It’s a dress and it’s a boat, Canada-based designer Jacqueline Bradley’s artwork features a surprisingly perfect combination of two commonly irrelevant things and accomplishes an impressive visual effect. But there’s still one thing I really want to know: will the dress float on the water just as regular boats do if we wear it in the water?

Designer: Jacqueline Bradley

“Descender”, announced as “the very first of its kind”, is an innovative piece of sport equipment that’s really hard to define: it’s not a regular sled or a skateboard, but seems quite like a small tank, as all its wheels are wrapped by treads. That unique design not only ensures a maximum traction and power, but allows the Descender to be used in almost every season and all terrain hills.

New good things in and old good things out, undoubtedly we’re now living in a throw-away culture nowadays. But instead of throwing those unneeded items away, there’s actually a better way for us to deal with them: to recycle them via the Swap-O-Matic Vending Machine. The machine comes with thirteen compartments where the items to be traded can be placed in and one touchscreen interface on which users can keep track of their account. When using the vending machine, you can either directly exchange your unused item for one placed in the compartment or place it in one compartment for sale. Quite interestingly, when you buy or sell one thing, you won’t need to pay or get paid with real money but virtual credits instead. As a result, as long as you have something in hand, you can exchange it for a needed item conveniently.

“So what is the weather today?” Wait, wait, I’ll soon tell you something about the temperature with my hands to feel the Cryoscope. It’s not for kidding, as industrial design student Robb Godshaw’s Cryoscope is indeed an intelligent device that allows you to feel the weather with hands rather than to read cryptic icons with eyes. The Cryoscope is made from a heat sink, cooling fan, and a Peltier element, which are all housed within an aluminum cube to reflect tomorrow’s predicted air temperature by heating up or cooling down. In case that the cube may get too hot for you to touch, the designer also built the Cryoscope with a red and blue colored LED to provide a visual cue to the temperature change.

Designer: Robb Godshaw

Stroke is one disease that ranks top on the list of “most dangerous threats to human health”, but pity that there was no completely useful ways to cure or monitor the stroke, until these days when scientists from Mayo Clinic in Florida have developed the wearable head patch. The device is known as near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS), and it will be attached to a patient’s forehead like a sticker to monitor the potential advent of another stroke through the simple act of shining light through the brow skin. It will measure blood oxygen levels in the brain, based on which a doctor can determine whether or not there’s a possibility of another stroke. Compared with other products that are usually big and heavy, the device is really smart for everyday use.

These notepads are especially impressive because, more often than not, we may just feel sleepy rather than hungry when seeing or using some notepads… Not everybody loves to study hard, but they do all prefer to play hard. So if you want something unique on your desktop, you should never miss these “Delicious” Notepads!

Selling Price: $12

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Yes, yes, my house is very charming, with bright white walls, good-colored floors, well-designed furniture, and Rooftop Ceiling Lights!! Though the ceilings used to be easily ignored by people, they will never act that way anymore, after Hamburg and Berlin based company Lightboys have brought us with these delicately-designed ceiling lights. They’re clever combinations of large format photographs and common ceiling lights, each featuring a classical domed roof to add some romance to your houses.

Designer: Lightboys

Using an electric circuit, two razor blades, a 3D printer and an LED light, Brian Beebe has successfully created a wire stripper all by himself. The smart device is very clever: when the blades have made it through the plastic sheathing to the metal wire beneath, the circuit is then completed and thus the LED indicator is turned on to alert the users to stop cutting.

Designer: Brian Beebe

How to effectively treat burns with fewer efforts? It seems that scientists from all over the world are offering us with different solutions, and the Biomask is rightly the one put forward by the USA military. The mask is built with sensors, actuators and a regenerative elixir inside, which would help your face regain mussing facial tissue within several months. The biomask for facial faces is expected to hit the market in 2017.

Designed to look like a transmission tower, the Nanton Coat Rack by Palette Industries not only comes with a unique shape, but some profound meanings: a good design can work like a transmission tower, to carry good ideas and important information from people to people.

Designer: Palette Industries

Art is an energy-costing and time-costing work: to finish these Paper Collage portraits, artist Nathalie Boutté has spent much time in splitting old pages of books into strips and then arranging them into remarkable artworks carefully. The process to make each artwork takes really a long time, but the result? Wow, it’s surprisingly good – as you step backward, the painting then gradually becomes much clearer and more charming.

Designer: Nathalie Boutté

As your little babies grow up day by day, their cradles are no more needed but simply left in a garage full of dirt. To solve that problem, designer Martin Price has come up with this Convertible Rocking Cradle that can be divided into two rocking chairs for average-sized adults to use. It’s really a clever concept, right? We wish it would soon come into production.

Designer: Martin Price

No refrigerators or other alternative devices, you can now enjoy cold drinks anytime and anywhere simply by opening your cans and pressing a tab on the cans. Although many companies, like Pepsi Cola, have been focused on the self-chilling technology for a long period, this self-chilling can finally comes from Joseph Company International, which announced that the temperature of the liquid inside will decrease by 30 degrees within three minutes with a simple motion.

Designer: Joseph Company International

Although I think smartphones are already cool enough, some people are just trying to make them cooler: for instance, you can connect a Xappr Gun onto your smartphones and convert your mobiles into a virtual gun! Claimed to be available this Spring, the Xappr will actually be compatible with iOS, Android and Windows Phone devices.

Selling Price: $30

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Really quite a long time has passed since we were informed that computers or other advanced devices could detect human’s brain activity. And to push that technology forward to a newer level, scientists now claim that they can use a computer to decipher brain activity too. In other words, a computer is now capable of “translating” brain signals into actual words. That means, people who have difficulty in speaking could communicate and interact with others again, simply by thinking in sentences.

As the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympics Games are soon to begin, the London government is now busying with many projects to make the city good enough to welcome guests from all over the world. One of those projects is the LCD smart recycling bins built in London’s streets and public spaces. Each recycling bin features a couple of LCD screens on either side, which will display the latest news from 6 am to the mid-night every day. The bins are fitted with Wi-Fi too, so that they can offer a better and wider connectivity. Since these bins are nearly the most high-tech recycling bins we’ve ever met, each of them will cost about £30,000 to build.

Hey, what’s that up in the sky? Is it a superman? Not really, as it is RcSuperhero flying mechanism indeed. Measuring 78-inches tall and weighing just 3.3 pounds, the RcSuperhero looks very eye-catching in the sky, making it one of the most-wanted gifts this year. So would you like one too?

Selling Price: $345

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BangBang handle, a unique door handle rightly in the same shapes as pistols. Hence whenever you open the door, you may feel that you’re holding a pistol…Isn’t that exciting? And that’s not dangerous at all.

Designer: Nikita Kovalev

With its concept and technology becoming more and more widely accepted and used, the augmented reality technology has already been adopted by designers and scientists to create something unique, just like this “Mirracle” project. Led by researchers from Technical University of Munich, the project is actually an updated version of the interactive mirror systems that display tomography images virtually on the body of the person who was scanned, and it now turns out “more intuitive and easy to use”.

During January 26 to January 29, 2012, the spectacular Ghent Light Festival held in Belgium and showcased several fantastic light art pieces submitted by designer from all over the world. One of those interesting projects is this cathedral made from no less than 55,000 LED lights. The art installation is very huge, eye-catching, especially when it is turned on with all the colorful lights in the evenings. But quite surprisingly, the cathedral, though has used over 55,000 LEDs, consumes only 20Kwatt / h of electricity, thus making it both a charming art piece and energy-saving project as well.

Why haven’t we realized that even the bottle corks may have lives before? Fortunately it’s still not too late for us to know that truth, and welcome you to this new world of bottle cork animals. They’re made by two Israeli design studios, who packaged all the required body parts in with each bottle of wine, for people to build out a bear, buffalo, bunny, crow, deer or monkey with the cork, so as to recycle your resources in an easy and interesting way.

Utilizing a photochromic screen-print composition, designer Solenne Morigeaud has constructed the “Hide-and-seek with the Missing” floor that will reveal a vivid color palette whenever exposed to UV light. By designing such a color-changing floor, Solenne aims to bring the public with the awareness of many floral species extinction threat, as well as to inform them the importance of preservation of nature.

Designer: Solenne Morigeaud

Quite commonly we say that there’s valuable knowledge in books, but sometime there’s a comfortable soft pillow inside it too. It is disguised in the same appearance as a dictionary, allowing you to trick others for fun and to enjoy a sleep anytime and anywhere you may want. So how do you like it? Just work hard, and sleep better!

Selling Price: $80

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A new paint made of carbon nanotubes and fly ash is announced as a cheaper and easier way to monitor facilities like bridges, mines and wind turbines. The development is put forward by researchers from the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, who explain that the nanotubes’ conductivity will change if they get bent, and wireless transmitters placed throughout the structure would receive the data and resend it to the system, using the conductivity change as a sign of defect in the structure to alert people of possible dangers. Also, the paint is said to be cheap too, allowing it to be used in a wide range of buildings, bridges, coal mines, etc.

The future of weapons is indeed quite unpredictable as scientists are developing and launching new devices with at a really fast pace. Recently the Sandia National Labs has just tested a prototype laser-guided bullet that can steer itself and home in on targets. It doesn’t look like a bullet, as you may have seen from the picture: it is four inches long, with fins, optical sensor, actuators and other devices built in and outside. The fins can correct the bullet’s trajectory 30 times every second, not only ensuring a more accurate shot, but indicating that the bullet can even strike moving targets.

【More Information Here】

Undoubtedly everyone loves coffee – while most of us are used to enjoying a cup of coffee every day, the American company Virus is intended to produce comfortable base layer fabric that traps heat close to the skin, using recycled coffee grounds. The new fabric is announced capable of increasing skin surface temperature by 10 degrees Fahrenheit, and it features anti-UV and anti-odor properties as well.

Selling Price: $30.50-$60.99

Those days you carefully kept your various tools in drawers or cabinets have already passed, and from now on we’ll need to show off our delicate tools by hanging them on the wall – this not only lets you use your tools as wall decorations, but allows you to find the needed tools more quickly and conveniently. To offer you some functional and practical holders to organize your tools on the wall, we strongly recommend the Tool Dots and the drill bit holder. They’re both easy to operate and use, though function in totally different ways: the Tool Dots is especially useful to hold tools like hammers or wrenches, while the drill bit holder can keep nails in place, just as its name implies.

【Tool Dots】

Selling Price: $14.95 (for 12)

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【Drill Bit Holder】

Selling Price: $13.99

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“Watpack” is a pet shelter concept that can be molded into various desired shapes to offer your pets a personalized house. It’s stylish in looks and easy to use, and thus offers us a simplest way to build the pets a unique home, one that is different from others on the market.

Designer: Maria Lecanda

Let our opinion become clear and unbiased now: PC games actually can offer something more important than the great fun we usually get – it provides us with creative inspirations too! Look at this Ultimate-battlefield PC Case: it’s designed and made by a PC gamer, with a really cool appearance, good functions and even a beverage storage space.

White, square, square, white, why is every outlet so similar to others? Can’t they have their own personalities?  Of course they could, with the aid of these stickers. Printed on glossy vinyl, you can combine them in any number of ways to give your outlets an attractive look.

Selling Price: $4.95

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With a long 8 years’ development and improvement, the New Zealand-based Rex Company have finally come up with this robotic exoskeleton, which can help wheelchair users to stand and walk independently. The artificial exoskeleton is comprised of 29 on-board computer processors to control its movements and keep balance, thus to enable the Rex users to conveniently direct the device to sit, stand, walk and turn. Although the device is bit of heavier, measuring 38 Kg in total, it won’t become a burden to the users at all. Instead, the robotic exoskeleton may help to support up 60% of weight of its users, so that they could move with the Rex with minimum effort.

【More Information Here】

“Secure Magnet” is one of Apple’s new patent applications. It works in quite a similar way as the fingerprint-recognized devices: each cellphone or tablet will be built with a magnet that operates a switch, and it will only be activated when a “correlated” magnet inside a key-fob touches it. Once this patent application is applied in producing new Apple devices, the company is intended to protect your private information in a more efficient way. But now, we may still need to wait for years to use the “Secure Magnet”, since Apple offers no information on when this application will be used.

MITI System’s micro-needle is a medical instrument that can function in both beauty and medical fields. It is perfect to make beauty instruments that are widely used by skin-care specialists with the micro-needle, which will not only ensure a better absorption of cosmetics into skin, but solve skin problems like age spots, blemish and others. On the other hand, the micro-needle would benefit to the medical fields too, where it can be used as a delivery system of things such as vaccine, hormone, insulin, protein treatment products.

Designer: MITI System

【Via】

Avalanche airbags backpacks? Not any more, as we now have these avalanche airbag clothing developed by The North Face. This innovative vest has integrated a nitrogen-based airbag system from German manufacturer ABS, and it is built with airbags in both the front and the back, to provide the wearer a full protection whenever it is activated to work. Furthermore, as soon as the airbags pump out, they will immediately increase the user’s surface area so that he will float on top of the moving snow rather than get trapped by it.

Selling Price: $1,300

Because it’s not the first foldable guitar we’ve ever seen or introduced here, this one from designers Shlomi Daniel and Uri Nir must have gotten its own unique features, e.g. its tension release mechanism that promises the guitar a perfect timbre even after it is repeatedly folded and unfolded. Still, like all other foldable guitars, the instrument could be easily and conveniently carried around for a outdoor use.

Designer: Shlomi Daniel and Uri Nir

“Moon river, wider than a mile”, and there’s a boat candle floating on the water… Designed by Slovak designer Roman Ficek, these candles are inspired by folded paper boat and each comes with a cute bright color. All handcrafted, the candle can burn up to approximately two hours.

Designer: Roman Ficek

Fashionable, durable, except for those existing ones, we now have another new reason to explain why we all love jeans: because they smell pretty good, good like raspberries! That’s rightly the unique feature of these Weird Guy Scratch n’ Sniff Raspberry Scented jeans from Naked & Famous. They’re made with denim that is coated with millions of tiny micro-scent capsules, thus whenever you on the surface of the jeans, you will smell yummy raspberry fragrance around. As an additional bonus, these jeans can still release fragrance even after four to five (or even more) times of washes. Isn’t that amazing?! I mean, when you though your jeans are bit of smelly, you can just scratch to make them smell good again.

Designer: Naked & Famous Denim

Selling Price: $165

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According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), a driver’s inattention is one of the main factors that may lead to a car collision. So while you’re with your airbag to offer protection, you still need something more efficient, like the new Mobileye 5-Series. It comprises a camera and proprietary algorithms and microprocessor that will function in unison, intending to alert the drivers to regain full attention whenever there are unintended lane departures, imminent collisions or something else. The system is compatible with many kinds of cars, trucks, buses and RVs, and it will work perfectly in both days and the nights.

【More Information Here】

Researchers from the Purdue University have created a Bass-powered medical implant that can utilize sound waves as an energy source. This new pressure sensitive microelectromechanical system has a vibrating cantilever that’s receptive to sound within the 200Hz to 500Hz frequency spectrum. By applying such smart technology into producing medical implants, you can then get some better appliances that can convert the low-frequency vibrations into energy, so as to power themselves automatically.

Designer: Purdue University

“Give me a place to stand, and I will move the world”, even though Archimedes’ Lever Law indeed hasn’t been used to move the earth, it does have served us quite much in various ways in our daily life, and this Kuhn Rikon Ratchet Pepper Grinder is rightly a clever product made based on that. The item has a long arm that you can crank back and forth, making it easy for both kids and elderly people to operate. Moreover, it has a smart appearance too, so that you’ll be in a good mood when working with these little guys.

Selling Price: $20

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Instead of rebuilding the roads damaged by the harsh winter in London, a guerrilla gardener Steve Wheen has planted some miniature flowers and trees to create sanctuaries of tranquility in broken urban places. These mini gardens, though not that attractive as normal gardens, has successfully brought the old city and old roads with new appearances, and add some new fun to the urban life as well.

Designer: Steve Wheen

While more and more wallpaper designs are pursuing brilliant patterns and luxurious colors, Young & Battaglia’s wallpapers are striving to bring us back to a pure and simple world. These wallpapers, available in “stone angels”, “bookshelves” and other patterns, each features light color and simple designs, to make you feel that you’re rightly surrounded by Renaissance-style angels carved in stone or hundreds of books.

Designer: Young & Battaglia

Based on clever design and accurate arrange, the Rozetkcus Wall Socket comes with 9 points to allow you to plug in various shapes of devices effectively. It not only solves that problem that we usually need to insert several different types of plugs in one socket, but also promises endless possibilities of how to configure your devices according to their plugs’ shapes. Except for the 9-point socket, the Rozetkcus is also available in a 16 points version.

Designer: Art Lebedev Studio

【Via】

Traditional methods to make real-world objects invisible are usually based on materials that route incoming light around the hidden object, but researchers from the University of Texas at Austin have employed plasmonic materials that can affect the electric and magnetic fields the incoming light used to offer us a new way to make objects invisible. These new materials present a “photo negative” of the hidden object, which can cancel the disruption the object causes to the electric and magnetic fields.  That means, if you apply the material onto any object, the object would then become completely invisible from all angles- even the radars cannot detect it anymore.

Argus One, named after the Greek god Argus who was the all seeing god with one hundred eyes, is a new airship design that features automated control for individual body modules so as to improve its flight stability and aerodynamic control. Besides, the Argus One has come with other characteristics too, e.g. it can be easily assembled and tactically launched in hours from virtually anywhere; it has a several day endurance capability and it can keep working in rigid weather conditions too.

【More Information Here】

Located in Villa Escudero of Quezon Province, Philippines, the Waterfalls Restaurant is quite well-known for its delicious local dishes and the sparkling waterfalls as a background. The moment you step into the restaurant, you’ll feel spring water running over your feet, and then you may feel that you’re much closer to the nature as a result.

【More Information Here】

Tardis, used to be the Doctor Who time machine police box made famous by the British television show, is now a smart safe that can only get unlocked by your smartphones. The Tardis Safe is easy to operate: simply insert your cellphone into the dock and type the password, and then it will open with a sound of the Tardis revving up to time travel. Apart from Tardis, the cellphone-opened safe is also available in an R2D2 version, which will come later this year.

Selling Price: $59.99

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Bondi is a smart little hanger with astonishing multi functions. According to your real needs, the Bondi can be used to hold a wide range of things, including your cellphones, keys, or even your books. With its flexible but practical design, Bondi can be used anywhere too, such as in your cars, on your bicycles, in your kitchen and so on. The possibilities are endless- as you think of a new possibility, the Bondi then manages to make it true.

Selling Price: $20

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Quantum dots, tiny particles made of semiconductor crystals, have reached a new level of development since the Japan-based Photonic Network Research Institute of NICT has managed to make them more stable and with a higher optical frequency. By using these new quantum dots as the light source or amplifier in optical systems, the scientists can operate in optical frequency bands about 70 THz wide, which is approximately seven times wider than the 10 THz of frequency bands currently in use. Except for use in optical communication systems, the new wavelength band can effectively permeate human skins as well, making it a promising technology in bioimaging and medical sensing too.

【More Information Here】

Scientists of the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California have succeeded to create super-hot solid plasma burning at 3.6 million degrees Fahrenheit (about two million degrees Celsius). That’s not only hotter than almost everything on the earth, but even hotter than the temperature of the Sun corona. That’s also something never created by humans, and you could only find the kind of matter in the heart of stars or giant planets before.