HOME |
RSS | 
Archaeologists
have found the world's oldest mattress in a cave in South Africa:
The mattress—which consists of layers of reeds and rushes—was discovered at the bottom of a pile of bedding made from compacted grasses and leafy plants. The bedding had accumulated at the Sibudu Cave site in KwaZulu-Natal (map) over a period of 39,000 years, with the oldest mats dating to 77,000 years ago. [...]
What's more, researchers believe the ancient people added a "top sheet" to the bedding made of insect-repelling greenery, possibly to ward off biting bugs such as mosquitoes and flies.
The whole family slept on it: Link
Comments Off
This five-foot diameter mattress is from Korean designers Lily Suh and Zoono of i3lab. The image of the moon is by astrophotographer Chin Wei Loon. There’s also a glow-in-the-dark pillow to go with it. Link -via Laughing Squid
Comments Off 
There’s a growing market in luxury mattresses. The most expensive made in the United States is the Palais Royale by E.S. Kluft & Co., which costs $33,000. It contains 10 pounds of cashmere and its coils are tied together by hand with Italian twine. The price only goes up for higher-end, imported European models:
At $69,500—roughly the price of a Porsche Cayenne S hybrid SUV—there’s the Vividus king-size mattress set from Hästens Sängar AB, of Sweden. Hästens says it takes 160 hours to assemble this mattress entirely by hand, which has a Swedish-pine frame with thick layers of horsehair, cotton, flax and wool inside. The company says since introducing the mattress in 2006, it has sold 250 of them world-wide.
There’s an arms race under way in the world of luxury mattresses that jittery economists and sluggish home sales seem unable to stop. Even at the middle-to-upper-middle tiers, mattress prices are creeping up as companies cater to mainstream demand for luxurious sleep.
Voon. At the link, you can view a cross section of the Palais Royale.
Link via Marginal Revolution | Photo (unrelated) via Flickr user aralbalkan used under Creative Commons license
Trying to ignore the alarm isn’t going to work with the Princess in a Pea Alarm Clock (PPAC). Jeff Saltzman rigged an air compressor to lift up one side of a mattress when it’s time to wake up. If the sleeper doesn’t get up, s/he’ll get thrown to the floor.
UPDATE 12/14/09: I’ve swapped out the video. Thanks, GlitchEnzo!
The safest place is keep your money is to stuff it into your mattress. Or, alternatively, this mattress-shaped piggy bank which received no TARP funds and comes complete with a miniature pillow.
Link via Nerd Approved
An Israeli woman named Annat decided to surprise her elderly mother by giving her a new mattress to replace the rattty old one she had been sleeping on for decades. But what was supposed to be a pleasant surprise turned to be a nightmare:
Annat, who did not want to reveal the rest of her name, told Israel Army Radio that she woke up early Sunday to get a good deal on a new mattress as a surprise for her mother.
She fell asleep that night, exhausted after lugging up the new mattress and hauling down the old one to be taken out with the trash.
When her mother realized the next day what her daughter had done, she told her that she had been using the mattress to stash away her life savings and had nearly $1 million padding the inside of the worn-out mattress.
Annat ran downstairs, but it was too late. The garbage truck had already taken away the money-stuffed mattress.
And thus the hunt for the $1 million mattress began in Israeli landfills: Link
