A group of Gen-Zers have managed to fool over 100 fine diners by creating a highly exclusive steakhouse that doesn't actually exist. On Saturday evening 140 diners were invited to Mehran's Steakhouse, thinking they had finally managed to get a spot at the most exclusive restaurant in Manhattan. In reality, it was an elaborate prank pulled off by a 21-year-old, and over 60 of his friends. Mehran's Steakhouse was a joke created in 2021, when Mehran Jahali's 16 housemates decided to commemorate the biweekly steak dinners he'd cook them by marking their Upper East Side Home as Mehran's Steakhouse on Google Maps. His friends and roommates left glowing reviews, resulting intrigued strangers showing up at their door trying to get a table. Taking it one step further, Mehran made a website for their solidly booked, "revolutionary steak experience". By the end of 2022 Mehran's Steakhouse had accumulated a 2,600-person waitlist. Mehran eventually decided to make the steakhouse a reality, recruiting friends to be volunteer staff, choosing a public-bathhouse-turned-event-space for the night, getting a one-day liquor license, food handling permits, and a 212 number to invite select wait listers to a one night dining experience at the restaurant's 'Lower East Side location'. Whilst it was not immediately obvious that the restaurant was in fact one big joke, guests began to notice something was off as the night went on. From the sommelier being unable to open bottles of wine, to the venue being surrounded by photos of Mehran with celebrities such as Albert Einstein, Marilyn Monroe, and JFK. As part of the elaborate act, two waiters paraded around a gallon of whole milk, telling diners it was "intended to represent the bovine life cycle", according to New York Post reporter Hannah Frishberg. There was also a staged crowd outside the restaurant screaming for Drake, as well as a fake proposal. When diners got wind that the restaurant was not what it seemed many were amused, although one couple threatened Mehran with legal action after founding out Merhan's Steakhouse was "fake." Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

Scientists have discovered a way to store the Sun’s energy in rocks and convert the heat into electricity. Using an approach called concentrated solar power, a team of researchers from Tanzania found that certain granite and soapstones could store solar heat at a sufficiently high density to serve as a primitive form of battery. Thermal energy storage has been touted as a low-cost way of storing and harvesting energy from the Sun, even when it’s no longer shining. Last year, scientists from Sweden and China came up with a way to store solar energy for nearly two decades using an ultra-thin chip, which serves as a thermoelectric generator. The innovative system could technically be integrated into electronics, however it remains too costly to implement at scale. By contrast, the granite and soapstone samples offer a low cost and readily available method of storing solar energy, the researchers said. “Using rocks as a storage medium offers the potential of affordability due to the abundance and low cost of rocks,” the researchers noted in a paper outlining their findings. “An air-rock bed has low investment cost, high reliability and efficiency, is environmentally friendly, and does not require the use of heat exchangers.” The rock bed captures and collects solar thermal energy up to 600 °C, which is then used to boil liquid into steam that powers a generator turbine to produce electricity. The results were detailed in a study, titled ‘Experimental Investigation of Soapstone and Granite Rocks as Energy-Storage Materials for Concentrated Solar Power Generation and Solar Drying Technology’, published by the American Chemical Society. Other thermal energy storage systems have focussed on salt and water, with researchers at Eindhoven University of Technology unveiling a heat battery last year that they claim could work at scale. Rather than capturing heat from the Sun, the system instead collects industrial residual heat. “While the potential is great, we have also seen many great potential technologies that have not made it,” the scientists said at the time. “So we’re going to keep our feet on the ground and take this one step at a time.” Read More Scientists break world record for solar power window material Scientists smash world record for solar power window material Nasa holds urgent meeting about sightings of UFOs Opinion: The real reason companies are warning that AI is as bad as nuclear war

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OAKLAND--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug 7, 2023--