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How To: Fold a Chopsticks Rest from Its Paper Wrapper

The next time you go out for sushi with friends, impress your company by fashioning your own chopstick rest using the paper wrapper the wooden chopsticks come in. Keeping the ends of your chopstick off the table surface makes for good hygiene (who knows when was the last time the table was really wiped clean?), and there is no awkward moment of getting your chopsticks off your plate when your server whisks your finished plate away mid-meal. Gotta love functional origami.

News: Print Yourself in 3D

Since the early genesis of the brilliant Microsoft Kinect hack, inventive applications have been popping up nonstop. One of the most fascinating projects to surface recently falls within the realm of 3D printing. "Fabricate Yourself"—a hack presented at the Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction Conference in January—allows users to pose in front of an Xbox Kinect, which then converts a captured image into a 3D printable file. What does this mean exactly? Think Han Solo trapped in carbon...

News: Enter the Trippy Vortex of Optical Distortion

New York based studio softlab's latest installation "(n)arcissus" is an eye-bending site specific installation currently on display at the Frankfurter Kunstverein art center in Frankfurt, Germany. The piece, made with over 1,000 mylar and vinyl laser cut panels, hangs in a stairwell, measuring 9 meters tall from the lobby ceiling.

News: "Living" Flower Dresses Change With the Seasons

While I don't find Mattijs van Bergen and Anouk Vogel's "Living" dresses aesthetically earth shattering, I'm wowed by the concept. The fashion designer and landscape architect created a collection of dresses made from recycled inner tubes and flowers for a late summer exhibition titled “Fashion & Architecture” at the Amsterdam Centre for Architecture.

WARNING: House-On-the-Go May Induce Nausea

Experimental house, "Roll It", is a collaborative project within Germany's University of Karlsruhe. The basic concept is as follows: using a cylindrical design to maximize space within a minimum housing unit. Not sure how "space efficient" this would actually be, but using it as transport could be fun (until the nausea inevitably sets in).

News: Paintings That Live and Breathe

Washington, D.C. based artist Alexa Meade completely redefines traditional body painting. She paints with acrylic paint directly on human flesh and clothing, making her subjects appear as if they were part of a painting (or a living painting immersed in everyday life).

You Won't Believe They Roll: How to Build Half Circle and Elliptical Wobblers

If you thought the last post on Two Circle Wobblers was wild, then wait until you see what happens when you build wobblers out of two half circles or two ellipses. In both of these cases, the center of gravity still remains constant in the vertical direction, allowing them to roll down the slightest of inclines or even travel a significant distance on a level surface if given a push or even when blown on.

How To: Ikea Makes Beautiful (Not Quite HowTo) Cooking Videos

When images of a rumored Ikea cookbook surfaced through the blogger grapevine, foodie and graphic design fetishists alike grew ecstatic. The leaked images from the 140 page coffee-table baking book presented pristinely assembled, OCD patterns of ingredients and the resulting desserts for 30 classic Swedish baking recipes. Forsman & Bodenfors, the Swedish agency behind the project took a different approach to the typical organization of the standard baking cookbook.

News: Early Humans Use Each Others' Skulls As Drinking Cups

How far would you go to be resourceful? Early Britons used each others' skulls as drinking cups and bowls. Recently, researcher Silvia Bello found human skulls with the top cut off laying in Gough's Cave, England. Skillful cut marks make it look like fellow humans scraped off the dead skin to clean the bone, and chips around the rim of the skull cup make it look like the edges were evened out for a better drinking experience. Researchers have found other skull cups in France and Germany, but ...

Start Your Day Off Right: Beautiful Oscar Nominated Short "The Lost Thing"

The Lost Thing is a lovely short written by Shaun Tan and co-directed by Tan and Andrew Ruhemann (executive producer of the fantastic doc My Kid Could Paint That). Based on the award-winning children’s book of the same title (also by Tan), the piece was created over a span of eight years(!) using a mix of CGI and 2D handpainted elements. Tan, whose background is in painting, spent much of the duration "carefully building, texturing and lighting of digitial elements to create a unique aestheti...

How To: Hot Wheels! Workshop Teaches Kids How to Steal Cars

It may look like a modern take on Oliver Twist but, we assure you, this is for real. Before you get too alarmed, however, you should note that the headline reads "how to steal cars" and not simply "to steal cars." We are, after all, dealing with the fine people at Machine Project, a Los Angeles-based non-profit community space organized around the investigation of "art, technology, natural history, science, music, literature, and food."

News: Wedding Ring Inscribed with Voice Recording

Well, here's a darling idea if there were one. Best not to consider the implications of making a low-fidelity promise of eternal love, of course. But, really, just darling: Working with a jeweller and the vinyl record manufacturer Dubstudios, I created this engagement ring for my partner Shelina. The ring has a 20 second recorded message (my proposal) etched onto it's surface and can be played back with a miniature record player.

Grow While You Go: The Bus-Top Gardens of New York City

If you were to look on the roof of your local city bus, what would you find? A little bit of dirt, most likely, and a whole lot of space. Precisely the stuff you'd find in an empty container garden! Enter NYU graduate student Marco Castro Cosio's Bus Roots, a project which, through installing gardens on the rooftops of New York City buses, seeks to "reclaim forgotten space, increase quality of life and grow the amount of green spaces in the city."

News: Alligator Zoo Drowning

The idea is to get at least three of the guys to go to a zoo with an indoor alligator pond inside one of the indoor buildings with a railing around the pond. The pond needs to be murky and anyone looking down at the pond should not be able to see more than a foot down in the water. A fake alligator head on a hydroaulic cylinder will be floating at the surface near one side of the pond as that is usually all you can see of an alligator when it is wallowing in the water anyway. A scuba diver wi...

News: No, It's Not an App. It's a Japanese Soft Drink.

Shiny, pretty touchscreen vending machines have finally gone mainstream in Japan. My only question is... what's taken so long? The vending machine business can be quite lucrative (location, location, location), so all the more reason to make the interface as aesthetically appealing and user friendly as the iPhone AND as smart as a robot (read below). Features (translation via YouTube):

HowTo: Save Wet Electronics

It's one of the most popular queries on the web, meaning the wet electronic disaster is likely a common mishap. There are many answers out there, but if you're lucky enough to have never googled it, pay attention now. You never know when you may drop your cell phone or iPod in the sink...

News: This Cow Tongue Looks Delicious

Here's another jewel from Serious Eats series, The Nasty Bits: yummy cow tongue, complete with that lovely texture we all know so well. Though most us likely have a negative visceral reaction to the idea of tongue, Serious Eats make a compelling argument that it is actually one of the tastiest bits of the animal.

HowTo: Poach an Egg Perfectly

Since we've already mastered the fried egg, it's time to move on to a slightly more ambitious task. Apartment Therapy brings us another step-by-step on the art of the egg. This time around, HowTo: poach an egg perfectly. You Will Need: