing site during an extravehicular activity. The Lunar Module ‘Orion’ is on the left with the Lunar Roving Vehicle parked beside. (NASA / AFP PHOTO / HANDOUT)
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5dtcdmjOaE?feature=player_embedded]

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Microsoft saying good-bye to Hotmail

Microsoft's new Outlook.com address is pushing out Hotmail, Curiosity will soon meet Mars, and we look at the head-scanning technology used by EA Sports.

Microsoft's new Outlook.com address is pushing out Hotmail, Curiosity will soon meet Mars, and we look at the head-scanning technology used by EA Sports.
Bridget Carey
by Bridget Carey
July 31, 2012 2:30 PM PDT

It's not often we get a shakeup in the email world, but say hello to Microsoft's new free email account, Outlook.com. It'll eventually be replacing Hotmail, but you might want to grab your name now. There's a new, clean look and it ties in your social media contacts. It's not too far off from what you may be used to already in Gmail, as you'll be able to tell from CNET's full overview of the features.

The Mars Science Laboratory rover, called Curiosity, will land on the red planet overnight Sunday to search for the building blocks of life and test if anything could live on Mars. Some say this $2.5 billion mission could be the most important event in the history of planetary exploration.

The Apple TV streaming box just added an app for Hulu Plus. Users can pay for the $8 monthly subscription through iTunes.

There's a new way to tag on Twitter. Using the dollar sign before a ticker (such as $FB) will create a cashtag. When clicked, it takes you to the search result of the financials for that company. It's a concept that's already been used by Stocktwits, but that service does more than simply link to a search results page.

And today's show ends with a look at how EA Sports scans the faces of real players for its video games. A demonstration was held in New York's Grand Central Station as the Tottenham Hotspur players were scanned for FIFA Soccer 13.

Players sit still for a couple of minutes as 18 cameras capture images of every angle of their face. In the case of a game like FIFA, players give a neutral expression to create a base model. The computers will later animate those faces with different expressions. (Because there are so many players in a game, it would be a daunting task to capture every unique emotion and expression for every player. But they have the technology to do it.)

The photos will stay with the players for the life of their career, according to Nigel Nunn, the digital imaging lead for The Capture Lab. If players change hair, EA can make an update without needing a new photo.

The Capture Lab team has been traveling the globe to get as many teams as possible for EA's suite of games, but the work is far from over. Not every team will have this capture technology by the time FIFA 13 comes out in September, but more will make the cut for the next version.

Nunn said FIFA was the first to adopt this head-scanning technology, and other sports followed. "FIFA is cutting edge, they're always willing to try the next best thing. They're usually the first to invest in new technology."

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Deputy Minister of Costa Rica is suspended for an erotic video

Costa Rican Vice Minister of Youth Karina Bolaños was fired by President Laura Chinchilla, after it was leaked on the Internet a sex tape of the official.

Bolaños appears in underwear sending a message to a person in front of a camera. “Here I am alone, wishing, hoping to see you on Tuesday. I swear if this pillow was you, what I wouldn’t make you,” she says very sensual.

“The separation of charge will be for her to deal with this case from the private sphere,” said government whips, who stated that the suspension was ordered directly by the president.

Bolaños, wife of a ruling congressman has not yet said anything publicly about the video.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_X0w0WLbClE?feature=player_embedded]

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Scandal, Albanian sentenced in Greece

The Albanian citizen Mark Marku has been sentenced to 18 years in prison in the beginning of this year for armed robbery in a time when he has been in Ireland.

He is married to an Irish woman, July O’reilly, a teacher graduated at the Dublin University in Ireland.

The crime happened in Rrethimnos, Crete, on 3 May 2010, but according to the Sunday Times, Marku has been in Ireland on that day.

The 24 year old was charged of participating in a gang of nine armed people that has committed armed robbery, car theft, illegal arm possession and drug possession.

The three-judge panel has found Marku guilty of all charges, besides the drug possession one.

On the day of the crime, Mark has been with his wife at “Co Carlow”, Ireland, right after he had started working at the Mount Wolesley Hotel.

Mark was offered to work as a part time waiter, a job that he has started on May 3rd, as confirmed by the General Manager of the hotel, Garry Lavin. Dhe official documents of the hotel show that he has even received a bonus on that day for working extra hours.

According to the Irish wife of Mark, O’reilly, he has been to Crete, at his brother, on May 18th, which can be verified from his airplane ticket. The ticket was presented in the trial, but it was rejected as falsified.

The Irish wife of Marku claims that her husband has not had an honest trial due to the hate against Albanians in Crete.

Another Albanian in Britain was charged for a murder that he had not committed, since he was in England when the crime was committed, and he was compensated.

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Organ traffic in Kosovo

Quoting an article published by the daily German “Der Spiegel”, Deutsche Welle says that the EU investigators are tracking organ traffickers of global activity.

The initiative was initiated by cases like a German producer and a poor Russian emigrant, which shows how diseased rich people prolong their life by using the poor.

The authors of the article are Arndt Ginzel, Martin Kruashaar and Steffen Winter. Their article published on Der Spiegel this Monday focuses on the medical clinic “Medicus” in Kosovo. The authors have been able to discuss with a person involved in the affair, Vera Shevdko, who confessed how poverty pushed her to do what many others seem to have done in her situation: selling a part of the body for thousands of Euros.

The person who is tracking the affair is the Prosecutor Jonathan Ratel, who arrived in Kosovo in 2010 to help the EU mission of EULEX in the construction of a Constitutional system. The Canadian started investigating the illegal activity of the organ traffickers from the Medicus Clinic, according to the DW while quoting Spiegel. The Canadian was convinced that the hospital of a German owner has stolen 20-30 kidneys that have been implanted to sick people who are able to pay. The so called kidney donors come from Instambul, Kishineu in Moldavia, or people who had just emigrated in Israel.

“The system has functioned because it was covered by the Kosovo doctors and the administration workers”, declared Spiegel after following for one month all tracks of the mafia organized by the “Medicus” clinic. The searches have expanded  to Israel, Turkey, Belarus and Germany.

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Bujar Nishani new President of the Republic of Albania

The DP Minister of the Interiors Bujar Nishani is elected the President of Albania as the only 73 of the 140 voted in his favor as the opposition did not vote in bloc. Apart from Kastriot Islami all the other opposition members did not vote at all since the SP had constantly declared they would not vote a partisan candidate. After the negotiations which took place on Sunday, the majority had proposed Artan Hoxha, an analyst, but he pulled out early on Monday as he ‘could not bear the storm’ the process was evolving to.

The leader of the Socialist Party Edi Rama did not comment immediately but his previous statements on the process and election signals that Nishani could have been what Rama categorically rejected as a unilateral candidate who represents only the Democratic Party. The SP did not propose a candidate of its own but said it was willing to back a consensual figure embodying the unity of the nation. Fatos Nano, the other candidate was not backed by the SP as Idrizi, present at the negotiation table on Sunday, said on Monday that he had proposed Nano but the SP rejected it on spot.

The troika of ambassadors had called for a consensual president and US Ambassador Arvizu and EU counterpart Ettore Sequi did not even attend the voting session at the parliament which was attended by the OSCE Ambassador Eugen Walfarth only.

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