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My kid is obsessed with Band-Aids, and can spend a good fifteen minutes deciding between the Hello Kitty and the Strawberry Shortcake varieties to stick on the day's imaginary boo-boo. Once you're all grown-up, I've found, Band-Aid picking gets a lot less fun. You get a paper cut opening a bill, you curse, you apply a bandage. But what if that bandage could help save someone's life?

This new product was just introduced at TED, and it really is brilliant: a combination pack of adhesive bandages and a bone marrow registry kit. People with diseases like leukemia need bone marrow transplants to save their lives, but the lack of donors to the National Marrow Donor Program makes finding a match unlikely, especially for people of non-white ethnicities. Registering to be a match only takes a few seconds and a drop of blood. Admit it: the joy of saving a life may even make you look forward to those paper cuts.

Read about the origin story of this genius product, and about how you can obtain one yourself, at co.EXIST.

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