Picture taken by Enzo dal Verme
What we from Science of the Time found most attractive and inspiring in 2008 was not a gadget or whatever superficial thing people keeps running. It is cool in its simplicity and we hope it wil keep inspire people in 2009. Massimo Voltolina started practising sport only when he was 30 and he trains without following rigid schedules: he simply “listens to his body”. At the age of 43 Massimo Voltolina is one of the two Italians that has swam from France to England across the Channel. Of course, with worse weather conditions and a better timing. He is now getting ready for his next adventure: crossing the Adriatic sea.

Created by an American artist, Karolina Sobecka, the tiger “Wildlife” was running in the streets of São Paulo this year. It´s one of the installations for the Electronic Language International Festival (FILE) at SESI Art Gallery. Between the pedestrians it will be projected on the walls of the buildings, moving in the same speed of the chaotic transit of the metropolis (here in SP, I think it will be stopped all the time!). The tiger is an animation painted by hand. The artist created a device that makes the image motion in the same speed to the automobile that carries its projector.

Www.stitsh.com The site looks like a fashion blog, filled with loads of snapshots of cool kids from the streets. The impressive new thing is that you can buy any piece of clothing they are wearing by just clicking on it. That will bring you to an online retailer who sells that exactly the product.

We all know Africa is the garbagedump of the western world. Literally. Western companies pay African countries loads of money to import their garbage. Cars that are not allowed to ride the European roads anymore are massively shipped to Africa. What is not good enough for us, is good enough for them. Africans make the best of our stuff and try to recycle as much as possible. This recycling has reached a new peak with the assembly of a working four-seater helicopter. It was made from old car parts and parts from a crashed 747. It was build by a 24-year old undergraduate student who got his information solely from the internet, in just eight months time. This is Cradle to Cradle meets Cool Sustainability meets Cool Creators, wow!

Hitotoki is an online literary project collecting stories of singular experiences tied to locations in cities worldwide.  Established in Tokyo, it is launched in/on Shanghai now. Aiming to build a narrative map of the world, Hitotoki encourages the inhabitants of cities - currently Tokyo, New York, Washington DC & London - to share a personal story, focused on a single moment, and tied to a specific place.

In 2008 Xerox introduced Ink that uses ultraviolet light and regular surrounding heat to vanish. By using this ink you can recycle the paper as many as 30 times. As soon as the printing is finished, special molecules begin reacting to the warmth in the surrounding air and gradually return to their natural state. The technology, which will not be commercially available for several years, will reduce the amount of energy required to print a single page by a factor of 200. 


To make its brand known, the ING-bank decided to open café’s as a commercial space. The inside of the café is accentuated with a wide band of orange-colored rubber sheets, which extend from the floors up the walls to the ceiling. The first orange area has a service counter. The staffs who serve espresso are all ING Direct employees well versed in their financial products and capable of thoroughly answering questions from customers who come in to drink coffee and become interested in the products advertised in the brochures.

This ad for D&G jewellery aired in heavy rotation on TV and in cinemas across Europe in 2008. It is devilishly clever. It toys with your expectations about boys meets girls and all the love that might come from that. But then, right at the end, when you think you know what it’s about, you slowly realise that yes, it’s kind of about that, but actually it’s much more about something else that is even more powerful and salient and unsettling. And strangely hotter. Narcissistic self love.

These are called bling band-aids. Wear them as jewelry. How to really turn your OUCH into BLING. Packaging: Three plasters in slide top tin. One with ice white rhinestones, one with rose and one with red rhinestones. sterile. 2008’s decadence with a twist/wink.

2008 was filled with binging. Binge drinking. Binge eating. Binge shopping. The term is generally associated with overindulgence and has a negative connotation, but it isn’t always a bad thing. Introducing “binge chilling”: using one’s personal time in the most relaxed of manners desired, lazing about and re-enacting those post-exam college days by pretending all the stress is finally gone … until Monday, that is.
We live in a technologically driven, always-on, always-connected society, and people who expend 110 percent during the week are finding new ways to decompress on the weekends. Today’s younger demographic in particular is inclined to relax by doing whatever they want for as long as they want, without guilt, whether it’s watching 24 back-to-back episodes of 24, playing virtual tennis on Nintendo’s Wii or updating profiles and catching up with friends on Facebook for hours on end.