Quitting smoking is, for many people, one of the most difficult transitions a person can undergo. Smoking cessation aids like patches, gums, and e-cigarettes don’t work for everyone, but Quitbit might. Built by a team of engineers, designers, and hardware tinkerers, the Quitbit is quite possibly the world’s most advanced lighter.

Quitbit helps you stop smoking by tracking your habit, letting you set custom goals, and keeping track of your progress. The flameless lighter uses a heating coil (like in a car lighter) to light cigarettes. The built-in screen displays your stats such as how long it’s been since your last smoke and how many cigarettes you’ve smoked that day.

The Quitbit also pairs with your smartphone via Bluetooth LE to give an even broader range of functions. In the app, you can set how many cigarettes you want to limit yourself to each day and see on a simple graph whether you are meeting that goal. If you really want to go hard-core with your goals, you can even limit when the lighter works.

The app will also help you see what times of the day you tend to smoke the most. As you cut down, the app will tell you how much money you save day by day, week by week, and month by month. The project is raising money on Kickstarter and, as of the date of publication, looks to be right on track to meet its goal.

The post Flick to Quit: Smart e-Lighter Helps You Kick the Habit first appeared on Gajitz.

There has been a lot of smoker-shaming going around in the past few years. While we aren’t defending smoking in any way, we do still think that responsible cigarette smokers deserve some props for correctly disposing on their butts. Fumo, a musical cigarette receptacle, rewards smokers for putting their used cigarettes into it instead of throwing them on the ground.

The Dutch/Turkish design firm ioglo designed the awesome urban fixture to reward smokers for doing the right thing and keeping their surroundings clean. Every time someone throws a cigarette butt into the Fumo, it lights up and plays any of a number of musical compositions from a moving gospel tune to Homer Simpson’s classic “D’oh!” exclamation.

Fumo was inspired by the type of attention given to different types of garbage in a city. The designers were walking through their town and saw someone bend over to pick up a discarded can. Although there were hundreds of cigarette butts littering the ground, no one ever thinks to pick those up. They wondered if rewarding responsible behavior might encourage more people to do the right thing.

Every Fumo is hand-crafted and can be customized to fit the venue in which it will be used. Currently, the designers are working with a hospital to put a Fumo on its grounds, and they may soon be able to place Fumos at musical festivals. Wherever they end up, the cigarette poles could make a huge difference in the way that smokers treat their environment.

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Remember the hookah-smoking, puzzle-talking caterpillar from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland? It turns out that that animated butterfly lava wasn’t the only insect that enjoys a few puffs now and then – but the hornworm caterpillar doesn’t do it for kicks. It emits little puffs of tobacco to ward off its natural predator, the wolf spider.

The caterpillar eats the leaves of the tobacco plant, a practice that would kill a human (and probably most other insects). It’s a fortunate choice of diet since the bug has a gene that allows it to eat the plant without dying. In fact, the tobacco provides an interesting defense against spiders. [WARNING: the video below contains some arachnid-on-insect violence.)

When confronted with a wolf spider, the hornworm caterpillars emit a foul-smelling puff of tobacco through tiny holes in their sides. The terrible smell is a warning to predators – a tactic that researchers are calling “defensive halitosis.” The discovery is significant because after researchers isolated the gene responsible for this interesting trick, they were able to develop a strain of tobacco that cancelled out the gene’s function.

After the caterpillars ate the genetically altered tobacco, they were unable to produce the little puffs of bad breath that scared the wolf spiders away. Researchers believe that they can use this knowledge to produce crops that will address specific human nutritional or health needs by canceling out certain genes in our own bodies.

The post Smoking Caterpillar Blows Nicotine to Ward Off Predators first appeared on Gajitz.

Back in the days before we knew just how unhealthy smoking is, everybody was lighting up seemingly all the time (if we can believe what we see on Mad Men, anyway). Apparently it was kind of a chore to light cigarette after cigarette all day long, so someone invented a cigarette dispenser that spat out pre-lit tobacco sticks.

These images from 1931 show a larger commercial model and a smaller personal dispenser, both of which doled out one cigarette at a time and did away with the need for a separate lighter. Although we don’t condone smoking, we do have to admit this is a pretty cool retro gadget, and it was probably quite useful for the lady who just couldn’t find a gentleman ready with a lighter when she needed one.

The post Unnecessary Convenience? ’30s Pre-Lit Cigarette Dispenser first appeared on Gajitz.

Smoking bans around the country have spurred on the sudden growth of the electronic cigarette industry – a tar-free, smokeless alternative to traditional puffing. One such company sent in free samples (no, silly, not for Delana – she does not smoke!) and they are a truly fascinating invention from the first drag to the last lingering cloud of fake smoke.

Electronic Cigarettes Inc. produces e cigarette varieties on the front lines of this strange new movement with rechargeable, portable and long-lasting devices that mimic the look of cigarettes and feel of smoking … but deliver a nicotine vapor instead. While it might not be as healthy as a tofu diet and ten-mile daily run this is certainly way better than regularly ingesting the typical carcinogens found in normal smokes. And the experience? Certainly worlds closer to actual smoking than lozenges, mints, gum, patches or other nicotine supplements and delivery systems. Any smoker (like myself) knows that the puffing is a key part of the habit – and perhaps the hardest part to break.

They sent over two products in particular – their Duo Pro and Vapor King alternatives. The former looks pretty much just like a regular cigarette, but the glowing ember at the end is not on fire … and the smoke you blow out is not really smoke at all. The Vapor King has a sleek and shiny silver variant as well as the option of a manual push-button activation versus a simple drag-and-draw model. While the Duo Pro has pre-loaded one-time-use cartridges the Vapor King has refillable ones. Various flavors are available as well as different nicotine strengths – you can even get the glowing tip in different colors. So for fellow smokers, well, there is good news and bad news: the good news is there is an easier way to quit the old cancer sticks – the bad news is you have one less excuse for stopping smoking.

The post Beating the Ban: Electronic Cigarettes & Smokeless Smoking first appeared on Gajitz.