Baby drop-box

Every year some 400 babies are abandoned in Italy. To make sure that unwanted infants don't end up in trash cans, Ognissanti Church in Padua has devised a baby-drop box of sorts. When someone leaves a baby in the padded "cradle for life," which opens into the offices of a shelter for single women, an alarm goes off alerting workers of its presence. What's most surprising is that only the technology is new: up until 1888, the contraption was designed like a Lazy Susan that'd turn to deliver babies, hors d'ouevre-like, into the arms of waiting nuns.