Sideswipe: December 15: Fashion fail

Am I seeing straight?

Gucci has been mocked on social media for selling a pair of "upside-down" sunglasses for £470 ($882). The luxury Italian retailer describes the item on its website as "an unconventional take on the 50s and 60s inspired cat eye frames". However, shoppers have shared their confusion over the design, with one person saying it made them feel "uncomfortable".

Woman of the future

In 1950 the Associated Press reported anthropologists' and beauty experts' predictions about the woman of the future: "The women of the year 2000 will be more than six feet (183cm) tall, wear size 11 shoes and have shoulders like a wrestler and muscles like a truck driver. Chances are she will be doing a man's job, and for this reason will dress to fit her role. Her hair will be cropped short, so as not to get in the way.

"She probably will wear the most functional clothes in the daytime, go frilly only after dark. Slacks probably will be her usual workaday costume. These will be of synthetic fibre, treated to keep her warm in winter and cool in summer, admit the beneficial ultra-violet rays and keep out the burning ones. They will be light-weight and equipped with pockets for food capsules, which she will eat instead of meat and potatoes. Her proportions will be perfect, though Amazonian, because science will have perfected a balanced ration of vitamins, proteins and minerals that will produce the maximum bodily efficiency, the minimum of fat. She will go in for all kinds of sports – probably will compete with men athletes in football, baseball, prize fighting and wrestling. She'll be in on all the high-level groups of finance, business and government. She may even be president."

Santa's pre-Xmas grooming

Santa's getting his hair done at Laboratorie Hairsalon in Kingsland this year.

The weight of the earth

Human-made stuff is now likely to be officially heavier than the mass of the natural world. New research published in Nature, which has detailed the "crossover point" between human-made mass and living biomass, seems to suggest this. Considering the fact that we today are largely dependent on manufactured materials, we know that it is inevitable that we would soon outweigh nature. Still, it is surprising at how it happened so soon. The weight of roads, buildings and other constructed or manufactured materials is doubling roughly every 20 years, and authors of the research said it currently weighed 1.1 teratonnes (1.1 trillion tonnes).

As humankind has ramped up its insatiable consumption of natural resources, the weight of living biomass — trees, plants and animals — has halved since the agricultural revolution to stand at just 1 teratonne currently, the study found. Estimating changes in global biomass and human-made mass since 1990, the research showed that the mass of human-produced objects stood at just 3 per cent of the weight of biomass at the start of the 20th century. But since the post-World War II global production boom, manufacturing has surged to the extent that humans now produce the equivalent of the weight of every person on Earth every week on average. Read more here.