From battery covers to bird houses

This nesting box was once a Chevrolet Volt battery. It was designed especially for the endangered scaly-sided merganser in China. A few months after it was installed, a merganser hen and her eleven chicks moved in.

General Motors has made a lot of these, and they have lasted some very harsh winters and many squirrel attacks. The old batteries came from prototype cars, were damaged in assembly, or were used during training exercises. Instead of sending them out to a landfill, GM reuses them to provide shelter for bats, ducks, and birds.

The project was inspired by GM global waste reduction manager John Bradburn's personal experiences with nature. John, who grew up building nest boxes in his youth, said: "Once I saw the Chevy Volt battery cover in our plant, I knew it would make a good nest box. To test the idea five years ago, I built a prototype and within two weeks, I had a hen hooded merganser nesting in it."

I don't think there's an old battery cover lying around here somewhere, but I hope I can create something really nice for the chirping dozen of sparrows that always come around my front yard to hang out, feed and play.

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Preserved tattoos of the dead

The idea of preserving tattoos after death came into existence long before NAPSA . London's Wellcome Collection has over 300 specimens of preserved human flesh bearing tattoos , collected in the late 19th century. There are many more examples of smaller collections in Paris, Poland, Portugal, Berlin, and Austria. But what fascinates me the most is this lesser-known museum at Tokyo University, the Medical Pathology Museum, which houses pieces of skin collected since 1926 by Dr. Masaichi Fukushi. "Fukushi would perform autopsies on donated cadavers and dissect off just the skin. He created a method of treatment to preserve the skin and kept them stretched in a glass frame, essentially like a leather. Later the ownership of the tattooed skin collection was passed on to Fukushi's son Katsunari. Katsunari added a further 20 tattooed skins himself and it's believed that the Medical Pathology Museum has 105 in its collection, many with full body suits." ...

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Brother Victor-Antoine d' Avila-Latourrette is a Benedictine monk who lives at a secluded monastery in New York's Hudson Valley. He's an internationally acclaimed, best-selling author of several cookbooks, including From a Monastery Kitchen and Twelve Months of Monastery Salads . And he makes vinegars unlike those found in most markets.

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