"Mom, you sure can hydrate a...T-shirt?"

So some smart guys came up with a cool new T-shirt. It starts out super tiny, like...too small for even a newborn baby or a small dog.

Then, you apparently apply cold water, and the thing expands to full, human size.

Cool!

I like how they tapped in to the growing consumer trend in wearing clothing that is freezing cold and sopping wet. It's nice to know I can cut out the part of my morning routine where I soak the shirt I'm going to wear to work in cold water while I shower and shave. That'll save me... at least... ten minutes.

Of course...I suppose I'll have to go through the same steps anyhow, only it'll be putting this tiny shirt in cold water instead of a huge shirt. But I won't have to use as much water, so I'm still saving something.

Heck, as long as I reach my goal of having correctly sized, cold and wet clothing by the time I'm ready to dress myself... I'm good.

Seriously, though, this is amazing. It's one step closer to Back To The Future Part II's promise of hydrating a pizza. Pizza comes in tiny package... put it in the Hydrator, and a few moments later... full sized pizza! This is a personal dream of mine. It's on my list of things I hope happens before I die.

Tiny food storage is a lot less consuming of space than regular-sized food storage. We'd be able to store a month's worth of meals in a drawer, people! Just think of all the uses for the pantry now that we don't need it for storage.

Also... how long could it possibly take before we see Star Trek's "replicators" in the real world? I mean... what if this fantastic tiny T-shirt started out even tinier... like, say, microscopically tiny? So tiny we can't see it with the human eye? We use voice-recognition technology and speak the name of the food we want. It drops out the little molecule for the food we desire... heats it or cools it or whatever... moments later we have the item, full-sized and the right temperature.

I'm telling you it's going to happen. All because of this wonderful T-shirt.

(by the way... that Spulch site is where I get many of my featured science-fiction-in-the-real-world examples. I probably haven't done a good enough job crediting them. A lot of the stories we both cover come from Digg and other social news sites. But I read Spulch every day too, and they find a lot of this stuff before I do. They cover a lot more than just sci-fi stuff...mostly, though, it's off-the-wall type stories. And they post often. Check it out.)


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