Unless you’ve been living in a cave, you should know that clean water is one of the major issues plaguing the world right now. You guys helped Josh donate a well via Charity Water and last month, I was in Central Mexico scouting locations for a filtration system for a local elementary school. On a smaller scale, clean water is just as important to an individual whether you are hiking or simply in a foreign land where the quality is questionable. Enter the SteriPEN Adventurer. The pocket-sized unit weighs only 3.6 oz with the batteries. It uses UV light technology to purify 16 oz of water in 48 seconds or a full liter in 90 seconds. It uses lithium CR123 batteries included which have a shelf life of 10 years and work in extreme cold conditions; this means you can truly toss this tool in your bag and forget about it until you need it. The Adventurer’s probe is protected by a quartz sleeve and provides insulation in cold water. For your convenience, the optical LED also serves as a flashlight for emergencies. The unit provides 8,000 UV treatments which will likely last a lifetime for
most people. The Adventurer works in containers with a minimum 1.7 inch
diameter and retails for $99.95.

Help Remedies. You get the point. Gorgeously packaged bandages, pills, tablets and more with witty sayings that give a warm feeling.

Six packs are $20. It’s a shame they’re not homeopathic or natural remedies (hint, hint)– but the idea is damn nice. I see good things in the future for these folks!

Want to help them? They’ve set aside 5000 shares of their own company to give to people that help them on a variety of tasks from translation services to reviews and product suggestions. Check them out.

Update: Biodegradable packaging too!

Our packaging is made of molded paper pulp and a bio plastic made primarily of corn. We use these materials because they are interesting to look at, and they are compostable—which means one day, they might become part of a large tree. Maybe you can cut down that tree and make it into a speedboat.

Update 2: When you have nearly 6000 posts sometimes you forget when you’ve written about something before.  Damn, hey, at least it looks like they’ve come a long way!

  

If Ugly Dolls are any standard for cuteness, then a stuffed E. coli bacterium is downright adorable. Giant Microbes, a Delaware company with a mind for the medical, creates plush stuffed toys resembling microscopic critters, viruses, and cells with enough personality to make a tapeworm look friendly. Among the categories are Corporeals, Tropicals, and (our favorite) Calamities, which include the black death, flesh-eating virus, and mad cow disease. The Petri Dish, a combination of any three microbes, makes for a perfect gift for the healthcare professional in your life, who will certainly get a kick out of these gross little cuties. No good looking cuddly for H1N1 yet though.

What would you do if you were an out of work art director with some free time and you wanted to help fight the Swine Flu epidemic plaguing Mexico (and looking pretty grim all over the place)? Irina Blok decided to get creative with some fashionista surgical masks. She says: With all the paranoia about swine flu i think there’s an opportunity to do something cool – design fashion surgical masks! Not only they are aesthetically pleasing, they can save your life (well.. not really.. they mostly just look good.)

My favorite by far is the awesome Domo-Kun reference (in the center). She’s going to produce limited quantities of these masks and sell them for $10, and you can email her if you want one! All proceeds go south of the border to help fight the flu epidemic. No word on where she’s donating though.

Since I started up cycling again, I’ve been thinking about how to help my body recover not only after, but during the ride. I drink a ton of water when I am doing cardio, but lately it occurred to me that if I’m going to be drinking anyway, I may as well bring electrolytes into the mix. Enter nuun (pronounced noon), a startup by a professor and student duo from Darthmouth’s business school. Nuun comes in five different flavors (such as orange ginger, lemon-lime, and citrus fruit) and is packaged in convenient tubes that hold 12 tablets each. Each tablet, when mixed with 500ml (16 oz) of water, forms the perfect hydration tool. It’s effervescent and two minutes after dropping it in (no stirring or shaking required) the tablet is completely dissolved. I love that once it’s dissolved, it’s not fizzy (harder than it sounds); the last thing I need to drink during my workout is something carbonated.

You are going to have to manage your carb intake because nuun has none. It is strictly sodium, potassium, magnesium and calcium. It contains no sugar nor does it leave a powdery residue at the bottom of your bottle. If you give nuun a try, tell us what you think!

Yoga’s great for the soul and all, but when it comes to yoga mat design, it seems like all the soul is sucked out. At least we think that’s what Terra Breese, the creative who launched Devi Mats in 2006, thought. To solve the monotone problem, her line of yoga mats — each 1/4″ thick and printed so that they retain their grip — have organic designs like plants, the Aurora Borealis, and fire. Because nothing is more relaxing than envisioning yourself about to be engulfed by an erupting volcano.

“I'm working on a story that the world needs to know about. I wish for you to help me break it, in a way that provides spectacular proof of the power of news photography in the digital age.”

At the conference he couldn’t provide specifics and it took nearly two years to finally release the story, and it’s now public.  His mission is to create awareness about an extremely drug-resistant strain of tuberculosis which is killing one person every 20 seconds around the world, and it’s completely preventable.  Watch the gripping 3 minute video and help make a difference now, please spread the word.

The popularization of the mind/body/soul lifestyle has brought about a few good changes — the most important being a proliferation of healthier people. But those of us who have been there since the beginning know that it hasn’t always been as easy to jibe with. In fact, even if you are among the newest of followers, you probably already have some experience sifting through the occasional dose of power-hippy, (i.e., things that are a little too all-or-nothing to meld into our individual paths). Thankfully, there is a new approach to conscious living that is rapidly gaining momentum, and it has more to do with the pursuit of happiness than the perfect patchouli. A great example of this progressive mindset can be found in BeThree, an online lifestyle community that is using its message of an energized existence to put the hip in hippy.

The premise of BeThree is simple: spread the gospel of all things fresh for the mind, body and soul. Geared towards women, the daily publication aims to share the most exciting, relevant and uncut truths about today’s health-conscious lifestyle, and aims to do it in the most mod way possible. Delivered in a voice that is engaging, inspiring, and most importantly, realistic, BeThree takes living consciously to a level that is more worldly than new agey. In other words, while the site may cover ways to incorporate more healthy herbs in your life, it won’t coach you through bombing your home with a fistful of burning sage. As an extra perk, the contributors to this site have been at The New York Times, Delicious Living, and Rock and Ice, insuring that the content is coming from the mouths of people who are not only health-savvy, but also rather adept at sentence formation. Read up and sign up here.

If you’re like me and you’re stumped about what to get your pops for his upcoming ‘day’ (it’s on Sunday… dang it!), and you’re also sick of your pops calling you out as a metrosexual just because you choose to pluck those scraggly eyebrows that you inherited from him, we have a little gift idear for ya. Ritual, the grooming guys who tagged the line “goodbye metrosexual, hello machosexual,” have a little F’s Day special going where you can get a deal when you purchase together The Great American Bathroom Book and their ‘Kit.’ The Kit is all of their full-size products in a wooden box– you get the Razor Rinse, The Whip, The Balm, the Trifecta, and their Nature Calls product, which will have your Mum happier than the day your Dad got his vasectomy– 2 drops in the toilet after he takes his Number 2, and the odor will recede into the shadows. Just put both items in the cart and enter the code: JUNEDAD.

50 Graus — the heads we told you about last year who put ice penguins under the hot sun in a Sao Paulo park to make a point about global warming — is on our radar again (thanks to the same Marco Monteiro who tipped us on the original post) with another intelligently conceived campaign. This time they’re targeting, cough, smokers. In “Smoking Kills More,” they juxtapose the death rates of well-known historical happenings with the fatalities caused by smoking-related diseases, using cancer sticks as their medium to create both non-moving and moving images. Watch their incredibly well-done stop-motion animation vid spot of a war scene created from cigs here. The controversial art piece you see pictured was made with 13,000 cigarettes and was built and displayed in front of curious passersby in the city’s center for full effect. Imagine trying to wash the smell of all of those out from your clothes. Nasty.

The E is for Energy, and the Boost is for….boost. If you’re too old for Flintstone vitamins and too young for Centrum Silver, consider EBOOST, an orange effervescent tablet that contains a full day’s supply of essential vitamins and minerals like B12, C, Zinc, and other too-healthy-to-be pronounceable supplements. Plus, it’s probably better for us than our usual 10-12 sugar free Red Bulls, half a pack of American Spirits, and the Diet Coke chaser that we modestly refer to as “wake-up juice.” Kidding! Kidding. It also comes in single-serve powdered packets, great for emergency stashing.

We appreciate a company with an ethos. Makin’ It Great is not an ethos. Neither is Built Ford Tough. Help Remedies has a simple one: Help people. Make ethical and environmentally sounds products. Give some money back, oh yeah…have a laugh about it. Right now they can help you by providing toilet kit essentials like space-age bandages and organic aspirin, all packaged in nondescript recycled paper mold. They also have company motto inspired t-shirt, where you can fill in this sentence “Help I…” with a personalized cry for assistance. We find their way of doing things so refreshing that we hope they offer a little more in terms of product selection next time. Come on guys, it’s our turn to help.

This made me happy. Maybe not for the reasons it intended to, but the end result was still joy. Bright laughing yellow-colored joy.

The iconic smiley face has expanded into the world of aromatherapy and fragrance with Smiley. Claiming to be the “very first anti-stress perfume,” Smiley offers a full range of olfactory uppers. Naturally derived from cocoa, the unisex fragrance is filled with an “olfactive substance with euphoriant bio-mechanics.” Containing Phenylethylamine (a hormonal joy booster) and Theobromine (an adrenaline blocker and stress reliever) to help get you pepped up and then keep you that way.

Smiley's website is a playground. Not only are they selling something called a “psycho-tonic,” but the English section of the site is a lost in translation dream (or nightmare, depending on how you look at it). It sounds like everyone working at Smiley mush be high. Even if a sniff of smiley does nothing for you, reading the line “these two cardio-tonics associated together dope the vitality and sets up the moral” should amuse pretty much anyone. I've totally been looking for a new way to dope my vitality. And of course, once your vitality is doped your moral is set up too.

Smiley's online store, called the “Happy Therapy Centre,” sells the whole range of smiley products – including “epidermal stimulating massage oil with micro-nutrients to activate happiness.” The site also ships worldwide and has a store locator in case you want to go pick up some happy in person.

I hate pumping my body full of nasty stuff; it’s a trait I inherited from my parents, who have always preferred straightening themselves out through more natural means. Years of experience and plenty of positive results have reinforced their beliefs, but always at the classic naturopathic risk of a few failed remedies between problem and solution. The latest product that will hit the testing block is FlyRight, a new anti-jet-lag formula that promises to completely cure users from the rough side-effects of long-distance flying. Apparently, FlyRight tastes like absolute crap, but counts several high-profile (non-endorsed) jet-setters as fans (to my knowledge, Josh is not currently among them; he won’t try anything unless it tastes like lilacs). Anyway, if Flyright actually follows through with getting my parents to China and Italy fuzz-free, I think we’ll officially be able to kiss those sleeping pills/painkillers/tequila shots good-bye. Then again, the painkillers are kind of fun. Wait, just kidding; I hate pumping my body full of nasty stuff, remember?

Dr. Alex Hughes is an orthopedic surgeon at UCLA in the morning and in the afternoon, he is the president of Function Drinks. You may have heard of Function Drinks (their first drink, Urban Detox, is a popular remedy for nasty hangovers), which is a fusion of clinical science and all natural, tasty beverages, and we've been fortunate enough to have the chance to try their three new functional platforms currently being launched into the market. The new drinks, entitled House Call (also dubbed as “Dr. McDrinky” on the bottle), Vacation and Light Weight are yummy to say the least. House Call is a pleasant honey green tea flavor that makes you think twice because of its complexities. Vacation, which improves your mood, is a tropical getaway in a bottle due to its pleasant pacific coconut flavor (and those magical scientific ingredients). Light Weight has a sophisticated combination of active ingredients to get your metabolism going and burn calories, including red wine extract. We can't decide which of the three Light Weight flavors is the best: Acai Pom, Dragonfruit or Pink Grapefruit, so you're going to have to try them yourself. Just 8oz of Function Drinks will make you feel like a better person, so keep an eye out for this drink, which definitely earns its name.