Recycled Animal Art
Driven by a combination of her passion for fitting odd shapes together and a sympathy toward discarded objects, Japanese artist, Sayaka Ganz creates animals from thrift store plastics. She only select objects that have been used and discarded. She believes the best way for artists to help reduce waste is to show how beautiful the materials can be and what can be done with them.
(via thehappysorceress)
Dieter Rams: Ten principles for good design
Back in the early 1980s, Dieter Rams was becoming increasingly concerned by the state of the world around him – “an impenetrable confusion of forms, colours and noises.” Aware that he was a significant contributor to that world, he asked himself an important question: is my design good design?
As good design cannot be measured in a finite way he set about expressing the ten most important principles for what he considered was good design.
‘Perfect Smell’ invented.
Scientists in Israel claim to have invented the scented equivalent of white noise - a completely neutral odor.
They created olfactory white by taking a large number of unrelated molecules that smell wildly different, and combining them at the same level of intensity. While strong and pungent odors may have dozens of smells, usually they’re related or there’s a strongly dominant note. With olfactory white, everything is reduced to the same level, evening it out, much like white noise.
Even more interesting, it doesn’t matter where those smell components come from. A mix of 30 disparate smells from across the olfactory space will produce much the same olfactory white smell as those from another batch of 30 odorants without any crossover.
Could it be used to mask other odors? Anyone who has ever accidentally unleashed a foul smelling hell in their kitchen would love a smell that actually covers the more offensive stuff with something neutral. Or maybe this will lead to a true deodorant?
There’s also been some work that suggests that hearing problems like tinnitus could be helped by “resetting” the brain to a more neutral state. Could olfactory white be used to the same end for people with smelling disorders?
(via 8bitfuture)
Self-filling water bottle draws water from the air.
The water bottle draws inspiration from the Namib Desert beetle, which is able to draw in 12 percent of its weight in water from the air using hydrophilic areas on its back which cause water to condense.
“We use nanotechnology to mimic this beetle’s back so that we too can pull water from the air,” Sorenson told PRI. “We see this being applicable to anything from marathon runners to people in third-world countries, because we realize that water is such a large issue in the world today, and we want to try to alleviate those problems with a cost-efficient solution. We are looking to incorporate this in greenhouses or green roofs in the immediate future, and then later on, we’re looking to see how far we can really scale this up to supply maybe farms or larger agricultural goals.”
Arguably the most remarkable part might be that fact that Sorenson insists the technology does not require much energy; he said the company’s showed how solar cells and a rechargeable battery can be enough. This means the device could potentially be attached to vehicles, buildings, or even a running human, and still be able to grab all the power it needs supply to move the air over the specially-coated surface.
(via 8bitfuture)
