A general store is often no more than a shack with a veranda, peeling paint and a flat gable sign. This humble piece of vernacular architecture is sometimes found in Canada and Australia, but at its heart it is American. The general store, nostalgically fictionalized as Ike Godsey's in the Waltons or Oleson's Mercantile in Little House on the Prairie is part of America's soul that has been eroded, in the real world, by strip malls and Walmarts. Here is a collection of just a few of our favorites. Drill through on the links to explore some of the great finds on sites like Flic

The ability to print incredibly complex custom objects on demand through the use of computer-aided rapid prototyping techniques will transform product design.Here are some of the most amazing current examples of digital fabrication through techniques such as stereolithography, selective laser sintering, 3D printing and fused deposition modeling. Vote for your favorite.

The essential fashion item if you are going to the Beijing Olympics to watch people compete in air made of Jello - a gas mask. Gas masks are all more or less terrifying to look at, which is why some people get a kick out of them, creating artsy fetish masks, or artists create ironically cute masks such as Bill Barminsky's Mickey Mouse mask.The irony is on the artists, however, since genuine Mickey Mouse inspired gas masks were given to children in both the UK and the US, during wartime, to appear less scary

A bunch of swimming pools have been doing the rounds on blogs lately. Here is the Oobject alternative list of cool pools. Including pools over fake pools, pools hanging off the edge of buildings, 1000 year old pools and spectacular underground pools. Vote for your faves.

Obviously the design criteria for four wheeled vehicles are somewhat different on other planets. This has yielded some of the most bizarre and fascinating vehicles ever proposed, from the giant Mobility Test Article test driven by Wernher von Braun to todays rovers which have ditched the most expensive component of all, the driver.Here are a variety of some of both classic and unusual space rovers from prototype to flown.

The Saturn V rocket was something the size of a skyscraper could survive being thrown into orbit, undamaged. 40 years after the Saturn V powered trip to the moon, nothing as powerful exists today.Years ago Airfix made a model of a Saturn V which I lusted after as a kid and Revell have now re-released their original 1:96 version and a 1:144 one which is the same size as the old Airfix. We tracked down the best Saturn V models that you can buy or have been built, culminating in auto repair man, Steve Eves' completely insane home built 40 foot high, 1600 pound monster which he actually launched, in April.

You can pick up an old Boeing jetliner for the price of scrap, and turn it into the ultimate trailer home. Here are some of our favorite examples of recycled planes used as houses and restaurants, including a former Irish airliner that ended up as a bar in Syria and a Jumbo Jet that is a restaurant in South Korea.

A Sky Hook is an impossible item that interns were traditionally sent out to buy , as a prank. These eight flying cranes, seven helicopters and one blimp, are as close to reality as sky hooks can get. The blimp proposal is actually named the Sky Hook.

As I write this, I am surrounded by custom designed furniture and lighting, and the only thing that ruins the overall effect are the ugly power strips. A ubiquitous gadget which is often very cheap and badly designed. Here are a collection of well designed power strip ideas from sliding, plugin-anywhere systems, that have been available for high end office design for decades but haven't been available in consumer markets, to a $3500 audiophile power strip based upon quantum Resonance technology.

iPods, Nikons, vibrators, Hummers someone has released a really crass gold plated gadget for the arms dealer market. Gizmodo suggested the gold plated shuffle 'signaled the downfall of civilization', vote according to which item you think is the most revolting.

Machines designed to smash large tough items into small bits, including a machine that eats trees whole, and yes, a real bone crusher, that makes fertilizer from animal bones.

The design history of snowmobiles starts with propeller driven sleds, including the amazing Russian combat version and migrates to half track vehicles with rear engines. Today's front engine vehicles were pioneered by Polaris, and are represented here by the Arctic Cat F6 600, which is driven by Sarah Palin's husband. This list of personal snowmobiles also contains two state of the art concept single track motorcycle style vehicles by Keller and Schlootz.

To mark the 800th anniversary of the famous London Bridge, the Royal Institute of British Architects has launched a competition for designs of an inhabited bridge.The current London Bridge is not the Victorian Gothic Tower Bridge, as many people believe, but a rather bland stone one. Its predecessor was also uninteresting and was bought by mistake and put in the Arizona desert. But the original London Bridge was a cultural icon, a bridge covered in buildings.Inspired by the competition we have put together a list of the most interesting inhabited bridges, from surreal single house bridge designs to Zaha Hadids sleek Zaragoza Expo bridge .

Last night our very, very ,very bad cat had diarrhea, then stepped in it, walked all around the house and trampled all over the bed. Here is a list of the best gadgets to deal with cat and dog feces, including a $7000 device for cleaning out paddocks, which I think we might have to buy.

Brittny Badger disassembles everyday appliances, carefully lays them out and photographs them, Paul Veroude takes cars entirely to pieces and suspends them from wires, like a giant real-life exploded isometric drawing, while Holger Pooten photographs gadgets as frozen in time snapshots of parts suspended in mid air. There is something satisfying, not just about the dis assembly of machines, appliances and complex objects, but the arrangement of their parts into a tableau. Here are a dozen.

Burning man, which currently rages in the Nevada desert, is Mecca for art cars. America is the capital of modified cars, since rules about what you can do to your car and it still be street legal are less stringent than most other developed nations. Custom vehicles are a cultural expression of individuality.There are many categories of art cars, but our favorites are where a mundane, ordinary vehicle is completely covered in a single material or item. Here are some of our faves.

Airstream was neither the first nor the only manufacturer of streamlined trailers with examples shown here, by Spartan, Silver Streak, Westcraft and Bowlus, among others, yet they are deservedly the best known and continue to thrive. Because of their futuristic design they have a unique place in the history of technology. An Airstream was used for quarantine after the first men returned from the moon and today takes astronauts to the Space Shuttle. Their iconic silver bullet shape still looks modern, yet it dates from the 30s and is based upon a prior streamline designed trailer, called the Bowlus. Here is a list of some of the most beautiful things to have ever been on the roads.

Although the term galvanometer is often used to refer to things other than devices which measure electrical current (such as charge or resistance), there are an amazing array of early designs for this instrument, considering their simplicity.Many of these design differences are to do with the cases that surround what is basically a twisting wire, however there is something definitively analog in their mechanism and 19th century amateur scientist in their variety. Early galvanometers represent the extreme opposite of todays high energy physics, which requires giant multi billion dollar apparatuses and extreme digital processing for measurement. A long way off a compass and a battery.