buzz off makes insect repellent clothing by permeating fabric with permethrin, a pesticide that can endure 25 washings (the ‘product life’ according to their site). this pesticide is only a ‘possible’ human carcinogen according to the EPA, for whom this is the only approved repellent clothing today. now that repellents can be part of clothes, when will clothing become a drug delivery method in themselves? your lucky shirt may actually make you feel that way, with only minor side effects.
a great invention in our on-going battle to take back the streets: the portable zebra crossing allows you to take possession of the asphalt you need to cross, regardless of whether you’re allowed to.
via connor
when i was in west palm this past weekend i saw these blue plastic bubbles washed up on the shore – they looked like shriveled balloons, only they were portuguese man-of-war: although these are highly poisonous, they look just like the plastic bags that wash ashore and fill the oceans. two things: have they evolved to look like trash as camouflage? and, can we use their genes to grow our own plastic bags?
rotorooter is sponsoring a contest in which this pimped out toilet is the ultimate prize – enough said.
via porcelain
yahoo’s new pipes allow you to play a little more with the internet by creating your own aggregators of web content (i.e. find an apartment for rent near a park) through a quasi-intuitive graphical interface where the sources of information, operators and user inputs are windows connected by pipes. the programming language works kind of like LEGO mindstorms’ or scratch, where parts of code are represented as building blocks with specific roles picked from a catalog and arranged geometrically on the screen. researchers proposing an analytic method could one day code it into such a program and evaluate it by having it used by a community of their peers.
when one of your products is described as “it does some treatment on balding head and over-secrete fat pelt” (the ozone active oxygen biopelt, first from the left) it seems to follow that you are selling image over content. and that’s why you need design: to make something with very little technological differentiation (ok, none) over its competition (ok, nothing) still sell. chinameiyu produces a stunning and somewhat frightening series of machines that achieve more through their intimidating product design than anything else (unless “red-light” therapy on the right really does help “eliminating free radical”).
brandon sullivan has invented a drawing machine that makes a unique piece of art as it is shipped – essentially a pencil-studded ball in a paper-lined box. it was inspired by his earlier vibratory drawing machine, a far cry from tinguely’s originals. what is interesting about this new method is that it could be functional as well: for years delicate goods have shipped with sensors to ensure that they are not damaged along the way. the advent of sensor RFID tags and GPS systems makes it possible to know a lot about where a package has been – at a substantial cost. while the drawings made by the shipping method are apparently random, a careful combination of drawing tool and enclosure could already determine a number of factors about the shipping such as how long it was in transit and how much it was shaken. temperature activated dyes or varying hardnesses and colors could help establish additional factors, for example.
via make
swamp’s improvised empathetic device is a close cousin of philip k. dick’s empathy machine: a way to stay in contact with humanity’s greater suffering through direct physical empathy – in this case administered by an armband with a needle on a solenoid. the ied pricks you every time a soldier dies in iraq – presumably because it would be too intrusive if it pricked you for each of the civilians killed. another nice touch in this design is the circuit board in the shape of iraq – a way for expert-designed and typically cryptic hardware to serve as an intuitive interface.
