While browsing online for a birthday gift for a Virgo friend of mine, I came across the coolest, and possibly creepiest item I've seen since the shrunken head jewelry that I fell in love with over a month ago. Actual soap, shaped like tiny little hands. Using molds made from dolls, each "hand" is handmade and cared for like the doll it came from.

Born 1958, Beijing and currently a professor of Stagecraft at the Beijing Central Academy of Drama, Xia Xiaowan's suspended paintings are not molded from any rough material and, as the artist says, "despite this overwhelming sense of mass, they still maintain that 'emptiness' of painting or drawing."

Learn all about the way bread mold grows and how it ruins your families lunch.

We have all had the experience of finding mold on some type of food in our kitchen. Be it on the loaf of bread hanging out on the counter for too long, the cheese in the fridge, or taking over the leftovers forgotten about in the back of the low moisture crisper drawer. We make disgusted faces (some of us even feel temporarily nauseated due to ho

Here are a couple of pics of some bread that has been in one of the lockers in my old office since early February 2006, and mid-summer 2006, respectively. Both loaves of bread have nary a spot of mold on them.

Rhizopus stolonifer (black bread mold) is a widely distributed Mucoralean mold.Asexual spores are formed within sporangia, which break to release the spores when mature. Germination of these spores forms the haploid hyphae of a new mycelium. R. stolonifer grows rapidly at temperatures between 15 and 30 degrees C.Rhizopus stolonifer is a heterothallic species (Schipper 1984), in that sexual reproduction occurs only when opposite mating types (designated + and -) come in contact. Successful mating results in the formation of durable zygospores at the point of contact. Subsequently, the zygospore germinates and forms a sporangiophore whose sporangium contains both + and - haploid spores.There are three varieties: R. stolonifer var. stolonifer produces straight, erect sporangiophores, whereas those of R. stolonifer var. lyococcos are curved . A closely related species, Rhizopus sexualis, differs primarily in being homothallic (self-compatible). Distribution and HabitatRhizopus stolonifer has a pandemic distribution. It is capable of causing opportunistic infections of humans (zygomycosis). It is most commonly found growing on bread and soft fruits such as bananas and grapes. Because its spores are common in the air, it can be grown within a few days by keeping moistened pieces of bread in an enclosed, humid environment. References^ a b Schipper, M. A. A. 1984. A revision of the genus Rhizopus. I. The Rh. stolonifer-group and Rh. oryzae. CBS Studies in Mycology 25:1-19.