Tire sneakers from Japan, tread intact

Danish industrial design firm KiBiSi and Danish bicycle manufacturer Biomega have teamed up with Puma to release the Mopion cargo bike, a sort of pickup-truck version of the Puma Boston bike:

[The Mopion] mixes city bike features and cargo bike feat…

I once accidentally shot a girl I was trying to date in the head with a champagne cork. She was standing next to me as I opened the bottle; the cork slipped my grasp, shot straight up, hit the ceiling, and came down squarely atop her noggin. It all h…

On physical objects becoming less and less physically weighty: Nowadays if you drop your phone, it may not survive. The other day I caught a snippet of GoodFellas, the part where Robert Deniro uses a 1970s-era telephone receiver to bludgeon a crony. …

We’re excited to hear that Ponoko, the popular, laser-cutter based, online fabrication system, is teaming up with SparkFun to offer electronic hardware as part of its catalog of materials, allowing makers to create polished, custom electronic product…

ActiveIon’s Ionator HOM is a magic cleaning machine. Intended as a replacement for endless bottles of spray cleaner, the large, drill-gun-like device converts regular tap water into an ionized mist that lifts dirt off of surfaces and kills bacteria. …

Regular watchers of Entourage may remember the episode beginning with the birthday of Turtle, the Imelda Marcos of sneakers, which gave viewers a glimpse of his insane shoe closet and wall-length hat racks. Question is, how does a guy like that travel? The kicks I don’t know about, but a company called New Era makes these amusing Cap Carriers, which come in two-, six-, and 24-capacity sizes. A combination of nylon and neoprene formed into crush-proof shapes keeps your lids from getting flattened like Turtle’s ego.

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RISD-educated Jay Brett’s got a pretty kick-ass job: Industrial designer for Hollywood, building prototypes for superheroes.

Brett recently worked on the prototype build of a jet (in two versions, crashed and un-crashed) for the forthcoming Green Lantern movie, and it’s presumably the plane that the titular hero crashes during his Hal Jordan test-pilot days. While no shots of the Green Lantern plane are publicly releasable yet, for obvious reasons, one project you can see is Brett’s prototype of the Tron Light Cycle. While some of you may have spotted it at Comic-Con, Brett’s got shop shots of the thing posted here. And you can also check out Brett’s full book on Coroflot.

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Designer Marian Bantjes was recently commissioned by Wallpaper* Magazine to design the graphics for a Laser Sailboat for their upcoming exhibition at the Salon del Mobile in Milan later this year.

The result of the collaboration was a striking geometric all-over print, which Bantje’s describes as:

I avoided the obvious of working with organic forms to go with the wind, water, etc., and instead work deliberately against those forms. I wanted to make something that was incredibly distinctive in the water, and which would disguise its speed and versatility.

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I always thought Sony’s Digital Mavica digital camera from 1997, the one that took floppy disks, was the first digital camera; turns out I was off by almost 20 years. Check out this fossil:

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I freelanced in the structural package design department of a conservative consumer products company for years, and learned that if you want to have fun with bottles, you’d better move over to designer fragrances. The three bottles here (spotted on Uncrate, linked below) may or may not be “successful” designs, but they’re a damn sight more exciting than vessels made to hold fabric softener and focus-grouped into the ground.

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