The magic ice cream van

Your dreams are about to come true

The magic ice cream van

Remember when you were young and assumed that all clouds were probably made from ice cream?

Remember when you tried to jump out of a plane only to discover that clouds are actually made from water vapour and plummeted to your violent death? Okay so that was just a dream but still, the discovery was made in some childhood-ruining form.

Well, two Fairy Godmother style figures, Zoe Papadopoulou and Cathrine Kramer, have been working hard on a solution to all of this crushing disappointment. While they haven't managed to actually modify clouds themselves (give them time), they have managed to create a machine that can make its own ice cream snow.

The Cloud Project is an initiative that uses nanotechnology (manipulating matter on an atomic and molecular scale) to fuel an ice cream van that spurts out morsels of the good stuff as it it were coming from the sky.

They do this by pouring liquid nitrogen into the ingredients of ice cream.

This summer it's heading to China where we fear it may cause a nationwide ban on 'machines that create ice cream in ways that contradict the national belief of how ice cream is normally made'.

Find out more here.

Marc Chacksfield
Content Director

As Content Director of Shortlist, Marc likes nothing more than to compile endless lists of an evening by candlelight. He started out life as a movie writer for numerous (now defunct) magazines and soon found himself online - editing a gaggle of gadget sites, including TechRadar, Digital Camera World and Tom's Guide UK. At Shortlist you'll find him mostly writing about movies and tech, so no change there then.