Second Skin and Other Interesting Products

I found this on boingboing.net – a Cory Doctorow posting (September 16, 2010) that refers to this footwear as “rainboots with depth-gauges”. Interesting, huh?

If I am Phua Chu Kang (below), I would discard away my yellow galoshes and replace them with the above! Definitely, they are more useful, given that Singapore is no longer spared from floods!

Photo credit: http://www.klue.com.my/articles/1061-Monday-Blues-Something-of-the-Day

Another interesting product that appeared in a Mark Frauenfelder posting (April 08, 2010) – also from boingboing.net – is beer bottles re-blown into drinking glasses. Glassblower Nick Paul of Chicago drinks beer. (Hey, I don’t mind helping him drink the beer!) Then he takes the empty bottles and blows out their necks to make flat-sided tumblers. Then, in a stroke of packaging/marketing/recycling genius, he puts them back in their original six-packaging and sells them through his online storefront, Windy City Glass (Check out http://makersmarket.com/seller/nickpaul).

And finally, an amazing invention that was reported on Thursday (Webpage http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/8007246/Spray-on-clothing-in-a-can-to-be-launched.html), what about clothes that fit like a second skin? It’s a liquid clothing spray that hardens on the body and turns into a reusable garment. So in the mornings, instead of trying to pick between different shirts, you reached for a spray can instead. Scientists at the Imperial College London have made it a reality, using a cocktail of cotton, polyester, plastic and solvents.

Amazingly, the material peels away from one's skin as it dries, and at that point you can even take it off and run it through the washer to use again. The downside? It looks like someone went nuts with some silly string – you’ll be turning heads, but not in a good way. Check it out in the video below, though be forewarned, this spray-on clothing is tested on a pretty lady:

The spray may in the future be used to create not only garments but also medical dressings and upholstery for furniture.