With approximately 3.9 million infants dying within a month of birth each year throughout the developing world, and 25 percent of those deaths due to complications of being born prematurely like heat and water loss, a group of innovative engineers at Design that Matters are finding a way to recycle cars into infant incubators and hoping to ensure that millions of kids live to see their first birthday as a result of their effor

These old clunkers are unexploded global warming bomblets -by edcrowle @ flickr.

The PAPPA* Phone

Justin at Materialicious asks "How cool is this?" BoingBoing asks "Why didn't somebody think of this before?! Was there some engineering issue that had to be overcome to allow such an elegant, ingenious and obvious design?"

I can think of a couple of reasons:

Image source: Digital Home Thoughts

Images used with permission of the photographer

When it comes to appliances, they don't build them like they used to, to last a long time and to be relatively easy to repair. Now they are built to be thrown away as replacement can often be cheaper than trying to find a repair shop or parts. Photographer Brittny Badger wasn't shy about digging around inside appliances, and took a dozen of them apart for her senior thesis at Hartford Art School....

I was not unhappy when the Sharper Image went bankrupt earlier this year; the store seemed entirely devoted to selling superfluous junk that was all connected to wall outlets. Its demise might have saved us a coal fired power plant or two, except Amazon has stepped in to take its place. Exhibit A:

A kind Thank You to the person at Carbon Kids Blog, for doing the heavy plotting; and, for tipping us off to the chart. Great work in progress.