"Crowd control" took on a whole new meaning last night as a room full of partygoers in San Francisco were given power over a cocktail-making robot controlled by their smartphones.

Attendees at the closing party for the Google I/O Conference were invited to send a drink recipe via a smartphone app to the Makr Shakr, a three-armed robot designed especially for the show. They could then interact with attendees of similar taste to collaboratively design their perfect drink via social media.

MIT's Senseable City Lab wanted to see what would happen when you let a mass of people take control of an industrial manufacturing machine.

Read the full story: Robotic bartender creates crowd-sourced cocktails via a smartphone app

Kate Krader (@kkrader on Twitter) is Food & Wine's restaurant editor. When she tells us where to find our culinary heart's desire, we listen up.

At Food & Wine magazine, where I work, we keep an ongoing list of apps that we love. They include the Seafood Watch App from the Monterey Bay Aquarium, which helps you choose sustainable seafood. We also shamelessly love our F&W Cocktails App, which has hundreds of great drink recipes and a guide to top bars. Both are free.

I’m also a fan of More Pizza, the app that lets me make virtual pizzas. I found it after I downloaded More Toast, which turns my phone into a virtual toaster. Each of those apps cost me 99 cents, which is fine since I’m now expert at toast and pizza making on the subway.

But I love free things, which is why I’d like to go back to great food- and chef-related apps that happen to cost nothing for you to download.
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File this under the "wouldn't it be cool if ...?" category.

IBM is developing a computer system that could theoretically customize healthy recipes based on your personal taste buds. An outline of the project was presented as part of the company's annual 5 in 5 list - five inventions that could change the world in five years.

"At the end of the day, taste is about chemistry," Bernie Meyerson, vice president of innovation at IBM, told Fast Company.

So how would it work?

Find out in the full story: Future computer system could be your personal chef

Editor's note: Nathan Myhrvold is CEO of Intellectual Ventures, author of "Modernist Cuisine" and "Modernist Cuisine at Home." Sanjay Gupta hosts The Next List on Sundays at 2 p.m. ET, only on CNN

CNN: For people who don't know anything about cooking, how would you define modern cuisine?

Myhrvold: So modern cuisine is the movement of chefs that are trying to create new kinds of food, new food experiences. And they don't care if they have to break some of the traditional rules of cooking to do so.
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Food delivered to your gate at the touch of a screen? It sounds too good to be true, but it's happening at a handful or airports.

About 7,000 Apple iPads are being installed at La Guardia Airport in New York, Toronto Pearson International in Ontario and Minneapolis-St. Paul International in the Twin Cities in a collaboration between airport food and beverage provider OTG Management and Delta Air Lines.
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A burger grown in a laboratory. Sounds like science-fiction? Well up until very recently it probably was but now the prospect of lab-grown meat appearing on our supermarket shelves is closer than ever.

Synthetic or test-tube meat involves taking a small amount of cells from a living animal and growing it into lumps of muscle tissue in the lab, which can then, in theory, be eaten as meat for human consumption.

As well avoiding killing animals, scientists believe it could help reduce the environmental impact of meat production.

Read the full story: Lab-grown meat gives food for thought

Cell phones often claim a spot on the table in restaurants, sitting right next to utensils, plates and glasses. One restaurant is trying to change that.

Eva Restaurant in Los Angeles offers diners a 5% discount for leaving their phones with the receptionist for the entirety of the meal. The new policy went into effect a bit more than a month ago, according to chef Mark Gold, who runs the restaurant with his wife, Alejandra.

Since then, the chef estimates that 40% to 50% of customers have opted in and ditched their phones.

Read the full story on CNN Money: Restaurant offers a 5% discount to eat without your phone

Sometimes, eating your words isn't a bad thing. Now you can do it 140 characters at a time.

As part of their Data Visualization course at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design this past semester, students Kat Zorina, Ruben van der Vleuten, and Kostantinos Frantzis created a project that allows them to transform Twitter data into edible graphs - smoothies, to be exact.
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Google is throwing significant muscle into its new focus on local businesses: It has acquired reviews behemoth Zagat for an undisclosed sum, the company said Thursday.

"[Zagat's] iconic pocket-sized guides ... were 'mobile' before 'mobile' involved electronics," Marissa Mayer, Google's head of local and location services, wrote in a blog post announcing the deal.

Zagat, founded in 1979, rates restaurants on a 30-point scale based on consumer surveys and reviews. Its guides include short paragraphs culled from those reviews, and it operates in 13 categories and more than 100 cities.

Read the full story: "Google buys Zagat in push for local market"