Gourd crafts can be fun, but the shapes are often impractical for daily usage. With The Gourd Project, Jun Aizaki of the CRÈME design house is trying to change that. To reduce waste from packaging, he's making completely biodegradable cups, jars, and vases from gourds.
From a farm in Pennsylvania, Aizaki is able to grow complete vessels in six weeks. He grows the gourds inside molds with optimal shapes.
Molding gourds is not new. What is new about Aizaki's project is his objective of making this process available for mass production. He writes:
We plan to initially invest money towards R+D, so we can grow the gourds in both indoor farming facilities and outdoor farms, allowing us to scale up the quantity and lower the price per gourd. The goal is to keep the high quality and quantity, so that The Gourd can be a viable challenger to the plastic waste industry.
-via Colossal
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Very very very cool. To go with that, there's a video of Adam Savage dancing in the Faraday Cage while Arc Attack plays their rather *ahem* electric version of the Doctor Who theme. Search "Adam Savage Arc Attack" on YouTube and you'll probably find several -- gotta love cameraphones. :-D
It'd be awesome to see a Doctor Who episode of Mythbusters, but it could be challenging; it's more science fantasy than hard sci-fi, so many of the claims are fundamentally untestable. (Does the solar system explode if you go back in time and meet yourself, and can this be avoided by channeling the energy into a regeneration machine? Stuff like that.) But there's gotta be stuff they could test.