(Photo: Elizabeth Esponnette)

Ch-Ch-Ch-Chia! It's the classic Chia Pet home decoration made into a garment. Elizabeth Esponnette, a product design professor at the University of Oregon, made this living vest. She spread chia seeds over a muslin garment soaked in water. They grew quickly and even attracted snails. It's a veritable ecosystem!

Esponnette wants to reinvent how we look at clothing. Ecoterre quotes her:

By manipulating materials we’re comfortable in, and those we are not, she seeks to explore new structural and performance possibilities for the products we use.

“Why it is that we are comfortable wearing cow, but uncomfortable wearing other materials like hot glue, chia, and crystal?” she asked. “Is there an optimum level of familiarity with a material for our comfort level?”

-via Inhabitat

The Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists currently rests at 3 minutes to midnight. Randall Munroe of the webcomic xkcd provides yet another argument against Daylight Saving Time. Leave your clocks alone and we all get to live a little longer.

Daniel LaRusso from The Karate Kid

Cuyler Smith, an artist in California, creates trading cards for people you'd never expect, including atheltes from television and movies. He has framed copies on display at Gallery 1988 in Los Angeles. He includes some of the greatest screen athletes of all time, including Teen Wolf and Forest Gump.

(Photo of Lovato and Terrell via WUSA9)

Phyliss Terrell, a great-grandmother in Washington, D.C., was trapped in her third-story apartment. She was getting ready to jump out the window when Truck 7 from the DC fire department arrived. Firefighter Danny Lovato reached her with a ladder.

Both of them were engulfed in smoke. Lovato had an oxygen mask, but Terrell didn't. So Lovato pulled off his mask and gave it to Terrell so that she could survive while other firefighters approached her position from inside the building.

Harshita Murudkar, Shivani Gulati, and Mehak Philip are students at the MIT Institute of Design in Pune, India. They took on a daunting challenge: to design and build a new type of chair in only 2 weeks. This is the marvelous result of their labors. It's a woven hammock set inside a circular frame. It rocks back and forth on two runners.

-via Contemporist

This is Space Oddity, an anamorphic mural painted by Truly Design, an art firm in Turin, Italy. It sweeps over the walls of a hallway in the headquarters of the VF Corporation in Lugano, Switzerland.

The mural is certainly odd, for as you walk through it, the geometric forms distort your sense of space. It begins as a circle, but quickly changes into this:

(Image: Mike Licht)

Are you frustrated that you lost an hour today? That's nothing compared to the experience of daylight saving time during World War II. The belligerent nations often thought that adding extra daylight waking hours would increase productivity and decrease electricity expenditures. Winning the war necessitated maximizing this possible gain to the fullest advantage. Atlas Obscura describes their sometimes extreme efforts to alter official time.

In 1940, the United Kingdom added an hour in the spring. But the government decided to skip the fall reversal. Then, in the spring of 1941, it engaged in the regular adding of an hour. This was called Double Summertime.

In addition to the standard advantages of daylight saving time, Double Summertime made blackouts to prevent air bombings more effective because it gave workers time to get home before they went into effect.The UK decided to keep the practice for the rest of the war.

Other nations used time changes for administrative convenience. For example, Soviet-occupied Germany was on the same time as Moscow:

In 1945, Berlin and Soviet-occupied Germany went on Double Summertime for one summer, putting it in the same time zone as Moscow. Basically, time in Europe was extremely confusing for a while.

(Video Link)

Tortoise wants a snack. The sleepy kitten's toes are a convenience food. Unfortunately for him, the meat is a bit too tough to get down easily.

-via Tastefully Offensive

Isabell Kiefhaber, an artist in Germany, makes tiny miniature scenes of animals and people at play inside rings. You can see more on Etsy or her own website. She takes custom orders for any ring size if you give her about 2 to 3 weeks to work.

(Photo: David Shankbone)

Wait, wait--don't close your browser window yet! Hear me out.

Someday, it may be possible to own a handbag made from Kim Kardashian's own skin--all without harming Kardashian herself.

It's feasible to grow human skin in laboratory settings. In fact, the cosmetics brand L'Oreal already produces 54 square feet of human skin every year. So it's within the realm of possibility to produce on a large scale skin from a specific person's genetic sample. If you'd like a very personal memento of your favorite celebrity, you could have one. Designer Tina Gorjanc considered this possibility for a master's degree project. Ecouterre quotes her:

“Major fashion and cosmetic companies have already signed research collaboration agreement with bioengineering institutes,” Gorjanc said. “Those collaborations are enabling the development of existing skin technologies that were firstly designed for specific medical problems and applying them to commercial products targeting the enhancement of normal human functions.”

Her work is entirely speculative, of course. Yet it also raises the issue that bioengineering technologies are advancing faster than legislation can govern. […]

By envisioning a range of commercial products cultivated from an individual’s skin cells, Gorjanc wanted to show how deficiencies concerning the protection of genetic information can “shape a whole new luxury market.”

Pure Human, as she’s dubbed the work, is a critique of corporations and the terrible ease one person can gain ownership of another’s DNA.

-via Inhabitat

About 100,000 people in the USA are currently waiting for kidney transplants. The right donor kidney has to come along for a transplant to work. About 50% of patients have a great deal of difficulty receiving a transplant and about 20% have such sensitive immune systems that finding a matching kidney is almost impossible.

But that may change. According to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers have found a way to change the immune system of a transplant patient so that it can accept any donor kidney.

This treatment filters a patient's own antibodies out of his blood, then replaces it with different antibodies. Gina Kolata explains at the New York Times:

Desensitization involves first filtering the antibodies out of a patient’s blood. The patient is then given an infusion of other antibodies to provide some protection while the immune system regenerates its own antibodies. For some reason — exactly why is not known — the person’s regenerated antibodies are less likely to attack the new organ, Dr. Segev said. But if the person’s regenerated natural antibodies are still a concern, the patient is treated with drugs that destroy any white blood cells that might make antibodies that would attack the new kidney.

-via Debby Witt | Image: Holly Fischer

Didga the cat, who is a superstar in the skateboarding world, now takes up another ride in this GoPro video. She climbs on the back of Ice, the dog in her family, and goes for a ride. Ice ferries her across the pool.

(Video Link)

Ice, don't be surprised if she scratches you while halfway across the pool. After all, it's her nature.

-via Gifsboom

When your descendants relatives visit your final resting place for generations, they will find it among the other graves by the mark of your waifu. In this case, it's a veritable harem of waifu forming the cast of Love Live!, an enormously popular anime series about high school girls who form an idol singing group in order to save their school from being closed.

Twitter user @t_hide is a stone engraver. He has recently turned his craft to inscribing Love Live! characters on stone and glass. He does incredibly precise work that will make an anime fan the envy of every other resident of a cemetery. You can see more photos of his work at Rocket News 24.

(Video Link)

When George Lucas began working on Star Wars, he approached Ben Burtt, a former classmate at the University of Southern California, for help. Burtt, a professional sound designer, knew how sound effects could subtly shape a story and make a fantasy universe seem real.

Burtt developed the sounds of Star Wars that are now instantly recognizable, including that of the lightsaber, the TIE fighter engine, Darth Vader's breathing, blasters, and R2-D2's beeps and chirps. This task involved a surprising amount of work. For example, to prepare Chewbacca's voice, Burtt recorded several different animals at optimal times and then combined their intonations:

"Mostly bears, with a dash of walrus, dog, and lion thrown in," Burtt once said simply when asked how he found the sounds to create the character of Chewbacca's voice. But it took some doing: Burtt would travel to oceanariums on the off chance that their walruses would give him just the right sound. As he would later recall about visiting Long Beach's Marineland of the Pacific, which closed down in 1987, "Its pool had been drained for cleaning—the walrus was stranded at the bottom, moaning—and that was the sound!"

You can learn more about 6 iconic Star Wars sound effects at Popular Mechanics.

-via Jonah Goldberg

When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Canada leaped to defend the freedom of Europe and declared war. Its citizens raced to enlist in the armed forces to contribute to the effort.

Many of them were rejected because they had medical problems that prevented them from serving effectively. This was a source of disappointment to many and embarrassment to some as they faced public shaming by ignorant fellow citizens who thought that they should be in uniform.

So the Canadian government created a badge that these men could wear to deter their critics. It was a silver or rhodium plated badge that said in either English or French "Applicant for Enlistment - Canada." It affirmed that the person had tried to enlist, but was rejected through no fault of his own. Veterans Affairs Canada quotes the Order in Council that created it:

Persons who have voluntarily declared their unqualified willingness to serve in and beyond Canada in the Military Forces of Canada, and who are refused enlistment by reason of their not possessing, due to no faults of their own, the necessary qualifications then required for enlistment in the Naval, Army and Air Forces of Canada.

-via reddit | Image: Veterans Affairs Canada