THUNDERSHIRT
Phil Blizzard had a 10-year-old dog named Dosi who was very friendly and healthy, but terrified by loud noises such as thunderstorms and fireworks displays. Anxiety medicines prescribed by a veterinarian weren’t effective, because they took too long to work; Dosi could sense a storm was coming and would already be freaked out by the time Blizzard could give her a pill.
A trainer suggested noise desensitization, so Blizzard played recordings of thunderstorms. But Dosi wasn’t an idiot. It didn’t work. So what did Blizzard do? He gave Dosi a hug. A permanent hug.
Blizzard developed the Thundershirt—an anxiety-relieving sweater vest for dogs. Simple and easy to slip on, it seemed to cure Dosi of her freakouts immediately. Amazingly, they work for most dogs, and they’re widely available in pet-supply stores now. The concept is similar to swaddling a baby and holding them close to calm them down. The Thundershirt does the same thing for dogs (and cats): hugging them when you can’t get down there and hug them yourself.
EXTREMELY INSTANT NOODLES
A boiling pot filled with noodles can take anywhere from five to 10 minutes to cook. That’s five to 10 minutes too long, depending on how hungry you are. But thank the Flying Spaghetti Monster: Science has finally given us a faster noodle.
In 2013 Royal Chef, a Japanese food company, released Eight Second Spaghetti. Unfortunately, that name is a bit of a misnomer. Pasta cravers still need to wait for a pot of water to boil first. However, once the water’s bubbling, the pasta does, indeed, cook in just eight seconds. That’s fast enough to make a bowl of instant noodles seem downright slow by comparison. The noodles come in three different varieties: thin, normal, and hefty (they’re normal noodles, but there’s more of them). Prior to cooking, they look like unappetizing bricks, much like the stuff found in a typical package of ramen.
Eight Second Spaghetti is also spendier than your average container of Cup Noodles. The packets cost between 550 and 580 yen. That works out to over $6 per plate. And another drawback? You still need to heat up some spaghetti sauce, too.
MIRACLE WEIGHT-LOSS PRODUCTS
Spray-on weight loss: CLAmor contains a chemical called Clarinol that’s thought to shrink fat cells. When the clarinol-sprayed food is eaten, it reduces fat on the food and fat that’s already inside the body. It comes in four flavors: butter, olive oil, garlic, and plain. So what is Clarinol? CLAmor’s maker says that it’s a naturally occurring bacterium found in the stomach of cows. It’s harvested from fried ground beef, and also it doesn’t work.
Fat converted to water: A pill called Phena-Frene/MD sold in the mid-1990s claimed to turn fat into water, which was then flushed from the body by peeing it out. One problem: It’s physically impossible to turn fat into water. The product bombed, despite citing studies from the California Medical School and the U.S. Obesity Research Center, neither of which exists. Phena-Frene was banned in 1997, and also it didn’t work.
Ear-clip your way to a new you: According to Ninzu, the manufacturer of a device called the B-Trim, weight loss could be attained by clamping this Bluetooth-like object onto the ear. Here’s how it “worked”: The clip put pressure on a nerve ending, which supposedly stopped stomach muscles from moving, signaling to the brain that the stomach was full. This controlled the appetite and resulted in weight loss. The Federal Trade Commission made Ninzu stop selling the B-Trim in 1995 because it didn’t work.
SPRAY-ON SKIN
The next time someone (probably your grandfather) starts bellyaching about how “if we can send a man to the moon, how come we can’t do [whatever thing he saw on Star Trek]?” you can shut him up with three simple words: Spray-On Skin.
Spray-On Skin, developed by Avita Medical Limited, is used in a variety of medical procedures, primarily wound treatment, scar remodeling, and cosmetic surgery, but perhaps most importantly it aids in the treatment and healing of burn victims. And before you even ask, this does not involve keeping spray bottles full of skin at the ready. That would be gross. Cool, but gross.
The process involves harvesting a quantity of healthy skin roughly the size and thickness of one or two postage stamps, which is much less destructive and painful to the patient than a traditional skin graft. The harvested skin is liquified, then mixed with a special enzyme and sprayed onto the areas to be treated. Within a week, an area of skin the size of a stamp can grow to the size of a sheet of paper, although we aren’t sure if that’s letter, legal, or A4 size.
THE THEREMIN
The sound is familiar, even if the name isn’t. The warbling melody at the fade-out of the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations,” the electronic keening that underscores 1950s sci-fi movies—it’s a tone somewhere between a slide whistle and a singing saw: That’s the sound of the theremin, one of the strangest musical instruments ever created.
Purely electronic, the theremin is unique in that the player never touches it. Two antenna-like capacitors—one controlling pitch, the other volume—protrude from a box that houses radio frequency oscillators. The resulting signal is fed out through a speaker. The device is played with delicate, precise motions of the hands in the air around the antennae. The effect is eerie, as if the player is conjuring music from the ether; in fact, inventor Léon Theremin’s original name for his instrument was the etherphone.
A physicist and amateur cellist, Theremin invented his instrument in 1920, more or less by accident, while working for the Soviet government on a device to detect objects through the air (sort of like radar). The Soviets sent him on a European tour to demonstrate the device (and Soviet ingenuity), and he played to packed concert halls across the continent. In 1928 he defected to the U.S., where he stayed for 10 years, setting up a lab in New York City During his decade in New York, Theremin—along with his protegée, Clara Rockmore—worked to popularize electronic music. Serious contemporary composers like Percy Grainger, Miklós Rózsa, and Dmitri Shostakovich were soon writing works integrating the theremin into the concert orchestra.
Then, in 1938, Theremin was kidnapped by the KGB and put to work in a secret government lab in Siberia, where he remained until 1966. Upon his release, he turned to teaching, living in obscurity. Many believed he was dead. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Theremin began to travel again, eventually returning to New York, where he was reunited with old friends, including Rockmore.
It’s easy to make noise on a theremin, but hellishly difficult to make music. It requires tremendous mental discipline—concentration, sense of pitch, and muscle memory—as well as daunting physical skill. During Theremin’s half-century absence, it was nigh impossible to find instructors qualified to teach the instrument, and the theremin fell into disrepute. Its use by self-taught rock and avant-garde musicians—many of whom employed it primarily as a sound effect—gave it a reputation as a novelty instrument.
But since Theremin’s death in 1993, there’s been a resurgence of serious interest in the instrument. A new generation of players and composers—including Theremin’s grand-niece Lydia Kavina, a virtuoso trained by the old man himself—are writing and performing new music for the theremin, taking advantage of its ethereal qualities.
MORE KITCHEN GADGETS
Egg Cracker. Everybody knows that eggs have extremely fragile shells—that’s why we envision Humpty Dumpty as an egg and use the expression “walking on eggshells.” They’re remarkably easy to crack them on nearly any hard surface. That’s why it’s difficult to imagine who would ever be in the market for the $10 EZ Cracker. Resembling a garlic press, it has an egg-shaped chamber where you put the egg. Then you squeeze the handle…and it cracks the egg into a bowl, retaining the shell.
Butter Cutter. Cutting softened butter is easy; slightly harder is cutting off a slice of butter just out of the fridge. Not a problem for the One-Click Butter Cutter. Just insert a stick of butter in this $12 plastic doohickey, and then squeeze it, and out drops a perfectly square pat of butter.
Hot Dog Hamburger Mold. It’s the barbecue attendee’s dilemma:
hot dog or hamburger? Now you don’t have to choose, because the Hot Dog Hamburger Mold ($15) makes hamburgers…in the shape of a hot dog. Fill up the hot-dog-shaped mold with ground beef, and you’ve got a hot-dog-shaped hamburger patty that you can serve on a hot-dog bun. (This product is great for people who bought the wrong buns at the store.)
THE 10-IN-1 GARDEN TOOL
Storage is a common frustration for the weekend gardener: What to do with the hoe, the shovel, the pruning shears, the rake, the scythe, the machete, the grass-maintaining goat, and all the other things that might only come out of the shed once or twice a year. A Japanese inventor, apparently tired of running over his rake every time he pulled into the garage, decided it might be a good idea to combine all his garden tools into a single unit, with space for each tool to be folded away when not needed.
If this sounds like a Swiss Army knife, that’s what it looks like, too. Ten tools in one device! A multi-function apparatus for the less-than-constant gardener! The only trouble is that, whereas a corkscrew or can opener is compact enough to tuck into a pocket knife, a shovel or hoe isn’t. And a five-foot-long, 20-pound Swiss Army knife handles like a five-foot-long, 20-pound Swiss Army knife. Not exactly the tool for those precision jobs that require a firm grip, a steady stance, or the ability to see the dirt into which you’re digging.
BAGELHEADS
Tattoos and piercings are so yesterday. This strange form of body modification is known in Japan, where it’s been popular for nearly a decade, as seerin durippu, or “saline drip.” Technicians insert a needle in the client’s forehead and inject about 400 cc of a harmless saline solution, which creates a large bulge just under the skin. The technician then uses their thumb to create an indentation in the middle of the bump. The whole procedure takes around two hours, and the end result looks like a subcutaneous bagel.
“Bagel bumps” are temporary. It typically takes between 16 and 24 hours for the body to absorb all the saline and the forehead to return to its normal shape. Unlike a tattoo or a facial piercing, a bagelhead will turn heads on Saturday night, but fade away by Monday morning.
Japanese journalist Ryoichi “Keroppy” Maeda popularized bagelheads. He’s been covering Japanese body modification fads since the early 1990s. At a body mod convention in 1999, Maeda ran into an artist named Jerome Abramovitch, who was experimenting with saline infusions. With Abramovich’s permission, Maeda began organizing bagelhead booths for parties and events around Tokyo. The fad took off from there, and more daring fans of the procedure have begun injecting saline into other body parts.
GOOGLE GLASSES
Google is probably the world’s leading research-and-development company, particularly with its well-funded (but highly secretive) Google X division trying to make sci-fi a reality. Founded by CEO Larry Page in 2005, one of the division’s primary directives is to eventually create a direct line between the human brain and consumer technology powered by Google’s many online services.
Google envisions a future in which you don’t have to type or even look anything up on a computer—just think of what you need or want and it will pop up in front of you. That’s the idea behind the company’s most promising gadget yet: Google Glasses. They’re a pair of transparent glasses hardwired with smartphone technology. As the wearer walks around, the glasses display things in front of them that only they can see, such as directions superimposed on the street, weather reports, or incoming text messages.
The company has sent employees out to major events (such as the 2013 Academy Awards) to demonstrate and test the Glasses in the real world. But the ultimate goal, according to project leader Babak Parviz is to put the system on a pair of contact lenses, which would utilize radios no wider than a few hairs. Then, Parviz theorizes, you could watch videos or even monitor your health with tiny biosensors. This gives new meaning to the phrase “Googling yourself.”
THE SOVIET CALENDAR
Rather than follow the decadent, lazy, and inefficient Gregorian calendar used by the U.S. and literally every other country on Earth, in 1929 the U.S.S.R. introduced its own internal calendar. Instead of 52 weeks of seven days each, the Soviet calendar consisted of 72 five-day weeks. That makes 360 days, so the other five days became holidays to mark important dates in Communist Party history.
The purpose of the calendar was the same as the purpose of every other Soviet innovation: to squeeze more work out of the workforce. Instead of having two days off out of every seven days, workers got one day off every five days. On physical calendars, the five days of the week were printed in different colors, and each worker was assigned a color to indicate which day was their day of rest. The new calendar made it easier for factories to remain in operation every day of the week. It also furthered the ideological goal of de-emphasizing Sunday as a religiously ordained day of rest, because religion was frowned upon in the U.S.S.R.
The new system didn’t increase productivity much. Machinery in constant use tends to break down a lot, as do people. In 1931 the five-day week was scrapped in favor of a six-day week with a common rest day for everyone. That lasted only until 1940, when the Soviets went back to the seven-day week with a two-day weekend.
THE TRANQUILITY CALENDAR
Many would argue that the single most impressive moment in the history of Earth is when we shot three guys off of it and landed them on the moon. Such an important event marks a new epoch in human history, and as such, we should adjust our calendars accordingly. This is he theory behind the Tranquility Calendar, a system proposed by Jeff Siggins in the July 1989 issue of the science magazine Omni.
Here’s how it would’ve worked: This calendar uses as its starting point “Moon Landing Day,” or more precisely, the moment (20 hours, 18 minutes, 1.2 seconds) when Apollo 11 set down on the moon and Neil Armstrong said over the radio to NASA’s Mission Control, “Houston, Tranquility Base Here. The Eagle has landed.” Dates before and after Moon Landing Day are designated as BT (“Before Tranquility”) and AT (“After Tranquility”). The Tranquility calendar is a perpetual calendar with 13 months of 28 days each. That adds up to 364 days. The anniversary of Moon Landing Day, called “Armstrong Day,” serves as the 365th day. It is a “blank day” that is not part of any week or month. In leap years, a second blank day, called “Aldrin Day” after Neal Armstrong’s crewmate Buzz Aldrin, is also added.
But old habits die hard. People are insanely loyal for decades to their brand of beer—good luck getting them to change how they view time.
THINGS INVENTED BY THE PROFESSOR ON GILLIGAN’S ISLAND
•Lie detector (made from the ship’s horn, the radio’s batteries, and bamboo)
•Bamboo telescope
•Jet-pack fuel
•Paralyzing strychnine serum
•“Spider juice” (to kill a giant spider)
•Nitroglycerine
•Shark repellent
•Helium balloon (rubber raincoats sewn together and sealed with tree sap)
•Coconut-shell battery recharger
•Xylophone
•Soap (made from plant fats, it’s not really so farfetched)
•Roulette wheel
•Geiger counter
•Pedal-powered bamboo sewing machine
•Pedal-powered washing machine
•Keptibora-berry extract (to cure Gilligan’s double vision)
•Pedal-powered water pump
•Pedal-powered telegraph
•Hair tonic
•Pedal-powered generator
•Various poisons and antidotes
•Pool table (for Mr. Howell)
•Lead radiation suits and lead-based makeup (for protection against a meteor’s cosmic rays)
ICE-BASED AIRCRAFT CARRIER
In 1943 Geoffrey Pyke, a science advisor to the British military, made a radical proposal: Build unsinkable aircraft carriers out of ice. His reasoning: Glaciers are made of ice, and they are virtually unsinkable. Building hulking aircraft carriers out of ice would also be
cheaper than using metal and other materials, and it would protect Atlantic convoys against attacks from German U-boats. “Project Habbakuk” was on. (It was named for a biblical prophet who promised unbelievable things to his adherents.)
The scale of these floating landing strips would be immense: 4,000 feet long (more than three-quarters of a mile), with 50-foot-thick hulls and displacement of two million tons of water. And since they were to be made out of ice, the vessels would have been virtually unsinkable, yet easy to repair if damaged by torpedoes.
A 1,000-ton prototype was being built on Patricia Lake in Alberta, Canada, but the project was abandoned when the British were informed that completing it would cost $70 million (about $1.2 billion in today’s money) and take 8,000 people working for eight months. The refrigeration units were turned off and the hull sank to the bottom of the lake, where it eventually melted.
HAMSTER SHREDDER
Hamsters aren’t the best pets in the world. They’re glorified goldfish, but much messier. Plus, sunflower seeds and sawdust aren’t getting any cheaper these days. If only there were a way to make these furballs earn their keep. Now there is…sort of. In 2007 London-based consultant Tom Ballhatchet created the Hamster Shredder while working toward his master’s degree in industrial design. The ingenious device will help your pet burn calories while helping you destroy documents that might contain personal information ripe for picking by identity thieves.
Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Weird Inventions Page 13