A few of us at work have been pranked one too many times by a certain coworker by the name of Mike. He was out of town for a few days and we had some extra cardboard laying around. This is what happens when you push creative IT workers too far! Enjoy your new office Mike!
A Chinese schoolgirl has invented a pair of shoes that enable her to walk on water. Wang Wenting, from Chengdu, says she got her inspiration from watching ducks. The high school girl took nearly four years, experimenting with different materials, to come up with the design.
Meet Hugo Zamoratte, an Argentinian "Bottle Man" who discovered his talent quite by accident:
He discovered his talent for dislocating almost every bone in his body by accident. In 1964 Hugo was serving in the National Guard practising the drill, when his arms dislocated. So, he began to practice contortionism and yoga exercises. The idea for the unique routine of squeezing into a bottle came a few years later. He adopted bottles after being inspired by a dream about the Bible’s three wise men. “I saw one of the wise men go into a bottle”. It was 18 months of training and then I went into a bottle”. He has been filling confined space for more than 20 years. Hugo says:” I love my job, I love my bottle. It’s sometimes better to be in the bottle than outside”.
His training almost cost him his life in a hotel room in Santiago de Chile in 1982, when he became stuck in the bottle with the door firmly closed. He was freed after 40 minutes, thanks to a timely visit by a cleaner. “I was starting to hallucinate and I was worried that my time had come”.
In 2004, Dutch artist Joanneke Meester had an 8-inch-long piece of her skin surgically removed so she can use it to cover a gun-shaped plastic and fiber mold. Voilà – a skin gun.
Artists Arash Kaynama and Kelly Sant created this awesome piece of useful furniture called "Genius Table," which comes with a 300 sheet "Genius Pad" giant sticky notes – hey, it’s for those big ideas you got!
An oldie but goodie: Meet Alba, a transgenic bunny that fluoresced green (when exposed to uv light … okay, not exactly glow in the dark – but close enough) thanks to a jellyfish gene for Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP). Alba was genetically engineered by Eduardo Kac in 2000:
"Alba", the green fluorescent bunny, is an albino rabbit. This means that, since she has no skin pigment, under ordinary environmental conditions she is completely white with pink eyes. Alba is not green all the time. She only glows when illuminated with the correct light. When (and only when) illuminated with blue light (maximum excitation at 488 nm), she glows with a bright green light (maximum emission at 509 nm). She was created with EGFP, an enhanced version (i.e., a synthetic mutation) of the original wild-type green fluorescent gene found in the jellyfish Aequorea Victoria. EGFP gives about two orders of magnitude greater fluorescence in mammalian cells (including human cells) than the original jellyfish gene [2].
Because firemen can’t get people trapped in a burning building out fast enough down ladders, Israeli inventor Eliyahu Nir suggested a neat solution:
A specialised emergency truck would carry an extendible boom that could be raised to a window in a burning building. Jaws at the top of the boom would then expand to clamp a small platform inside the window frame, while a spiralling tube would be dropped from the frame down to the ground.
Anyone trapped inside the building could then step out of the window, onto the platform and into the mouth of the tube. Before they know it they are spiralling safely down to the ground. Nir claims that friction and the tube’s twisted shape should slow their descent, while a soft mat laid on the street below would break their fall.
Posted by Alex in Art, Pictures on August 13, 2006 at 1:01 am
Kazuya Kanemaru made a balloon shaped like the atomic bomb "Little Boy" that was dropped on Hiroshima – the first nuclear weapon used in warfare, and traveled across Japan to interview the people’s reaction to the art piece.
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