Ideas

• NASA’s Image Archive
  
  It’s felt like too long since we posted something on space exploration. So we took a rummage around NASA’s Image Archive, which has been loaded up onto Flickr for all to see. This shot that we love is of the Apollo 11 Lunar Module ascent stage, with Astronauts Neil A. Armstrong and Edwin E. Aldrin [...]
• The Tea Calendar by Hälssen & Lyon
  
  This is probably the most innovative use of tea we’ve seen in a bloody long time. German tea company Hälssen & Lyon has created the Tea Calendar, a calendar in which every day is a uniquely flavoured wafer of pressed tea leaves. Simply boil water, tear off the day from the calendar, immerse it in [...]
• “Ghosts in the Machine” by Mark Crummett
  
  In the photo series “Ghosts in the Machine” by Mark Crummett, old electronic components serve as imaginary environments for tiny human figures (played by model railroad figurines). The “ghosts” in these machines are just folks, dwarfed by the technology that pervades their lives. Engaged in enigmatic activities in an out-of-scale, high tech landscape, workers toil [...]
• ‘Lord of the Rings’ Walking Directions in Google Maps
  
  The engineers that keep Google Maps are always instaling awesome little easter eggs into the program for us to find. The most recent one is a Lord of the Rings reference. If you go to Google Maps, click “Get Directions,” select walking, and search for directions from The Shire to Mordor, this amusing Lord of [...]
• Green Box by Act Romegialli Architects
  
  Designed by Italian firm Act Romegialli Architects, Green Box is a small camouflaged garage for a private residence situated on the Raethian Alps. While the interior is organized into a gardening room, cooking area, and a small dining/hang out space, it’s the exterior that makes this contemporary hobbit home pretty remarkable. The architects created a [...]
• Sky City, China
  
  As soon as 2014, the Burj Khalifa’s title as world’s tallest building will be no more.   Sky City, a planned 220-story prefab tower in Changsha, China, is taking its place. Broad Sustainable Building, the company in charge of the build, will begin construction on this monster next month, and aims to have it the whole [...]
• Geoguessr
  
  How’s your geography skills? Or rather, how is your, ‘how well do you know random streets in random towns across the world? That’s the premise behind Geoguessr. Developed by Anton Wallen, the game will randomly dump you on a road somewhere in the world using Google Street Map and you have to then guess where [...]
• 9 Film Frames
  
  9 Film Frames is a single topic blog on Tumblr that presents the entirety of a movie in nine panels. The frames include anything from key plot points to popular scenes that have gone on to leave their mark in film history. The blog is an ongoing project that includes a wide variety of films [...]
• London in Colour, 1927
  
  Want to see what London looked like back in the year 1927? Check out this beautiful colour footage shot in various London locations by Claude Friese-Greene, an early British pioneer of film. Frisse-Greene created a series of travelogues nearly 90 years ago using a colour process developed by his father William Friese-Greene. The film has [...]
• The world’s biggest ghost mall
  
  It’s hard to say what’s more interesting about this video in which a CNN reporter tours the New South China Mall, the largest mall in the world when it was built five years ago, now a deserted ghost-mall. On the one had, there’s the “eerie urban landscape” of the mall itself, and on the other, [...]
• Behind the Edge by Luigi Bonaventura
  
  Luigi Bonaventura’s “Behind the Edge” is a series of photographs documenting the vibrant, eye-catching facades of hotels in Jesolo Beach, a town in Venice, Italy. Sorry Bognor Regis, you were in the running, but your drab 1950s utopia just wasn’t what Luigi was looking for. Photographed in primarily static, symmetrical compositions, the buildings appear as [...]
• No More Stars by Rä di Martino
  
  In September 2010, visual artist and filmmaker Rä di Martino set out on a quest to photograph and document old abandoned film sets in the North African deserts. The project had started when she discovered that it was common practice to abandon these sets without tearing them down, leaving them fully intact and crumbling over [...]
• Every Noise At Once
  
  Every Noise at Once is a site created by Glenn McDonald that maps different musical genres and artists. Users can scan through various genres to hear examples of each, and can listen to different artists and songs from within each genre. It’s a beautiful way of organising music and helping people discover new tunes.
• David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” on board the ISS
  
  Taking the Flight of the Conchords’ premise to its inevitable (and literal) conclusion, Commander Chris Hadfield recorded a cover of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” aboard the International Space Station and uploaded it to YouTube earlier today. (Which is like seven years ago in space time, I think.) The song, from the Bowie album of the [...]
• Google Timelapse
  
  Google’s new Timelapse feature may be the closest thing to a time machine that we’ve seen yet. Fed by imagery meticulously collected by NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey, Google has documented some of the more interesting — and often unsettling — changes that have taken place across the globe. Sifting through high-res imagery collected [...]
• “Ryan Gosling Won’t Eat His Cereal”
  
  We love ‘The Gos’, we really do. So when we heard about Ryan McHenry’s genius internet meme, “Ryan Gosling Won’t Eat His Cereal”, we couldn’t wait to share it with you. The Scotland-based writer and director made up of a series of short videos on Vine, each showing a spoonful of cereal slowly inching towards [...]
• Here is Today
  
  Have you ever wondered where you were in time, precisely at this moment? Well, there’s a beautifully simple website that will put your position in all of the iterations of time we currently understand. So just in case you’re having a bad day, you know it’s not going to last forever.
• Cut Food by Charlotte Omnes
  
  For her project titled “Cut Food”, New York-based still life and food photographer Beth Galton, in collaboration with food stylist Charlotte Omnès, created a series of still-lifes showcasing dynamic cross sections of packaged food. “This series was inspired by an assignment in which we were asked to cut a burrito in half for a client.” [...]
• The Beastie Boys on The Joan Rivers Show in 1987
  
  Juxtapoz Magazine is running a Beastie Boys in this month’s issue. To celebrate, they dug out a 1987 appearance on the Joan Rivers Show. From Joan calling it Licensed to KILL to Adrock doing a Pee Wee Herman impression, MCA taking over her desk, girls in leather mini skirts dancing, a DJ Hurricane turntable encore…we’ve [...]
• ‘The Hyena & Other Men’ by Pieter Hugo
  
  Pieter Hugo shot the series ‘The Hyena & Other Men’ in Nigeria. Pieter was captivated by the first pictures of the ‘hyena men’ that he came across randomly. He went to live with them on the periphery of Abuja in a shantytown – a group of men, a little girl, three hyenas, four monkeys and [...]
• Things Come Apart & Disassembly Series by Todd McLellan n
  
  With his photographic series “Things Come Apart & Disassembly Series,” Todd McLellan dismantles objects and pieces of machinery, like this bike, to reveal the hidden beauty within. The stunning visual creations will be published in a book, to be brought out by Thames & Hudson later this month. But you can check out more by [...]
• Behind The Scenes’ Photos of Monty Python’s Holy Grail
  
  We love behind-the-scenes photography, especially when it’s a film we’re so fond of. Over on Vintage Everyday, they’ve unearthed shots from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The film shot in 1973, followed the fortune of Sir Galahad and his journey into the nether regions of England on a holy quest. We particularly love the [...]
• The First Taste
  
  Screened at the TEDxSydney conference on Saturday The First Taste captures in delightfully slow motion the unfettered reactions of a group of children trying foods such as anchovy, Vegemite and olives for the first time. Matt Gilmour, creative director at marketing agency Saatchi & Saatchi, says the inspiration for the film came from his two-year-old [...]
• The People You Meet at McDonald’s by Nolan Conway
  
  Photographer Nolan Conway has created a fantastic series of portraits of McDonalds diners, which were recently posted on the New York Times. What Nolan found, after visiting hundreds of their restaurants across America, was the diversity in the customers, how it’s one of the only places where the poor dine alongside the rich, which you [...]
• How historical figures would have looked today
  
  In this series of illustrations created for a British TV show, historical figures are depicted as they might look today. The project, comissioned by history TV channel Yesterday to celebrate its new series, the Secret Life Of…, saw digital artists working closely with history experts to ensure the portraits gave a real sense of how [...]
• Riding an Icebreaker
  
  While the northern hemisphere slowly, but surely creeps out what must have been the longest winter on record, spare a thought for marine scientist Cassandra Brooks. She’s been on a two-month journey on an Antarctic ice breaker, which she has narrated the journey in this fascinating video. Check out the ice ramming and the fishing [...]
• Hungry Planet by Peter Menzel
  
  What the World Eat is an exciting photographic series on consumption habits across the world. Put together by artist Peter Menzel, he travelled across the globe visiting different countries to photograph families and what they eat for a week. The snapshots have all gone into a book called “Hungry Planet”. Fubiz has lots more.  
• Musical Poster by Trapped in Suburbia
  
  Trapped in Suburbia has produced a new interactive print, Sounds Poster 1.0, that you can play like an instrument. The poster is the “first design in a series of ‘analogue meets digital’ experiments.” The user places one finger on a tab at the bottom of the poster and then can move the other hand over [...]
• Hate Mail by Mr Bingo
  
  London-based artist, Mr. Bingo, wants to offend you. “I will send an offensive postcard to the first person to reply to this message,” he tweeted one night back in 2011 and thus, a new Internet art project, aptly titled Hate Mail, was born. The response was overwhelming, so he realised that people really wanted to [...]
• Shadow Pictures by Larry Kagan
  
  Larry Kagan has come up with an novel way of creating shadows using steel and light to cast beautiful shadows. Larry explains a bit further: ‘We are more or less aware of the presence of shadows, since they tell us something about our environment, but we do not actually look at them – unless they [...]
• Patrick Bateman business card
  
  A brand new musical, based on the iconic novel ‘American Psycho’ by Bret Easton Ellis, is coming to the Almeida Theatre in London this December. They’ve decided to raise some funds over on Kickstarter, by creating a very cool/geeky accessory to show your support for the production. A 1GB “Patrick Bateman” business card has been [...]
• New York + London by Daniella Zalcman
  
  Photographer Daniella Zalcman recently produced a series entitled New York + London – where she combined shots from both the cities to create these beautiful collages of the two great metropolises. Zalcman’s personal love letter to New York and London can be purchased in a limited edition book, which can be found on Kickstarter. Click [...]
• The Uncensored Oral History of ‘The Hangover’
  
  It’s the biggest R-rated comedy franchise in history and on May 24 – in America anyway – the third installment of The Hangover franchise will be released. The Hollywood Reporter has a hilarious interview the actors and director Todd Phillips about Lindsay Lohan’s meeting, Mel Gibson’s ill-fated cameo and how they tricked the baby’s mom. [...]
• Band Riders by Henry Hargreaves
  
  Photographer Henry Hargreaves created this amazing series, called Band Riders. In it he explores the requests made by the film and music world’s elite on how to organize their dressing room, and what kinds of food and drink to provide backstage during a show. In the case of Frank Sinatra – the image on this [...]
• The Life of an Orthodox Jewish Surfer
  
  We love photo essays here at Apowl. But we love photo essays about the unexpected more – as is the case of writer and surfer Gai Shtienberg and his documenting of the life of an ultra-orthodox Jewish man’s life as he balances his devotion to religion and his irrepressible affinity for surfing. Shtienberg followed 34-year-old [...]
• A Boy And His Atom: The World’s Smallest Movie
  
  IBM released its first production movie today, but don’t look for it on the big screen as the characters are just a bunch of atoms in a stop-motion film. IBM said it made the world’s tiniest movie by using thousands of precisely placed atoms to create nearly 250 frames of stop-motion action. IBM’s new flick, [...]
• The world’s first web site
  
  CERN joins several other ongoing 20-year anniversaries by restoring the world’s first website. Although the Internet as we know it was first invented by Tim Berners-Lee while working at CERN, it wasn’t until 1993 that Berners-Lee’s then employer would make the technology behind the world wide web available license-free. To commemorate this, CERN has recreated [...]
• The Hacienda Nápoles
  
  As far as theme parks go, there isn’t really anything too surprising or out of the ordinary going on here at the Hacienda Nápoles. But take a closer look and you’ll realise this isn’t no ordinary theme park.  The Hacienda Nápoles theme park is situated on grounds that once belonged to Colombia’s (and perhaps the [...]
• Boxing in the early 20th century
  
  Boxing has fallen a long way over the past 100 years. Back when men were men, boxing matches were among the most celebrated and attended sporting events across America. The Library of Congress has a jackpot of boxing photos from the early 1910s that perfectly capture the strangeness and simplistic beauty of the bygone sport. [...]
• Superconducting Super Collider
  
  Like CERN’s Large Hadron Collider on steroids, the Superconducting Super Collider was to be a huge underground ring complex beneath the area near Waxahachie, Texas, that would have been the world’s most energetic particle accelerator. Construction on the site began in the early 1990s, but only got so far as 14 miles of tunnel being [...]
• Bread city by Johanna Mårtensson
  
  What would happen to our cities if humans suddenly disappeared? Stockholm-based artist and set designer Johanna Mårtensson set out to recreate that scenario by erecting a model cityscape made out of bread, and  documenting the naturally slow process of decay every day for six months. Speaking about the project Johanna says, “I was inspired by [...]
• Kite Aerial Photography
  
  If you were looking for a more interesting way of capturing photos, why not strap your camera to a kite? This is a relatively old form of photography, but one that has, in recent years taken on a new dimension, thanks to ambitions of a few keen amateurs and advancements in digital technology. Over on [...]
• The Homos Luminosos by Roseline de Thélin
  
  Inspired by astronomy, quantum physics, scientific theories, and the expansion of consciousness – oh and yeah, we spotted it Roseline, the transportation systems from Star Trek – Roseline de Thélin has been creating art with light for over 15 years. This series, called “The Homos Luminosos”, features a family of light beings that represent life, [...]
• Crime Scene Die-o-ramas by Abigail Goldman
  
  Abigail Goldman is obsessed with the darker side of life. So much so she has created these  miniature crime scene displays, playfully titled Die-o-ramas. These little boxes of horror feature seemingly ordinary scenes of people enjoying themselves while somewhere else in this tranquil scene, a grizzly murder has been committed. Click the pic to see [...]
• Happy End by Dietmar Eckell
  
  The Scenic Route to Nowhere, Happy End #3.1, Mexico, 2010 / Grumman Albatross, no official report as used for drug trafficking, locals say all survived. Photographer Dietmar Eckell tells the story of a genuine miracle. In his series titled ‘Happy End’ he captures the moments in aviation history where planes went down and everyone walked [...]
• Spontaneous sculptures by Brad Downey
  
  Sculpture and art installations tend to favour the safety of an art gallery. But Brad Downey, a visual artist adorning public streets with his sculptural installations thinks otherwise. His works live (and die) in the streets – in 2011 one installation was eaten by a dog. Using seemingly ordinary objects; broomsticks, bricks, bits of salami, [...]
• Plosky Tolbachik volcano by Liudmila and Andrey
  
  In eastern Russia, a couple of photographers, known by the names Liudmila and Andrey, adventured up the fiery mountain of Plosky Tolbachik, which has been spewing lava after being dormant for 36 years. They set about capturing the size and power of the lava flows – but for non-scientists like us, it’s a change to [...]
• Artists and their cats
  
  A the relationship between a cat and its owner, in today’s digital age is one where the cat carries on much as normal, but the owner, aghast screams at any camera phone within ten feet, ‘he thinks he’s people!’. It wasn’t always this way, or was it? Flavorwire has posted a photo gallery of famous [...]
• Images Connect by Henny Boogert
  
  Images Connect is an international photo project by photographer Henny Boogert that explores the similarities and differences between the places students call home around the world. Boogert visited 10 countries to capture all of his images: Kenya, Russia, Moldova, Cuba, Bolivia, the Philippines, India, Hong Kong, Italy and his home country of the Netherlands. And [...]
• The CIA and abstract expressionism
  
  From a 1995 article in The Independent, an account of how the CIA promoted and funded US and other Western artists during the Cold War, including abstract expressionists like Rothko and Pollock. The decision to include culture and art in the US Cold War arsenal was taken as soon as the CIA was founded in [...]
• The Con by Vincent Glielmi
  
  Photographer Vincent Glielmi sheds a fascinating light on the people who attend the comic conferences across the world. These people are the ones who come dressed as their favourite characters from books, comics, and films – but in this setting take on a far stranger and more unusual context. Click the pic to see more.
• North Korea by Ilya Pitalev
  
  The winners of Sony’s World Photography Awards have been announced, and the winner of the Current Affairs  category was Russia-born Ilya Pitalev, a photographer who works for RIA Novosti, a Russian and international news agency. His series on North Korea reveals how the regime celebrates it’s on going dominance of the state, and the lengths [...]
• Astronaut Fashion: Spacesuits Through the Years
  
  Fashion gets everywhere, even space. As NASA shows in this wonderful collection of how their space suit has evolved over the years. We particular like the silver foil look that seemed to be so wildly popular in the 70s. Click the pic to see.  
• Cloud I Meteoros by Lucy Orta
  
  If you’re coming into London today (via Kings Cross) be sure to check a new piece of sculpture that’s just popped up in the departures hall. The art work, created by Lucy Orta and her husband Jorge, is called ‘Cloud i Meteoros’. Here’s more from the pair themselves: “Meteoros is a word derived from ancient [...]
• To Do Cat
  
  Apowl is having a wee break at the moment – if you must know, we’re in Denmark – while we change a few things on the site. Don’t worry, it’s going to mean more interesting things for you to look at – and a brand new section! In the meantime, we saw this and couldn’t [...]
• Parkour by Andy Day
  
  Even though Parkour has been knocking around for a years now, we’re always impressed when we see photos and footage from the free running community. Alan Day, a British photographer has made it his life’s work – thus far – to capture and document these high flyers. You can see all of his work over [...]
• South America’s Salt Mines
  
  Over at The Atlantic’s In Focus photography page, they’ve pulled out some strange, and really rather beautiful photos from the salt mining processes of South America. This beautiful shot is of one of the colourful brine pools that are part of a lithium salt pilot plant on the Uyuni salt lake, which holds the world’s [...]
• The Daft Punk Interview
  
  As internet citizens and commuters of the world wide web, we’ve been bombarded with news of Daft Punk’s imminent return. While we’re extremely happy about this, we’d prefer to hear more about it from the robots themselves, and not the seas of PR surrounding them. Thankfully, Rolling Stone Magazine sat down with the two to [...]
• One Dress, One Woman, One World
  
  Photographer Jeff Salvage and his wife Jennifer got married back in 2008 near a volcano crater on Easter Island. Pretty special you might think – but apparently not special enough. After they’re 7,000 mile journey, they decided to go on a bigger one, with the dress. The two, in their One Dress, One Woman, One [...]
• 50 Years Ago at Cannes: Rare Photos From 1962
  
  With the Cannes Film Festival coming round again this year, we thought we’d take a step back in time to see how the world’s sexiest film festival looked half a century ago. The answer? Pretty frikkin sexy, as you can see from the above shot of the beautiful German actress Elke Sommer. From the description [...]
• Supercut of Will Ferrell Yelling in Movies
  
  NextMovie released a supercut video of Will Ferrel yelling in movies. A full list of the movies, in order of appearance, is available on NextMovie. Get him angry. You’ll like him when he’s angry.
• Passenger Side Window by Johnny Tergo
  
  Photographer Johnny Tergo would constantly see people he was inspired to photograph while he was driving the streets of Los Angeles. One day he had the idea to rigg up his Chevy Silverado truck with his camera gear and while driving, be able to click and shoot his unbeknownst subjects. He titled the project “Passenger [...]
• Magnetic Putty
  
  Magnetic putty is just like any other putty in that you can handle it, sculpt it, and squeeze it in a fist as you visualize your enemies. But place it anywhere near a strong magnetic field and it will SPONTANEOUSLY ANIMATE and move to consume anything magnetic in its path like a voracious mutated slug. [...]
• OBEY THE GIANT – The Shepherd Fairey Story
  
  “OBEY THE GIANT” is a short film about the formative years of artist Shepard Fairey and the origin of his “OBEY GIANT” street art campaign. The film focuses on Fairey’s time at Rhode Island School of Design (1989-1992), during which the artist installed his first piece of André the Giant-themed street art. The film was [...]
• Wall Piece by Mikko Kuorinki
  
  Sometimes text can do the work of a thousand thoughts in one sentence. For ten months artist Mikko Kuorinki formed one new text on the wall of Kiasma museum every week, using text passages of different authors such as Mitch Hedberg, Elias Canetti or Joe Brainard. Click the pic to see more.
• The Marmite PM
  
  On the day of Margaret Thatcher’s funeral, we thought we’d draw your attention to agency BBH’s creation for the Saturday’s Guardian coverage of the Thatcher legacy. The ad is to promote cartoonist Posy Simmond’s take on Thatcher’s life in the newspaper – but has used a cultural symbol just as divisive as the ex-PM to [...]
• Branding Terror by Artur Beifuss and Francesco Trivini Bellini
  
  Branding Terror looks at 60 organisations from al-Quaeda to the Tamil Tigers and combines Francesco’s creative direction expertise with Artur’s experience as a counterterrorism analyst for the United Nations. They say: “Branding Terror does not seek to make any political statements; rather, it offers insight into an understudied area of counterintelligence, and provides an original [...]
• The 2013 Pulitzer Prize Winners
  
  Columbia University has announced the winning photographs of both the Breaking News and Feature Photography Pulitzer prizes for 2013 — all of which depict the heartrending civil war in Syria. At first glance that may not seem like a big deal, but when you consider that the Breaking News prize wasn’t awarded to one, but [...]
• Secrets From the Potato Chip Factory
  
  In this fascinating short video titled “Secrets From the Potato Chip Factory,” NPR’s Planet Money looks at how technological innovations have transformed the production of potato chips. Some of the key food-making technologies are explained with animated GIFs in this companion article. The video was shot at the Herr’s factory in Pennsylvania.  
• Where’s Wally – at the US Masters
  
  Hidden among the sea of spectators of the 2013 U.S. Masters is Wally/Waldo of the famous Where’s Wally/Waldo books. A new Tumblr reignites the fondness of hunting for the red and white striped, spectacled nomad who wonders in and out of scenes from all over the world. No clue if Wenda or Wizard Whitebeard will [...]
• Branding the US Presidents by Meg Jannott
  
  Designer Meg Jannott has gone through 44 presidents and painstakingly re-created a unique typographic brand identity for each one. The project, started last year, only got through the first 22, but the prolific brand creator is back to finish them off. Click the pic to see them all.
• Greg Guillemin’s ‘The Secret Life of Superheroes’
  
  Illustrator Gregoire Guillemin has introduced the second installment to his Secret Life of Superheroes series. Exposing superhero’s daily lives, Gregoire features Marvel and DC characters doing normal things like Batman brushing his teeth, Wonder Woman stuffing her bra, Spiderman eating a burger, and Catwoman enganging in some NSFW activities with Ivy. Click the pic to [...]
• Google Street View World
  
  We all know about the wonders of Google Street View, and we’ve all seen the things people get up to when those google cars drive buy. But what about a world full of the strange and wonderful sights? That’s the purpose of Google Street View World. This collection of the funny and downright bizarre is [...]
• Mare Vida by Mark Tipple
  
  Going where most men fear to tred, photographer Mark Tipple takes photographs of waves from below, capturing a swirling chaos that few people ever really experience. “We both knew the reefs on the island were shallow; we’d been there before and surfed the waves, but shooting The Underwater Project dictates no boards and definitely no [...]
• Cardboard Dioramas by Francesco Romoli
  
  Italian artist Francesco Romoli creates mysterious dioramas constructed out of cardboard, incorporating light and shadow to produce a very dramatic atmosphere. Each diorama is constructed specifically to be photographed. Like filmmaking all staging and lighting is done looking through the lens. Once photographed the dioramas are then digitally manipulated to add solitary figures wandering through [...]
• McDonalds Batumi, Georgia
  
  Designed by Georgian architect Giorgi Khmaladze, the contemporary McDonald’s fuel station was commissioned by Socar and took 3 years to complete. The structure is 1200 sq m (12,916 sq ft) and was designed in a way to separate the restaurant and fuel station, even though to they share the same space. In the hopes of [...]
• Bad Weather by Danny Santos
  
  What started as a hobby after he moved to Singapore in 2008, has blossomed into a career. Danny Santos began capturing pictures of any strangers that look interesting on Orchard Road. He discovered a unique theme that got him some interesting shots. An unexpected rainstorm can change a person’s day in a snap. For some [...]
• Museum, NYC
  
  Hidden inside a nondescript freight elevator in a NYC TriBeCa alley lies Museum, a delightful cabinet-of-curiosities drawing from weird collections around the globe. Museum is now open for its second season and includes such items as: “Personal Ephemera from Al Goldstein, The Rocks and Tools from Tom Sach’s Mars expedition, Objects Made For Prisoners or [...]
• David Imms: Sunday League Refs
  
  David Imms’ four portraits of Sunday League referees, taken on London’s famous Hackney Marshes, are an attempt not just to understand, but to lionise these figures who facilitate our national pastime. As David says: “This mini-series is about the home-made thrown together referee attire, the individuality and personality of a bloke that’s always seen as [...]
• A profile of Felix Baumgartner
  
  When Felix Baumgartner set out to make a living by stunt jumping—from cliffs, buildings, and bridges—the young Austrian had no idea where it would take him: to a pressurized capsule nearly 24 miles above New Mexico, last October 14, preparing to free-fall farther than any man in history, and at supersonic speed. Detailing Baumgartner’s quest, [...]
• War Photography by Jeremy Lock
  
  Every year since 1960, the government has held a Military Photographer of the Year competition to highlight the best images created by photographers in uniform. US Air Force Master Sergeant Jeremy “JT” Lock has won the award a staggering seven times. No other military photographer has come close to that. Lock is an editorial photojournalist [...]
• Life on the Moon circa 1836
  
  In the old days, Mars was peopled by one vast thinking vegetable, and the Moon was peopled by stick-wielding bat-men and moth-winged moon maidens. This series was taken from the Smithsonian Institute Image Collections. This portfolio of hand-tinted lithographs purports to illustrate the “discovery of life on the moon.” In 1836, Richard E. Locke, writing [...]
• Travelling Landscapes by Kathleen Vance
  
  For her series of works titled “Travelling Landscapes”, artist Kathleen Vance created miniature landscapes inside weathered steamer trunks and vintage travelling cases. Displaced elements indicative of nature are presented in partially opened cases, as to not fully expose the delicateness of what is contained within. Via her website, “The illusion of life and growth, illuminated [...]
• Computer Schematic Prints
  
  If you can identify any of these wiring schematics (without reading further) you score 200,000 points, with a 16x multiplier for every extra ID. You’re looking at the inner workings of some of the most revered personal computing and gaming consoles from the rise of the electronics era – from the Apple I and Commodore [...]
• Exploded Flowers by Fong Qi Wei
  
  Exploded Flowers is a series of photos by artist Fong Qi Wei that shows a variety of flowers dissected into individual components. Reminiscent of exploding fireworks, it’s fascinating to see the radial footprints each flower makes relative to the size of its actual bloom. The series placed second in the 2012 International Photography Awards. You [...]
• Animal Eyes by Suren Manvelyan
  
  This photo collection by Suren Manvelyan, simply called Animal Eyes, is a fantastic voyage into the landscapes that lay within the eyes of a multitude of animals. What you see above are the eyes of a fish, a llama and a husky. But they look like the most foreign, alien landscapes you’ve ever seen. The [...]
• Alpha Beauties project by Nazareno Crea
  
  For his Alpha Beauties project, artist Nazareno Crea retouches paintings and sculpture from throughout history, a process which normalizes each period’s ideal of female beauty to that of the present day. That is, much skinnier, with smaller noses, higher cheekbones, and larger breasts. Click the pic to see more.
• Lionel Messi vs. robot goalkeeper
  
  Someone built a robotic goalkeeper in Japan and invited world footballer of the year Lionel Messi to try and beat it. Who do you think won this titanic feat against man and machine? Click the pic to find out.
• Volcanoes by Alexandre Socci
  
  Action sports photographer Alexandre Socci along with kayakers Pedro Oliva, Ben Stookesberry and Chris Korbulic recently took a trip to Hawaii. But where most of us would spend our time on the beach or in a national park, they decided to brave the waters surrounding Kilauea, an active volcano on the southeast slope of Mauna [...]
• Attention: A Life In Extremes
  
  Attention: A Life In Extremes is an examination of the psychology of risk-taking. It follows three protagonists; wingsuit flyer Halvor Angvik, freediver Guillaume Néry and cyclist Gerhard Gulewicz wth filmmakers Adri-Alpe determined to get to the bottom of why these men put themselves through what they do. Check out their Kickstarter campaign and keep an [...]
• Rob Hann: Deserted States of America
  
  Rob Hann is fascinated with the desert states of America – which is a far cry from the town of Salisbury in the UK, where he grew up. Drawn to the sense of “silence, wonder and mystery,” his photo series ‘Desert States of America’ is a fascinating insight into the rugged, yet serene landscape of [...]
• Margaret Thatcher – in her youth
  
  Britain’s first and only female Prime Minister Baroness Thatcher has died at the age of 87 after suffering a stroke. Lady Thatcher’s children Mark and Carol said their mother, who suffered bouts of ill health in recent years, died peacefully on Monday morning. We have to say, we were never a fan of her politics [...]
• The Shed
  
  If you’ve been down to London’s Southbank recently, you might have seen an new structure going  up. Plugging a gap while the Cottesloe Theatre is redeveloped, this big red slap in the face is called The Shed due to its wooden slat structure. Although only due to stay until February 2014, it’s a big brute, [...]
• Vadering
  
  New internet meme alert! If you aren’t strong enough in the Force to choke someone, then Vadering is the next best thing. This rapidly growing photo meme shows one person jumping up in the air while the other (presumably) pretends to hold him or her there with the Force.
• 70s & 80s Rock Albums Imagined as Vintage Book Sets
  
  London designer Standard Designs has converted a number of rock albums from the 70s and 80s into imaginary sets of vintage books for his ingenious music-themed print series. Each song in an album is represented by a book, and the books are arranged in track order. Click the pic to see more.
• Darwin’s Letters on Evolution
  
  From a scientific point of view the most important letter in history may be the one Charles Darwin wrote to friend and fellow botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker on January 11, 1844. Writing from his home, Down House in Kent, Darwin fires questions at Hooker about seeds, seashells and Arctic species—his mind obviously a blur of [...]
• RIP Pasha P183
  
  Pasha P183, a prominent Russian graffiti artist who hid his identity and has been compared to Britain’s Banksy, has died. He was 29. The Teatralnoye Delo theatrical production company, which recently commissioned Pasha P183 to create scenery for the musical “Todd,” said the artist died Monday in Moscow. It wouldn’t elaborate. Teatralnoye Delo’s spokeswoman Regina [...]
• Marlon Brando and his cat
  
  Marlon Brando loved his cats. So much so, someone decided to do a photoshoot him and his favourite mog. But it wasn’t the most famous “Marlon & kitty” picture of all — that title belongs to the one featured on the covers for VHS and DVD copies of “The Godfather.” The kitty that Vito Corleone [...]
• The 91-year-old cobbler
  
  Frank Catalfumo is a 91 year old shoemaker and repairer in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. He first opened the doors to F&C Shoes in 1945 and continues to work five days a week alongside his son Michael. If you’re ever in the area, make sure to stop by the shop and listen to one of Frank’s amazing [...]
• 2000, the Year Formerly Known as the Future
  
  For decades, the year 2000 had been the embodiment of «the future». As early as a hundred years before, people imagined what the world would look like in 2000. There is a wonderful set of illustrations by various artists who imagined futuristic France. Later, once time had turned 1984 from dystopia to past, the year [...]
• What Ali Wore by Zoe Spawton
  
  Zoe Spawton often photographs a particularly well-dressed man who passes her cafe in Berlin each day. She’s documenting the results at What Ali Wore. Click the pic to see this tumblr of the day.
• The 25 least visited countries in the world
  
  Are you up for going on that unique trip that almost no one has done before you? The problem might just be finding the right destination. The least visited country in the world may not be the one you would think. Gunnar Garfors is currently conducting research through visits to all 198 countries of the [...]
• Documerica
  
  In 1970, the Environmental Protection Agency was born. The next year, the agency began one of its most uniquely ambitious initiatives: Documerica, a photography project spanning from 1971 to 1977 that hired photographers across the U.S. to document environmental images from the 1970s, creating a baseline of what things looked like in the nation’s mines, [...]
• Computer Chronicles – 1995
  
  Hey internet, what was life like online way back in 1995? Well, it was a strange, scary place where ageing TV presenters tried to convince a sceptical public that the world wide web wasn’t a place for of weirdos waiting to become serial killers, but actually, something that might become useful one day. Want to [...]
• Transcript of Raiders of the Lost Ark brainstorming session
  
  In 1978, George Lucas gathered together Steven Spielberg and screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan to go over ideas for a film Lucas had wanted to make about a swashbuckling archeologist, i.e. Raiders of the Lost Ark. Their sessions were recorded and there’s a transcript available online. Patrick Radden Keefe at the New Yorker read through the whole [...]
• What does your Instagram filters say about you?
  
  Marketing firm Marketo recently poked around with some of Instagram’s statistics, and then decided to assign personality profiles to some of the service’s most popular filters. It’s like Instagram meets Chinese Zodiac. Instagram is well known for its various filters that transform the look and feel of the photos. With them, sunsets, coffee cups, and [...]
• Sweet Sounds of Science
  
  Radiolab, one of our favourite radio shows, is known for its striking sound effects to communicate big ideas. You can currently listen to excerpts in this sonic gallery over on The New York Times. My favourite is ‘the sleeping cat’s brain”. Click the pic to see more.
• Moscow Beauty 1988
  
  Here’s a trip down memory lane – well for anyone harking back to the good old days of the USSR. In 1988, the first Soviet beauty contest was held in Moscow. Titled “Moscow Beauty-88,” it was the first officially recognized by the government. The prize was won by Masha Kalinina. Click the pic to read [...]
• Animal Portraits by Gerrard Gething
  
  Gerrard Gething is a photographer who spends a good chunk of his time handling bitches, he only deals with the finest bitches and has a way to make them do whatever he wants in front of his camera. He’s a photographer who captures wonderful portraits of the four-legged, two-legged and winged kind. His work captures [...]
• Big Bang by Deborah Bay
  
  For her latest series titled “Big Bang” Houston-based photographer Deborah Bay explores explores America’s long-held affection for guns as part of its heritage.  Many of the images resemble exploding galaxies, however a closer look reveals the destructive nature of weaponry. Speaking about the project Deborah says, “I began thinking about “The Big Bang” after seeing [...]
• Watch a silent film on Instagram
  
  Canadian agency Cossette has launched a series of Instagram accounts that when scrolled through in slideshow mode, simulate a clip from a classic silent film. It’s all in aid of the forthcoming Toronto Silent Film Festival. To view the ‘trailers’, simply visit the accounts at @tsff_1, @tsff_2, and @tsff_3 on the Instagram mobile app, tap [...]
• ‘I’m Google’ by Dina Kelberman
  
  I’m Google is an ongoing digital art project by Baltimore artist Dina Kelberman that documents digital patterns through non-artistic photography found on Google Image Search. When I first started scrolling through her Tumblr I wasn’t quite sure what I was looking at: frame after frame of airplanes pouring orange fire retardant on fires which slowly [...]
• The World As 100 People
  
  Graphic designer Jack Hagley has created “The World as 100 People,” an infographic that illustrates global breakdowns of language, religion, gender, literacy, and more using statistics from 100 People. The full infographic is available on Visually. Click the pic to see more.
• Everybody Wants to kill Bruce Willis
  
  Everybody Wants to Kill Bruce” is a mashup video by French artist Pierre-Alexandre Chauvat that compiles footage from 39 different action movies. The end result is an exciting 10-minute chase sequence starring actor Bruce Willis. Click the pic to watch the vid.
• David Lynch’s Fine Art Hair
  
  David Lynch has some pretty lively hair. San Francisco-based creative Jimmy Chen has taken the legendary filmmaker’s various hairstyles and juxtaposed them with an equivalent famous artwork. Click the pic to see more.
• Jay Shell’s “The Rap Quotes”
  
  Multidisciplinary artist, Jay Shells, has recently been creating legitimate looking signs containing rap quotes that reference specific locations in New York. After compiling over 30 signs, Shells set out installing these signs in the locations mentioned in the quotes. The artist has quoted many well-known rappers such as Jay Z, Mos Def, Kanye West, Gza, [...]
• Google60
  
  Web design company mass:werk has created Google60, a creative reimagining of Google Search — or Gabby Ontology Operated Grader and Linguistical Extrapolator — in the style of AMC’s Mad Men, a popular television drama set in the 1960s. Click the pic to take a look.
• The Girls of Atomic City
  
  In The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II (public library), Denise Kiernan tells the story of the Oak Ridge center of the Manhattan Project, a town of 70,000 workers — primarily women — who lived in a camp-like environment of propaganda, barbed wire, checkpoints, code [...]
• Crayon Carving by Diem Chau
  
  Crayon carving extraordinaire Diem Chau has just completed a new set of work that’s as charming as can be. The ABC’s (and accompanying imagery) have been carved into the tops of Crayola crayons. As she states, “Maybe it’s the Fontophile in me, but I find an extreme satisfaction in seeing a well made set of [...]
• Arizona’s Antelope Canyon by Gregory Boratyn
  
  Landscape and nature photographer Gregory Boratyn produces some truly spectacular shots of Arizona’s popular Antelope Canyon. The photographer visually highlights the ridges and varied textures found within the cavernous canyon in addition to inserting a brilliant splash of color. Boratyn’s digitally enhanced photos provide a feast for the eyes, allowing the viewer’s gaze to wander [...]
• US Patent Illustrations
  
  A cracking new website has been scanning in old American patents that give us a glimpse of what the future looked like to people in the past. From an initial glance , it’s clear inventors from yesteryear were obsessed with man living under the sea, and also pacifying children. Click the pic to see more.
• Iran by Amos Chapple
  
  Palangan Village, in the mountains near the Iraq border. Palangan, illustrative of many of the country’s rural settlements, has benefitted handsomely from government support. Many villagers are employed in a nearby fish farm, or are paid members of the Basij, whose remit includes prevention of “westoxification”, and the preservation of everything the 1979 islamic revolution [...]
• New York City’s Street-life from 1968-1972 by Paul McDonough
  
  Photographer Paul McDonough has a knack for catching passing, off-kilter incongruities on the New York City streets. He arrived in the city in 1967 and started taking photographs of unique moments happening around him; the New York City 1968-1972 series is said to be his first as a photographer. Capturing weirdness on the streets of [...]
• The Most Important Thing by Brian Sokol
  
  NYC-based photographer Brian Sokol has been working on a project supported by the UN Refugee Agency titled “The Most Important Thing.” It consists of portraits of refugees in which the subjects pose with the one thing they couldn’t let go of when running away from home. Sokol started the project in Sudan. More than 100,000 [...]
• Vintage VHS adverts
  
  Shops that still sell tape cassettes are very few and far between these days, which means the tape is now more or less an obsolete format. The first mass produced Cassettes were made and sold in Germany in 1964 and companies like Memorex, TDK and BASF continued to manufacture tapes through the seventies and eighties [...]
• A Haircut in Space
  
  Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield has already explained how food tastes in space, and now he shows what its like to get a haircut aboard the “International Space Salon.” Click the pic to watch the vid.
• Presidio Pet Cemetery by Troy Paiva
  
  Photographer Troy Paiva took these spooky light-painted night photos of the Presidio Pet Cemetery in San Francisco back in 2011. Due to highway construction going on at the time, the cemetery was covered with a temporary roof, giving the site a claustrophobic, tunnel-like atmosphere. The Presidio Pet Cemetery dates back to the 1950s, when families [...]
• Planet Universe by Adam Kennedy
  
  Artist Adam Kennedy is one of those people who sees beauty in places where other people don’t. So much so, he’s created planets out of the tops of American fire hydrants. The San Francisco-based artist is inspired by the decaying round tops of old fashioned fire hydrants in his home town. Kennedy sees all kinds [...]
• Suspended Feather Installations by Isa Barbier
  
  French artist Isa Barbier suspends gull feathers in geometric arrangements, determining each piece’s composition on site. The artist maintains the light and airiness of her chosen medium while presenting them as a geometric entity. There is a duality in her work that is seamlessly effective at exhibiting shape and form as well as abstract freedom. [...]
• Muhammad Ali in Candid Camera
  
  In 1974, students in a Greenwich Village elementary school were asked to write essays on what they would say to Muhammad Ali if they ever had the chance to meet him.  As part of a hidden camera show skit, Ali snuck into the classroom dressed as a janitor, disrobed into only his boxing shorts, and [...]
• Building the World’s Largest Ship
  
  The Discovery Channel and Maersk Line partnered to create this amazing 76-second time-lapse featuring the construction of Triple-E, the world’s largest ship. The time-lapse consists of more than 50,000 photos of the ship’s three-month construction at the DSME shipyard in Okpo, Korea. Click the pic to watch how it’s done.
• Google’s Seven Summits
  
  Google this week unveiled the ability to virtually explore, via Google Maps, some of the most famous mountains on Earth, including Aconcagua (South America), Kilimanjaro (Africa), Mount Elbrus (Europe) and Everest Base Camp (Asia). Click the pic to find out more.
• The Iraq War: 2003-2013
  
  The United States launched the Iraq War on March 19, 2003, ten years ago today. To mark the anniversary, Reuters has posted a collection of 45 news photographs of the war and its aftermath. Warning: some of the pictures are graphic, and all are disturbing. Click the pic to see them.
• Thumbs and Ammo
  
  The blog Thumbs and Ammo, have created this awesome collection of shoot’em up moments with one element removed: the guns. Suddenly tough guys like Al Pacino’s Tony Montana in Scarface don’t look so tough… he’s just enthusiastically giving a thumbs-up. Click the pic to see more.
• Early McDonald’s menus
  
  McDonald’s started out as McDonald’s Bar-B-Q in San Bernardino, CA in 1940. Here’s a copy of the menu from that time. The original McDonald’s served potato chips and pie, which were swapped out for french fries and milkshakes after the first year; that photo must have been taken sometime after the switch. Ray Kroc got [...]
• Breaking the Fourth Wall
  
  I remember vividly the thrill of Wayne in Wayne’s World addressing me, the humble cinema-goer, directly and wondering whether anyone had ever dared do such thing before. Of course it turned out there’s a venerable tradition of breaking the fourth wall on the silver screen, and in homage to this practice Leigh Singer has created [...]
• Chessboxing by Laura Pannack
  
  First invented by Enki Bilal in his 1992 comic book Froid Équateur, this strange hybrid of mental and physical challenge that is chess boxing has now been played in various countries around the world, and photographer Laura Pannack has turned her prodigious talents onto this bizarre corner of the sporting world. Whether it’s her portraits [...]
• Collage by Jiyen Lee
  
  Korean artist Jiyen Lee has created a series of hypnotizing digital collages that present people going up and down stairs, as seen from a bird’s eye view. Each puzzling assemblage features an unidentifiable traffic of pedestrians on an endless journey. It also remains unclear whether they are actually ascending or descending the steps in front [...]
• Military Men in Love
  
  London, 1935 – Soldiers departing for Egypt from Feltham Station lean out of their windows to kiss their loved ones goodbye. A wonderful gallery of World War II-era military men putting in some literal lip service as they board their trains to go off to war. Click the pic to see more.
• STRIPPED – a documentary about comics
  
  STRIPPED is an upcoming feature-length documentary by Fred Schroeder and Dave Kellett of Sequential Films that explores the world of newspaper comics, webcomics and how comics survive in today’s society. It features interviews with some of the world’s top influential cartoonists, including: Bill Watterson (Calvin and Hobbes), Jim Davis (Garfield), Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik [...]
• Emoji Movie Pictionary
  
  Abel Macias has come up with a cool game involving Emoji icons on iOS platforms: Emoji Movie Pictionary. The game is simple, use the variety of icons on offer to suggest the names of film titles. Apparently, there’s an app of this already, but we like the organic way in which this came about. Click [...]
• From radio to the iPlayer – 90 years of innovation at the BBC
  
  Ninety years of innovation at the BBC is celebrated in a new campaign from the broadcaster, complete with an interactive time-line of technological achievements. The short tells the story of broadcasting at the Beeb, outlining various significant moments of technological progress that have happened since 1922. This takes in radio and TV (including outside broadcasts [...]
• Complete set: London Underground Depot Postcards
  
  With the London Underground celebrating its 150th year, there’s a whole slew of paraphernalia floating around on the internet commemorating this special event. Here’s a complete overview of the postcard collection of train depots on the London Underground network. There are 17 depots in total, and each card is coloured to correspond with the tube [...]
• Beachcomber Collection by Jim Golden
  
  For Beachcomber Collection, Jim Golden wanted to document the things he came across along the beach. So he and his team, including his daughter, combed the beach and gathered items that were eventually arranged into the rainbow gradient of colour. For Camera Collection, 20 different photographers provided equipment for the shoot, including 190 camera lenses [...]
• How to get to Mars
  
  With the successful landing of the Mars rover on the face of the red planet last year, NASA has released a fascinating video on how they went about doing it. The clip is taken from the IMAX movie “Roving Mars” from 2006 . Click the pic to watch the video.
• Honkey Kong by Christian Åslund
  
  With his project ‘Honkey Kong’ Christian Åslund turned the world into a real 2D video game. Based in Stockholm, Sweden, which is a fairly small city for being a capital without any major tall rising buildings, he was amazed of the view from the skyscraper rooftops in Hong Kong and developed the concept for this [...]
• Colourful Shit by Gabriel Morais
  
  For his “Colourful Shit” project, copywriter Gabriel Morais ate several types of the same food (like Froot Loops cereal) for 30-36 hour timeframes. To show how much the food we ingest affects our body, he artfully documented his coloured feces. His images were not manipulated and there are more examples at his website. To achieve [...]
• Toy Stores by Gabriele Galimberti
  
  Like many photographers around the world, Gabriele Galimberti enjoys traveling. During an 18 month span of travels, Galimberti visited and photographed children in a long list of countries around the world with each child posing with his or her favorite toys. Lucas was one of the kids Galimberti visited for his project, which is titled [...]
• preTenders by Rebecca Martinez
  
  Babies create strong emotions for the bearer, holder, and observer. I have discovered this holds true even when it is known the baby is not real. Photographer Rebecca Martinez photographs dolls that are created to look and feel like living babies. They are constructed and weighted to feel like infants, which includes a head that [...]
• Diving Deep into Danger
  
  A fascinating piece by Nathaniel Rich over at the NY Review of Books about deep water diving. I had no idea that people building marine oil wells live for weeks at a time at depths of 1000 feet. The first dive to a depth of a thousand feet was made in 1962 by Hannes Keller, [...]
• Scout Paré-Phillips Impressions
  
  In this rather erotic shoot, photographer Scout Pare-Phillips has spelt out the garments on the model by using their impressions only. The ghostly palimpsests of the clothes are enough to make your imagination run wild, as it’s entirely left up to you to imagine what the items of clothing were like before they were taken [...]
• Bovine Waterskiing, Kerala
  
  In the Indian state of Kerala, the southwest monsoon is in full swing and the air is humid. A crowd has gathered on the muddy banks around a submerged paddy field, waiting for the event of the day. All eyes are trained on pairs of heavy bulls yoked together in the field. The hulking animals [...]
• The Year in Construction Photo Contest
  
  Pontiac Plant demolition, Pontiac, Michigan, USA (Photo: Stephen SetteDucati) Amateur photographer Stephen Ducati knew that he could get a “potentially fantastic” photo as he climbed onto the ledge of a building overlooking the demolition yards of an old Pontiac assembly plant in Michigan. He was right. It is indeed, fantastic. It forms part of a [...]
• Why is the sky blue?
  
  Why is the sky blue? It’s a question that you’d think kids have been asking for thousands of years, but it might not be that old at all. The ancient Greek poet Homer never used a word for blue in The Odyssey or The Iliad, because blue is one of the last colours that cultures [...]
• 19th-Century Tokyo
  
  In the 19th century, Japan was only just starting to open its doors to the rest of the world. For centuries, the country had developed largely in isolation of western influences, creating a culture and societal unlike any other found elsewhere. In a time before World War and the rapid march of technology and progress [...]
• The United Kingdom: musically gifted
  
  Graphic artist and physicist James Chapman first designed a detailed poster titled “AMERICA:the home of television” which mapped television show locations in the United States. Now he’s created “The United Kingdom: musically gifted,” a poster that maps where bands formed and solo artists grew up in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Both posters are [...]
• Brazilian Birds Radio
  
  Brazilian Birds Radio is a rather simple, but beautiful idea. Brazil’s tremendous array of flora and fauna is stuck, well, in Brazil. But Brazilian Birds Radio is trying to get round that, by streaming audio of some of the flying inhabitants of the country over the internet. The result is a peaceful backdrop to any [...]
• A Period of Juvenile Prosperity by Mike Brodie
  
  When photographer Mike Brodie was 17 years old, he had his first train hopping experience in his hometown of Pensacola, Florida. Over a number of days, that train would take him to Jacksonville, Florida and then back. It was as short trip, but sparked a lifelong passion for train hopping and exploration in Brodie. Brodie [...]
• How our food gets to the table
  
  This is a clip from Samsara, a 2011 film directed by Ron Fricke, who was the director of photography for Koyaanisqatsi. The chicken picker machine hoovering up chickens and depositing them into drawers is one of the most dystopian things I’ve ever seen. It’s a rare, beautiful, but equally disturbing look into the world of [...]
• Growing Up In The World’s Deadliest City
  
  Thanks to a truce in the drug wars, Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, for the first time in years, no longer has the world’s highest murder rate. But for a generation that grew up around constant violence, the fight for normalcy is just beginning. Click the pic to read this fascinating essay on Buzzfeed.
• The Man Who Sells Property on the Moon
  
  The Man Who Sells the Moon is a short documentary by Simon Ennis that centers on Dennis Hope, a man who has been selling property on the moon since the 1980s and is also selling land on Mercury, Mars, Venus, and Jupiter’s moon Io. Article 2 of the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 states that “no nation [...]
• Colour Photographs from the Russian Revolution
  
  Russian-born photography aficionado Anton Orlov couldn’t believe his luck when he was allowed to rummage through a number of old storage chests in the basement of a house in northern California in 2005. Inside, he found a treasure trove of hand-colored glass slides taken by an American pastor named John Wells Rahill during the Russian [...]
• Mosaics by Hong Hao
  
  Hong Hao is considered one of China’s most famous contemporary artists. Born in 1965, this month he will be exhibiting a selection of his extensive work at the Pace Gallery in Beijing from March 16-April 27. Hao creates prints displaying a myriad of objects that he scans, configures and enhances before printing. He draws inspiration [...]
• L.A. Noire Blooper Reel
  
  This blooper reel shows off the motion-capture fidelity used to make the Rockstar Games title L.A. Noire . The system really captures the embarrassment in the faces and bodies of the actors as they blow their lines. Assuming, of course, that this is what was programatically rendered from the mo-cap data, and not something ginned [...]
• A photographic guide to the world’s embalmed leaders
  
  When Hugo Chavez’s embalmed body is laid in a glass casket sometime next week, he will join at least eight other world leaders whose remains are on display for all eternity … or at least for as long as their keepers can preserve them. Vice President Nicolas Maduro announced Thursday that Chavez’s body would be [...]
• Titanic 2
  
  The billionaire Clive Palmer announced in late February the first images of his crazy project called ‘Titanic 2′. Scheduled for 2016, this replica of the ship that sank in 1912 will, according to the teams who thought out the design, be a lot safer than the original. Just as a note of comparison, the designers [...]
• Bloody Sunday
  
  During the 1960s, only small percentages of the large populations of eligible black voters in certain parts of the South could actually vote, even after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In 1965, a voter registration campaign focused in Selma, Alabama, began – at the head of this revived effort was Martin [...]
• Ralph Baer, the father of video games
  
  Ralph Baer is often called the father of video games. His invention, the Magnavox Odyssey, was the first home console system. Last year he celebrated his 90th birthday the same year the Odyssey turned 40. Here he talks about those early days of video game history and why now, at 90 years old, he’s still [...]
• The Virtue of Wrestling by Nick Ballon
  
  The Virtue of Wrestling by Nick Ballon, is an intriguing series which takes us through the ropes to get up close and personal with the grapples and the throws and the lycra key in the world of wrestling. By shooting against a black background, Nick has created an almost dream-like feel, like we’ve been thrown [...]
• Les Miserabluths
  
  Arrested Development is one of those shows which has proven to be excellent for mashing up with other franchises. So far we’ve featured mashups of Arrested Development with Thor, Downton Abbey, Mitt Romney (and the 2012 election in general), video games, and everything else. Now another single-serving Tumblr has chicken danced into our hearts. Les [...]
• Miss Atomic Bomb, 1957
  
  Copa Room showgirl Lee Merlin poses in a cotton mushroom cloud swimsuit as she is crowned Miss Atomic Bomb in this 1957 photograph. Above-ground nuclear testing was a major public attraction during the late 1950s, and hotels capitalized on the craze by hosting nuclear bomb watch parties, which usually included the dubbing of a chorus [...]
• Dreambox Vending Machine
  
  UC Berkeley’s new Dreambox is a vending machine like no other – it incorporates a 3D printer that makes and dispenses goodies right before your eyes! By connecting to a cloud-based computing system hosted within the machine, customers can upload their designs and set them in the cue for printing. Click the pic to see [...]
• Architecture by André Chiote
  
  André Chiote, an architect and illustrator living in Portugal has created a beautiful collection of posters about his architectural inspirations. This was inspired by major references of architecture in the world such as “Zaha Hadid” or “Oscar Niemeyer” to design a series of posters that convey both the beauty of the buildings and Chiote’s eye [...]
• The Periodic Table by R. Tanaka
  
  Photographer R. Tanaka of Japan enjoys taking photos of landscapes, cats and elements from the periodic table. Through his lens and eye he captures the mystery of each element he photographs. Photos of Bismuth, Osmium and Thallum are just a few of the many elements he focuses on. Click the pic to see more.
• Chinese Sentiment by Shen Wei
  
  Modern China is a country in flux. In recent years we’ve seen a large number of photographers explore the country’s changing landscape with images that document the socioeconomic impact of its emergence as a superpower. Shen Wei’s series ‘Chinese Sentiment’ is a refreshing change from these sorts of images. Instead of cliched pictures of towering [...]
• The world’s most beautiful shipwrecks
  
  Italian product manager and web designer Francesco Mugnai recently added a collection of images to his blog touting some of the most beautiful images of abandoned spots and modern ruins that he’d ever seen. The images Mugnai has captured come from empty castles, shuttered power plants, and dilapidated churches around the world. From a sunken [...]
• Spot the Station
  
  The International Space Station is, after the sun and the moon, the third brightest object in the sky. If you know where to look for it, you can easily see it — no telescope required. But where is it right now? You know who always knows where the ISS is? NASA. Several times a week, [...]
• Musicians in Their Studios
  
  For musicians, at least as far as the recording process goes, the studio is their creative mecca. Flavorwire decided to take a look at the studios of some of our favourite musicians. The contrasts on display are intriguing, from the endearingly chaotic to the pristine and very expensive, from analog to digital, from minimalist to [...]
• Wealth Inequality in America
  
  A shocking infographic on the distribution of wealth in America, highlighting both the inequality and the difference between our perception of inequality and the actual numbers. The reality is often not what we think it is. Click the pic to watch the vid.
• NYC Past
  
  New York has been arguably one of the most photogenic destinations on earth ever since photography allowed it to be. Which is why when we saw NYC Past we got all excited in the brain space. This Tumblr has, at last count, 49 pages of large format photography from the Big Apple’s past and present. [...]
• Perfect Bucket List
  
  Perfect Bucket List is an inspiring Tumblr blog that goes beyond travel destinations. It includes moments or experiences in a wide range of categories including Food, Fitness, Family and Love. Each image consists of just a simple photo with a few words, yet they describe dreams, hopes, and aspirations many of us share. Click the [...]
• The ICEHOTEL and gallery, at Jukkasjärvi
  
  The ICEHOTEL #23, a temporary hotel and art gallery, is located in Jukkasjärvi, 200 km north of the Arctic Circle. The ice is made from water supplied by the nearby Torne River. Within the hotel there are artists’ “suites” where artists who have been selected by ICEHOTEL’s Art & Design Group come from all over [...]
• How Ink Is Made
  
  Ever wonder how Ink is made? A very passionate Chief Ink Maker shows how color and ink is created from raw ingredients of powder and varnish in this video from The Printing Ink Company. Click the pic to watch the video.
• Introducing ‘Everything’ by Lernert & Sander
  
  Introducing ‘Everything’ – The Perfume That Combines 1,400 Fragrance Samples Into One Giant 1.5 Liter Bottle. Everything is a perfume by directors and artists Lernert & Sander consisting of new fragrances that were launched in 2012. Over the last year Lernert & Sander collected almost 1,400 samples of newly launched fragrances. By mixing the content [...]
• Cat Map, An Interactive Map of All the Cats in the World
  
  The Zoological Society of London has launched its Cat Map, a global, searchable map of all the world’s cats. You can search for cats by age, gender, color, and name, and even add your own cat to the map, complete with a picture and description. The Cat Map was created to raise awareness of the [...]
• Hollywood Homes from the 1950s
  
  Despite being just steps from a glamorous stretch of Central Park, James Dean’s studio apartment on West 68th Street in New York City was decidedly collegiate. The actor lived in the rented space, off and on, from 1953 until his death in a car crash two years later. An article by Architectural Digest featuring photographs [...]
• Hand-Drawn Floor Plans of Popular TV Show Apartments and Houses
  
  House of the Simpson Family (The Simpsons). Azpeitia, Spain-based professional interior designer Iñaki Aliste Lizarralde (aka “nikneuk“) has hand-drawn an incredibly detailed series of floor plans that map out numerous popular television show apartments and houses. Prints are available to purchase on RedBubble, Etsy and deviantART. Click the pic to see more.
• Misheard Song Lyrics
  
  You know how there are certain songs that, no matter how many times you listen to them, you just can’t figure out what the hell the person singing the song is saying? “Even Flow” by Pearl Jam is the ultimate one for me. I’ve probably listened to that song 10,000 times over the past few [...]
• Subverting the Stock Image Library
  
  Stock Photo images, those painfully glossy interpretations of modern living are the stuff stock library proprietors’ dreams (and young graphic designers’ nightmares) are made of. Enter the image-terrorists behind DIS Magazine, an influential ‘post-internet’ publication/website that serves as a provocative sneer towards modern product and image making; the subversive agitators turning their inciting attentions to [...]
• Women Soldiers Who Dressed and Fought as Men in the Civil War
  
  Women lived in germ-ridden camps, languished in appalling prisons, and died miserably, but honorably, for their country and their cause just as men did. The untold stories of women who dressed and served as men in the Civil War. Click the pic to read more.
• Covering Lolita
  
  This online exhibit is dedicated to all the different covers that have graced Vladimir Nabokov’s classic ‘Lolita’. The collection comes from all over the world, featuring issues from Lebanon, Brazil, and elsewhere, totaling 185 different books from 37 countries spanning 56 years. Click the pic to see more.
• Abandoned Communist Party Headquarters in Bulgaria
  
  The Buzludzha monument – or to give the building its official name, the ‘House-Monument of the Bulgarian Communist Party’ – was envisaged as a symbolic meeting place for the communist regime. Resembling something straight out of a 1950s sci-fi flick, the colossal concrete saucer perches at an altitude of 1441 metres above sea level – [...]
• The Gowanus canal by William Miller
  
  Brooklyn’s Gowanus canal is one of America’s most polluted waterways. More than a century of unfettered industrial abuse was followed by decades of bungled attempts to clean it up. It is significantly cleaner than it was 30 years ago but it’s contaminated waters hold the evidence of it’s history. Inspired by the light reflected in [...]
• Mr. Chick Pea And Friends
  
  Using the streets of New York as his canvas, American artist Sadi Tekin places hand painted chickpeas all around the city, expressing his uniquely playful and comic take on life. The project titled “Mr. Chick Pea And Friends”,  is a collection of photographs documenting the leisure activities and pursuits of a set of tiny characters [...]
• License to Quaff: The Many Beverages of James Bond
  
  We’ve long admired James Bond for what he has that we don’t: the cars, the tux, the attitude, the girls. But there’s one aspect of the Bond persona that anyone can steal: his drink orders. For some people, half the appeal of ordering a Martini lies in the fact that it’s 007′s “shaken, not stirred” [...]
• Follow Me Too by Murad Osmann
  
  Photographer Murad Osmann creatively documents his travels around the world with his girlfriend leading the way in his ongoing series known as Follow Me To. Chronicling his adventures on Instagram, the Russian photographer composes each shot in a similar fashion. We see each landscape from the photographer’s point of view with his extended hand holding [...]
• People with Passions by Jack Daly
  
  Jack Daly, a photographer at the University of Portsmouth in the UK, is working on a portrait project titled People with Passions. Each photograph in the series features a person posing with the objects of their passion (e.g. things associated with their interests, pursuits, and pastimes). The picture above is Andrew Gadsden: Creator of All [...]
• The First Instagram Photos from Inside North Korea
  
  AP’s David Guttenfelder and Jean Lee, have begun uploading the first ever Instagram photos from inside North Korea — giving us an intimate glimpse at daily life inside the very closed off country. Featured today on the Instagram blog, AP Chief Photographer for Asia David Guttenfelder is, in his own words, “opening a window into [...]
• 12 Piano notes made visible for the first time
  
  Shannon Novak, a New Zealand-born fine artist, commissioned CymaScope to image 12 piano notes as inspiration for a series of 12 musical canvases. They decided to image the notes in video mode because when they observed the ‘A1′ note they discovered, surprisingly, that the energy envelope changes over time as the string’s harmonics mix in [...]
• Alive and flicking by Tom Groves
  
  Photographer Tom Groves has been following the world of competitive table football since 2010 and his forthcoming book, In the Box, offers a glimpse of this little known, but passionately played, sport… According to Groves, who has worked on the book with designers Thomas + Thomas, Subbuteo competitions are thriving in Europe. The photographer visited [...]
• Three Centuries Of Drug Advertising
  
  Physicians and chemists who formulated drugs began writing of their wonders and publishing them in medical texts and newspapers in the late 1700s. From there, drug advertising took off as both doctors and the public were eager to try anything to alleviate pain and health problems. Over time, the drugs changed and so did the [...]
• Every Meteorite Strike Since 2300 BC
  
  A map showing every meteor strike since 2,300 B.C. is now making the rounds after a recent spate of space rock related events. The map was created by Javier de la Torre, co-founder of data visualization company CartoDB. De la Torre used data uploaded to the Guardian’s website that originally came from the Meteorological Society. The data [...]
• Hide & Seek by Chris Buck
  
  Chris Buck has built a career creating images that fall outside the box. But his series of celebrities, titled Presence, currently on view at Foley Gallery in New York City until Feb. 24, could be considered to be “outside the frame” as well. In essence, Buck plays a game of hide-and-seek with his famous subjects, [...]
• Prison Landscapes by Alyse Emdur
  
  Prison visiting rooms are often home to large-scale paintings that are enjoyed by only a few. Often created by the inmates themselves, the artworks serve as the photographic backdrops of a portrait studio as inmates pose in front of them for pictures that are given to loved ones as mementos. Since these intricate drawings are [...]
• A Gallery of Pavlov’s Dogs
  
  What kind of dogs did Ivan Pavlov use in his classical conditioning experiments? The dogs that learned to salivate to the sound of a bell weren’t all purebreds -it turns out that Pavlov wasn’t all that picky about his subjects. Smithsonian has a pictures of 35 of the dogs Pavlov used to develop his theories [...]
• The Muppet Movie 1978 – On The Set!
  
  Flickr user BATMAN4OZ has recently uploaded this awesome collection of photos he took while working on the set of The Muppets movie, way back in 1978. All the puppets are there, including Fozzy Bear waiting patiently in a car. It looks like all the shots were taken with a Lomo camera, or he’s only recently [...]
• Collections by Jim Golden
  
  Portland photographer Jim Golden created these photos of neatly arranged collections of objects. Most of the objects he photographs are vintage, and in some cases, the photos represent one person’s private collection. For prints, check out Golden’s online store and for more of his photography, see his Tumblr. We previously wrote about Golden’s photo of [...]
• The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food
  
  How snack-food company executives help perfect our addiction to junk food—and whether Americans can reverse course on a dangerous diet of salt, sugar and fat: “The food technicians stopped worrying about inventing new products and instead embraced the industry’s most reliable method for getting consumers to buy more: the line extension. The classic Lay’s potato [...]
• London Night in The 1930′s
  
  These atmospheric images of London streets in the 1930s, before the Blitz, before the clean air act, before sodium lighting. It was a city of gloomy back streets lit by dim lamps, with forbidding alleys and the occasional welcoming light. The photographs are from a book called London Night, by John Morrison and Harold Burdekin, [...]
• Krampnitz: Potsdam’s Abandoned Nazi and Soviet Military Complex
  
  High walls, gates and barbed wire surround the abandoned old building. Floorboards creak, branches scrape against dirty windows, and encroaching weeds creep inside. It’s not surprising that the site doesn’t attract many visitors, and intrepid explorers are likely to find themselves alone, except for creepy reminders of the facility’s former occupants, including an imposing mosaic [...]
• Street Fighter Art Show Tribute
  
  Street Fighter is one of the most iconic arcade games of all time. Last weekend, San Francisco lifestyle boutique Bait paid tribute to the game by throwing a Street Fighter event featuring an art exhibition, mini tournament which was streamed live with onsite commentary, and a personal appearance by series producer Ono-san. The show featured [...]
• Star Wars Action Figures Production Line Circa 1978
  
  Star Wars toys production line at the Kenner Factory circa 1978. Star Wars toys production line at the Kenner Factory circa 1978. These cracking pictures were taken from the factory in Cincinnati, who was responsible for churning out the toys that would go on to become priceless collectors items. Click the pic to see more.
• The 50th anniversary of 1963
  
  A half century ago, much of the news in the United States was dominated by the actions of civil rights activists and those who opposed them. Our role in Vietnam was steadily growing, along with the costs of that involvement. It was the year Beatlemania began, and the year President John F. Kennedy visited West [...]
• Courts by Ward Roberts
  
  Beautiful photos by Ward Roberts depicting various courts integrated into the urban landscape in near chameleon ways. “When living in Hong Kong I remember being amazed at how much area was offered up for court/pitch activities, given how short they are on space. Many of these are most likely far above street level, and while [...]
• Tropical Island Inside a Hangar
  
  Sandy beach, palm trees and clear, blue water. But if you think that these vacationeers are lounging on a warm tropical island, you’d be wrong. They’re inside a giant hangar in snowy Germany: The ‘resort’ is actually located on the site of a former Soviet military air base in Krausnick, Germany. Tropical Islands is inside [...]
• The Subculture of Chess
  
  “The Subculture of Chess” looks at New York City’s vibrant chess community, from old chess clubs to aspiring young chess players. Directed by Matt Porter, the short documentary is the latest in the Subculture Club series by Thrash Lab. “From Union Square where chess is played for fun and money. To PS 183 where chess [...]
• Suffering under a Great Injustice by Ansel Adams
  
  In 1943, Ansel Adams (1902-1984), America’s best-known photographer, documented the Manzanar War Relocation Center in California and the Japanese Americans interned there during World War II. In “Suffering under a Great Injustice”: Ansel Adams’s Photographs of Japanese-American Internment at Manzanar, the Prints and Photographs Division at the Library of Congress presents for the first time [...]
• Legion of Doom for Real Life Supervillains
  
  Brazilian illustrator Butcher Billy is back and this time, he has recreated the world’s most brutal dictators (and other unpopular public figures) as comic book villains. Some might say all art is a reflection of the times we live in. If back in the day comics and movies were pretty naive and faced only as [...]
• Philippe Starck’s PIBAL
  
  When Bordeaux wanted to expand its bike sharing program, it turned to its citizens for input, garnering 300 responses, and the resulting ideas were integrated into a concept bike by designer Philippe Starck. The result is a crowd-sourced bicycle that is claimed to be the “ideal city bike”. Click the pic to see more.
• Baled: Photographs of America’s Recyclables
  
  Wesley Law’s series “Baled’ is a photography project that follows some of the millions of pounds of everyday items discarded annually in the US and shipped overseas to be recycled. Beginning in a massive warehouse space in St. Louis, Law decided to take a closer look and discovered that each bale had, “their own personality, [...]
• Finding Vivian Maier
  
  When young Chicago resident John Maloof stumbled upon a collection of obscure street photographs in 2007, he had no idea he was about to become a part of one of the biggest art discoveries in the 21st century. It was until after purchasing the contents of an abandoned storage unit for less than $400 that [...]
• World’s First Underwater Nuclear Explosion
  
  Operation Crossroads was a series of nuclear weapon tests conducted by the United States at Bikini Atoll in mid-1946. It was the first test of a nuclear weapon after the Trinity nuclear test in July 1945, and the first detonation of any nuclear device following the Fat Man detonation on August 9, 1945. Its purpose [...]
• Hong Kong’s micro homes
  
  In the middle of last year, The Economist released rankings for the world’s most liveable cities, and Hong Kong was found at the top. What many people don’t know, however, is that there is a percentage of Hong Kong residents living in rather horrid conditions. In an attempt to draw attention to the issue, human [...]
• The secret language of sommeliers
  
  Ever wondered about the overly intricate languages use in describing your tipple of choice? For the NY Times, Ben Schott compiles an extensive list of wine-related jargon. Here’s a weirdly strange example. WHALE . PLAYER . BALLER . DEEP OCEAN A serious drinker who will regularly DROP more than $1,000 on a single bottle. When [...]
• The Magnificent Seven by Philippe Pétremant
  
  French artist Philippe Petremant has cleverly combined currencies from across the world to create unique and slightly strange stately figures. In one example, Chairman Mao has developed a moustache and cowboy hat, and Che Guevara is in a shirt and tie. The clever combinations provide insights into both national identities – by the people we [...]
• What 200 Calories of Various Foods Look Like
  
  We all know some foods have a much higher Calorie content than others, but how many of us know what that difference actually looks like? Information website wiseGEEK sought to answer this question way back on January 3, 2007. The result was a fascinating article that compares over 71 foods! Click the pic to see [...]
• Disney’s 1956 Illustrated Propaganda for Nuclear Energy
  
  In 1956, just over a decade after the atomic bomb showed the world the devastating power of nuclear weapons, Walt Disney partnered with German physicist Heinz Haber, a professor at USC and personal science consultant to the legendary animator, to produce Our Friend the Atom — a gloriously illustrated 165-page tome extolling the promise of [...]
• Christian Dior in Moscow, 1959
  
  The Khrushchev’s Thaw was to bring change to many aspects of the Soviet life, and fash­ion was one of them. The deci­sion to allow the Soviet fash­ion design­ers to learn off their French coun­ter­parts was made as high as at the gov­ern­ment level, which implic­itly put fash­ion above pol­i­tics or inter­na­tional ide­o­log­i­cal regimes. The colour [...]
• Paul Rousteau – Swiss, Sweat & Sun
  
  It’s winter, which for most of us, is not a good thing. But, Swiss photographer Paul Rousteau is trying to remind us that maybe summer isn’t the great hope for northern Europeans that we think it is. In this photo series he captures the scantily clad Swiss trying to get their share of the sun [...]
• CATcerto by Mindaugas Piecaitis
  
  Remember Nora, aka “Piano Cat,” the piano-playing cat who took the internet by storm with her ivory-tickling skills back in 2007? Well, Lithuanian conductor/composer Mindaugas Piecaitis built an entire “CATcerto” around the video of Nora playing piano that now has over 24,000,000 YouTube views to its credit. Because why not?! And the end result is [...]
• Eye charts for drones
  
  Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG ruminates on optical calibration targets, weird landscape relics scattered across military bases made to check the resolution of cold war era photograph-snapping spy planes. You can find one target on Google Maps here. Click the pic to see more.
• Poster Art 150: the tube says it with a poster
  
  To mark the Underground’s 150th birthday, an exhibition at the London Transport Museum presents150 of the most significant posters created for the tube. Within this history of London Underground posters lies the history of the poster itself. From the purely typographic examples of the late 19th century, through the first illustrated tube poster in 1908, [...]
• Where We Live by Steve McCurry
  
  Renowned photographer Steve McCurry takes us on an insightful journey, sharing the varied definitions of “home” from around the world in his series titled Where We Live. The world-traveling photojournalist focuses primarily on the most impoverished and grief-stricken areas where people have made their humble abodes a home. Despite the poor conditions of their weathered [...]
• Deaths by Quentin Tarantino (Infographic)
  
  Inglorious Bastards was one of Quentin Tarantino’s largest undertaking of death, but it wasn’t his first step into gore. From Reservoir Dogs to Django, his blood red motif has splattered million of movie screens. He is known for many signature trademarks in his films – the car trunk scene, a ridiculously long un-edited scene, an [...]
• Assimilation by Dillon Marsh
  
  This series of incredible images by African photographer Dillon Marsh titled “Assimilation”, captures the nests of weaver birds built around telephone poles in the vast barren landscapes of the southern Kalahari region. The twigs and grass collected to build these nests combine to give strangely recognisable personalities to the otherwise inanimate poles. “In these series [...]
• LIFE With Guns: ‘Drawing a Bead on Safety,’ 1956
  
  Wide-eyed fascination is displayed by boys as Rankin holds his revolver with the cylinder opened to show them there are no shells in it. Six decades ago, in its March 26, 1956, issue, LIFE magazine published a remarkable series of photos that accompanied an article titled, “Drawing a Bead on Safety.” Here, in hopes of [...]
• SnesBox
  
  While our editor is away – he’s making furniture for some reason – we found this little gem of a site that allows you to play NES and SNES games online. Today just got a whole lot more unproductive. Click the pic to play.
• The Boneyard Project: Resurrecting Planes Through Art
  
  Conceived in Spring 2010 by Eric Firestone and organized with curator Carlo McCormick, The Bone Yard Project revives disused airplanes from America’s military history through the creative intervention of contemporary artists, taking entire airplanes and their elements out of aeronautic resting spots in the desert, known as boneyards, and putting them into the hands of [...]
• Chernobyl, the Teeming, Irradiated Eden
  
  Twenty-five years after the Soviet-era meltdown drove 60,000 people from their homes in the Ukraine, a rebirth is taking place inside the exclusion zone. With Geiger counter in hand, the author explores Europe’s strangest wildlife refuge, an enchanted postapocalyptic forest from which entirely new species may soon emerge. Click the pic to read more.
• Unmasking West African Voodoo
  
  Animal sacrifices, black magic, hypnotic dances and strange talismans are the kind of images most people associate with Voodoo. For years, popular culture has portrayed the religion as dark, mysterious, primitive and creepy. Yet Voodoo is derived from the oldest spiritual traditions in the world and dates back at least 10,000 years. Voodoo’s mythology and [...]
• Red Bull’s Cliff Diving World Series 2012
  
  Balanced 90 feet up in the air, the view from the top is astonishing. Sheer rock faces plunge into deep pools of water, wind whistles in your ears, and the insect-like size of the figures far below accentuates the feeling of danger. For most people, the first instinct would be to step away from the [...]
• Call of the Wild by Michael Patrick O’Leary
  
  This series of animal portraits came as a result of a benefit of Michael Patrick O’Leary, who helped out with for the Maryland Zoo in Baltimore. They gave him behind-the-scenes access to all of the animals so he could produce prints for the benefit auction. Here’s more from Michael: “These animals were amazing to photograph. [...]
• VHS Box Graphics
  
  Sadly, VHS box design never reached the heights achieved by audio cassettes, but looking back they weren’t as bad as I remembered. This set comes courtesy of Hauk Sven. Click the pic to see more.
• Happy Valentines Day from Jason Schwartzman
  
  For the February/March issue of BUST magazine, Los Angeles-based photographer Amanda Marsalis shot Jason Schwartzman in a wide variety of scenes for Valentine’s Day. From nonchalantly sucking on a lollipop while sporting heart-shaped sunglasses to lying passed out on the floor with the top of a chocolate box covering his head. Happy Valentine’s Day, from [...]
• Valentine Cards for Puritans
  
  Happy Valentine’s Day Owls! To celebrate, here’s a collection of Valentine’s Cards from those crazy Puritans. Thanks to Collegehumor for creating these little gems. Click the pic to see more.
• Infographic: An Amazing, Invisible Truth About Wikipedia
  
  Every Wikipedia entry has an optional feature we take for granted–geotagging. An entry on the Lincoln Memorial will be linked to its specific latitude and longitude in Washington D.C. On any individual post, this may or may not be a useful thing. But what about looking at these locations en masse? That was a question [...]
• The Maths of Love
  
  Joe Hanson, mastermind of the wonderful science-plus compendium It’s Okay To Be Smart, has a new online show in partnership with PBS and the latest episode explores what the search for extraterrestrial life can teach us about our odds of finding that much-romanticized human soulmate, using the Fermi paradox, the Drake equation, and a lesson [...]
• Goodbye Childhood by Celine Artigau
  
  French photographer Celine Artigau created a series of photographs entitled Goodbye Childhood that are the embodiment of bygone imaginary friends and symbolize her lost childhood. She starts from a photo she captures of a place that holds specific meaning for her such as her grandmothers garden which had fallen into disrepair or the subway she [...]
• Vintage Postcards of Incredible Architecture
  
  The postcard has quite the storied history. The first known picture postcard was sent from Vienna as a souvenir, but images of the sparkling new Eiffel Tower in 1889 gave impetus to the postcard, leading to the little convenient cards’ golden age at the turn of the century. The tourist images of time past serve [...]
• Chinese New Year
  
  Yesterday marked the start of the Chinese Lunar New Year 2013, the Year of the Snake. One of the 12 animals of the Chinese zodiac, the snake signifies cleverness and tenacity and is associated with the element of fire. In the larger Chinese astrological cycle, this year is also associated with the element of water, [...]
• The Alphabet by David Lynch
  
  “The Alphabet” is an early short film (1968) by director David Lynch which is described on IMDB as a “…woman’s dark and absurdist nightmare vision comprising a continuous recitation of the alphabet and bizarre living representations of each letter.” Click the pic to watch the film.
• The Black Duke
  
  DuDug is an international street art collective that has taken over an abandoned ship on the beaches of Llanerch-y-Mor in North Wales, repurposing its deserted carcass as a large canvas for their graffiti art project referred to as The Black Duke. The once highly revered cruise liner known as the Duke of Lancaster was left [...]
• A Warm Story about a Cold Place
  
  Have you ever wanted to ski in and out of an art exhibit? Well, here’s your big chance. On view now until it begins to melt (approximately mid-April) next to the Icehotel in Sweden is photographer/sculptor Anna Öhlund and lighting designer John Petterson’s light and photography exhibit titled A Warm Story about a Cold Place. [...]
• The Family Photo Left on the Surface of the Moon
  
  On April 23, 1972, Apollo 16 astronaut Charlie Duke took his third and final jaunt on the moon. He and fellow astronaut John Young took the Lunar Rover exploring in the Descartes Highlands, and while they were there, Duke left a token on the surface of the Moon — a portrait of his family. The [...]
• The Windows of New York
  
  One of our favourite new illustrative projects. The Windows of New York is a weekly illustration project by Jose Guizar, an ode to architecture and personal challenge to never stop ‘looking’. Beautiful. Click the pic to see more.
• Mr Game Boy
  
  You’ve probably never heard of Gunpei Yokoi, but if you’ve ever played a Game Boy, a Color Game Boy, Donkey Kong, or just about any other Nintendo product made between 1970 and 1996, you have him to thank for it. Here’s his story. In the mid-1960s, an electronics student named Gunpei Yokoi graduated from Doshisha [...]
• The Business Cards of History’s Greatest figures
  
  How do you make a first impression, when most people already have one of you? That’s the question on our minds when we look at this collection of 20 business cards from world leaders, popstars and general celebrities. Abraham Lincoln has a cool authority to it, where as Harry Houdini’s is in the shape of [...]
• Angles by Sébastian Dahl
  
  Photographer Sébastian Dahl recently hitchhiked 10,000 kilometers from his hometown of Oslo to Beirut—a remarkable journey that he documented in a photographic diary that features some outstanding travel photography. Click the pic to read more.
• The Making of Pulp Fiction
  
  Photos and ephemera from the set of Pulp Fiction, the making of which Quentin Tarantino, John Travolta, Uma Thurman and others discuss in March’s Vanity Fair. “I wasn’t sure I wanted to be in the movie,” Uma Thurman tells Vanity Fair contributing editor Mark Seal of Pulp Fiction. Thurman explains that it wasn’t just the [...]
• New York Nights
  
  The Murrays, who last gave us the enchanting Store Front, a daylight look at dozens of mom and pop stores across the five boroughs, have returned with New York Nights. But please don’t think of this as the noir version of the first book. It’s more like the Through the Looking Glass companion to Alice’s [...]
• The Sleep of the Beloved by Paul Schneggenburger
  
  “What happens to lovers while they are sleeping?” asks German photographer Paul Schneggenburger. “Is it a sleeping just next to each other, each on his own, or is there a sharing of certain places or emotions? Is it a nocturnal lovers’ dance, maybe a kind of unaware performed tenderness, or does one turn their back [...]
• Sony World Photography Awards
  
  Out of the over 122,000 entries received from 170 countries, the Sony World Photography Awards has now shortlisted a few hundred incredible entries in their prestigious photo competition. The highest number of submissions to date, the competition was fierce as judges had to select those photographs that stood out the most for their impressive high [...]
• Parkour Motion by Ben Franke
  
  New York-based photographer and videographer Ben Franke captures the beautiful, acrobatic movement of parkour. The photographer followed New York City free runners, known as tracers, for a few years, documenting their athletic prowess as they freely roamed about the urban streets with a zest for life. Finally, he decided to take his personal project to [...]
• Panto’N’Roll
  
  Chic & Artistic’s latest series, Panto’N’Roll take Pantone’s indexed colour chips and merging them with famous song titles. Chic and Artistic may have created one of the most shareable design memes we’ve ever seen. Click the pic to see more.
• Commuters by Rebecca Davis
  
  “Commuters,” a beautiful short by Rebecca Davis about a year riding on the New York City Subway. Taken from her blog, newyorkunderground.tumblr.com it’s a intimate look at the faces, and personalities who ride New York’s mass transit system. Click the pic to watch the vid.
• Eames Chair Debut 1956
  
  Charles & Ray Eames show their then-new lounger on the Arlene Francis “Home” show broadcast on the NBC television network in 1956. This was the first wide-scale public unveiling of what would become one of the most iconic pieces of furniture of the 20th century. Click the pic to watch the link.
• A Day in India
  
  A Day in India ‘beautifully summarizes the three week tour duo Daniel Klein & Mirra Fine took together under the collective name of The Perennial Plate. Beautiful images of moments of life in India, dating and delicious food are everywhere, along with some truly breathtaking vistas. For anyone who’s been to the subcontinent, these will [...]
• Super Bowl rings
  
  The Super Bowl ring is one of the most ostentatious items a sports man can win. But it’s also one of the most fascinating. The rings almost always include the team’s name, logo, and Super Bowl number (usually in Roman numerals), the final game score and the names of the particular player. Several include inscriptions [...]
• Darkened Skies by Thierry Cohen
  
  What if: the Milky Way were visible in NYC? It would look something like this. Taken from Darkened Skies by Thierry Cohen; he photographed various cities (NYC, Paris and Tokyo) and matched them up with starry skies from more remote places like Montana, Nevada, and the Sahara. New Yorkers can see Cohen’s work at the [...]
• Undercity by Steve Duncan
  
  As an urban historian & photographer, Steve Duncan tries to peel back the layers of a city to see what’s underneath. From the tops of bridges to the depths of sewer tunnels, these explorations of the urban environment help me puzzle together the interconnected, multi-dimensional history and complexity of the great metropolises of the world. [...]
• Diary of a Body Snatcher
  
  In the 19th century, medical education was making great strides, and professors needed cadavers for demonstrations and lectures. However, the only legal way to procure bodies was after criminal executions, and there weren’t enough of them. This gave rise to the profession of body-snatching, and grave robbers could make a pretty penny for their clandestine [...]
• The Passports of 20 Famous Artists and Writers
  
  Like business cards, passports can say a lot about a person — where they’ve been, where they’re going, and well, how photogenic they are under the worst conditions. This week Flavorpill decided to check out the legal papers of a few more of our favorite artists, from Virginia Woolf to Walt Disney. Click the pic to [...]
• Discover North Korea in 2 minutes
  
  This fast travel clip follows a group tour that was organised by Koryo Tours and filmed by Adam Ziegenhals. It explores various areas or sites in the DPRK (North Korea) that you can visit as part of a group tour (or travelling independently as well). The locations here include Beijing (Koryo Tours office), Pyongyang, Kaesong, [...]
• Google Maps Grand Canyon
  
  Google announced today that it has gotten into the hiking game… and they’re making it a lot easier for those who would rather go there by armchair. Today they released an extensive trail based tour the majestic Grand Canyon. Just like Google Street View, you can now cruise down over 75 miles of trails including [...]
• Skeletons in the Closet by Klaus Pichler
  
  Austrian photographer Klaus Pichler was walking home late one night when he passed by the Vienna Museum of Natural History and saw a light shining through the museum’s basement window. He peeked and saw wonders inside. So, how does the museum store all their fantastic specimen, like the life-size shark above? Pichler shows us in [...]
• Architecture of Density by Michael Wolf
  
  In total there are 6588 high-rise buildings in Hong Kong, surpassing New York’s 5818 buildings, making Hong Kong a true skyscraper city. Many people live, work and play in high-rise buildings scattered across the country. Here we bring you the work of german photographer Michael Wolf, who’s created a series of the photographs called Architecture [...]
• FourSquare Travel guides.
  
  Finally, a ‘best of’ guide based on where people actually go. Social network FourSquare has crunched over 3 billion check-ins and tens of millions of tips to bring you the most awesome places in cities across the U.S. Sadly, they haven’t used done anything for Europe, yet. Click the pic to check it out.
• NYC Ballerina
  
  Photographer Dane Shitagi’s project, NYC Ballerina, capture the beauty and elegancy of ballet dancers in a landscape that by itself is already breathtaking, New York City. The New York City Ballerina Project grew from the idea of New York City as a magnet for creativity; each photograph is a collaborative work of dance, fashion design [...]
• All the ads for Super Bowl XLVII
  
  Super Bowl XLVII might not air until Feb. 3, 2013, but you don’t have to wait until Sunday to check out the ads. With some advertisers shelling out as much as $4 million for a 30-second time slot, companies started rolling out teasers for their big game commercials weeks ago to get the most bang [...]
• Tulip Fields by Norman Szkop
  
  Photographer Norman Szkop has been flying over the Tulips Fields in Anna Paulowna a municipality and a town in the Netherlands, in the province of North Holland. The tulip has come to be a loved symbol of the Netherlands. Many tourists visit the country just to see the bright coloured flower and the astonishing view [...]
• Murder in the Library
  
  A new exhibition at the British Library traces the history of crime fiction through an enlightening illustrated alphabet. From the foxed pages of the earliest forays into crime in the late 19th century to the rubbed spines and cracked joints of well-fingered contemporary paperbacks, there are some choice books on display. Illustrated covers of crime [...]
• China’s Toxic Sky
  
  Since the beginning of this year, the levels of air pollution in Beijing have been dangerously high, with thick clouds of smog chasing people indoors, disrupting air travel, and affecting the health of millions. The past two weeks have been especially bad — at one point the pollution level measured 40 times recommended safety levels. [...]
• Shout Out Louds – Blue Ice
  
  Swedish band the Shout Out Louds have created a limited edition version of their new single Blue Ice as a playable piece of ice. As the first single to be released from its Optica album, the band created ten boxes, containing a plastic record-shaped mould and a bottle of water. Offered to fans and press, [...]
• Google Street Scene
  
  Who needs those fancy movie cameras? To make a movie, all you need is a Google Street View car. Google Street Scene is a site filled with movie scenes as seen through Google Street View. Click the pic to explore more.
• In Spacesuit: A History through Fact and Fiction
  
  In Spacesuit: A History through Fact and Fiction, Brett Gooden traces the development of astronaut outwear in both fact and fiction from the first hot air balloon flight in the late 1700s to the present. Along the way, you get an inside look at suit innovation during the Cold War space race. The modern space [...]
• Dog Fonts
  
  Created by Vienna-based studio grafisches büro is a series of images that playfully interpret which dogs could be related to which typeface – a dalmation as courier, or perhaps a german shepherd as helvetica. The work observes each pet for their various characteristics in the same capacity as comparing fonts – finding the similarities in [...]
• Pantone Food by Alison Anselot
  
  Inspired by these tiny swatches and their corresponding numbers, artist Alison Anselot created Pantone Food. The project features variations on the typical pantone swatch, in which the Belgium-based artist uses food to complement the corresponding shades. From fresh strawberries to brownies and slices of cheesecake, Anselot found ways to perfectly match each swatch with a [...]
• Kelly Slater’s Donut Pool
  
  Eleven time surfing world champion legend Kelly Slater has been working on this project for a few years with existing technology, seeking to perfect an infinite wave simulation. The innovative surfer-turned-entrepreneur has worked with skilled hydromechanics and industrial engineers to construct this hydrofoil-generated mechanism to produce a variety of swells to accommodate a diverse community [...]
• A dramatic surprise on an ice-cold day
  
  To launch TNT – a quality series and movies TV channel – in the Netherlands, we made a sequel to the viral hit video “A Dramatic Surprise on a Quiet Square”. On a cold winter’s day, we placed the famous red button somewhere in a Dutch shopping street. Are you ready? Discover here what happened [...]
• Chris Hadfield’s otherworldly Earth landscapes
  
  Canadian Astronaut Chris Hadfield is currently living in space aboard the International Space Station (ISS) as Flight Engineer on Expedition 34 and he has been tweeting absolutely stunning photographs of Earth. Follow him on Twitter, for daily photo updates. Hadfield has captured some of the devastating floods hitting Australia this week, and this one of [...]
• Disenchanted Rides by Renaud Marion
  
  French photographer Renaud Marion captured these beautiful night shots of abandoned carnival rides for his series “Les Manèges Désenchantés” (Disenchanted Rides). Rather than some of the usual abandoned shots of fair grounds we’ve seen, Marion goes in search of rides still in use, to give the project a far more mysterious edge. Click the pic [...]
• Tuscany’s Abandoned Asylum for the Criminally Insane
  
  Outside the deserted building, darkened branches reach out like claws, making the already spooky scene even more ominous. And inside, it’s worse still. There are cracks in the walls, and the paint is peeling all down the long, creepy corridors; steel bed frames are stripped of all bedding except a few moldering pillows; and broken [...]
• The Art of Penguin Science Fiction
  
  he Art of Penguin Science Fiction examines the history and cover art of science fiction published by Penguin Books. Penguin Books was launched in 1935 as a paperback imprint of The Bodley Head and became a separate company early the following year. The books were extremely popular and instantly recognisable by their eye-catching covers, which [...]
• Downton Abbey for the Super Nintendo
  
  Thanks to an exceedingly clever person named Bill Kiley, Downton Abbey is now a video game.  For children of the ‘90s who grew up playing “Super Mario Bros.” and “The Legend of Zelda,” the spoof game is like a double dose of nostalgia: all the peculiar rituals of the British aristocracy as reimagined in 8-bit [...]
• Extremely Trivial Police Reports
  
  Extremely Trivial Police Reports is a fairly new blog by an emergency medical worker who combs public information records for trivial but amusing reports. There’s also the occasional photograph of recovered stolen goods of dubious value. Click the pic to take a look.
• Singular Beauty by Cara Phillips
  
  Whether its a key ingredient of your dressing-table fantasies or fills you with sickening despair about humanity/commercialism/everything, there’s no denying plastic surgery is big business. Over the last couple of decades it’s gone from being a privileged fad to an unavoidable fact not only in fashion and celebrity but in many ordinary lives. Phillips’ monograph, [...]
• The Space Food Systems Laboratory
  
  The Space Food Systems Laboratory (SFSL), which is the sector of NASA responsible for preparing and concocting the food for astronauts, has a very clear mission: provide high-quality flight food systems that are convenient, compatible with each crew member’s physiological and psychological requirements, meet spacecraft stowage and galley interface requirements, and are easy to prepare [...]
• Not in my house: how Vegas casinos wage a war on cheating
  
  A fascinating article in The Verge looks at the history of casino cheating and talks to Ted Whiting, director of surveillance at the Aria casino in Vegas, who specced out a huge, showy CCTV room with feeds from more than 1,100 cameras. They use a lot of machine intelligence to raise potential cheating to the [...]
• Buildings by Evol
  
  Berlin-based street artist Evol playfully transforms city blocks, power boxes, walls, and any other public architecture he comes across into micro cities as part of his ongoing Buildings series. The German artist carefully executes his crafty urban project by using stencils to mimic the gridded windows and balconies that line an apartment building’s facade. Essentially, [...]
• Belle Isle to 8 Mile
  
  Whether in Detroit for the first time or for a lifetime, uncover and discover this great American city. The first comprehensive, printed guide to Detroit in a generation, Belle Isle to 8 Mile: An Insider’s Guide to Detroit features more than 1,000 Detroit attractions, sites, institutions, events, restaurants, bars, shops, and curiosities, from the essential [...]
• The Speakeasies of New York
  
  New York City’s nightlife was hopping even during Prohibition. The clubs of the ’20s and ’30s ranged from glamorous to seedy to dangerous. The most famous had stories to tell, of celebrities, mobsters, and murder. El Fey owner Larry Fay’s other venture, the Casa Blanca Club, was a haven for gangsters that started to lose [...]
• The Golden Age of DC Comics
  
  The Golden Age of DC Comics, a new book from Taschen edited by Paul Levitz, chronicles the time  when the adventures of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and The Flash dominanted print media. In the early 20th century, in the thick of war and Depression, readers were hungry for spectacular escapist entertainment where the public was [...]
• Formalina: Extreme Knitting
  
  Polish creative Izabela Kaczmarek-Szurek –who works under the enigmatic name Formallina – has created the Extreme Knitting calendar. The collection of 12 of her heroes have all been rendered in crochet with the portraits place onto pieces of clothing. Hulk Hogan cushion anyone? George Michael bikini? Click the pic to see more.
• WikiCancel
  
  WikiCancel shows you step by step how to delete your online accounts, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, and cancel contracts with companies, such as Sprint, Comcast, and LA Fitness. Click the pic to take a closer look.
• What if?
  
  One of our favourite websites recently is ‘What If’? A Q&A forum where hypothetical questions are answered using physics. Our current favourite is, ‘What if I took a swim in a typical spent nuclear fuel pool? Would I need to dive to actually experience a fatal amount of radiation? How long could I stay safely [...]
• Can you pass the primary school maths test?
  
  In revealed in yesterday’s Telegraph, almost a third of parents lack the confidence to help their primary-age children when confronted with maths homework. In a study of more than 2,000 mothers and fathers, just one-in-20 – five per cent, if fractions aren’t your thing – were able to correctly answer the above 10 questions, which [...]
• Misao the Big Mama and Fukumaru the Cat
  
  12 years ago, Miyoko Ihara started taking photographs of her grandmother, Misao. One day, her grandmother found an odd-eyed kitten in the shed. She named the cat “Fukumaru” in hope that the God of “fuku (good fortune)” would come and everything would be smoothed over like “maru (circle)”. Even though she is 87 years old, [...]
• The President’s Photographer
  
  National Geographic’s The President’s Photographer explores the perspective of the visual historians who capture both public and intimate moments in the lives of Presidents. Browse this gallery of the work of some of the photographers—and their subjects—featured in the programme. Cecil Stoughton’s photographic coverage evolved from making the typical ceremonial images of previous administrations to [...]
• David Bowie Nacht Musik
  
  David Bowie is a man of many faces, a fact borne out by the selection of 45 7-inch single sleeves soon to be exhibited at The Vinyl Factory in London’s Chelsea. The exhibition, entitled David Bowie Nacht Musik, follows a near-identical format to the recent Kraftwerk 45RPM show. It will feature the collection of original [...]
• Memorex, A Compilation of 1980s Commercials From VHS Tapes
  
  As a followup to their Skinemax video, Smash TV has now created Memorex, a 50-minute video composed of 1980s commercials snagged from VHS tapes. It’s described as “the advertising industry’s collective wet dream.” Sourced from over forty hours of 80s commercials pulled from warped VHS tapes, Memorex is a deep exploration of nostalgia and the [...]
• Mummies and Mummification
  
  Mummification, the art of preserving a body, is a defining element of ancient Egyptian civilization. Mummification differs from the science of embalming. The latter is defined as delaying decomposition to keep the corpse looking natural. The traditional Egyptian mummy, swathed in bandages, is a far cry from an embalmed lifelike body such as that of [...]
• Bloomberg Billionaires
  
  “Bloomberg Billionaires” is an intriguing example of information design. The net wealth of the world’s 100 most rich human beings has been arranged into an interactive display. Users can search by gender, age, citizenship, and industry to reveal who tops the list. Click the pic to see more.
• On the Razor’s Edge
  
  During this week’s Sundance Film Festival, Vanity Fair contributor Sebastian Junger will debut his HBO documentary chronicling the life and work of his friend (and fellow V.F. contributor) Tim Hetherington. Which Way Is the Front Line from Here? recalls the risky adventures of the renowned war-zone photojournalist, who tragically lost his life in April 2011, [...]
• The Creative Confessional
  
  The Creative Confessional is a website that posts anonymous sordid admissions from those working in the trenches. Creative professionals from all over can confess something terrible that they did, or vent their disgust with the industry as a whole, and let the site’s readership determine whether the complaints are valid. Beneath each confessional, readers can [...]
• The Last Photographs of Famous People
  
  This week marks the 32nd anniversary of Rolling Stone’s famous cover featuring a portrait of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, photographed by Annie Leibovitz. It was the last professional photo captured of the iconic musician, who was killed hours later outside his apartment in New York City. Flavorpill has scoured the t’interweb for other last [...]
• Super Bowl I, 1967
  
  Despite its utterly prosaic name, the First AFL-NFL World Championship Game, played in Los Angeles on Jan. 15, 1967, remains a thrilling benchmark for fans not only because it was, in fact, the very first Super Bowl, but because of the jaw-dropping number of future Hall of Famers — and gridiron legends who never made [...]
• Alphamales – a typographical tribute to the world’s manliest males
  
  D is for Don Draper. Old Fashioned-supping alpha and legendary mad man/remover of bras. This fantastic series of posters pays homage to life’s manliest males with a series of clever posters that combine images and typography, in one fell swoop. Click the pic to take a closer look.
• Mark Landis, America’s most prolific art forger
  
  The Avante/Garde Diaries recently released these two brief clips of an interview with master art forger Mark Landis who for the last 20 years created dozens if not hundreds of convincing art forgeries including works by Picasso which he then donated to institutions around the United States including over 50 art museums. Landis would often [...]
• Brave by Eyeforce
  
  Blind since the age of two, Tommy Carroll began skateboarding at the age of 10. Eyeforce decided to make a great video on this skater ignoring his disability to indulge in his favourite sport. It’s a magnificent piece of film-making and a healthy dose of optimism. Click the pic to watch the film.
• Google Birdhouse by Shu-Chun Hsiao
  
  Inspired by the icon drop Google Maps uses to mark places on its mapping platform, artist Shu-Chun Hsiao decided to make the digital markers into real ones. But, the Taipei based Hsiao decided to make the drops a bit more useful for locals, in particular, the birds. The “Google Birdhouse” provides homes for birds in [...]
• Six Month Pinhole Exposure
  
  Inspired by a pinhole workshop taught by Justin Quinnell, UK based photographer Matt Bigwood created a a six month long exposure using a beer can converted into a pinhole camera. The setup is very simple – an empty beer can with the top removed and a hole made with a needle or pin, a card [...]
• Eames House Blocks
  
  In 1949 Charles and Ray Eames constructed Case Study House No. 8. This beautiful landmark of modern architecture still stands on the 1.4-acre property in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles on which it was erected. The Eames house is regarded as a structural masterpiece. One that integrated a concept of harmony between the [...]
• Rodeo Drive, 1984 by Anthony Hernandez
  
  The 1980s and Rodeo Drive – a perfect partnership of luxurious consumerist excess. It was exactly this which inspired photographer Anthony Hernandez to take pictures of the iconic shopping district, resulting in a collection of 70+ photographs now showcased in a glorious book Rodeo Drive, 1984. Click the pic to take a look.  
• Interactive Map of WWII Bomb Sites
  
  For the record, bombs are not cool. Bombing people, is not, in any way…cool. But this interactive map that explores the London Blitz during WWII made us say “WHOA!”. The shock factor behind the awesome Bomb Sight website is unrivalled. It was developed by a team at the University of Portsmouth and gives a detailed [...]
• Birds on Twitter by Voldemars Dudums
  
  Latvian conceptual artist and creative director Voldemars Dudums created this insanely clever bird feeder using an old computer keyboard and some cubes of bacon fat. When the birds would fly down to snack their inadvertent key presses were fed to an api that parsed each little tap into a bonafide tweet on the @hungry_birds Twitter [...]
• Submergence by Squidsoup
  
  Submergence is a mixed media installation designed to challenge the natural perception of space. The piece includes 8,064 points of lights, suspended from the ceiling in a mind-boggling construction. Developed by collaborative group Squidsoup, which consists of international artists, researchers, and designers who create work that “combines sound, physical space, and virtual worlds to produce [...]
• Oscar the Globetrotting Dog
  
  Meet Oscar—the Alsatian, Corgi, Cocker Spaniel, and Basset Hound mix (as revealed through a DNA test)—who just so happens to be the first dog to ever travel all across the world. It was only a few years ago that this adorable pooch was rescued by Joanne Lefson from the SPCA in Cape Town, South Africa. [...]
• Anechoric Chamber at Orfield Laboratories
  
  It’s the world’s quietest room. This room, the ‘Anechoric Chamber’ at Orfield Laboratories in the US is 99.99% sound absorbent. The Guinness Book of World Records says it’s the quietest room on the planet. Apparently it’s so quiet, staying in there for a time will drive you insane. Nobody has been able to be in [...]
• A visit to a Turkish harem in 1843
  
  At 10am, Mme. Marcrioniti, the wife of an Armenian merchant, came to be our interprets, at the harem of Mehemet Ali, and we made our way up the Bosphorous, to little beyond the palace of the Sultan’s mother, on the Asiatic side, and were received at the door by several servants, and by Achmet Bey, [...]
• Arboretum by David Byrne
  
  About a decade ago, David Byrne began making “mental maps of imaginary territory” in a little notebook based on self-directed instructions to draw anything from a Venn diagram about relationships to an evolutionary tree of pleasure — part Wendy MacNaughton, part Julian Hibbard, yet wholly unlike anything else. In 2006, Byrne released Arboretum (UK; public [...]
• BingoSTRONG
  
    As the internet turns over Lance Armstrong’s career with greater veracity, one of the stand-out pieces of parody was BingoSTRONG. The game, made by Aaron Sanchez and Nick Scarlet, the Bingo variant is a series of phrases Lance has been pedaling over the past fortnight in light of his admittance to taking drugs. The [...]
• Architectural Vacuums by Frank Halmans
  
  Dutch artist Frank Halmans creates hybrid vacuum cleaners that transforms the interior cavities of these machines into miniature houses inspired by mid-century architecture. The sculptures highlights a meeting between two object worlds, blurring the line between the interior and exterior. Click the pic to see more.
• Icescapes Inside a Historic Chicago Cold Storage Facility
  
  For nine decades Fulton Market Cold Storage Company operated in Chicago’s meatpacking district with a full ten stories of freezing storage situated close to major railways. Last summer the company decided it was time to start fresh in a state-of-the-art facility outside of Chicago, so the building has undergone refurbishment to make way for SRAM, [...]
• Amsterdam’s Over het IJ theatre festival
  
  To celebrate the 20th anniversary of Amsterdam’s Over het IJ theatre festival, local architecture studio O+A created a gigantic recycled shipping container stage made from locally sourced materials. Piled up within North Amsterdam’s huge NDSM shipyard, the containers have been retrofitted into a space for live artistic performances. Click the pic to see more.
• Singapore’s Gardens by the Bay
  
  Singapore’s extraordinary Gardens by the Bay opened in the summer of 2012, and we are still blown away by the park’s amazing design. Among the project’s highlights is a pair of carbon neutral conservatories – one of which is the largest climate controlled greenhouse in the world. Designed by Wilkinson Eyre, the Flower Dome and [...]
• Ice Hotel in Jukkasjärvi, Sweden
  
  This year’s Ice Hotel in Sweden is back – and this year, it’s taken on an alien theme. The hotel in Jukkasjärvi in Sweden, 200 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle has been inspired by the sightings of unidentified flying objects in the area. The result is flying saucers carved out of the ice beaming [...]
• Soviet Child Care Posters, 1930
  
  Educational posters produced by the Soviet Ministry of Public Health in 1930. Courtesy of the LSE Archive. That is all. Click the pic.
• The Event of a Thread by Ann Hamilton
  
  We’re gutted we didn’t get to see Ann Hamilton’s groundbreaking installation, The Event of a Thread, at the Park Avenue Armory in New York. Perhaps the only saving grace of not seeing it in person, is this gorgeous new video by Paul Octavious who managed to catch a final glimpse of the installation before it [...]
• the Road to the 1979 Iranian Revolution
  
  On January 16th 1979, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, accompanied by his wife, Farah Diba, stood at Mehrabad Airport facing a bleak future. He was leaving behind his throne and his country – a country he would never see again. In less than a month, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini would disembark from an [...]
• Frozen Bubbles
  
  This image was taken in winter time in a arid area of the Canadian Rockies. Temperatures where below -30 degrees Celsius yet because there was no snow fall the surface of the lake was uncovered allowing me to see and capture the bubbles (gas release from lake bed) that were trapped in the frozen waters. [...]
• I’m Not Here by PoL Úbeda Hervàs
  
  Photographer Pol Ubeda Hervas is having a bit of an identity crisis. So he decided to show it through his work. The passage that accompanies this thoughtful series implies Pol doesn’t know who he is, so why should his photos? How can we accept that we are changing? How can we accept we hardly recognize [...]
• Meet the Tokyo Beatles
  
  Anyone curious about the myriad and unpredictable ways that enormous success can translate into enormous influence need look no further than Tokyo in the summer of 1964. There, in the city’s dankest music clubs, a group of skinny, mop-topped Japanese rock and rollers were driving their fans wild playing the music — and borrowing the [...]
• Designers’ Favourite Movie Interiors
  
  We all have our favourite films – but about our favourite movie interiors? Over on House Beautiful they asked designers to name their favourite interiors and to talk a little bit about why they liked them. “Gorgeous busts on pedestals, pelts draped across furniture, oil-burning chandeliers, and campaign furniture — as in, on an actual [...]
• Window Seat by Julieanne Kost
  
  Aerial photography taken from the window seat of a plane. We’ve all done it, but strangely, none of them seem to come out anywhere near as amazing as Julieanne Kost’s does. The photographer works for Adobe Systems and serves as the Principal Digital Imaging Evangelist for Photoshop and Lightroom – so she knows a thing [...]
• Lonely Hearts ads from the 1960s
  
  In the 1960′s there was no shirking behind instant messenger, flirty SMS’s or ability to pre-screen through Skype. You put an ad in the paper, crossed your fingers and hoped lady luck would deliver your soulmate. But with thousands of people reading the personal ads each day, you have to make yourself enterprising enough to [...]
• Last Meals Of Inmates On Death Row
  
  Many people (especially families of the victims) consider death row as the final stop before taking the trip down to hell. Reserved exclusively for the most violent, cruel and evil inmates, death row is an area in prison designed to house criminals awaiting execution – whose crimes are so extreme, that death is the only [...]
• Tweets Transformed Into Haunting Works Of Art
  
  In their “Geolocation” project, conceptual artists Nate Larson and Marni Shindelman use GPS data to locate tweets and then add a photographic layer to the 140-character story. Every tweet may contain a story. But in 140 characters or less, tweets can only hint at drama, romance, tragedy, and intrigue. Artists Nate Larson and Marni Shindelman [...]
• The Pirate Bay Away From Keyboard trailer
  
  This new documentary entitled The Pirate Bay Away From Keyboard dives into the history of The Pirate Bay and its founders. The film details the massive legal battle between the founders and the entertainment industry, as the courts were asked if a websites founders can be held accountable for the actions of its users. The [...]
• The London Underground, 1940
  
  In 1940, during the eight months of German bombing raids known ever after as the Blitz, the Tube witnessed what was (to borrow a phrase from Winston Churchill) its finest hour. As Luftwaffe bomber planes pummeled London and other British cities, often sparking urban fire storms that raged for days and, by the time the [...]
• The movements of a violinist’s bow
  
  This photograph represents the meeting of two great 20th-century artists. Famed violinist Jascha Heifetz was known for his incredible technical precision, which made him the perfect subject for a series of light paintings by the photographer Gjon Mili. Mili is probably best known for his 1949 series of photographs in which he encouraged Pablo Picasso [...]
• Sworn Virgins of Albania by Jill Peters
  
  “Sworn Virgin” is the term given to a biological female in the Balkans who is chosen, usually at an early age, to take on the social identity of a man for life. As a tradition dating back hundreds of years, this was necessary in societies that lived within tribal clans, followed the Kanun, an archaic [...]
• Nightclub Interiors from the Rat Pack Era
  
  During the 1940s, nightclubs, while frequented by Hollywood’s A-List were, on the most part, little more than hang outs and offices for gangsters. Mob King Mickey Cohen was one such man – and the key character in new film Gangster Squad. From the world-famous Coconut Grove night club in the since demolished Ambassador Hotel to [...]
• Window Watching by Michael Wolf
  
  Michael Wolf has done what we all have done ever since builders started putting houses, and their windows closer towards each other. The German born photographer, currently living in Hong Kong has created a series called Window Watching – in which he used his skills as a photographer to capture what his neighbours get up [...]
• Bosco Verticale – The world’s first vertical forest
  
  Back in 2011, Bosco Verticale — a new superstructure designed to bring the world’s first vertical forest to Milan, Italy was announced. While many were skeptical when it came to the feasibility of construction, Boeri Studio reports that the structure is certainly more than just a fantasy — in fact it’s well on its way [...]
• Colour TVs, 1971
  
  By the late 1960s and early 1970s though, colour sets had become standard, and the completion of total colourcasting was achieved when the last of the daytime programs converted to color and joined with prime time in the first all-colour season in 1972. Colour broadcasting in Europe was not standardized on the PAL format until [...]
• Robot Restaurant
  
  A robot that specializes in delivering food holds an empty tray after serving meals to customers at a Robot Restaurant in Harbin, China, Jan. 12. Opened in June 2012, the restaurant has gained fame for using a total of 20 robots, which range in height from 1.3 to 1.6 meters (4.2 feet to 5.2 feet), [...]
• Stranded by Amy Stein
  
  For the past five years, photographer Amy Stein has been driving across America and capturing portraits random strangers who are stranded on the side of the road after having their cars break down. She often drives on freeways hours upon hours before coming upon a new subject for the series. Stein’s project is also intended [...]
• View from the Shard
  
  London’s eagerly anticipated landmark, The Shard is set to open its doors to the public on the 1st February. The View from The Shard as it’s so fittingly called is about to become prime location for both Londoners and visitors from all over the world. The only place in the capital where you can actually [...]
• Centipede Cinema
  
  The only way to watch a film at this unconventional cinema in Guimarães, Portugal, is by manoeuvring your upper body into one of 16 downward-pointing nozzles. The ‘Centipede Cinema’ was finished by Bartlett School of Architecture professor Colin Fournier, who teamed up with Polish artist Marysia Lewandowska and London studio NEON. While the upper body [...]
• The history of Nintendo
  
  RetroGameAddict commissioned an awesome video chronicling the history of Nintendo’s console platform, starting in 1980 with the Game & Watch, the portable computer that introduced us to games like Donkey Kong, all the way through to Nintendo’s most recent Wii U. It’s an amazing video that highlights just how much Nintendo have done in the [...]
• A tour of the International Space Station
  
  Several careful owners. Full service history, approximately 30 million miles on the clock. NASA astronaut Sunita Williams, who has spent almost a year in space, gives us a 25-minute tour of the International Space Station. AKA the nerdiest episode of MTV Cribs ever. In her final days as Commander of the International Space Station, Sunita [...]
• Famous Resolution Lists
  
  ‘Tis the season for New Year’s resolutions, but instead of regurgitating the most common ones — like changing habit loops, exercising more, and being more productive — here is a look at some of history’s more unusual resolution lists from the diaries, letters, and personal effects of cultural icons, as seen over on Brainpickings. Click [...]
• Harbin ice festival
  
  Visitors walk among large ice sculptures at the 29th Harbin International Ice and Snow Festival in Harbin, China, on Jan. 6. The annual festival features hundreds of activities related to snow and ice. With snow allegedly on its way to Britain and northern Europe, we thought it a perfect time to show you some pics [...]
• 125 Years of National Geographic
  
  On January 13, 2013, the National Geographic Society will celebrate its 125th anniversary. Though it’s best known for its stunning wildlife photography, National Geographic is, more importantly, a leading proponent of environmental and historical conservation. This anniversary they are reaffirming their role as the the ones at the forefront of discovery and adventure. They’re calling [...]
• Festival of Lanterns
  
  Singapore-based photo journalist Justin Ng had the privilege of seeing one of the most beautiful festivals in Thailand last year. In November, he attended Thailand’s famous Yi Peng lantern festival and captured this iconic shot. As he told PhotoBotos: “It was my first trip to Chiang Mai to capture this jaw dropping Yi Peng Lantern [...]
• The Ugly Truth by Rut Mackel
  
  Rut Mackel’s “The Ugly Truth” explores the ugliness and the beauty that exist within each of us. For the project the models were asked to hold a piece of framed clear glass and press their face against it to get various face distortions. Speaking about the project Rut said, “Face is a symbol of personal [...]
• LA’s 70s and 80s Punk Scene by Ann Summa
  
  This is the late 70s and early 80s as we wish we could have experienced. Photographer Ann Summa has recently released her personal collection of photos from that time, capturing snapshots of the world’s punk heavyweights as they literally cut and broke their teeth on LA’s burgeoning music scene. Click the pic to see more.
• Paths of Raiders
  
  Philadelphia artist and teacher Andrew DeGraff created an illustrated series of maps that each represent a film from the original Indiana Jones trilogy: Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. They were created, along with our previously posted Star Wars maps, for his [...]
• Soul Men: The Making of The Blues Brothers
  
  The pitch was simple: “John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Blues Brothers, how about it?” But the film The Blues Brothers became a nightmare for Universal Pictures, wildly off schedule and over budget, its fate hanging on the amount of cocaine Belushi consumed. From the 1973 meeting of two young comic geniuses in a Toronto bar through [...]
• The Fat and the Furious Burger
  
  Yeah it’s one of 5,000,000 other burger blogs on the fountain of knowledge that is the World Wide Web but this one is particularly hilarious. If you start at the bottom of his blog when this naturally anonymous French guy began making it, and slowly work your way up, you’ll see his transformation from casual [...]
• 50 Amazing Photos Of The Apollo Moon Missions
  
  In May of 1961, President John F. Kennedy made a promise to put a man on the Moon–and return him back safely–by the end of the decade. Somehow, it worked. Fast CoDesign assembled a gallery of our favorite 50 photos from the Apollo missions. Many you will recognize, but just as many will surely be [...]
• Off The Map by Tom Wood
  
  Graphic designer Tom Wood has created a series of ten designs that celebrate London Underground’s long closed and mostly forgotten stations. 2013 marks London Underground’s 150th anniversary and the world’s oldest underground transport system has seen some huge societal changes in its time. Ever-evolving demand has led to alterations, resulting in a number of disused [...]
• The best book covers of 2012
  
  The New York Times selects the best book cover designs of 2012, including I Saw a Peacock with a Fiery Tail (the magnificent Victorian trick poem illustrated with Indian folk art), David Byrne’s How Music Works, Chris Ware’s extraordinary book-in-a-box Building Stories, Lemony Snicket and Seth’s Who Could It Be at This Hour, and Jessica [...]
• Delicatessen with love by Gabriele Galimberti
  
  Here’s a clever idea for a photo project: Travel across the globe and ask the grandmothers who you meet along the way to prepare their favourite dish for you. In his series Delicatessen with love, Italian photographer Gabriele Galimberti does just that. From caterpillars in tomato sauce in Malawi to a ten-spice-curry in India, click [...]
• Around the Globe- A Snow Globe Timelapse Journey from Canada to London
  
  Freelance filmmaker Colin Mika scored a viral hit last year with his time-lapse video of Los Angeles shot through a snow globe. This past November, Mika created a followup video as a holiday Christmas card on behalf of Canadian law firm McCarthy Tétrault. He visited six cities across Canada and England: Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, Québec [...]
• Quentin Tarantino’s finest food moments
  
  Quentin Tarantino’s movies are violent, sure, and vulgar, certainly, but when his characters aren’t shooting something or driving somewhere, odds are they’re eating. Tarantino loves to use food to stretch out a scene, give a comic undercurrent to a grim conversation, or even advance a plot, and he fails to disappoint in his newest film, [...]
• People Preparing for the End of the World
  
  Today marks the end of the 13th cycle of the ancient Mayan calendar, giving rise to rumors about the end of the world. Worries about a looming apocalypse are nothing new in human history, but 21st century reactions to the possible destruction of the planet (or human civilization) vary widely, from “preppers” who cultivate self-sufficiency, [...]
• Dead Sea Scrolls Go Digital
  
  The Dead Sea Scrolls were buried in caves for centuries, and then enmeshed in controversy over scholarly access since their discovery in the late 1940s. But as of today, some 5,000 high-resolution images of the scrolls are readily available online, thanks to a collaboration between the Israel Antiquities Authority and Google. “Only five conservators worldwide [...]
• Henry Chu’s Fish Harp
  
  Artist Henry Chu has created a brilliant new exhibition for the MUSIQUE PLASTIQUE exhibition in Hong Kong. Whenever a goldfish swims beneath a glass, a motion sensor triggers a sound sample that mimics the sound that glass would make if a moist finger were dragged across its rim. Click the pic to see it in [...]
• Inside a Nazi Christmas Party, 1941
  
  The images are chilling, bordering on surreal: On December 18, 1941, as World War II rages and the horrors of the Third Reich’s “final solution” grow ever clearer — killing operations at the Chełmno death camp, for instance, began less than two weeks earlier — Adolf Hitler presides over a Christmas party in Munich. Stark [...]
• To Have and Have Another: The Hemingway Cocktail Companion by Philip Greene
  
  Ernest Hemingway was a war hero, big-game hunter, Nobel Prize winner in literature, and one of the most dynamic American authors in history. He also really liked his liquor, whether it was champagne, absinthe, or just straight Irish whiskey. So writer, cocktail connoisseur and Hemingway-enthusiast Philip Greene decided to write a book devoted to Hem [...]
• Space Project by Vincent Fournier
  
  Last year, $5 billion was spent on exploring the cosmos in the US. In the same 12 months, the great American public spent $10 billion on cosmetic surgery. While that’s a slightly dismaying figure, photographer Vincent Fournier has still managed to capture the excitement and obsession space conjures in the scientists whose job it is [...]
• Nabano no Sato botannical gardens – Japan
  
  Christmas lights in Britain are gaudy, tacky, and a slightly strange symbol of Christmas – we’re pretty sure Jesus and Santa have more pressing concerns round this time of year than wrapping up a dead tree in fairy lights. But, in Japan, as always, when it comes to tech, they take things to the next [...]
• What is colour? By Colm Kelleher
  
  Have you ever wondered what colour is? In this first instalment of a series on light, Colm Kelleher describes the physics behind colors– why the colours we see are related to the period of motion and the frequency of waves. Click the pic to watch this fascinating video that explains it for us.
• The xx 3-Part Mini Documentary
  
  Shot and directed by photographer and film-maker Jamie-James Medina (who also happens to be the founder of XL’s sub-label Hot Charity), this 3-part documentary follows The xx on the three major cycles of their creative process. Time in the recording studio, in rehearsals and then finally performing live is documented, ending in the last episode [...]
• Homeland Vintage Jazz Record Covers
  
  For fans of Homeland, and jazz music, rejoice! Mattson Creative, a design agency in Southern California has created these awesome mashup sleeves using jazz album covers as templates. Here’s more from the designer over on Mattson Creative: “Last night was the finale of the second season of Homeland. To say that I am a huge [...]
• Liquid Sculptures, Jelly Fish & Liquid Splashes by Markus Reugel
  
  German photographer Markus Reugels takes remarkable high speed photos of liquids in mid-splash. He has hundreds of photos on his Flickr site: see Liquid Sculptures, Jelly Fish & Liquid Splashes. Click the pic to see more.  
• Best Camera-Trap Pictures of 2012
  
  A leopard seems to strike a regal pose in China in the winning photograph of the annual BBC Wildlife Camera Trap Competition. Photographer Zhou Zhefeng snagged both the top prize and a category win for Animal Portraits. Established in 2010, the contest features the most “visually exciting” or significant camera-trap images taken by conservationists worldwide, [...]
• South Africa’s sardine run by Alexander Safonov
  
  Alexander Safonov is a software architect from Voronezh, Russia who currently lives and works in Discovery Bay, Hong Kong. Not content to sit in front of a computer full-time he obtained a diving license in 2002 and started to experiment with underwater photography about two years later. He has since made numerous excursions to photograph [...]
• Cranberry Bog Wakeboarding
  
  The annual harvesting of cranberries has to be one of the most ingenius methods of fruit farming there is. Every fall after the berries ripen on the vine, instead of being picked by people or machine the fields are flooded with water from a nearby reservoir. Because the berries are filled with air, all it [...]
• X-Rays of Christmas Presents by Hugh Turvey
  
  British Institute of Radiology artist-in-residence Hugh Turvey creates images with x-rays to reveal the hidden contents of wrapped presents. The images, which he calls Xograms, are made by exposing each object to photons for up to a minute in an x-ray machine. Speaking about the project Hugh says, “I have been working with x-ray for [...]
• The Real Toy Story by Michael Wolf
  
  Michael Wolf’s “The Real Toy Story” is an elaborate installation consisting of 20,000 toys made in China and purchased in California that Wolf attached to the walls of a gallery, along with photographs of workers making the toys in Chinese factories. The installation is a homage to China’s factory workers who slave away to produce [...]
• Seeing God in the Third Millennium
  
  There are many carefully documented accounts in the medical literature of intense, life-altering religious experience in epileptic seizures. Hallucinations of overwhelming intensity, sometimes accompanied by a sense of bliss and a strong feeling of the numinous, can occur especially with the so-called “ecstatic” seizures that may occur in temporal lobe epilepsy. Though such seizures may [...]
• A Look Into the Mind of a Military Photojournalist
  
  What’s it like to shoot on the front lines of battle as a military photojournalist? This 15-minute documentary by filmmaker Hannah Hill will tell you. This is a documentary about Staff Sgt. Ryan Crane, a United States Air Force photojournalist, who has deployed to Afghanistan twice. He shares his experiences as a photojournalist in a [...]
• Atlas Obscura
  
  Atlas Obscura is the a guide to the world’s most wondrous and curious places. In an age where everything seems to have been explored and there is nothing new to be found, Atlas Obscura celebrates a different way of looking at the world. If you’re searching for miniature cities, glass flowers, books bound in human [...]
• Are you living in a computer simulation?
  
  This mind-blowing paper argues that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly [...]
• Twas the Night Before Christopher Walken (feat. Kevin Pollak)
  
  Film legend Kevin Pollak (“A Few Good Men,” “Middle Men”) reads the classic poem “The Night Before Christmas” and adds some commentary of his own. Curious about the meaning of the word “kerchief”? Wondering how the narrator could possibly know the miniature sleigh belonged to Kris Kringle himself? Thinking that Santa is probably half in [...]
• The Three Speches
  
  Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama take a moment to address the nation in the wake of a school shooting. Clips are from addresses immediately following the Columbine, Virginia Tech and Sandy Hook shootings. The three speeches have been edited together here to illustrate the endless cycle of violence we are trapped [...]
• Filmography 2012
  
  There are plenty ‘best-of’ lists flying round the tinterweb at the moment. Easily one of our favourites is this excellent mash-up of films to be released in 2012. It covers everything from big-budget blockbusters, foreign flicks, and indie movies that have done the round this year. Excellent work from Genrocks. Click the pic to watch [...]
• How Long Would It Take Santa To Deliver Presents To Every Kid On Earth?
  
  About six “Santa months,” according to Larry Silverberg, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at North Carolina State University. He’s a Santa math specialist (really) whose students took on the problem. Here’s how he got there: Santa has to deliver gifts to around 200 million children spread over 200 million square miles. Because each [...]
• What Living On $1 A Day Does To The Body
  
  An estimated 1.1 billion people in the world survive on just $1 a day. It’s a fact economics students Chris Temple and Zach Ingrasci couldn’t get out of their heads. Together, the pair decided to take their studies outside the classroom, to someplace more practical –– the edge of poverty itself. Living on $1 a day for two [...]
• Skywalking
  
  We’ve already examined the phenomenon of Skywalking here at Apowl. But we can’t help but revisit this dizzying phenomenon that seems to be so wildly popular in Russia. The aim is simple: climb to the top of the highest thing you can find and make it look as dangerous as possible. These particular shots are [...]
• Fonderie 47
  
  Peter Thum, working in Africa for Ethos Water, noticed something while travelling in Kenya: Everywhere he went, people had guns. Lots and lots of guns. A year after his trip to Kenya, Thum found himself at a TED conference discussing the gun situation with John Zapolski. Last November, they formed Fonderie 47, a company dedicated [...]
• Golden Tweets – the most popular tweets of 2012
  
  Here are the top two Tweets that generated the most Retweets for the year, plus honourable mentions for a few other Tweets that caught attention around the world. Click the pic to take a look.
• Birds-of-Paradise Courtship Rituals
  
  You may have seen Birds of Paradise on David Attenborough’s numerous documentaries – but you’ve never seen this many. The Birds of Paradise project is attempting to document all the birds in their myriad forms, as well as capture some of their courting rituals. The project took Tim Laman and Ed Scholes through more than [...]
• Inside the Bank of England’s Gold Bullion Vault
  
  Professor Martyn Poliakoff of The Periodic Table of Videos takes us on a fascinating video tour of the Bank of England’s highly secure gold bullion vault. The Bank of England holds around 315 billion dollars in gold. Each bar in the vault weighs about 28 pounds and is worth about $700,000. The video is by [...]
• Senior Tech Lessons
  
  The arduous task of educating senior citizens has fallen to a kindly gentleman named Bob. Bob’s the teacher at Senior Tech Lessons – a tongue-in-cheek web series designed to impart advice on how to tackle technology. Made by the Conan show,  it gives the elderly the tools “to join the cutting edge.” Bob teaches those [...]
• Frost Flowers Blooming in the Arctic Ocean
  
  This beautiful and other-worldly photograph of ice was taken last year by University of Washington graduate student Jeff Bowman and his professor Jody Deming while they worked on a study combining oceanography, microbiology, and planetary sciences in the central Arctic Ocean as part of the Integrated Graduate Education and Research Training (IGERT) program. Their single [...]
• Tough Crowd by Dave Brown
  
  Dave Brown is probably best known for playing Bollo the gorilla in The Mighty Boosh, but he is also a graphic designer and photographer. He has a new exhibition of portraits of 50 well known comedians at London’s Strand Gallery. Entitled Tough Crowd, the exhibition features the likes of Adam Buxton, Bill Bailey, Julian Barratt, [...]
• Mary Ellen Mark’s prom dates
  
  The American high school prom has acquired a particular worldwide resonance thanks to its central role in a thousand teen-themed films and TV shows. But what do real prom-goers look like today? Photographer Mary Ellen Mark shot 13 high school proms at schools from across the US that reflect a wide variety of regional and [...]
• Everything that I wish I could be by Kent Rogowski
  
  “Everything that I wish I could be” is the title of a series of book collages made by Kent Rogowski. He used the titles of self-help books to create larger narratives, which become portraits of emotions, people and events in life. Click the pic to see more on his website.
• Portable Urban River by Luzinterruptus
  
  Portable Urban River by LuzinterruptusShedding light on the importance of Earth’s most abundant resource, Luzinterruptus literally packaged light with some colourful inhabitants of the essential liquid refreshment in Caracas, Venezuela, producing an artificial river in the streets. Local residents took home some of the 2,000 bags so that not a drop would be wasted. Click [...]
• Rare Colour Photos of Before and After D-Day
  
  It’s no mystery why images of unremitting violence spring to mind when one hears the deceptively simple term, “D-Day.” We’ve all seen — in photos, movies, old news reels — what happened on the beaches of Normandy (codenamed Omaha, Utah, Juno, Gold and Sword) as the Allies unleashed an historic assault against German defences on [...]
• Ordinary Batman Adventures
  
  What does Batman look like on an ordinary day? Artist Sarah Johnson offers some suggestions with her exquisite GIFs of Batman doing mundane tasks like scooping up kitty droppings, eating breakfast, and using the men’s room. Her inspiration to pursue illustration came from her adoration for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles at age 11 and [...]
• Game Over by Henry Hargreaves
  
  For his project titled “Game Over,” Brooklyn-based photographer Henry Hargreaves took a number of popular and instantly – recognizable children’s games (and toys) and painted over all the colourful designs and branding with single pastel colours. He then photographed the games on backgrounds of the same colour. Click the pic to see more.
• The Nautical Roots of the Modern Tattoo
  
  Contemporary tattooing can be traced to the 15th century, when pilgrims would mark themselves with reminders of locations they visited, as well as the names of their hometowns and spouses to help identify their bodies should they die during their travels. “The attractions of tattoos for itinerant populations are quite obvious,” says tattoo-art historian Matt [...]
• The Amazing Illustrations Of NASA’s Storyboarder
  
  What if your job was to make sweeping, cinematic images of planned NASA missions? Pat Rawlings, professional space artist, gives us a lesson in finding the story in science. For 30 years, Rawlings has made, for NASA and others, beautiful illustrations intended to capture the excitement and drama of outer space. He is, in a [...]
• Day to Night by Stephen Wilkes
  
  Photographer Stephen Wilkes has created a fascinating photo series where he combines vistas of New York City of day and night in one image. The result is a slightly visually arresting image where your brain tries to tell you it’s two separate images, as opposed to one continuous one. Anyway, click the link to check [...]
• The Moment After the Show by Matthias Willi
  
  Since 2005, photographer Matthias Willi and journalist Olivier Joliat have been developing a photographic project entitled The Moment After the Show. In the 144 page publication, the pair has captured the sweaty and exhausted backstage moments of famous musicians, scenes that regular audiences don’t generally get to witness. About 100 bands have participated, including popular [...]
• The Booth by Joseph O. Holmes
  
  It is true that we live in an age where film projectors are switching to digital and people are no longer needed to run them, so New York City based photographer Joseph O. Holmes decided to take photos of the people working, what he calls “The Booth.” Taking over a year and traveling to theatres [...]
• 12 Months of Neon Love
  
  Artists Victoria Lucas and Richard William Wheater have collaborated for the past year to create this glowing, self-funded public project entitled 12 Months of Neon Love. Featuring lyrics from popular songs, the team produced a series of twelve expressive signs that were displayed on the roof of their Neon Workshops in West Yorkshire, England. For [...]
• The Lady Lifeguards of 1940s Brooklyn
  
  The New York Times’ City Room blog explores “Lady Life Guards,” an “oddly racy newsreel” made around 1940 about female lifeguards on a beach in Brooklyn. The video made the rounds on blogs this week after being featured on blog Sheepshead Bites. The Times’ Andy Newman describes it as “a gently leering 10-minute tour de [...]
• The Wire, illustrated
  
  Illustrator Dennis Culver is offering for sale a poster of 50+ characters from The Wire. It’s awesome. Click the pic to see more.  
• George Orwell – A Life in Pictures
  
  George Orwell: A Life in Pictures is an Emmy award winning 2003 BBC Television docudrama telling the life story of the British author George Orwell. There is no footage of George Orwell, no recordings of his voice, just assorted photographs, and of course, his writing, his brilliant writing, which forms the basis of this Emmy [...]
• The Best Colouring Books Ever
  
  Stuck for Christmas presents this year? Fear not, Etsy seller teamart has created an awesome set of pop cultural themed colouring books. There’s 90′s Pop Divas, Boy Bands, Hunky Dudes, and our personal favourite, Bears. Click the pic to take a closer look.
• The Faces of Meth
  
  Eight years ago, the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office launched a campaign called “the Faces of Meth” to address Oregon’s methamphetamine problem. The images showed the jarring effects of meth on addicts’ faces through before-and-after pictures from their arrest records. Rehabs.com recently followed suit with this infographic. Warning: these images are disturbing. Click the pic to [...]
• The Worst Men’s Magazine Ads From The ’60s and ’70s
  
  They don’t make them like they used to. So much so, BusinessInsider decided to flip through the pages of “The Male Mystique,” a book about vintage men’s advertising by Jacques Boyreau, and pick out the worst ads from men’s magazines in the 1960s and 1970s. Some of the brands, like Gordon’s gin and Lee jeans, [...]
• Exploring the Remains of England’s Top-Secret Turbine Testing Site
  
  In the clearing of a small wooded area between the towns of Fleet and Farnborough in Hampshire, England stands a deserted structure of concrete, metal and glass. Abandoned and decaying, the building is nonetheless imposing. And for reasons that will become obvious as you look through these photographs, the location is a magnet for intrepid [...]
• RIP Oscar Niemeyer
  
  Oscar Niemeyer is on the infinitesimally short list of people who have designed and built an entire city. A world capital. Sure, Haussmann made Paris into the postcard background it is today and Wren rebuilt London after the Great Fire (by not building everything out of wood – good thinking!). But it’s not like they [...]
• London Smog Disaster of 1952
  
  The Great Smog of ’52 or Big Smoke was a severe air pollution event that affected London during December 1952. A period of cold weather, combined with an anticyclone and windless conditions, collected airborne pollutants mostly from the use of coal to form a thick layer of smog over the city. It lasted from Friday [...]
• How Many People Are In Space Right Now?
  
  It’s a question that bugs us fairly constantly here at Apowl. Just how many men and women are currently in space? Well, this rather simple website will tell, you in the most graphically explicit way possible. Brilliant! Click the pic to find out how many are up there today.
• You Are What You Eat by Mark Menjivar
  
  What does your fridge say about you? If you’re photographer Mark Menjivar, quite a lot. He’s been touring the chilled cabinets of American homes to find out what lifestyle choices they make when it comes to buying food. From this guy’s – you know this is a guy’s fridge – frozen meat and tequila fridge, [...]
• Isaac Newton vs. Rube Goldberg: A Gravity-Defying Chain Reaction
  
  It’s been a while since a quality Rube Goldberg has made its way around the internet – and it appears the folks over at Toronto-based 2D House have stepped up to the challenge. Isaac Newton vs. Rube Goldberg is an extremely slick chain reaction aided by magnets and all matter of visual trickery. Just watch, [...]
• The War on Christmas: Alan Sailer’s high-speed photos of exploding toys
  
  The latest pictures by high-speed photography fanatic Alan Sailer show him blowing up children’s toys with firecrackers. In this image, an apple explodes on a doll’s head. To blow up the objects Alan uses a firecracker modified so that it can be fired using an electrical signal. He then has to synchronise the opening of [...]
• The Making of The Chronic
  
  Dr. Dre’s seminal 1992 album, The Chronic, turns 20 next month. Though a sensation upon its release, the raw-but-melodic work’s legend has only grown in the ensuing decades, and today seemingly every MC-producer duo fancies itself the next Dre and Snoop Dogg. It has become the most influential rap work ever made, and perhaps even [...]
• From 57th Street to Shanghai by Michael Eastman
  
  Michael Eastman is renowned for his sublime photographs of urban architecture, using a wide-angle lens and lengthy exposures to capture the effects of light on the surface of a Frank Gehry building or in a Shanghai atrium, like the photo above. Eastman started out as a self-taught photographer in St. Louis and gradually developed his [...]
• THE 20 MOST SHARED SOCIAL VIDEO ADS OF 2012
  
  While Coca-Cola, Chevrolet, P&G, Nike and Volkswagen all feature prominently in the 2012 Unruly Global Viral Video Ads Chart — the annual ranking of the year’s most shared video ads, released today by Unruly — it is a little-known non-profit that is the year’s overall winner. Kony 2012, created and released by the not-for-profit Invisible [...]
• Steel Wool Light Painting by Simon Berger
  
  After seeing an online tutorial on steel wool light painting, photographer Simon Berger found a friend to model for him and went out to try his hand at the technique. After some initial success, he started brainstorming creative ideas that he hadn’t seen before. The result of the brainstorming was this stunning shot that makes [...]
• Desert Air by George Steinmetz
  
  Photographer George Steinmetz has spent the last 15 years paragliding his away across the world’s most spectacular scenery and documenting it for this amazing new book. The book ‘Desert Air’ captures many of the world’s most remote and dry places from his unique angle. A book signing with Steinmetz will be held on Thursday, December [...]
• A Comic Book Ode to Beastie Boys’ “Paul’s Boutique”
  
  American comic-book artist Food One is busy releasing his remix of his classic, out-of-print comic dedicated to the landmark 1989 Beastie Boys album Paul’s Boutique. Admitting to listening to the legendary Beastie album at least once a week, his latest edition of the book is 32 pages of eye candy for both hip-hop/musicology heads and [...]
• For sale: “Back To The Future” Hoverboard
  
  After the first batch of official Mattel Back to the future hoverboards (non working replicas though) have been sold out in no time at the beginning of the year, here comes another chance to get your hands on it. Matty Collector is now accepting pre-orders. The 1:1 scale model was made in cooperation with BTTF [...]
• Light Emitting Dudes
  
  Light Emitting Dudes takes a team of freerunners, geared up from head to toe with LED lights, and sets them loose on the streets of Bangkok at night. With acrobatic grace, they carved up the already buzzing nightlife spots while adding their own flair and colour to the mix. Click the pic to watch them [...]
• The Brain of Einstein
  
  Albert Einstein is widely regarded as a genius, but how did he get that way? Einstein always said he was never smarter than anyone else, it was just he stayed with problems for longer. But, a study of 14 newly discovered photographs of Einstein’s brain, which was preserved for study after his death, concludes that [...]
• Upside by Caulton Morris
  
  UK-based photographer Caulton Morris is a dude with a very strong head and neck. At least that’s the conclusion we came to after seeing his photo series titled Upside, which consists of photo after quirky photo of Morris standing on his head — literally. The “trick” behind these surreal images is that there is no [...]
• Passengers by John Schabel
  
  In the 90′s, New York-based photographer John Schabel took on a voyeuristic project involving people seated on planes, as seen through the aircrafts’ porthole windows. The series, titled Passengers, reveals intriguing portraits of the unknowing travellers powerlessly waiting for their flight to takeoff. Some of them appear to be anxiously preparing themselves for the trip [...]
• Maddie on Things (again)
  
  Maddie on Things is back! As we reported earlier this year, photographer Theron Humphreys has traveled across America with his Coon Hound Maddie taking pictures of her standing on various iconic American objects. In August there was talk of the project coming to an end. But we’re happy to report, Maddie and her love of [...]
• The Economy of Cheating
  
  How does cheating effect the economy? This short video attempts to examine the financial cost of cutting corners. As it turns out, our perceptions on fairness i.e. a little cheating, and unacceptable levels of cheating, are more subtle and nuanced than we first thought. Cheating’s also a pretty expensive business. Click the pic to watch [...]
• The Inside Story Of Pong And The Video Game Industry’s Big Bang
  
  On November 29, 1972, a crude table-tennis arcade game in a garish orange cabinet was delivered to bars and pizza parlours around California, and a multi-billion dollar industry was born. Here’s how that happened, direct from the freaks and geeks who invented a culture and pave the way for today’s tech moguls. Click the pic [...]
• 12 Questions for Woody Allen
  
  Filmmaker Robert Weide asks Woody Allen 12 questions that he’s never been asked before. We couldn’t help but feel surprised that he would choose sporting events over movies, but as he says, he’s seen ‘em all at this point. Weide directed the excellent documentary on Allen, which is available on DVD or streaming at Amazon. [...]
• Cheetahs on the Edge–Director’s Cut
  
  Cheetahs are the fastest runners on the planet. Combining the resources of National Geographic and the Cincinnati Zoo, and drawing on the skills of an incredible crew, we documented these amazing cats in a way that’s never been done before. Using a Phantom camera filming at 1200 frames per second while zooming beside a sprinting [...]
• Can a Jellyfish Unlock the Secret of Immortality?
  
  After more than 4,000 years — almost since the dawn of recorded time, when Utnapishtim told Gilgamesh that the secret to immortality lay in a coral found on the ocean floor — man finally discovered eternal life in 1988. He found it, in fact, on the ocean floor. The discovery was made unwittingly by Christian [...]
• Inside Amazon’s ‘Chaotic Storage’ Warehouses
  
  As the world’s largest online retailer, Amazon needs somewhere to put all of those products. The solution? Giant warehouses. Eighty to be exact. Strategically located near key shipping hubs around the world. The warehouses themselves are massive, with some over 1.2 million square feet in size (111,484 sq m). And at the heart of this [...]
• National Geographic’s Photo Contest
  
  As a leader in capturing our world through brilliant imagery, National Geographic sets the standard for photographic excellence. The submission period has closed–let the judging begin! We received more than 22,000 entries from over 150 countries, with professional and amateur photographers across the globe participating. Winners will be announced in December.One of our favourites was [...]
• The Korowai Tribe’s Incredible Tree Houses
  
  On the island of New Guinea in the southeastern part of Papua, the isolated Korowai tribe is the only group of people in the world that have established their primary residence in tree houses. The area, which is prone to flooding and populated with buzzing insects, proves to be a life-threatening and troublesome land to [...]
• Rock and Roll Billboards of the Sunset Strip
  
  The outdoor ads of the late-’60s through the early ’80s were as artistic as the album covers they were mostly based on. Photographer Robert Landau started shooting those rock and roll billboards on Kodachrome slide film when he was 16. “I was living a block above Sunset near Tower Records, so the Strip was like [...]
• Dancing in The Park, 1970s
  
  These shots were taken in Cambridge Common, Boston, Massachusetts from the late 1960s onwards. This one was sometime in October 1970 when there were a number of anti-Vietnam protests taking place almost every weekend. Click the pic to see more.
• Print your own gun
  
  Thanks to companies like MakerBot, 3d-printed replicas have become easily accessible to consumers everywhere, but would anyone have ever thought that would make firearms more accessible? Defense Distributed is a 3D-printing startup that wants to do just that, by sharing downloadable plans for 3D-printed plastic guns over the internet. The organisation is playing up its [...]
• Pirelli Calendar 2013 – behind the scenes
  
  For 39 years, the Pirelli Calendar has been known for it’s risque and artful photos of female and male nudity (like the Sexy Greek Gods calendar from 2011). But this year, the calendar, shot in Rio by photojournalist Steve McCurry, includes images of fully clothed models, actresses and singers along with pictures of Brazil’s art [...]
• The Bizarre Sport of Chess Boxing: Brains Meets Brawn
  
  If you haven’t already heard of chess boxing, you might be forgiven for thinking you’ve wandered into some kind of absurd comedy sketch. However, the sport is very real, and although it might still be marginal, it is growing. It’s already a popular sport in London and Berlin, but it has also started to spread [...]
• Encyclopedia of Flowers
  
  Encyclopedia of Flowers is a visual exploration of the breathtaking floral arrangements by Makoto Azuma—encounters of unusual, sometimes exotic plants that wouldn’t typically occur in nature. With his meticulously composed photographs, Shunsuke Shiinoki exposes the flowers’ tenuous existence, their fragile forms, continuous metamorphoses, and inevitable decay. Click the pic to see more.
• Fast Track by Salto
  
  As part of the 2012 Archstoyanie festival in Nikola-Lenivets, Russia (from what I can tell it’s kind of like a small version of Burning Man but… with architecture and forests) design firm Salto created this gargantuan trampoline installation called Fast Track. Measuring nearly 170 ft. (51 meters) the bouncy road is nearly the length of [...]
• Leonid and Zodiacal Light
  
  French photographer Stephane Vetter captured this outstanding time-lapse of the night sky using a Sigma 8 mm fish-eye lens, meaning that what you see in the video is a true representation of the entire visible sky. Titled Leonid and Zodiacal Light, the brief but jaw-dropping clip was shot November 17th of this year and includes [...]
• Boring Conference 2012
  
  Held at York Hall for the second year running the, you might not think the phrase ‘A Boring Conference’ would inspire a sold out day of talks on topics ranging from taking photographs of IBM cash points to the history of the yellow line – but it did! Formed after the cancellation of the Interesting [...]
• Impersonators by Nicolas Silberfaden
  
  Artist Nicolas Silberfaden rounded up a bunch of celebrity and superhero look-a-likes and made them cry. The resulting Impersonators series is a morbidly comic set of photographs that contrasts ideals of Hollywood success with the downturn of America’s economy. We caught up with Nicolas to talk about his inspiration, his techniques and, of course, his [...]
• Dunescape by Shawn van Eeden
  
  Dunescape is a collection of beautifully abstract photos of the Namib Desert by photographer Shawn van Eeden. The series exhibits a number of images that highlight the undulating sand dunes of the vast African desert. The way the sunlight beams down on the waves of dry lands results in a brilliant play of light, which [...]
• The Star Jet roller coaster by Stephen Wilkes
  
  Though there were many unforgettable images that were taken after superstorm Sandy, one of the most surreal was of the Seaside Heights, New Jersey roller coaster, sitting half submerged inside the Atlantic Ocean. Photographer Stephen Wilkes, who’s best known for his NYC merged day and night photos, was commissioned by TIME, along with four other [...]
• Bedroom Rockers by Christopher Woodcock
  
  The beats put down my modern DJs fill our lives each day with rhythms which give our time more meaning… and often get our bodies shaking in the process. But, how do these fine people live themselves? Photographer Christopher Woodcock has journeyed far and wide to answer that question, looking inside the homes of DJs, [...]
• Namesake Motors
  
  Today’s top Tumblr? A blog dedicated to reconnecting cars and their famous namesakes in slightly awkward looking pictures. Here we have Lincoln, and his err… Lincoln. We’re not entirely sure how accurate some of these are – was the Mini Cooper really named after a Alice Cooper? – but it’s still good fun. Click the [...]
• Trotify
  
  For any Monty Python fans, you’ll be familiar with the sketch from Monty Python and the Holy Grail involving coconuts as a replacement for horses. Well, Trotify has taken that joke to the next level. Mount one of these wooden Trotify devices on the front of your bike and it will make it clop like [...]
• The EyeSee Mannequin
  
  The new “EyeSee” mannequins by Italian company Almax have cameras inside their eyes that can track customers as they shop: The EyeSee looks ordinary enough on the outside, with its slender polystyrene frame, blank face and improbable pose. Inside, it’s no dummy. A camera embedded in one eye feeds data into facial-recognition software like that [...]
• Death Experience Room
  
  Various methods of treatment involve being “reborn,” but don’t you have to die first to be born again? Perhaps this will help: a psychotherapy in Shenyang, China, simulates death for patients by putting them in a coffin inside a “death experience room”: People who suffer from psychological problems or heavy pressure can be “reborn” by [...]
• Scattered Crowd by William Forsythe
  
  Since 2002 artist, dancer and choreographer William Forsythe has traveled with his audio/visual installation Scattered Crowd, created by suspending thousands of balloons in galleries, museums, banks and other architecturally significant spaces. Though the photos clearly do the work visual justice I think it’s hard to truly appreciate the full sensory experience without walking through the [...]
• 37 or so Ingredients by Dwight Eschliman
  
  After learning last week that Hostess, the maker of Twinkies and Wonder Bread could go out of business, we decided to pay tribute to the hugely popular spongy treat through an interesting project by photographer Dwight Eschliman titled “37 or so Ingredients”. Eschliman photographed each of the 37 ingredients in a Twinkie separately so you [...]
• Sketchbooks: The Hidden Art of Designers, Illustrators, and Creatives
  
  Publisher Laurence King has just released (in the US anyway, it came out in the UK a while back) a rather exquisite book examining the sketch books of some of the world’s most famous artists, designers and creators. Sketchbooks: The Hidden Art of Designers, Illustrators, and Creatives examines everything from sources of inspiration to process, [...]
• Breathtaking Aerial Photography by Klaus Leidorf
  
  There are many different ways to find peace – while some of us meditate, there are those who choose to pilot a plane and take pictures out the open window at the same time. Meet Klaus Leidorf, a 50-year-old aerial archaeologist from Germany, who takes stunning overhead photos while flying his Cesna 172. When Klaus [...]
• Happy Birthday, Lomo
  
  It was a nervous time for film photography when digital cameras took off in the 1990s, and seemed set to take over entirely. But with some help from Vladimir Putin – then deputy mayor of St Petersburg – the little Lomo camera became a retro cult classic, and showed film had a bright future. Click [...]
• The Chemistry of Addiction
  
  Over on the SciShow, presenter Hank describes how our brains respond biochemically to various addictive substances and behaviours and where those responses have come from, evolutionarily speaking. Interesting. Click the pic to watch the vid.
• How particles move and affect the globe
  
  Satellites, balloon-borne instruments and ground-based devices make 30 million observations of the atmosphere each day. Yet these measurements still give an incomplete picture of the complex interactions within Earth’s atmosphere. Enter climate models. Through mathematical experiments, modellers can move Earth forward or backward in time to create a dynamic portrait of the planet. NASA Goddard’s [...]
• Awesome People Hanging Out Together
  
  It’s a Tumblr we have visited before here at Apowl, but it Awesome People Hanging Out Together continues to bring the noise when it comes to awesome pieces of photography. The premise is simple, it’s an archive of images of famous people unexpectedly hanging out with each other. Like this amazing snap of Run DMC [...]
• India in Black and White
  
  India is unlike any other country in the world. Boasting over 1.2 billion people in a country only 1/3 the size of the United States, it is a place of many cultures, environments and fascinations. Our friends at Abduzeedo have collected a diverse collecting of photos by local photographers from the country that paint a [...]
• Wet Look 93 by Daniel Evans and Brendan Baker
  
  For anyone who had the misfortune of growing up in the 1990s, you will remember a worrying trend in hairstyling for men. Clippers were used to remove most, if not all of the hair on top of your head, and what left of it would be caked in wet look hair gel. The green (or [...]
• The Bajau Sea Gypsies of Borneo
  
  “First impressions were of awe,” says photographer Adam Docker. “You feel like you have arrived in some long lost tribe only ever seen on [BBC documentary] Planet Earth or read about in a Jules Verne book.” Docker, who took these stunning photographs, recounts his first visit to a Bajau sea gypsy village on the island [...]
• The Smith Tapes Box Set
  
  Between 1969–1972, Howard Smith recorded interviews with scores of rock stars and cultural icons. As a Village Voice columnist and radio personality on WPLJ FM, Smith sat down for revealing, personal conversations with Eric Clapton, Andy Warhol, Jim Morrison, Buckminster Fuller, Janis Joplin, Jerry Garcia and Hugh Hefner, to name just a few. He interviewed [...]
• Bureaucratics by Jan Banning
  
  Dutch photographer Jan Banning was tasked by his editor to “take photographs and images to compliment a story on the decentralization of the administration of the Dutch development aid”. In his interview with The New Yorker Banning eloquently summed up his thoughts saying  “To me, it seemed to be un-photographable.” which would more than likely [...]
• FBI Releases Stalin’s Daughter Files
  
  Newly declassified documents show the FBI kept close tabs on Soviet dictator Josef Stalin’s only daughter after her high-profile defection to the United States in 1967, gathering details from informants about how her arrival was affecting international relations. The documents were released Monday to The Associated Press under the Freedom of Information Act following Lana [...]
• The Last Days of Eden
  
  In an article for The Sydney Morning Herald titled The Last Days of Eden, photographer Brian Cassey documents the magnificent life of former businessman David Glasheen, now known as Australia’s real-life Robinson Crusoe. After ending his marriage and losing millions of dollars in the stock market crash of 1987, Glasheen up and left his corporate [...]
• Paris, 1914
  
  Unearthed by Retronaut, these color photos of Paris back 1914 are not only lovely to look at, they’re incredibly narrative, like a visual prompt for the kind of stories that Hemingway would write about the city in the decade to come. If you need an escape from the impending holiday drama, or you’d just like [...]
• Vanishing Spirits by Ernie Button
  
  In his photographic series Vanishing Spirits Phoenix-based photographer Ernie Button explores what happens after the last drop is drunk in his macro photographs of evaporated single-malt Scotch. Not unlike the recently featured work of Jason Tozer, Button turns the minute details of stained glass into curious landscapes and colourful terrain. Click the pic to see [...]
• Dancing Colours by Fabian Oefner
  
  After his excellent series Soap Bubbles, Swiss photographer Fabian Oefner has created this awesome Dancing Colors [sic] series. The project involved placing pigments of different colors in a sound chamber and  then snapping the pigments as they danced. A simple idea, very well executed. Click the pic to see more.
• The White Shadow – Hitchcock’s earliest surviving film
  
  The White Shadow (1924) is Alfred Hitchcock’s earliest known surviving film. However, there are two caveats: one only three of a total of six reels have been discovered and Hitchcock wrote the script and edited the film but did not direct it. The film itself starts out on a cruiseship as Nancy returns home from [...]
• In South America
  
  Ever been on a trip but never felt as though the images and film you brought back never quite summed up the emotion of the place? Well, Vimeo user Vincent Urban has managed to buck the trend with this stunning video of his time in South America. “Early 2012, we started a journey to Argentina, [...]
• The golden age of space exploration
  
  A collection of 4,500 photographs including documentary pictures of astronauts and technicians is to be sold at auction at the Westlicht Auction House in Vienna on 23 November. The collection features gems like the one above of an early space suit prototype being tested in the 1950s as well as many other previously unseen images. [...]
• London Olympic architecture by Janie Airey
  
  We’ve been waiting to see some artfully shot photographs of this year’s Olympic architecture – those astounding structures are owed some much-deserved lens love – and finally we’ve found them courtesy of photographer Janie Airey. Janie’s magnificent images capture some of the event’s stand-out venues in crisp definition, abstracting their unique and innovative features in [...]
• Once Upon a Time the Presidents by Olivier Ratsi
  
  Paris based Olivier Ratsi has created a series of glitchy, collage like portraits of past U.S. leaders which he calls Once Upon a Time the Presidents. Ratsi creates the images in Photoshop using various portraits of the presidents which he dissects and then reassembles into blocky collages containing a number of faces at once. In [...]
• The Columbo Encyclopedia
  
  The Columbo Encyclopaedia (we’ve changed it to the proper UK spelling) is a Tumblr blog by Brooklyn-based artist Rick Baker that features pen-and-ink drawings based on characters from the long-running television detective mystery show, Columbo. Volume I of the Encyclopaedia features the show’s murderers/villains and future entries will include illustrations of the victims. Here’s a [...]
• Famous Movie, TV, Comic & Gaming Weapons by Daniel Nyari
  
  New York graphic designer Daniel Nyari has created this awesome poster showcasing the weapons of TV, movie and video games. Can you name them all? We got under half, we admit, we have much to learn when it comes to weapons in media. Click the pic to see more.
• Oxford Dictionaries’ Word of the Year
  
  A telling part of our modern recapping tradition is choosing “words of the year.” In 1789, lexicographers probably would have gone with guillotine. In 1912, iceberg surely would have been a contender. And for 2012, Oxford Dictionaries settled on GIF. Time Magazine has a piece discussing the choice of word that the famed dictionary maker [...]
• Live From the Inside: A Radio Show Run by Psychiatric Patients
  
  Over on The Atlantic, they have a brilliant feature on a radio station in Argentina that is broadcast from inside a mental health institute. Radio Colifata uses patients, or those that are ‘interned’ at the centre to take part in the daily broadcasts, and has become so popular as to have a national, and international [...]
• The Biblio-Mat
  
  The Biblio-Mat is a random book dispenser built by Craig Small for The Monkey’s Paw, an idiosyncratic antiquarian bookshop in Toronto. Click the pic to watch how it works.
• Nudes by Shinichi Maruyama
  
  Japanese photographer Shinichi Maruyama is famed for his images of liquids suspended in mid air. This time round however, he’s examining the human form as it engages in movement. His series, “Nudes”, sees people moving in abstract ways across the photographer’s lens, which has been deliberately slowed down to reveal the energy and flow of [...]
• Metaphysics of the Urban Landscapes by Gabriele Croppi
  
  When Gabriele Croppi isn’t teaching at the Italian Institute of Photography in Milan, he’s on the streets creating beautiful pieces of monochrome art. His series “Metaphysics of the Urban Landscapes”, delivers superb images in black & white that capture famous landmarks but also, intimate moments highlighted by Croppi’s use of light and shadow. Click the [...]
• 10 Gorgeous Functioning Factories
  
  Factories have always conjured up images of man and machine working in disharmony. The cold, brutal spaces required for machinery to run are at odds with the visual and aural stimulation people require to stay happy, and healthy. But, the days of workhouses appear to be over, if this photo series from the good people [...]
• Vietnam a photo series
  
  There isn’t much we can say about this extensive collection of Vietnam War photographs. The images, taken by Horst Faas, Henri Huet, Sal Veder, Rick Merron, Bill Ingraham, John Nance, and Nick Ut show the conflict in its entirety; the faces of American GI’s under siege from an unknown enemy, the Vietnamese quietly engaging in [...]
• 100,000 Stars
  
  100,000 Stars is an interactive visualization of the stellar neighborhood created for the Google Chrome web browser. It shows the location of 119,617 nearby stars derived from multiple sources, including the 1989 Hipparcos mission. Zooming in reveals 87 individually identified stars and our solar system. The galaxy view is an artist’s rendition based on NGC [...]
• Litographs: Entire Books on Posters and T-shirts
  
  Litographs offers unique posters featuring the text from entire books. Founded by Danny Fein, the company has launched a campaign on Kickstarter to create their next product: t-shirts that let you wear your favorite book on your sleeve. They have worked with Sharprint to produce these screen printed t-shirts with all-over designs, and are seeking [...]
• Planet Tozer by Jason Tozer
  
  It might seem hard to believe at first, but these seemingly intergalactic shots are, in fact, ordinary soap bubbles. London-based photographer Jason Tozer invites us to get lost in the swirling planetary domes found in his Planet Tozer series, as commissioned by Creative Review on behalf of Sony. The brilliant patterns and designs created by [...]
• High Himalaya by Eric Valli
  
  French photographer and film director Éric Valli has spent the last 20 years trekking in the unforgiving high Himalayas, with his trusty Leica always at hand. The photographer, who has spent most of his career working for National Geographic Magazine and The Sunday Times, is a specialist at capturing far-flung places. The focus on this [...]
• Rap Colouring Book
  
  Rap hero Bun B is curating the greatest hip-hop colouring and activity Tumblr of all time. Never mind that it’s probably the only one. The American rapper, real name Bernard Freeman, has taken it upon himself to take some of his hip-hop heroes and turn them into print outs that you then colour in. “It’s [...]
• Abandoned Suitcases of Asylum Patients
  
  If you were committed to a psychiatric institution, unsure if you’d ever return to the life you knew before, what would you take with you? That sobering question hovers like an apparition over each of the Willard Asylum suitcases. From the 1910s through the 1960s, many patients at the Willard Asylum for the Chronic Insane [...]
• High-Res Images of Cities at Night
  
  City lights broadcast our existence into the night of space. Imagine how the Earth will look to astronauts in a century’s time or longer? These images are incredibly difficult to take from a spacecraft traveling along at almost 28,000 kilometers per hour. The images are held at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in a special archive [...]
• Kurt Cobain’s Top 50 Album List
  
  Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain penned this list of his top 50 favorite albums in one of his personal journals. This list can be found in Journals, a compendium of Cobain’s writings and drawings which was published back in 2002. Click the pic to see it in full.
• Football by Jessica Hilltout
  
  Photographer Jessica Hilltout has spent a good chunk of her time traveling the world documenting how football is played, viewed, and used to bring people closer together. It’s  a long way from the glitz and glamour of European football, but somehow, Hilltout’s photos feel much closer to the spirit of the game than anything you [...]
• Munich Subway System by Nick Frank
  
  Photographer Nick Frank likes the Metro. He first came to our attention when he shot the Stockholm Metro in gloriously minimal detail. This time he’s in Munich, which boasts one of the most design-focused transport systems in the world. What’s even better, he’s managed to capture the stations without anyone in them to reveal both [...]
• Grays the Mountain Sends by Bryan Schutmaat
  
  Delving deep into the mining communities of the American West, photographer Bryan Schutmaat has captured the aging locals and the atmosphere of the once thriving, now dilapidated mining towns where they reside. Cold, white light is thrown all over raggy hillsides, beaten up mobile homes and weathered faces in what is an incredibly moving series. [...]
• The Sicilian Mafia by Letizia Battaglia
  
  The triple murder of a prostitute and her clients, Palermo, 1982. Letizia Battaglia began to photograph the Sicilian Mafia in 1974, long before it was popular, chic, convenient or particularly safe to do so. As the photography director of L’Ora, Palermo’s left-wing daily newspaper, she or one of her assistants was present at the scene [...]
• Yuri Gagarin on BBC TV, July 11 1961
  
  Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin was a Soviet pilot who just happened to be the first human to journey into outer space, when his Vostok spacecraft completed an orbit of the Earth on 12 April 1961. Shortly after his historic mission he went on an international tour talking about his journey, as well as the Soviet Union’s [...]
• Traffic in Frenetic HCMC
  
  This beautiful time lapse by British photographer Rob Whitworth takes you through the crazy traffic and goings-on of Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam. The video titled “Traffic in Frenetic HCMC” was created by capturing 10,000 RAW images of the city’s relentless energy and pace of change. “Everyone who has visited Ho Chi Minh City, [...]
• Civil Rights Victories in the 20th Century
  
  Overseen by a white registrar, a black citizen trained by CORE fieldworkers answers a rigorous questionnaire in an attempt to register to vote during freedom summer in Baton Rouge, La., 1964. Bob Adelman/Magnum Photos. Magnum photographers have recorded many of the struggles over the right to vote, the right to marry, and the right to [...]
• Airborne by Luc Busquin
  
  Luc Busquin is both photographer and pilot. He likes to combine his two loves from his home in Phoenix, Arizona by capturing stunning shots of the clouds, the sky, and the land beneath it. Click the pic to see more.
• A Growing And Power Hungry Internet [Infographic]
  
  The internet is a big place. Since it’s inception, the world wide web has become literally a world unto it’s own. Today, there are 2.4 billion internet users. That’s double what it was compared to the internet population in 2007. In addition to these users, the content is matched tenfold. It would take 7 million [...]
• Bread by Nacho Alegre
  
  When you think of bread, you probably envision the plain and unexciting bookends of a sandwich. Perhaps that’s because you’ve never seen some of the finest bread in the world transformed into amazing sculptural experiments. These beautiful images were created by Omar Sosa and Ana Dominguez of Apartamento magazine with the help of photographer Nacho [...]
• The Infinite Jukebox
  
  The Infinite Jukebox is a site that will remix any song into a never-ending, constantly changing version of itself. It works by first identifying parts of the song that are similar to one another—during playback it jumps randomly between these parts to create a (mostly) seamless, unending remix. The infinite song is accompanied by a [...]
• German Tank Manual, circa 1943
  
  War is supposed to be serious business, right? Well, not according to German WWII technical writers who turned their thick and boring tank manuals for “Tiger” & “Panther” tanks into some sort of a “Popular Science”/”Playboy”/comic book combination.  These juicy manuals proved to be so popular, that they were even translated into Russian language and [...]
• The 20th Century by John Dominis
  
  Then there are great photographers whose work is so phenomenally varied — a uniform, unbroken excellence the only common thread running throughout — that every new shot one encounters might have been made by a different individual. John Dominis is such a photographer, and the photos presented here serve as a testament to the man’s [...]
• Dancers Among Us by Jordan Matter
  
  Jordan Matter’s wonderful photo series captures dancers in seemingly everyday places. From walking down 5th Avenue, to crossing the road in Washington DC to sitting in the park having a picnic. There isn’t anywhere a dancer shall not be. His photo series has now been turned into a book, Dancers Among Us: A Celebration of [...]
• 3D Printer Photo Booth
  
  Tokyo’s stylish Harajuku district will soon be home to an unusual pop-up photo booth—customers will walk away not with photos, but with 3D printed figurines of themselves. The customer is first 3D scanned in a process that requires them to stand still for 15 minutes. A 3D model of the customer is then refined on [...]
• The Smiths Song Lyrics as Classic Penguin Paperback Book Covers
  
  UK artist Chris Thornley (aka “Raid71“) has created an awesome series of book covers that each use song lyrics from the 80s alternative rock band The Smiths and resemble the classic look and style of retro Penguin paperback books. Select poster prints of the book cover designs are available to purchase from the Hunting Bears [...]
• Literary Bond vs. Movie Bond
  
  How does the 007 of film stack up against the original Ian Fleming books? Author Allen Bara contrasts the Bond of the novels with the cinematic Bond so many more people are familiar with. The agent that Ian Fleming created was not physically imposing, his tastes in food and drink were almost plebeian, he wasn’t [...]
• The Heart Grows Smarter
  
  In 1938, a group of researchers began an intensive study of 268 students at Harvard University. The plan was to track them through their entire lives, measuring, testing and interviewing them every few years to see how lives develop. In the 1930s and 1940s, the researchers didn’t pay much attention to the men’s relationships. Instead, [...]
• Legal drugs, deadly outcomes
  
  An excellent long read on the growing phenomenon of prescription drug overdoses in Southern California, which a Los Angeles Times investigative team reports “now claim more lives than heroin and cocaine combined, fuelling a doubling of drug-related deaths in the United States over the last decade.” Click the pic to take a read.
• The Pleasure Of by Vituc
  
  We’re never shy of highlighting work of those who focus on the joys of life. A truer statement couldn’t be said of ‘The Pleasure Of’ by Vituc – a beautiful short film that highlights the finer things in life, like warm feet, mountain streams, and shaking the wet out of your hair. Enjoy by clicking [...]
• Street Fight by Luca Sage
  
  Street Fighting as a term for painful rituals of blood letting was overtaken slightly when the arcade game of the same name turned it into a button bashing bonanza. But, Luca Sage’s sublime project work on Africa on that very subject is here to remind us of the phrase’s true origins. At times gory, and [...]
• Senegal Street Photography by Anthony Kurtz
  
  In Europe and the US, the concept of street photography tends to eschew visions of hipsters taking pictures of hipsters looking particularly hipsterish. However, over in Africa, the meaning has developed into something a lot more poignant as this series by Anthony Kurtz shows. “In the summer of 2011, I volunteered with an organization in [...]
• Life by Eduardo Rubio
  
  Spanish photographer Eduardo Rubio has the arduous job of traveling the world documenting the people and places he sees. Over on his Behance page he’s created a category called ‘Life’ in which he presents the images he has taken that most capture us in our myriad forms. It’s a moving series that helps remind us [...]
• MAD Magazine “Advertisements”
  
  When William M. Gaines was the publisher and owner of MAD Magazine, he refused to accept any form of advertising. This allowed him to spoof anyone and anything he desired. Some of the magazine’s best satire was in the form of a fake ad placed on the back cover, and occasionally inside the front cover. [...]
• PBS Arts: Off Book – We Love Retro Media: Vinyl, VHS, Tapes & Film
  
  We Love Retro Media: Vinyl, VHS, Tapes & Film by PBS Arts: Off Book explains and shows how some almost forgotten media formats from the past are making a come back in modern society due to the physical connection and unique artistry that we find in sounds, photos and video recordings produced from formats such [...]
• Pixel Trade by Shantanu Starick
  
  Australian photographer Shantanu Starick is trying to travel the world, for free. How? We’ll let Starick explain. “As a professional photographer I’m trading my services for a few days, photographing any subject, in return for the necessities: Food Shelter Transport Occasionally people trade personal necessities, items of clothing, equipment, flights etc. This is discussed before [...]
• How Hot Dogs are made
  
  If you’re eating while reading this, we thought it might be wise to warn you that the following video on how a hot dog is made, might not be conducive to proper digestion. Taken from the show, ‘How it’s Made’ on the Discovery Channel, the show rather reluctantly lifts the lid on how those homogenous [...]
• American Girls by Ilona Szwarc
  
  New York-based photographer Ilona Szwarc takes an interesting look into the relationships between young girls and their American Girl dolls. In her series, aptly titled American Girls, the photographer unveils portraits of “girls with their sculptural representations” which is meant to give us a visual sense of each of their personalities. The series, which is [...]
• Dawn by Yu Yamauchi
  
  Yu Yamuchi is an artist on a mission. For five months a year across four years, he lived in a hut a top Mount Fuji. Considered one of the most sacred mountains in the country, Mount Fuji has a great influence on Japanese history and culture. In a process that he considered a spiritual account [...]
• Casualty of War by George Lott
  
  In January 1945, LIFE magazine published a groundbreaking story, featuring dozens of photographs by Ralph Morse, chronicling the journey of a badly wounded American medic named George Lott from a battlefield in northeastern France to a veterans’ hospital in the States. “George Lott is a name on a list of 663,859 names,” LIFE told its [...]
• Genre Bending by Andy Rehfeldt
  
  Throughout the years, Los Angeles musician and composer Andy Rehfeldt has taken live performances by well-known musical artists and rearranged their instruments and sometimes even vocals with his own instruments and talent to make them sound like an entirely different genre of music (Death Metal, Jazz, Reggae and more). Click the pic to take a [...]
• The Pooch Index
  
  Check out this fascinating graph on the canine economy. What’s dogs got to do with macro economics? Well, according to Quartz, “dog ownership, like cocaine use, can be seen as an economic indicator.” In that sense, unsurprisingly, South America is a major player: Today, four countries—Chile, Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico—rank in the world’s top 10 [...]
• Letterheady – Vintage Letter Heads of Some of History’s Greatest
  
  From the people who brought us the wonders that were Letters and Lists of Note, comes Letterheady. This fantastic website has managed to get hold of the letter heads of the great and good for your viewing pleasure. Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color is a particular highlight, although we can’t help but love Woody [...]
• On the Cold Front by James Balog
  
  In an effort to provide concrete visual proof of climate change and its devastating effects, photographer James Balog embarked on a years-long project that spanned the northern reaches of the globe. He set up cameras from Greenland to Alaska in order to capture horrifying—yet undeniably beautiful—time-lapse photos that reveal the unprecedented rate at which glaciers [...]
• Extremely Silly Photos of Extremely Serious Historical Figures
  
  Scientists, tsars, world leaders and intellectual innovators aren’t usually the types you’d turn to for larking about. However, these men and women, when not being deadly serious can be as puerile as the rest of us. Over on Flavorwire they’ve put together a cracking collection of iconic figures having a laugh. Our favourite is this [...]
• Letters of Fatherly Advice from History’s Greatest Public Dads
  
  There’s never a bad time to receive good advice, especially when it’s from someone you trust. Maria Popova over on Brain Pickings has picked out five inspiring and moving letters from famous fathers – or fathers of famous sons – to their progeny on how to live life. There’s Ronald Reagan’s letter on a good [...]
• The Russian Revolution, in an hour
  
  On the anniversary of the Russian Revolution in 1917, History in an Hour has taken a brief but fascinating look into the events that would change Russia, and the world’s future forever. The Russian tsar, Nicholas II, had been disposed following the February Revolution of 1917 to be replaced by a provisional government, headed by [...]
• Smartphone by Benz Thanachart
  
  After spending a year in New York, Thai photographer Benz Thanachart found Thailand’s anti social subway rides needed to be changed. So he came up with Smartphone, a project designed to bring out a reaction in people. “I got into the subway, shouted out a random word that is completely unrelated to the situation and [...]
• Barack Obama, by Terry Richardson
  
  Unless you’ve been living under an apolitical rock, you’ll have noticed a lot of talk of this Barack Obama fella being re-elected President of the United States. So it seemed a strangely brilliant time for Terry Richardson to release these awesome photos of the Pres up close and personal. What can we say? We’re kind [...]
• A Woman’s Heart, Circa 1800
  
  According to this map, Love is at the centre of a woman’s heart, and Sentimentality and Sentiment (including Good Sense, Discrimination, Hope, Enthusiasm, and Platonic Affection) take up a sizeable portion of the entire territory. A Map of the Open Country of a Woman’s Heart was a map created by D. W. Kellogg circa 1833–1842, [...]
• A Galaxy’s Life History
  
  This computer simulation uses what we know about physical forces in the universe to model how a galaxy might have been born, and how it might grow over 13.5 billion years. This cosmological simulation follows the development of a single disk galaxy over about 13.5 billion years, from shortly after the Big Bang to the [...]
• Furniture, by Brad Pitt
  
  Oscar-nominated actor, father, humanitarian, heartthrob: Brad Pitt certainly has his hands full. But that hasn’t stopped the charismatic celebrity from adding another title to his ever-growing resume: furniture designer. The latest issue of Architectural Digest has all the deets on Pitt’s new venture: a series of tables, chairs, and even bathtubs done in collaboration with [...]
• Pop Pop Bang by Anna Burns and Thomas Brown
  
  A collaboration between creative director Anna Burns and photographer Thomas Brown, “Pop Pop Bang” is a series of installations that explores “the masculine world of B-Movies”. Using the themes of said movies – girls, guns and explosives – and twisting it against a very British backdrop, the duo created a wall of umbrellas displaying elements [...]
• Mormon Missionary Positions by Neil DaCosta
  
  For their collaborative project titled “The Book of Mormon Missionary Positions”, Portland-based photographer Neil DaCosta and art director Sara Phillips created a tongue-in-cheek photo series that pokes fun at religion and sexual politics. According to the Latter Day Saints Handbook, “Sexual relations are proper only between a man and a woman who are legally and [...]
• We Are The Not Dead by Lalage Snow
  
  For many of us, it is impossible to imagine what it would be like to fight in a war, and for many of those who have had to it is impossible to forget. Photographer Lalage Snow documented the faces of several British soldiers before, during, and after their operational deployment in Afghanistan. The series of [...]
• Firewatch by Mats Petersson
  
  Photographer Mats Petersson has just finished a fantastic project that looks at the landscapes created by forest fires. “For me, fire evokes complex questions about our origins, the power of nature, and the future of our planet.” Firewatch is a series that documents Petersson’s experiences with nature’s strength. Using his trusty Hassleblad camera, the artist [...]
• Jeddah Diary: A Photo Essay by Olivia Arthur
  
  In 2009, the British Council invited Olivia Arthur to teach a two-week photography workshop to a group of women in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Arthur has spent much of her photographic career documenting facets of the East/West divide, but was unsure whether or not this teaching post would lead to a project of her own. Nevertheless, [...]
• The History of Monopoly
  
  The official history of Monopoly, as told by Hasbro, which owns the brand, states that the board game was invented in 1933 by an unemployed steam-radiator repairman and part-time dog walker from Philadelphia named Charles Darrow. Darrow had dreamed up what he described as a real estate trading game whose property names were taken from [...]
• Romney vs Obama, by Cassetteboy
  
  King of the mashup, Cassetteboy has turned his prodigious talents to the US election with an almighty mash-up of the Presidential debates. Using his black sense of humour, he opens the video with Obama talking about how he is going to fist Romney. Still undecided? The video could help. Click the pic to watch.
• The Many Faces of Geisha and Maiko
  
  Both “In Character” and out, the Geisha and Maiko were the models behind almost all Studio “Character Studies” and Portraits in old Meiji and early Taisho-era Japan. During the late Taisho era (1912-26), picture postcards of Takarazuka Girls and Movie Stars began competing with those of the Geisha, but the Geisha clung tight to their [...]
• Bob Willoughby: The Silver Age of Hollywood
  
  We’ve covered inside Hollywood photos several times here at Parliament Of Owls, but we’ve not had the chance to see a true master at work. Bob Willoughby has a new retrospective at Proud Chelsea in London and it’s a homage to the man widely credited with inventing the photojournalistic motion picture still. The first “outside” [...]
• On Space Time Foam by Tomas Saraceno
  
  Argentinian artist, Tomás Saraceno has created a fantastic new installation at the HangarBicocca in Milan. On Space Time Foam, a floating structure composed of three levels of clear film that allows the public to walk, crawl or jump over each other while suspended by the structure. Click the pic to find out more.
• City of God – 10 Years Later
  
  In 2002 the movie ‘City Of God’ directed by Fernando Meirelles, highlighted the plight of thousands living in Brazil’s favelas. It tells the story of two friends growing up in the suburban slums of Rio de Janeiro. One becomes a photographer who earns his trade documenting the increasing violence as the descends further into the [...]
• The History of Smiling in Photographs
  
  “Say cheese.” It’s an expression that has become so much a part of our culture that everyone understands it to simply mean, “Smile,” rather than a command to actually utter the word “cheese.” For many people, smiling and posing for casual snapshots go hand-in-hand, but why do people smile for pictures, and when did this [...]
• By the Bus Stop by Richard Hooker
  
  There are more than 300 languages spoken in London, making it the most diverse place on earth, at least linguistically speaking. Between 2001 and 2005, photographer Richard Hooker visited various bus stops across London and shot film photographs of the people waiting for their rides to arrive. The 136 photographs he captured show the city’s [...]
• Hollywood’s Leading Men as Leading Ladies
  
  In this funny photomanipulation series, creative contest site Worth1000 presents some of Hollywood’s most famous men–including Clint Eastwood, Nicolas Cage, and Tom Hanks–as beautiful women in their most feminine expressions caught on camera, clad in cocktail dresses and full make-up. With seamless photomanipulation on each actor’s ‘girly’ image, one could easily wonder what Hollywood could [...]
• Symphony in D Minor by Chris Klapper and Patrick Gallagher
  
  Artists Chris Klapper and Patrick Gallagher create an indoor thunderstorm, called Symphony in D Minor at the Skybox gallery, Philadelphia. ‘Symphony in D Minor’ is the the result of an intensive 1 1/2 year collaboration between Husband and wife team Chris Klapper and Patrick Gallagher. A large scale series of hand made kinetic sculptures using [...]
• Architecture for Dogs by Kenya Hara
  
  When the Japanese art director and designer Kenya Hara (the man responsible for the look of Muji over the last decade) announced a top-secret new project for the fall, no one could have guessed that it would be called Architecture for Dogs. There must be a hidden meaning, right? Nope. Architecture for Dogs is just [...]
• Anatomy of an A-Bomb Test, 1946
  
  In July 1946, the United States conducted two atomic tests at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific. The tests, codenamed Able (an atmospheric explosion) and Baker (underwater), were among the very first of the more than 1,000 tests that the U.S. would eventually conduct in Nevada and the South Pacific over the next five decades. Able [...]
• London’s hidden interiors
  
  From the grandeur of Whitehall to an unremarkable high street in south London, a peek behind the capital’s less well-known facades reveals an amazing architectural heritage that rivals some of its most visited and celebrated sites, as these images from a new English Heritage book illustrate.
• Trains in India by Steve McCurry
  
  Steve McCurry is best known for photographing ‘Afghan Girl’, the image that appeared on the front cover of National Geographic that immortalised those sheltering from war in Afghanistan in the 1970s. However, he’s also done some rather spectacular work elsewhere, including this beautiful series on India’s sprawling, chaotic, but beautiful train network. Click the pic [...]
• Google Earth Artwork
  
  Digital artist Jenny Odell has scoured Google Maps looking for large-scale everyday man-made elements and objects and reduces them down into innovative & compelling mosaics. They might look like beautiful pieces of art (which they are) but look a little closer and you’ll see it’s made up from football stadiums, swimming pools and even nuclear [...]
• Behind the Scenes on Terminator 2
  
  Here’s an awesome collection of exclusive behind the scenes photos from James Cameron’s classic 1991 film Terminator 2. Taken from Stan Winston’s special effects work shop that worked on the film, the photos show T James Cameron and Arnold Schwarzenegger side by side shooting the Terminator’s cyborg hand. There’s also several images of some Schwarzenegger bust sculpts used [...]
• Bird Photobooth
  
  The Bird Photo Booth is the world’s first bird feeder and camera all-in-one that is designed to work with your iPhone, iPod touch and GoPro. The worst part about bird watching is having to sit around and wait for birds to cross your line or vision (or do something interesting). Now, you can set up [...]
• Hunters by David Chancellor
  
  If you’re an animal lover it’s highly likely you’ll find these images upsetting. The bloodied carcasses of slaughtered beasts have a habit of turning the stomachs of even the most committed carnivore, but David Chancellor’s portraits of hunters in various parts of Africa are also remarkably compelling, inviting us to witness a ritualistic and deeply [...]
• Orda Caves
  
  Orda Cave is the most extended underwater cave in Russia, the second in Eurasia, with regards to length, and the world’s greatest gypsum cave. It has status of All-Russia natural monument. A new book with over 160 images explores this fantastic network of submerged caves and lakes, the imagery revealing a world seen less than [...]
• Time over space by Jay Mark Johnson
  
  An architect, painter, political activate and cinematic special-effects designer, Jay Mark Johnson has managed to create these images using a slit camera that emphasises time over space. Movement is registered moment by moment as subjects pass by the camera lens – viewing the left side of the picture is not looking leftward but actually backward [...]
• Mark Alor Powell: Mexico XXI part 1&2
  
  Mark Alor Powell has spent the last couple of years documenting the stranger side of Mexico City. In his project, Mexico XXI part 1&2, Powell wanders the streets of his city, stumbling across larger-than-life characters, some of whom are so extrovert you can scarcely believe he has not styled them himself. Despite the visual oddity, [...]
• Behind-the-Scenes Photos From ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’
  
  With Indiana Jones arriving in cinemas in the US for another outing – whether this is linked to the sale of LucasArts we don’t know – Screen Rush has put together an amazing collection of rare, behind-the-scenes photos from Raiders of the Lost Ark. You can get a glimpse of Harrison Ford preparing himself for [...]
• London Heathrow Approach Time-Lapse
  
  Heathrow airport has one of the busiest flight paths in the world – with a plane landing and taking off every minute. YouTuber CargoSpotter decided to make a time-lapse to highlight how busy the skies are over London. Although the video just watches planes coming in to land, there’s something strangely compelling about it. click [...]
• David – Stories from The Street
  
  One of our favourite new web series, Stories from The Street, aims to capture the lives of those who you see, but not necessarily here. This week, programme makers SoulPancake profiled David, a Los Angeles Gospel Hip Hop artist, whose faith in God has helped him through rough times on the street. It’s a fantastically [...]
• The Man Who Made Star Wars
  
  With the news that George Lucas is to sell LucasArts, his film and TV production studio to disney for $4 billion, The Atlantic Magazine has dug out a fascinating article from 1979 with the man himself. “His interest in film came accidentally. He helped build a racing car for Haskell Wexler, the cinematographer; and he [...]
• The Burning House
  
  If your house was burning, what would you bring with you? The Burning House Project is a fascinating insight into what objects people prioritize the most when it comes to saving them. It’s a philosophical conflict between what’s practical, valuable and sentimental. You’re forced to prioritize and boil down a life of accrued possessions into [...]
• More Than Human by Tim Flach
  
  Photographer Tim Flach’s new book More Than Human aims to show a side of our animal cousins that we’ve never really seen before. Shot in studios under professional lighting, Flach captures animals posing, looking and highlighting a side to their behaviour that we readily see in humans every day. It’s a fascinating look not only [...]
• Global Model Village by Slinkachu
  
  Slinkachu is a master of the miniature world and he has been at it again with his recent show at Andipa Gallery in London. In conjunction with his book, Global Model Village, the installation with the same name featured what the artist described as “the common denominators of humankind, the dramas of hope and tragedy, [...]
• Still Life by Fideli Sundqvist
  
  Fideli Sundqvist, a Swedish artist specializing in paper craft, has created scenes reminiscent of painters during the Renaissance using little more than paper. Her skill over the years has been used from everything such as the images you see here to costume elements for portraits, finely cut collage work and child-like fantasy scenes made completely [...]
• How do they make money?
  
  Have you ever wondered how your favourite tech company makes the cash to keep going? The era of flogging ads and popups is finally dying – hurrah! – but with that death comes the rise of less obvious forms of money making. Seer Interactive has put together a fascinating little website that reveals how companies [...]
• Typing Karaoke
  
  Love karaoke but can’t drag yourself away from the desk? We have the solution for you. Typing Karaoke allows you to sing along to your favourite song by typing out the words instead of using your mouth organ. It’ll also help you type much faster, and also make listening to Jason Mraz a fraught, and [...]
• Cat Bounce
  
  So, you’re looking to while away a few minutes in between things of slightly more importance? Head on over to Cat-bounce.com where you can, yes, literally, bounce kittehs all over your PC screen. Click the pic, y’all.
• The Brink of Oblivion: Inside Nazi-Occupied Poland, 1939-1940
  
  In the late 1930s and early 1940s, a German photographer and ardent Nazi named Hugo Jaeger enjoyed unprecedented access to the Third Reich’s upper echelon, traveling with Adolf Hitler to massive rallies and photographing him at intimate parties and in quieter, private moments. The photos made such an impression on the Führer that Hitler famously [...]
• Kanye Wes Anderson
  
  Tumblr time! A few weeks ago we brought you Wes Anderson Bingo – check out the ideas page for more – today’s diamond in the rough is a mash-up of Wes Anderson movies and Kanye West lyrics. What can we say, we love Wes Anderson, and we love people who like to parody his work [...]
• Captive Landscapes by Daniel Kukla
  
  We, as humans, go to great lengths to satisfy our desire for a connection with the natural world, especially in our interactions with wild and exotic animals. Zoos are the primary site for this relationship, but they often obscure the conflicts inherent in maintaining and displaying captive wild animals. In this series, photographer Daniel Kukla [...]
• The New Sound of Music (1979)
  
  This amazing documentary series tells the ‘terrifying’ story of the new sound of music, i.e. the sound of synths, and the rise of machines, way back in 1979. The BBC presenter’s clipped English, paired with a dashing checked blazer make it feel from another world, but tracing how machines from the Victorian era lead to [...]
• The Island Where People Forget to Die
  
  Ikaria, an island of 99 square miles and home to almost 10,000 Greek nationals, lies about 30 miles off the western coast of Turkey. Its jagged ridge of scrub-covered mountains rises steeply out of the Aegean Sea. Before the Christian era, the island was home to thick oak forests and productive vineyards. Its reputation as [...]
• Annual Report becomes Art Installation
  
  German agency Jung von Matt developed a creative way to visualize the annual report of L-Bank, State Bank of Baden-Wuerttemberg. The goal of the project was to take the audience that normally reads the document and lead them through a museum-like experience that translated abstract numbers and percentages into concrete art objects. Click the pic [...]
• Interview With A Man Who Saw Lincoln Shot
  
  Samuel J. Seymour, the last surviving attendant at Ford’s Theater the night of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, shares his story on “I’ve Got a Secret” back in 1956. Click the pic to watch the vid.
• Gone Too Soon – ODB
  
  Over on BBC1 Xtra they’ve been putting together an excellent series entitled, Gone Too Soon. The shows focus on musicians whose lives ended prematurely, and the stand out one so far, for us anyway, has been that of  Russell Jones, better known to the world as Ol’ Dirty Bastard. ODB died at the age of [...]
• To Have and To Hold
  
  Good design can be found in the most unlikeliest of places. Our Tumblr of the day and top feature post is a beautifully minimal blog documenting great carrier bag design. Examining the collection on the site, you won’t be surprised to see that most of the designs are of the vintage variety – something tells [...]
• EmergencyCompliment.com
  
  As winter sets in, so the motivation to stay up-beat takes a downward turn. But, help is at hand. Emergency Compliment is a site dedicated to picking you up just when you needed it the most. One not enough? Simply click ‘I still feel crappy’ for more. Head on over to the site for a [...]
• Famous Logos Recreated Using Comic Sans
  
  In this series Not Strong Mark, Russian designer Oleg Tarasov has recreated several famous logos using the casual typeface known as Comic Sans. You can see the entire series at Tarasov’s Behance page. Click the pic to see more.
• Unpublished Henri Cartier-Bresson
  
  Until this month, thesesensational shots of the Vélodrome D’Hiver, from Paris 1957 by Henri Cartier Bresson have been lost to all but the most privileged eyes at Magnum. But this month they’re available for all to see in Rouleur 34. Accompanied by an illuminating article on the Vél D’Hiv and a background on Cartier-Bresson himself [...]
• Street art by Nikita Nomerz
  
  Wouldn’t it be great if an urban area’s derelict buildings weren’t knocked down, but given a new personality all of their own? That’s the vision Russian street artist Nikita Nomerz had. In his home town of Nizhniy in Novgorod, he has re-purposed building’s features and given them distinctive characters through graffiti. He hasn’t stopped there. [...]
• Inside Google’s Data Centres
  
  Have you ever wondered what the internet actually looks like? Well, Google recently opened its doors to reveal the data centres that store and power the vast seas of information that we can access with our fingertips. Click the pic to take a look.
• Portrait of a Presidency by Pete Souza
  
  The long view of history tends to be the judge of a presidency. As we approach what President Obama hopes will be the midpoint of his tenure in the Oval Office, it is too early to draw conclusions on his legacy as Commander in Chief. What we do know is that Obama’s first term has [...]
• Incredible photos of a human embryo
  
  Thanks to technology, photographer Lennart Nilsson captured incredible images of the first 26-weeks of a fetus. What you may not know is that some of these photos were taken with conventional cameras with macro lenses, while others were taken with the use of an endoscope. That’s not all, scanning electron microscope technology enabled Nilsson to [...]
• Clouds over Cuba
  
  History is always a subject of ongoing fascination – none more so than when it’s been updated and presented in a beautiful new way – on the anniversary. Clouds Over Cuba is, in essence a documentary about the Cuban missile crisis and the deteriorating relations between the USA, Cuba and the Soviet Union. But, the [...]
• Calm.com
  
  Ever needed a break from it all but can’t abandon your desk? Allow calm.com to help. This simple site aims to help those stressed out at their computers chill out a little. Simply log-on, select your destination and duration and it’ll attempt to help you let go of your day for a few minutes. The [...]
• Taking Pictures: Images Rescued from the Past
  
  Ransom Riggs has an unusual hobby: he collects old photographs of people he doesn’t know. But it’s not necessarily about the snapshots themselves — the interesting part is what’s written on the backs. Riggs explains: When you’re looking through bins of thousands of random, unsorted photos, every hundredth one or so will have some writing [...]
• Ghosts of War by Jo Teeuwisse
  
  Historical consultant Jo Teeuwisse finds photos from the past and learns about their context. But her work doesn’t stop there. Since 2007, she has been merging war photos with modern day shots of the destinations they were taken in. A new set emerges capturing the fighting on the streets of France. The purpose, says Teeuwisse [...]
• Found Rolling Stones
  
  With the Rolling Stones ramping up the PR machine once more as they begin their next round of music making, it’s seems apt that someone should find in an unmarked box this cracking collection of photos from the band’s formative years. Discovered at an estate sale in Southern California, this historic set of photos capture [...]
• London and a Year by Brian Leli
  
  Charles Dickens was writing about revolutionary Paris when he penned the immortal opening lines “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” but the celebrated Londoner could easily have been talking about the 12 months in his home town that have been captured by American Brian Leli. The period from August [...]
• Married Men by Natasha Caruana
  
  For her peculiar photo project titled “Married Men,” London-based photographer and lecturer Natasha Caruana spent a year going on dates… with married men. She ended up going on 80 dates with men found through a dating website geared towards people looking to have affairs. At each meeting, Caruana used a disposable camera and a digital [...]
• The worst football team in Britain
  
  We loved this short documentary about Madron FC, one of the worst football teams in Britain. The film follows the story of the manager, owner, and everything else Alan Davenport as his story of how he came to be the head of the team that suffered the biggest league defeat in history. We won’t spoil [...]
• Henry Thomas’s Audition For E.T.
  
  Thanks to YouTube, we’ve been able to peer behind the curtain of how actors and films came to be. One of the most fascinating, and quite brilliant we’ve seen in a while is this video of Henry Thomas auditioning for the part of Elliot in Steven Spielberg’s E.T. You can hear the brief Henry is [...]
• Scientist Top Trumps
  
  What would happen if the world’s greatest scientists were pitted against each other? Scientist top trumps! Back in 2002, humour website All Too Flat started this series of scientist trading cards. The cards were based on the vintage baseball card format – so unfortunately, no stats on “quantum mechanics power” – and, regrettably, were not [...]
• Classic Snapshots Of American Tourists
  
  Something seems to happen to us when we go to visit famous monuments. We seem to suspend all sense of fashion, taste, and any semblance of how to pose for a photo. Luckily, photographer Roger Minick has been on hand since the 1970s capturing this photos and using them as a cultural document to American [...]
• Photo-Sharing Explosions
  
  Facebook took sharing to a whole new level when it allowed people to borrow other people’s content. But what does that sharing look like? Facebook Stories has visualised how a single piece of content is shared between hundreds of thousands of individuals on Facebook. Each visualisation is made up of a series of branches starting [...]
• Momentum by Alejandro Guijarro
  
  Photographer Alejandro Guijarro has been traveling to the great quantum mechanics institutions of the world and capturing the blackboards just as he found them. The images are beautiful in their orderly chaos; at once being symbols of complex minds at work, and simultaneously showing the erasure of those thoughts. Click the pic to see more.
• Underdogs by Sebastian Magnani
  
  Sebastian Magnani, a 27-year-old Swiss photographer has been attracting a good deal of worldwide attention lately for his photo project that takes the idea that dogs resemble their owners to the next level. Titled ‘Underdogs’, the series of photos features portraits showing dog faces carefully Photoshopped onto the bodies of their owners. The project began [...]
• Abandoned Paintings by Bence Hajdu
  
  As humans we are so drawn to life that sometimes we overlook the beauty behind it. New media artist Hadju Bence has put a new twist on classic paintings by removing the people to showcase the architecture behind them. It’s fascinating how unrecognizable some of the famous paintings become without the subjects there to give [...]
• Wake The Fuck Up!: Samuel L Jackson’s Argument On Why You Should Vote for Obama
  
  Hollywood’s A-List has always been involved in politics, and this being an election year in the US, they’re all out in force trying to help you make up your mind. None however have been as political, or as sweary as Samuel L. Jackson’s efforts to inspire Obama voters to go out and start helping him [...]
• Google’s Cultural Institute
  
  Google’s Cultural Institute, which aims to help preserve and promote culture online, has added 42 new historical exhibitions. They tell the stories behind major events like Apartheid, D-Day, and the Holocaust, and have been created by 17 partners including museums and cultural foundations. They include archives of letters, manuscripts, and first-hand video testimonials. You can [...]
• Fire Photography by Tom Lacoste
  
  Fire breathing has been around for a few years – it’s believed to have originated in ancient Persia. But French artist Tom Lacoste takes the circus act to the next level with these stunning photos of people interacting with fire. Lacoste is also a circus performer—his photos are populated by his juggling, dancing, and fire-breathing [...]
• Steve McQueen Retrospective, Atlas Gallery
  
  If you’ve got a spare couple of hours this week, we highly recommend you taking some time out to go and see this amazing retrospective on the king of cool, Steve McQueen. The show features the work of photography John Dominis, who spent three weeks with McQueen to capture these iconic shots. Click the pic [...]
• Crime Scene Dioramas by Bill Finger
  
  Seattle-based photographer Bill Finger – who worked earlier in his career as an assistant cameraman – uses his knowledge of cinematography and set design to create amazingly realistic crime scene dioramas. Each diorama is constructed specifically to be photographed. Like film making, all staging and lighting is done looking through the lens. Once photographed the [...]
• Space Project by Vincent Fournier
  
  With the weekend bringing news that Felix Baumgartner successfully jumped out of a balloon some 24-miles above the earth’s surface, we thought it a perfect time to take a look at fine art photographer Vincent Fournier’s photos of Russia’s cosmonauts. The photographer, who finished the series last year, got the opportunity to get up close [...]
• A Message for Mankind
  
  From the same remix artist who brought us yesterday’s Alan Watts meditation on the meaningful life comes “A Message for Mankind” — a stirring mashup of Charlie Chaplin’s famous speech from The Great Dictator. The video mixes scenes of humanity’s most tragic and most hopeful moments in recent history, alongside Chaplin’s moving, and at times, [...]
• Instant: The Story of Polaroid by Christopher Bonanos
  
  Instant: The Story of Polaroid by Christopher Bonanos is a comprehensive history of Polaroid, Edwin Land’s innovative instant photography company, which rose to prominence with the introduction of the Polaroid instant camera in 1948, enjoying decades of success before a period of decline that ended in the company’s bankruptcy in 2001. Click the pic to [...]
• Email endings and their meanings
  
  The closing line of email — that line that you write before you type your name — has been all but forgotten. Go take a look at your inbox: you might be astonished at how little attention people pay to the closing lines when writing email. This underrated rhetorical device is so frequently disregarded that [...]
• 24 Rose Varieties by Russ McLintock
  
  If Britain was ever in danger of thinking it was the voice of reason, Russ McClintock is here to remind us all that we’re not as sane as we think we are. The American photographer traveled round Britain looking at the names Brits gives to their plants. This illuminating series reminds us of Britain’s traditional [...]
• Awesome Photos of Writers Hanging Out Together
  
  The good people over at Flavorpill have put together a wonderful collection of photos showing some of the world’s biggest authors hanging out together. One of our favourites is this sepia tinged shot of Aldous Huxley and D.H. Lawrence taken in 1928. Click the pic to take a look at the rest.
• David Byrne’s Office by Gil Inouoe
  
  One of our favourite musicians and general creative types David Byrne recently let photographer Gil Inouoe in to his office to take a look around. The former Talking Heads front man has created a minimal space that combines his musical past, his art installation present, and his general curiosity for life. The photo that most [...]
• Wing Walkers: The Death-Defying Aerial Stunts of 1920s Pilots
  
  With manned flight only coming about a decade before, the speed at which adrenaline junkies took to planes is bewildering. Especially when looking at these amazing photos of death-defying pilots hanging out the back of their planes in the 1920s. Click the pic to see the flickr collection – courtesy of the San Diego Air [...]
• Art of the Arcade
  
  Art of the Arcade, curated by Nick Dart, showcases the lost video game designs and illustrations from the 70s and 80s. This is just awesome. Click the pic to go and take a look.
• Black & White (In Color) by Eran Amir
  
  Visual artist Eran Amir has created a fantastic new video that toys with the idea of photography. The video opens with a monochrome photograph of Amir sitting at a table covered with various items. Over the course of two minutes, Amir slowly adds splashes of color to the scene until the completely black-and-white photograph is [...]
• The Simpsons Opening – Real-life Style
  
  With The Simpsons being one of the most well established programs in televisual history, it comes as somewhat as a surprise that this has only been done this year. But, we’re glad someone finally has. Sky 1 commissioned a real life re-enactment of the show’s opening credits earlier this year, and now you can see [...]
• How wine corks are made
  
  Despite the use of corks in wine bottles declining, it’s always fascinating to learn how those spungy little plugs get made. It all starts in the forest. Cork oaks are harvested every nine years, once they reach maturity. It doesn’t harm the tree, and the cork bark regrows. Most cork forests are in Portugal and [...]
• A Taxonomy of Shit
  
  There are some words in the English dictionary that have the ability to be combined, used and illustrative in a bewildering number of ways. Shit is one of them. That’s why we couldn’t help but feature this brilliant taxonomy of the word and all the myriad associations it conjures. Click the pic to see more. [...]
• A Geography of Detectives and Authors in Crime Novels
  
  The good people over at Visual.ly picked up this amazing infographic from Italian publication, Corriere Della Sera who have produced an infographic of novelists and their detectives. The visualization analyses the geography of 68 detective in crime novels: enlightening relations between authors’ home-town and country and where their detectives operate. Detectives are located according to [...]
• Vintage London Underground Posters
  
  We’re a sucker for vintage posters here at Apowl. So when we heard about an auction of vintage London Underground maps, we had to feature it. Christie’s had just finished selling off more than 300 pieces of Underground memorabilia – the sales of which exceeded all expectations by pulling in over a million pounds. Click [...]
• What Marijuana Does to Your Brain
  
  Ever wonder why marijuana makes users so fixated on individual ideas, no matter how banal? Learn the scientific answer to that and discover what smoking a joint does to your brain in this fascinating video from Mitchell Moffit and Gregory Brown of AsapSCIENCE. If that awful “this is your brain on drugs” commercial with the [...]
• Glassblowing, the Brooklyn way.
  
  Brooklyn Glass, the outerborough studio is a 4,000-square-foot facility that boasts two furnaces and multiple shop areas, where everyone from experienced glassblowers to newbies taking their first class work the material. Now there’s a new video showing what goes on within Brooklyn Glass’ walls. In an exceptionally well-shot and -edited two minutes, Ablon’s co-founder Alan [...]
• The Rock Stadium, UAE
  
  The United Arab Emirates aren’t short of a bob or two. Nor are they shy on ambitious building projects. Take the Rock Stadium for example. This sports arena designed by MZ Architects will be sunk beneath the desert of Al-Ain and partially carved into the surrounding rock to help escape the searing the heat. A [...]
• Factory of the World: Scenes from Guangdong
  
  Guangdong is considered to be the home of the world’s manufacturing. The province’s economy is roughly the same size as Turkey or Indonesia’s and makes up 12 per cent of China’s total output. But, beneath the surface of this industrial powerhouse is a more human story. One that involves thousands of migrants from the rural [...]
• London’s Mushroom Tunnel
  
  Following on from the wildly successful High Line in New York City, London recently commissioned a competition to find a suitable use for a park underneath the capital. The task was to come up with a use for the Royal Mail’s disused tunnels that previously were used to distribute mail without having to hack through [...]
• Bedlam in the Old Vic Tunnels, London
  
  If you’ve never had the chance to head below the streets of London, we highly recommend you try this. For the third and final year, Lazarides Gallery in London is set to take over the Old Vic Tunnels underneath Waterloo Station with Bedlam. The interactive, site-specific installation coincides with the Frieze Art Fair, for what [...]
• The First Ever McDonald’s
  
  “Every business needs to have stories to tell” said the head of creative at Innocent Drinks. Even the biggest corporations. So, we were fascinated to see these amazing archive pictures of the first ever McDonald’s along with the story of how the golden arches came about. Maurice and Richard (“Mac” and “Dick”) McDonald moved their [...]
• Who Invented the Escape Key?
  
  Life, alas, does not come with an escape key. But your computer keyboard probably does. Why is it there? Pagan Kennedy of the New York Times explains that a computer programmer invented it to interrupt processing: The key was born in 1960, when an I.B.M. programmer named Bob Bemer was trying to solve a Tower [...]
• Orson Welles vs Frozen Peas
  
  Here’s a YouTube clip of Orson Welles’ infamous frozen/canned food advertisement voice-over recording sessions in which he berates the engineer for the inanity of the material he’s being asked to read. It’s a rare chance to hear a serious tantrum executed with stentorian emphasis. Click the pic to listen.
• RoboRomney
  
  With the election season in the US hotting up, so the internet begins churning out politically charged products. One of our favourites is RoboRomney. Due to Mitt’s tendency to change his mind over what policies he supports and what he opposes, this clever little website allows you to form Mitt’s beliefs to suit yours. Simply [...]
• Europe’s empty museums and palaces by Massimo Listri
  
  If you’ve ever wandered around a public space when it is completely deserted you’ll know that it is a special but pretty surreal experience. So when Massimo Listri went about photographing some of Europe’s biggest and most beautiful public spaces with not a single person to be seen, the results were unsurprisingly rather stunning. Capturing [...]
• Star Wars Opening Weekend Photos at San Francisco’s Coronet (1977)
  
  In May 1977, San Francisco’s Coronet Theatre was the only big screen within 50 miles to show Star Wars for the film’s opening. Word spread quickly about the movie and the San Francisco Chronicle sent out a photographer to capture images of the long line that had formed around the outside of the theatre on [...]
• Nerdy Postcards by Nicole Martinez
  
  Boston-based illustrator Nicole Martinez and her Nerdy Dirty postcard series proves that love can also speak the dialect of science. Nicole picked up an increasingly popular word-game trend, and turned some nerdy phrases into lovey-dovey or even somewhat dirty lines. In combination with the minimalistic lab-inspired designs, the postcards turned out to be both witty [...]
• Hair Barrels
  
  What a wonderfully creative place the internet is. This genius of a website Hair Barrels specialises in putting surfers on the hair lines of the rich and famous. Why? Because the hair lines of the rich and famous look like pretty awesome places to surf. Click the pic to see what we’re talking about.
• Dr Julius Neubronner’s Miniature Pigeon Camera
  
  In 1908 Dr Julius Neubronner patented a miniature pigeon camera activated by a timing mechanism. The invention brought him international notability after he presented it at international expositions in Dresden, Frankfurt and Paris in 1909–1911. Spectators in Dresden could watch the arrival of the camera-equipped carrier pigeons, and the photos were immediately developed and turned [...]
• Why is it dark at night?
  
  Why is the sky dark at night, but light during the day? Before you confidently try to ask that question with a simple explanation involving the sun, watch this video. The good people over at MinutePhysics unpack the incredibly complex reasoning behind day and night and also highlight how the stars we see the sky [...]
• Rain Room
  
  The Barbican in London has announced an awesome new installation called the Rain Room. The premise? A rainstorm where no one gets wet. Eh? The people from creative studio, rAndom International have come up with some jiggery-pokery of the highest order. But how on earth does it all work? Walking into the darkened corridor you [...]
• Menswear by Tom Phillips
  
  Compiled from a collection of over 50,000 photographs, Menswear by Tom Phillips is a fascinating study of gentleman’s fashion from the first half of the twentieth century.  The book – the latest to be published by Oxford’s Bodleian Library – features 200 photo postcards documenting the day-to-day wardrobes of the fashionable chaps from – everything [...]
• Sari, the Tokyo Photobomber
  
  We love a good photo bomb here at Apowl. But we weren’t expecting the internet phenomenon to go all high brow. Art student Sari Yamagishi has politely asked groups of tourists in Tokyo if she can photobomb their holiday snaps, making it clear to them beforehand that she wants them to act as if she’s [...]
• Graffiti and its place in art history
  
  Trying to locate Graffiti and Street art in art history Daniel Feral took on the huge task of tracing it back to its origins and documenting the various influences it draws from mainstream art movements such as Pop-Art and the Situationist movement. The fruits of this huge effort comes in form of a poster he [...]
• Olympic Park Construction Photos by Giles Price
  
  The Olympics are over, but that doesn’t mean we can’t still look back an admire some of the huge technological feats that took place during the summer of sport. Photographer Giles Price’s aerial photographs of the Olympic site under construction being a case in point. From his elevated position you can see the level of [...]
• The first fashion photographer: Clementina, Lady Hawarden
  
  Photography as a recognised art form didn’t really emerge until the 20th century, but it was back in the 19th century that many of the roots of today’s image genres emerged. Over on rbklocalstudies they’ve found a stunning collection of photos that seem to suggest the dawn of fashion photography. Lady Hawarden was possibly the [...]
• Torpedo Practice
  
  We struggled with this one – but decided it was worth putting out there, as it’s not often you get to see an intrinsic part of naval warfare in such detail. The ship in question is the HMAS Torrens, a 351-foot (107m) long River class destroyer escort weighing 2,700 tons. Commissioned for service by the [...]
• The Future is Ours by Julian Germain
  
  British photographer Julian Germain traveled around the world from 2004 to 2012 and through his recent travels he photographed classrooms of students. In an exhibition at the  Foto Museum in Rotterdam called “The Future is Ours” Germain’s aim was to depict how children across the world experience education. From the light, colourful spaces in Western [...]
• Vintage Nursing Recruitment Posters from World War I
  
  Charles Eames famously said “design depends largely on constraints.” Which is precisely the same maxim these fantastic nursing recruitment posters from World War I had in mind. Governments across Europe were under huge strain to keep its citizens volunteering for the war effort, especially nurses, who had to deal with the consequences of total war [...]
• Wahoo and Umbrella – Filmmaker recounts nuclear test
  
  Wahoo and Umbrella were code names for two underwater nuclear tests conducted in 1958. Wahoo was detonated on May 16, 1958 and Umbrella was detonated on June 8, 1958. Pat Bradley, the cameraman who photographed these events recounts his first hand experience of seeing these tests and being on the island as the explosion took [...]
• Gangnam Style – without the music
  
  We thought we could resist the tidal wave that is Gangnam Style here at A Parliament of Owls. But, after resisting for what felt like an eternity, we’ve finally succumbed to the South Korean pop sensation’s charms. But with a twist. YouTuber Moto2h has taken the Gangnam Style video, gutted it of the backing track, [...]
• The Blind Faith of the One-Eyed Matador
  
  Last autumn, one of Spain’s greatest matadors took a horn to the face. It was a brutal goring, among the most horrific in the history of bullfighting. Miraculously, Juan Jose Padilla was back in the bullring—sí, fighting bulls—a mere five months later. And in the process of losing half his sight, he somehow managed to [...]
• Vintage “Beefcake” Photographs from the 1950s
  
  Did someone order a beef cake? We’ve published lots of posts on the history of the female form as a pin-up, but we’ve never had a chance to put the male physique under the microscope. But, thanks to the good people over at These Americans, they’ve put together a collection of the finest specimens the [...]
• The History of the Hollywood Sign
  
  The iconic sign — which read ‘Hollywoodland’ until 1949, the year of its first face-lift — is undergoing its most extensive refurbishing in nearly 35 years. Workers will strip the letters of their paint and pressure-wash the exposed corrugated metal before priming and repainting them white, according to the Hollywood Sign Trust. The back of [...]
• Pi in the Sky
  
  Who said mathematics couldn’t be artistic? Artist ISHKY certainly didn’t. On September 12th, residents of the San Francisco Bay area witnessed the world’s largest temporary installation (150 miles long) 10,000 miles overhead as a team of skywriters wrote out the first 1,000 digits of pi. Each number in the 100 mile loop which started in [...]
• World War II: London in Colour
  
  The air raids by German Luftwaffe planes on English cities and towns in 1940 and 1941 — attacks known collectively and famously as The Blitz — were terrifying, but they failed in their key aims: namely, to demoralize the British people, and to destroy the UK’s war economy. London, not surprisingly, suffered the brunt of [...]
• Every Drink Ever Drunk on Mad Men
  
  Even if you don’t watch Mad Men, you’re probably aware that the characters drink. A lot. Eat Like a Man’s own Elizabeth Gunnison tried drinking and working like Roger Sterling, which explained why Sterling seems to achieve so little. Now supercut veterans Slacktory have made a five-minute supercut of all the drinks consumed on Mad [...]
• 140 Bondisms
  
  With the ‘accidental’ leak of Adele’s theme song for the upcoming Bond movie Skyfall, we thought it was high time for some Bondisms of the highest order. Expert mash-up-er (?) 1337Chimpanzee has stitched together 140 of Bond’s best lines from over the years. Admittedly, Connery seems to have the pick of the bunch, but watching [...]
• Trains mimic Versailles
  
  Another train based story for you; this time the carriage interiors of the RER C rail line in Paris have been decorated with replications of the halls and gardens of the Palace of Versailles. Concave carriage ceilings recreate Versaille’s vaulted halls, stair landings are transformed into open garden views and vertical walls appear to be [...]
• Glenn Eve’s World War II Photographs
  
  Pfc Glenn W. Eve was drafted by the US Army in 1942. He was too skinny for combat, but since he was an artist for the Walt Disney Company, the military put him to work taking photographs of the Pacific Theatre. The results of which are now online, complete with the notes he jotted on [...]
• Cardiff After Dark by Maciej Dakowicz
  
  For all our international viewers, Brits are big fans of the booze. So much so that city centres go from the genteel versions of Britain the tourist board flogs abroad to looking more like a bad night in Baghdad. Photographer Maciej Dakowicz spent five years documenting the Saturday night revellers as they spill onto the [...]
• Symmetrical Portraits by Julian Wolkenstein
  
  Symmetrical Portraits is a well-known and oft-imitated series of photos by photographer Julian Wolkenstein, shot back in 2010. After picking a number of subjects based on their facial features, he photographed them staring blankly straight-on into the camera. He then split the faces down the middle in order to obtain two separate “portraits” showing what [...]
• Postcards from Above
  
  A Tumblr of the day for you. Postcards from Above combines Google Maps with vintage postcards to create strangely beautiful pieces of art/tourist paraphernalia. The Tumblr has taken vintage filters to a whole new level, but we still think it’s awesome. Click the pic to see more.
• NASA Self Portraits
  
  Curiosity, the recently dispatched Mars rover, took a beautiful photograph of itself earlier this month. Given the great range of terrestrial artists who have documented themselves—Cindy Sherman, Lee Friedlander, Tseng Kwong Chi, Nikki S. Lee—it’s not easy for a humble space rover to distinguish itself in the field of self-portraiture. Curiosity’s success inspired us to [...]
• Guardians of the Lost Ark
  
  It’s not exactly the dramatic snake-filled pit in the Egyptian desert we might expect. It is a small, nondescript building next to an ancient, but plain looking church. Yet despite nearby sites of interest – the magnificent stone churches of Lalibela, the reputed bath of the Queen of Sheba, a 2,000-year-old granite stele, and an [...]
• Happy Birthday Nasa – Missions to Mars
  
  It’s NASA’s 54th birthday today, so what better way to celebrate than with an infographic highlighting the Space Agency’s attempts at reaching the red planet in its half century of existence. The graphic, taken from Taschen’s most excellent Information Graphics shows that our obsession with Mars hasn’t waned in 50 years, but our success rate [...]
• Superhero Economics
  
  Over on the Daily Infographic, we spotted this awesome examination of two of the most popular superhero’s financial situations. On the one hand you have Clark Kent’s relatively modest existence as a freelance news photographer. On the other is Bruce Wayne, and his $102,000,000 worth of stock options. This isn’t what makes a hero, it’s [...]
• Halloween Costumes From Yesteryear
  
  Over on Neatorama they’ve compiled an excellent collection of vintage Halloween photos to reveal how horror, and the celebration of all things ghastly, has evolved over the years. This slightly terrifying shot was taken in 1917, highlighting that even then, dressing up in drag was seen as only something dead people would do. More poignantly [...]
• Behind the scenes of Mad Men by James Minchin
  
  Getting the opportunity to peel back the curtain on one of the decade’s greatest shows is something we’d never pass up here at Apowl. Which is why we’re particularly excited to be able to show you this exquisite set of images from photographer James Minchin, who had the honour of being on set to capture [...]
• Flagsters by Kirill Zaytsev
  
  This Flagsters Series by Russian artist Kirill Zaytsev shows any nation in the world can be generalized based on certain preferences and ways of life. In this project, Zaytsev grabs hold of every cliche possible and narrows them down into what he describes as “an experiment with visual forms of national flags using verbal stereotypes.“. [...]
• What Is the Hottest Thing In the Universe?
  
  If you’ve ever wondered what the hottest temperature in the universe is (it’s not the sun), then you must see this amazing video. Vsauce did all the research and breaks it down in an ADHD friendly format to teach you some of the most incredible scientific facts about temperature. Click the pic to watch the [...]
• How Records Are Made
  
  We love a bit of vintage photography, and we were joyed to find two beautiful sets over on Voices of East Anglia highlighting how vinyl gets made. The first set are from 1954 starting with an engineer splicing up a tape. The second set is called “How records are made” from a 1962 Warner Brothers [...]
• Human Flesh Pop-Up Butcher Shop
  
  If you were walking around Smithfields market in London over the weekend, you may have come across something slightly out of the ordinary. A pop-up shop dealing in human flesh emerged. Don’t worry, the recession hasn’t got that bad, it’s all in the name of a game. Capcom decided a good way of promoting the [...]
• The Tunnel of Love
  
  Not to be confused with the gaudy fairground rides – there used to be one at Disneyland too – this tunnel of love in the Ukraine is a spectacular example of nature and man working in harmony to create something beautiful. As trees were left to grow freely around the rails, the passing train was [...]
• Ghosts of Google Street View
  
  We’re all familiar with Google’s Street View and the strange sights it has uncovered during its documentation of our world. Artist Paolo Cirio has taken a different take on the figures populating the digital street map. He has pasted up life-size images of people found on Google Street view in the same locations they were [...]
• Impossible Instant Lab
  
  This is the coolest thing we’ve seen in a long time. The Impossible Instant Lab is a genius way of turning your iPhone images into Polaroid pictures. The guys behind the project bought up the last Polaroid factory, did some tinkering, and came up with this. The idea is simple, you simply place your iPhone, [...]
• Bad Videogame Characters
  
  Continuing on our tech theme today, we unearthed these cool pictures of famous computer characters getting up to no good. Earthworm Jim, Mario, Crash Bandicoot and more have all been superimposed on real pictures of social unrest. No word on who actually did them, but anything involving retro gaming gets a thumbs up from us. [...]
• Minimalist Posters Celebrating Six Pioneering Women in Science
  
  Cryptically named designer Hydrogene has come up with some fantastic posters championing six women in science. Radioactivity researcher Marie Curie (who was not only the first woman to win a Nobel Prize but also the first person to win two Nobel Prizes, and in two different sciences at that, chemistry and physics), physicist and astronaut [...]
• The Urban Reef by Jason DeCaires Taylor
  
  Jason Decaires Taylor has been making waves for years with his amazing underwater sculptures for the Museo Subacuatico de Arte in Cancun. At this one-of-a-kind museum, visitors can scuba their way through tropical reefs and marvel at Taylor’s underwater tableaux, which include a beautiful submerged grand piano and a collection of more than 400 human [...]
• The history of the sidebar by Ivan Listes
  
  A total geek out today, we’ve just found an image, put together by Ivan Listes, which looks at the evolution of the sidebar since Xerox first coined the idea way back in 1981. As Steve Jobs famously admitted, he took a lot Apple’s ideas from what Xerox was working on at the time. As we [...]
• Boulevard du Temple by Daguerre
  
  We were brushing up on our photography history recently and came across this little gem of an image. The oldest known photograph of a person, 1838 – a Parisian getting his shoes shined shot by Louis Daguerre. It was taken in the middle of a busy street, but because the exposure time was over 10 [...]
• Pixel Perfect: Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!
  
  One of our good friends Melanie Newman – about to embark on an 18,000 mile cycle trip across the Americas – brought our attention to this amazing book by Daniel Lanciana. For any NES gamers out there, you’ll be familiar with Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out, and arcade/management game where your job is to train up a [...]
• Tumblr of the day: RomCom 2012
  
  As the November U.S. Presidential election quickly approaches, Mitt Romney and Barack Obama seem to be at the front of everyone’s minds. Their faces are becoming staples in American’s minds, and thanks to our tumblr of the day, Rom Com, Mitt Romney’s face is plastered all over these movie posters. From 50 First Dates to [...]
• Comedians in cars getting coffee
  
  We’ve been glued to Jerry Seinfeld’s latest YouTube venture all summer that we forgot to actually tell you guys. The title says all you need to know: Jerry drives around in beautiful cars with some of America’s and Britain’s best comedians/comic actors. As Larry David said in the first episode, “you’ve finally done it, you’ve [...]
• Flightdeck Timelapse
  
  Vimeo user Jakub Vlb thought it’d be a good idea to show people a little more about what he does for a living. So, he strapped a camera into the cockpit of the commerical planes he flew for a week and made this beautiful nine-minute time lapse of his travels around Europe. Click the pic [...]
• The Birth of a Tool
  
  This is manliest thing you’ll see today – the making, by hand, of an axe. They’ve even added a cracking little quote. “It is a tragedy of the first magnitude that millions of people have ceased to use their hands as hands. Nature has bestowed upon us this great gift which is our hands. If [...]
• Belgium’s Heart of Darkness
  
  When I was a boy we used to play a car game called Name Five Famous Belgians. The game speaks to a lazy stereotype among Britons that Belgium is a country without history or character, lost somewhere between France and Germany. How extraordinary it was to discover, then, that one of this small state’s kings [...]
• Chinese families’ worldly goods in Huang Qingjun’s pictures
  
  Think you’ve got a lot of stuff? Well, you do – in comparison to these families in China as photographed by Huang Qingjun, who has spent the last decade travelling to remote parts of the country to persuade people to pose with all of their worldly possessions in front of their homes: The idea for [...]
• Body Camouflage by Carolyn Roper
  
  Body paint specialist Carolyn Roper has been busy in London’s Portobello Road. To promote the new TV drama, Covert Affairs, she was commissioned to hide women in and around the iconic market the only way she knew how, by painting them. The result is this amazing array of photos that make you look twice. Click [...]
• What Does Music Look Like? By Martin Klimas
  
  In these extremely vibrant, abstract photographs, a series entitled What Does Music Look Like?, artist Martin Klimas took a different approach and focused on the fluidity of paints as they translate into music. The artist shows us what we might see if the sounds of music were visual patterns of dancing notes right before our [...]
• Dog Prints by Lumandessa
  
  We couldn’t help but love these geometric portraits of dog breeds by Josh Brill of Lumandessa. Each bread has been neatly summed up by the most iconic pooch from each one. Click the pic to take a look and maybe pick up a few.  
• The Cure for Greed
  
  The creative folks over at Diddo decided that the thirst for greed needed to be quenched, and what better way to satisfy the urge than to inject “one dose of stabilized pure dollar ink mechanically and chemically recovered from approximately $10,000 in U.S. currency.” Each personally monogrammed custom-made mahogany or walnut box contains: One 24-karat [...]
• Celebrities and their stunt doubles
  
  Stunt doubles have been a part of film ever since someone thought it’d would be a good idea to throw the main protagonist off of something big. But, it’s not everyday you get to see the double mingling with the Hollywood star they’ve been hired to mimic. Over on the thaeger they’ve put together a [...]
• CLOUD by Caitlind Brown and Wayne Garrett
  
  Visitors at Calgary’s first Nuit Blanche festival were treated to gorgeous illuminated cloud made from burnt out incandescent bulbs in the city’s Olympic Plaza. Designed by Caitlind r.c. Brown and collaborator Wayne Garrett, CLOUD is a large-scale interactive sculpture. Over 6,000 reclaimed bulbs cover a wire skeleton frame, which is illuminated with energy-efficient CFL bulbs [...]
• Mistral Wine & Champagne Bar, São Paulo
  
  Thanks to Studio Arthur Casas, São Paulo is the new home to an awesome new wine and champagne bar called Mistral. The wine company has a well respected reputation amongst the locals, being known for having “the best and most complete catalog of wines in the country.” With that sort of reputation, it only seemed [...]
• The Roper by Ewan McNicol
  
  Seattle, Washington-based studio, Lucid, has just finished the latest documentary film in its Meet Me Here series. The new short follows Kendrick Domingue, a young ‘calf roper’ from Lafayette hoping to make it big on the US rodeo scene. The Roper, directed by Ewan McNicol, is part of Lucid’s ongoing Meet Me Here series of [...]
• Hearing music for the very first time
  
  Austin Chapman was born profoundly deaf. Hearing aids helped some, but music — its full range of pitches and tones — remained indecipherable. As Chapman explains, “I’ve never understood it. My whole life I’ve seen hearing people make a fool of themselves singing their favorite song or gyrating on the dance floor. I’ve also seen [...]
• Health Secrets Of The World’s Oldest People
  
  Over at Forbes magazine, they’ve been exploring the idea of longevity. Doctors say that healthy habits will help get you to age 85, but how to live beyond that remains a medical mystery. Forbes sat down with people in their 100s to find out how they managed to befuddle the medical community. A fascinating read. [...]
• The Meaning of Life
  
  Over at Brain Pickings, Maria Popova has picked out a bit of a gem from the public library. In 1988, the editors of LIFE magazine posed the question, “what is the meaning of life?”  to 300 “wise men and women,” from celebrated authors, actors, and artists to global spiritual leaders to everyday farmers, barbers, and [...]
• Petri Dish Photography by Zachary Copfer
  
  What happens when the worlds of art and science merge? In the case of these brilliant images from microbiologist come artist Zachary Copfer, the result is some surprisingly different photography. Over the past 4 years he has diligently worked on creating a technique for exposing photographic images in petri dishes – using a process much [...]
• Domesticated by Amy Stein
  
  This series of photographs captures an increasingly human-dominated world as it collides with the wild animals at its boundaries. Photographer Amy Stein has created a collection of arresting yet quiet images, each one showing animals making their home in, or at least visiting, the world of humans. Through her work she addresses the paradoxical relationship [...]
• First Colour Films From the End of the Victorian Era
  
  Neglected and forgotten for the last 110 years, the world’s first colour film has recently been discovered and restored by the UK’s National Media Museum. Created in 1902, only a few short years after the invention of the motion picture itself and far before even colour photography was common, the film and its discovery is [...]
• Medness’ Iconic Musician Outfits illustration
  
  Iconic musicians like Michael Jackson, David Bowie, and Freddie Mercury are known for more than just their musical talents. Their unique fashion sense and wild costumes are crucial elements of their popularity. Given their legendary mark on fashion in pop culture, it shouldn’t be too hard to spot the celebrity in Singapore-based graphic designer Medness’ [...]
• Broken Flowers by Jon Shireman
  
  In his Broken Flower series photographer Jon Shireman soaked various kinds of flowers in a liquid nitrogen bath for up to 30 minutes before using a special spring-loaded contraption to slam them against a surface at high speed. He then photographed the hundreds of fragments spread across a white surface like sharp glass shards. Beautiful [...]
• Banksy is brought to life
  
  Banksy never intended for his art to move, but that hasn’t stopped a new site from taking the secretive artist’s work and bringing it to life. Made By ABVH is a Tumblr with an impressive amount of animated GIFs, though these pieces by Banksy that have been brought to life are pretty much the best [...]
• ‘Thank God That’s Over’ by Emiliano Granado
  
  When photographer Emiliano Granado finally set foot on dry land after five days aboard the MS Explorer of the Seas the first thing he said was “Thank God that’s over”. With a camera full of photographs and a thankfulness for getting home those words would go on to become the title of a series that [...]
• Ad Buster – Jilly Ballistic
  
  Hailing from New York’s dark urban underbelly, Jilly Ballistic is the city’s most ‘well-known unknown street and subway artist’. Whether it’s posting error messages on ad campaigns or reproductions of historical photos in public spaces, the mysterious artist’s tongue-in-cheek images are taking the metropolitan by storm. We get the exclusive first interview. Click the pic [...]
• Museum of Video Games
  
  Conrad Bodman, head of exhibitions at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), has used his extensive experience curating video games, film, and digital media at institutions around the world to organize ACMI’s current exhibition, “Game Masters,” a celebration of the art of video games that has become a hit with the public and [...]
• iPad Prototype, circa 2002
  
  These new photos referred to as the “035 mockup” are alleged to hail from around 2002 to 2004, according to Apple’s senior vice president of design Jonathan Ives: My recollection of first seeing it is very hazy, but it was, I’m guessing, sometime between 2002 and 2004, some but it was I remember seeing this [...]
• Erik Klein Wolterink: Kitchens
  
  Photographer Erik Klein Wolterink explores kitchens of various ethnic groups within the city of Amsterdam. For this project he mapped these kitchens in a systematic, almost maniacal way. The inside of cupboards, drawers and fridges was photographed in the way that the original user had left it and then reassembled into a single seamless composite [...]
• Standing Beneath the Atomic Bomb
  
  On July 19, 1957, five Air Force officers and one photographer stood together on a patch of ground about 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas. They’d marked the spot “Ground Zero. Population 5″ on a hand-lettered sign hammered into the soft ground right next to them. Click the pic to watch the amazing video.
• Planet Hiltron by Danny Evans
  
  NYC-based artist Danny Evans has a hilarious project titled Planet Hiltron in which he performs “make unders” on celebrities. Rather than use Photoshop to achieve unattainable beauty, Evans does the reverse, using his ‘Shop skills to transform high-powered stars into rather ordinary-looking people. Click the pic to see more from Danny’s collection.
• Fingerprints by Kevin Van Aeist
  
  American artist Kevin Van Aeist produced this collection of photos appropriately titled Fingerprints that features jumbo-sized fingerprints made out of everyday items (some of which are positively random in the best of ways). The artist uses his own fingerprints as his subject matter and attempts to use the materials that comprise the print to define [...]
• X-Rayed Buildings by Nick Veasey
  
  It’s good to know that if British X-ray photographer Nick Veasey ever found himself in a hard place, he could work for Heathrow security. But let’s hope it doesn’t come to that: The oeuvre that Veasey is building from within his concrete bunker is too freaky to fizzle out just now. The artist got his [...]
• 8-bit illustrations of the first lines of famous short stories
  
  Stephen Crane — “The Open Boat” What if short stories were 8-bit video games? Or at least looked like them? Over at Slacktory, Oliver Miller has created a fun series of 8-bit adaptations of the first lines of some of his favorite short stories. He explains, ”I was an English major, and then I got [...]
• Comedians by Jill Greenberg
  
  Photographer Jill Greenberg, who, in the past, has shown us the funny, emotive facial expressions of wild animals and the tear-stained faces of babies in a moment of utter anguish, manages to capture the equally animated faces of a number of comedy moguls posing for the camera. Whether it’s a simple face-forward portrait or a [...]
• The Evolution of the human face in utero
  
  Have you ever wondered why humans have a groove above the upper lip that seems to have no purpose whatsoever? This groove, known as the philtrum, tends to go un-noticed unless it is not completely formed, resulting in a cleft palette. With the help of a CGI created from high quality human embryonic scans during [...]
• The Higgs Boson Explained
  
  For those of you who don’t have a physics degree, physicist Daniel Whiteson gives the rundown on the so-called “God particle,” in this brilliantly informative video/cartoon. Click the pic to watch.
• The Girl Who Inspired ‘Alice in Wonderland’
  
  One hundred and fifty years ago, on July 4, 1862, a young mathematician by the name of Charles Dodgson, better-known as Lewis Carroll, boarded a boat with a small group, setting out from Oxford to the nearby town of Godstow, where the group was to have tea on the river bank. The party consisted of [...]
• All 135 Space Shuttle launches at once
  
  This is a video showing all 135 launches of the various Space Shuttle at once by by McLean Fahnestock. This one requires sound, and definitely full screen. Click to watch.
• The Gallery of Lost Art
  
  The Gallery of Lost Art is a virtual exhibition in which the site reconstructs the stories behind the disappearance of major works of modern art and present the evidence of how it happened. Destroyed, stolen, rejected, erased, ephemeral, some of the most significant works of the last 100 years have been lost, and can no [...]
• Death row dogs by Tou Chih-kang
  
  For the past two years, 37-year-old photographer Tou Chih-kang has been capturing the last moments of dogs at Taoyuan Animal Shelter in Taiwan. His roughly 400 portraits show the dogs — most of them abandoned by their owners — moments before they’re put to sleep. His mission is to raise awareness and encourage responsibility among [...]
• Pantone People by Angelica Dass
  
  Spanish artist angelica dass has conceived ‘humanae’. the project applies the alphanumerical classification of the pantone colouring system to human skin tone, communicated through a photographed portraiture series. the background of each piece is dyed the exact shade extracted from a sample of 11 x 11 pixels from the very face of the people depicted, [...]
• Interiors by Arnold Kramer
  
  Kramer has in the past made landscape and portrait photographs. From an early time, however, he has focused on what we might call the topography of furnished rooms. Kramer trained not as an artist but as an electrical engineer; he obtained an advanced degree in this field at M.I.T. It was there that he met [...]
• The Elevated Elderly by Angie Hiesl
  
  German Installation artist Angie Hiesl made some jaws drop with these elderly people suspended 20 feet in the air on the streets of Montreal for Festival Transamerique this year. Hiesl premiered this concept in 1995 and has taken it all over the world to over 14 countries, including: Poland, Brazil, Colombia, and Perú, with local [...]
• The “Memento” Timeline, Visualized
  
  Christopher Nolan’s Memento, is unusual in that there are two narratives, one playing forward, the other backwards – both of which meet somewhere in the middle at the end. Confused? Well, that’s why a designer, whose name we can’t seem to find has come up with this amazing infographic that clears up any confusion there [...]
• Pensioner Ping Pong
  
  Resilience, determination and good old fashioned chutzpah intermingle in this tale of age defying octogenarians. This documentary featuring ageing table tennis champions with a shared age of 703 is a heart warming ode to the perils of growing old. Eight entrants compete for the World Championship Ping Pong title in Inner Mongolia. And they’re all [...]
• Stalin’s Breakdown
  
  During his thirty-year rule of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin succeeded in stifling all opposition. There was never a serious threat to his leadership. But there was one occasion, at the end of June 1941, when Stalin suffered what may have been a mental breakdown. When, after three days, his colleagues came for him, he [...]
• Where Do the World’s Tweets Come From?
  
  A new “map” of Twitter from researchers Mark Graham of the Oxford Internet Institute and Monica Stephens of Humboldt State gives us a pretty good visual of what’s out there. Their graphic shows by size the number of geocoded tweets coming from different countries during a week-long period in March of this year. Their sample [...]
• How Colours Get Their Name
  
  In Japan, people often refer to traffic lights as being blue in colour. And this is a bit odd, because the traffic signal indicating ‘go’ in Japan is just as green as it is anywhere else in the world. So why is the color getting lost in translation? This visual conundrum has its roots in [...]
• Where Sci Fi Movies Began
  
  A year before the Wright brothers launched the first airplane flight in 1903, Georges Méliès, a French filmmaker with already 400 films to his credit, directed a film that visualized a much bigger human ambition – landing a spacecraft on the moon. Loosely based on works by Jules Vernes (From the Earth to the Moon) [...]
• The beginning of life
  
  Cells divide. One single piece of life tugs itself apart and splits in two. It sounds like a purely destructive process, reminiscent of medieval woodcuts where the hands and feet of some unfortunate thief are tied to horses heading in opposite directions. But that’s the macro world. On the micro scale, to split is to [...]
• Awesome aerial photography by Bernhard Edmaier
  
  Veidivötn is a watery landscape in central Iceland on the northwest edge of the Vatnajoküll Glacier, flown through by many meltwater streams. It contains some 50 lakes, many of them in craters caused by Veidivötn’s position above a volcanic fissure zone. The last eruption happened in the year 1480. Fish inhabit about 30 of the [...]
• Vodun by Frederic Vanwalleghem
  
  Vodun- Trying to grasp the ungraspable is a photo series by by Frederic Vanwalleghem (1978, Belgium). Primitive religions and their rituals are difficult to grasp to the western world. Projecting our own beliefs, customs and behaviors, we imagine black magic, psychotropic plants and group hysteria – a sensational, almost dangerous savagery. Vodun, the national religion [...]
• Underground New York Public Library
  
  The Underground New York Public Library is a visual library featuring the Reading-Riders of the NYC subways. This library freely lends out a reminder that we’re capable of traveling to great depths within ourselves and as a whole. Click the pic to see more.
• The Tour de France at Ninety-nine
  
  The first Tour de France was organized in 1903 to promote the sports paper L’Auto. Of the sixty starting riders, only twenty-one finished. The winner was Maurice Garin, a.k.a. the Little Chimney-Sweep, seen center right at the finish of the first Tour. This year, a hundred and ninety-eight cyclists started the ninety-ninth edition of the [...]
• First MRI Video of a Human Birth Taken in Real-Time
  
  In December 2010, Charite hospital in Berlin, Germany documented a woman giving birth in real-time with a specially-designed open high-field magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner made by Philips. While images were available in 2010, the video from that birth has just been released. Click the video to see the birth.
• Two Hundred Years of Surgery
  
  The first volume of the New England Journal of Medicine and Surgery, and the Collateral Branches of Science, published in 1812, gives a sense of the constraints faced by surgeons, and the mettle required of patients, in the era before anesthesia and antisepsis. In the April issue for that year, John Collins Warren, surgeon at [...]
• The life of American President Assassinator Charles J Guiteau
  
  On a hot June Saturday in 1881, a gentleman strolled into the US capital’s district jail on the banks of the Anacostia River. The visitor was well-dressed, about 40 years of age, slight of frame, and sunken of cheek. A weedy patch of gray-tinged whiskers sprouted from his chin, and his face was punctuated by [...]
• MARGUERITE BAKER JOHNSON: “AMERICAN LIFE” (1952-1964)
  
  Marguerite Baker Johnson, a native of Brussels, Belgium was a female photographer noted as the first woman to take photographs inside the arena at “Cheyenne Frontier Days”, a task formerly conducted by men due to the dangerous setting. Her photos appeared in the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Automotive Periodicals, London Times, Daily Mirror, Us [...]
• Byberry Mental Hospital
  
  The Byberry mental hospital was a turn of the 20th century institute for the mentally ill. It has since become a byword for brutality in healthcare. The hospital was turned over to the state in 1936 and was renamed the Philadelphia State Hospital at Byberry. Conditions in the hospital during this time were poor, with [...]
• (En)tangled Word Bank – The Evolution of Charles Darwin
  
  This visual comparison of the six editions of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species shows the changes Darwin made to the texts during his lifetime. Using data from online versions of the books, the designers created six wheels, each representing a different edition, with each chapter divided into sub-chapters, paragraphs (represented by a leaf [...]
• Stately Sandwiches by Kelly Pratt
  
  Kelly Pratt loves Sandwiches, especially when they come with a pickle. She has set out to make a typical sandwich for each of the 50 states as a fun way to work on her photography and design skills. It is a delicious journey across the US. For each sandwich she does research on the Internet, [...]
• The History of Margarine
  
  Sometime in the 1860s the enterprising French chemist Hippolyte Mège-Mouriès made an important discovery. He took a pound of beef tallow soaked beforehand in a solution of 15 percent common salt and 1 percent sulfate of soda, slowly rendered it at 103 degrees Fahrenheit, poured in gastric juices of a pig, and sprinkled it with [...]
• Welcome to the World’s Most Controversial Zoo
  
  At the Lujan Zoo, on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, visitors can do much more than admire wild animals from a distance. They can ride on the backs of wild lions, feed tigers or hand-feed cheetahs. You couldn’t pay me enough to get up close and personal with a full-grown lion, but apparently there are [...]
• Mathematics Made Visible: The Extraordinary Art of M.C. Escher
  
  Where the Renaissance masters used shading and perspective to create the illusion of three-dimensional depth on two dimensional surfaces, Escher turned those tricks in on themselves to create puzzles and paradoxes. He manipulated our faculties of perception not simply to please the senses, but to stimulate the mind. His cool, analytic tendency was apparent from [...]
• Why I Write: George Orwell’s Four Motives for Creation
  
  Literary legend Eric Arthur Blair, better known as George Orwell, would have been 109 today. Though he remains best remembered for authoring the cult-classics Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, he was also a formidable, masterful essayist. Among his finest short-form feats is the 1946 essay Why I Write. Maria Popova over on Brain Pickings has [...]
• The Origin of the word ‘Cool’
  
  Over at Flavorwire, they’ve been discussing how the meanings of words has evolved over time. One of the most interesting ones we saw was on the origins of cool as we currently understand it today. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, its earliest slang meaning dates to 1728, to describe large sums of money, a [...]
• Britain from Above
  
  Wembley Park – the FA Cup Final between Sheffield Wednesday and Cardiff City, April 1925 English Heritage today launched a new website, Britain from Above, that will host little-seen images of London taken between 1919 and 1953. Part of a commercial collection of aerial photographs, this treasure trove of historic shots has been painstakingly restored [...]
• Water Photography by Clive Rose
  
  Clive Rose teamed up with Canon to come up with a solution for photographing the water sports at the upcoming olympics. Solution? A waterproof Canon EOS-1D X and a 15mm Fisheye lens. Clive had to time this shot perfectly, just as the the divers hands were touching the water. Once they’re in the water, the [...]
• Seeing Fashion History, By Reducing 130 Years Of Vogue Into Colors
  
  British artist Arthur Buxton has just completed an exhaustive study on the history of color in fashion. Last time we wrote about Buxton, he was busy reducing the color composition of famous paintings to pie charts that gave a clinical overview of the palettes of everyone from Vincent Van Gogh to Paul Gauguin (and made [...]
• Zeppelin over the Pyramids, 1931
  
  Before Zeppelin’s became a by-word for catastrophe, the giant blimps were perfect for showcasing man’s scientific endeavours. This photograph taken in 1931, showed the Graf Zeppelin’s rendezvous with the eternal desert and the pyramids of Giza. It was taken from the top of the Great pyramid and shows the zeppelin above the pyramid of Khafre. [...]
• BMW M5 – Bullet Art
  
  The ad men at BMW Canada have created something rather special. Taking the familiar concept of bullet photography, i.e a super slow motion camera capturing bullets from a gun trashing things, they decided to apply it to BMW’s new M5 car and film the same effects. It’s pretty damn amazing. Click the pic to watch [...]
• We Are Lucky
  
  What would you do if you suddenly were given A LOT of money? The person behind we-are-lucky.com decided to pass on his/her good luck to others by giving away £1,000 every day. He/She (?) planned to give the money to complete strangers – someone different every time – and all he’d ask is that they’d [...]
• The History of Toilet Roll
  
  Since the dawn of time, people have found nifty ways to clean up after the bathroom act. The most common solution was simply to grab what was at hand: coconuts, shells, snow, moss, hay, leaves, grass, corncobs, sheep’s wool—and, later, thanks to the printing press—newspapers, magazines, and pages of books. The ancient Greeks used clay [...]
• The Not-So-Great Escape: German POWs in the U.S. during WWII
  
  Nearly 400,000 German POWs were brought to the United States during World War II, and officials recorded precisely 2,222 individual attempts by the Germans to flee their camps. POWs scaled fences, smuggled themselves out in or under trucks or jeeps, passed through the gate in makeshift GI uniforms, cut the barbed wire or tunneled under [...]
• Business Lessons from Bees
  
  Michael O’Malley is a “human capital consultant” (whatever that is) but has also been a beekeeper for the past ten years. Here’s what he’s learned about how bees organize themselves and manage risk. Take, for example, their approach toward the “too-big-to-fail” risk our financial sector famously took on. Honeybees have a failsafe preventive for that. [...]
• Exploding Balloons by Edward Horsford
  
  London-based photographer Edward Horsford has mastered the technique of timing in these photographs that feature split-second water balloon explosions. He is well known for this exciting series, and he says, “I started these as a way to challenge myself technically and creatively.” Wow, he has had great success with his self-initiated challenge! Horsford’s goal in [...]
• World Irish Dancing Championships
  
  The all-natural look did not win any prizes this year at the nine-day World Irish Dancing Championships in Belfast. The young girls among the dancers — who came from as far away as China, South Africa, Australia and Canada — applied spray-tanner and wore purple eyeshadow and pink lipstick and sparkly dresses and wigs with [...]
• The Private World of an Astronaut
  
  “When I reached orbit,” astronaut Scott Carpenter wrote in the June 8, 1962, issue of LIFE, “the first thing that impressed me was the silence.” The 37-year-old Colorado native, just the second American to orbit the Earth (and the fourth American in space) was letting the magazine’s millions of readers in on what he called [...]
• Old Interiors in Architecture
  
  There’s something fascinating about old buildings: the history, the detritus of those who have lived there before, nature’s slow reclaiming of the materials. We spotted this brilliant gallery showcasing old architecture from the inside in all its myriad forms. Click the pic to see more.
• Small Scale Models of Decaying Homes by Ofra Lapid
  
  Broken houses is a series of images of dilapidated and abandoned buildings, destroyed by weather, decay and neglect. Artist Ofra Lapid found photos of these homes and buildings on the web while pursuing an amateur photographer from North Dakota (name not disclosed) who obsessively documents the decaying process of these houses- not unlike these wonderful [...]
• ‘Music is ‘life it’self – a letter from Louis Armstrong
  
  One of our consistent faves, Letters of Note has unearthed a beautiful letter from Louis Armstrong to a Marine stuck out in Vietnam. In 1967, jazz legend Louis Armstrong wrote this generous, heartfelt letter to a fan who, as a Marine stationed in Vietnam, had recently sent him some fan-mail. You wouldn’t think they were [...]
• Fictitious Dishes
  
  Over on Dinahfried.com are a cracking series of photographs that recreate the meals of famous fictional characters. Featuring food from the likes of The Catcher in the Rye, Oliver Twist, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and Moby Dick, it’s a fascinating look at the lesser examined aspects of literature. Click [...]
• ‘Dangerous Women’ – Prostitution in Late Imperial and Post-Revolutionary Russia
  
  In late imperial Russia, women who engaged in prostitution were perceived as dangerous social elements. Venereal disease reached record levels during the late nineteenth century; the  the prostitute was typecast by Tsarist authorities as a ‘human transmitter’, described as ‘dangerous fonts of disease whose very existence necessitated state intervention’. In 1843, an Empire-wide system of [...]
• How the FBI Fell Victim to Hitler Survival Conspiracy Fever
  
  In 1945, at the end of World War II, Adolf Hitler committed suicide. As the story goes, with his wife Eva Braun by his side, the two committed suicide. Hitler died by gunshot wound to the head, and Braun via a cyanide tablet. However, because of the Fuhrer’s instructions to his staff on how to [...]
• Travel Photographer of the Year 2011
  
  Enjoy these striking images from around the world featured in the Travel Photographer of the Year competition, on show in an exhibition at the Royal Geographical Society in London, opening on Friday. Above is the overall winner – Travel Photographer of the Year 2011 Oaxaca, Mexico. Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead). This [...]
• It’s not easy being Superman
  
  In this photo taken June 14, 2012, Avelino Chavez wears his signature Superman costume as he walks to work in Lima, Peru. Chavez, 52, took on the Superman persona 15 years ago, when he lost his job as a security guard, and says he has had work ever since. Chavez also says he only earns [...]
• All the known Exoplanets to Scale
  
  With the search for extra terrestrial life expanding way beyond our solar system, and even galaxy, scientists have been discovering planets with the potential to harbour life forms like our own. A cracking infographic from xkcd highlights, as of June this year, all the ‘exoplanets’ and their perspective scales we’ve found thus far. There’s even [...]
• The Parks of the World by Mikell Fine Iles
  
  Ever wondered which was the biggest park in an urban area? Well, designer Mikell Fine Iles felt the question needed to be answered once and for all, so he went and made this info graphic. The variables that he was particularly interested in was size, shape, position on map, annual visitors, and date of inception. [...]
• And the Most Peaceful Country in the World Is…
  
  Anyone seeking that elusive state of affairs known as peace on earth had better have an appetite for volcanoes, glaciers and hot springs. Iceland, the Nordic island with no standing army and the smallest population of any NATO member state, is the most peaceful country in the world, according to the annual Global Peace Index [...]
• DarwinTunes: Evolution of Music
  
  Who needs composers when you’ve got … Darwin! Robert MacCallum and Armand Leroi from Imperial College London wondered if music could “evolve” out of short bits of noises. So the duo created DarwinTunes, where thousands of humans participate in the natural selection process: The DarwinTunes tracks are all 8-second-long loops, each encoded by a ‘digital [...]
• The watercolor version of Blade Runner
  
  We’re huge fans of Ridley Scott’s masterpiece, Blade Runner, but our levels of appreciation are dwarfed when compared to Swedish artist Anders Ramsell. He has hand painted 3,285 scenes from the film to create a 12-minute clip reel with the sound from the original film. This is bloody brilliant. Click the pic to watch the [...]
• Business Lessons from a Mexican Drug Cartel
  
  The Sinaloa cartel can buy a kilo of cocaine in the highlands of Colombia or Peru for around $2,000, then watch it accrue value as it makes its way to market. In Mexico, that kilo fetches more than $10,000. Jump the border to the United States, and it could sell wholesale for $30,000. Break it [...]
• Behind the scenes at a McDonald’s food photo shoot
  
  Why does McDonald’s food look so much better in the ads than at the restaurant? Watch as the director of marketing for McDonald’s Canada buys a Quarter Pounder at McDonald’s and compares that to a burger prepared by a food stylist and retouched in post by an image editor. We can’t quite tell whether this [...]
• CupNoodles Museum
  
  Over on Collacubed, a couple of the staffers went on a trip to Japan and paid a visit to the CupNoodles Museum in Yokohama, about 30 minutes from Tokyo. Opened last fall, the interactive museum chronicles the history of the instant ramen noodle created by Momofuku Ando in 1958. Included in the museum is a [...]
• Shelving the Body by Darragh Casey
  
  Darragh Casey’s current series ‘Shelving the Body’, focuses on the traditional role of the shelf as a device to display, portraying people alongside objects relevant to their own lives and personalities.  Via his website: “This project aims to disrupt our habitual relationships with furniture and reassess the idea of the ‘user’. This subversion, initiated through [...]
• Duck herding in China
  
  The City of Taizhou, Shinghai in China was a scene of spectacular traffic Jam yesterday 18 June 2012 when a prosperous Chinese duck farmer decided to take his 5000 grand ducks for a country walk along a busy Shinghai road. It was the kind of display of personal wealth like none seen before. The 5000- [...]
• Institute of Intimate Museums by Kenji Sugiyama
  
  A collection of dioramas by artist Kenji Sugiyama, “Institute of Intimate Museums” proved to be one of the most engaging displays at Scope Basel 2012. Spanning the artist’s output from 1999 to 2008, the works serve as clever variations on traditional diorama art—cramped consumer boxes containing lilliputian scenes of museum-goers standing in halls of shrunken [...]
• Los Angeles in the 1940s by Ansel Adams
  
  Los Angeles was a very different place when Ansel Adams looked at it through his camera lens in the 1940s. The sprawling town was changing on an almost daily basis as new developments sprung up around the valley, but underneath it all, there still remained some of the charms of the city from an era [...]
• The Libraries, Studies, and Writing Rooms of 15 Famous Men
  
  While the lesser man would have a ‘den’ in his house, the more loftier gent would opt for a study or writing room. We’ve just spotted this awesome collection of famous men’s writing rooms throughout history. If you can’t crisscross the globe this summer, come along with us for a tour through 15 rooms where [...]
• Self healing materials
  
  A fascinating new programme highlights how new materials are being manufactured that can actually heal themselves. From ByteSizeScience – “Our latest episode explores materials that mimic the human skin’s ability to heal scratches and cuts. For a first-hand look at self-healing plastics, we visited the lab of Nancy Sottos, Ph.D., professor of engineering at the [...]
• The Company That Quietly Knows Everything About You
  
  You probably have never heard of Axciom, but it has heard of you. Actually, not only has it heard of you, it knows all about you. It knows who you are. It knows where you live. It knows what you do. It peers deeper into American life than the F.B.I. or the I.R.S., or those [...]
• The Talking Heads Song That Explains Talking Heads
  
  The New Yorker has just put up a fascinating article about one of our favourite songs from one of our favourite bands. Talking Heads released “This must be the place” way back in the early 80s, achieving moderate success. It wasn’t until nearly 20 years later did the songs prominence shoot into the public’s consciousness. [...]
• Tetris: From Russia With Love
  
  The following is a great 2004 BBC documentary about Tetris, the man who created it, and the lengths that several companies went to in order to procure the rights to distribute it. Tetris – From Russia With Love. Alexey Pazhitnov, a computer programmer from Moscow, created Tetris in 1985 but as the Soviet Union was [...]
• Who Made That Soy-Sauce Dispenser?
  
  Just 16 and recently released from a naval academy, Kenji Ekuan witnessed Hiroshima’s devastation from the train taking him home. “Faced with that nothingness, I felt a great nostalgia for human culture,” he recalled from the offices of G. K. Design, the firm he co-founded in Tokyo in 1952. “I needed something to touch, to [...]
• Living with Epilepsy by J A Mortram
  
  One of our favourite photographers J A Mortram recently let us know about a moving photo project he recently worked on. The project is a visual essay on living with epilepsy in the modern day. Following Simon as he struggles for independence, the monochrome imagery moves delicately from the seemingly mundane every day tasks of [...]
• Origami Shadow Portraits by Kumi Yamashita
  
  Though at first glance you’d think you were just looking at a bunch of colourful construction paper pieces neatly arranged on a blank white wall, come a little closer and you might notice a familiar face. Back in 2011, famed shadow artist Kumi Yamashita was commissioned by American Express to create a unique work of [...]
• The Paparazzo of Paris
  
  Nestled in the heart of the City of Light on the famed Avenue Hoche, the hotel Royal Monceau-Raffles Paris embodies all that the romantic city has to offer. After being renovated for two years under the critical eye of designer Philippe Starck, Le Royal Monceau opened its elegant doors to visitors once more last year. [...]
• The Evolution of 8-Bit Art
  
  Beginning with early Atari and Nintendo video games, the 8-bit aesthetic has been a part of our culture for over 30 years. As it moved through the generations, 8-bit earned its independence from its video game roots. The idea of 8-bit now stands for a refreshing level of simplicity and minimalism, is capable of sonic [...]
• Contents of the Voyager Golden Record
  
  When they were launched in 1977, the two Voyager spacecraft each carried with them a 12-inch gold-plated copper record containing multimedia pertaining to life on Earth, the idea being that if an extraterrestrial ran across one of these records millions of years from now, they could play it an learn something about our planet. A [...]
• Movie poster colours through history
  
  A couple of weeks ago, engineer Vijay Pandurangan was having I was having brunch with a friend and he mentioned how he felt that most movie posters these days were very blue and dark. His friend didn’t fully believe him and challenged him to prove it. So, as any engineer would do, he wrote some [...]
• These Americans
  
  We’re very excited to have been put on to the “These Americans” project by the lovely people at It’s Nice That, it has quickly become one of our favourite websites. The website is an online archive of photography by some of the world’s most preeminent snappers and their take on all things America. There are [...]
• City of Ruins
  
  We just spotted this cracking video and explanation of the world’s first digital stereoscopic reconstruction of a city destroyed during World War II. The city itself, Warsaw, after the sustained bombing campaign, went from just under two million to less than 1,000 inhabitants living there. The reconstructed city of Warsaw features 63,000 manually placed models [...]
• The Bill Murray Colouring Book
  
  Thanks to the rather brilliant people over at Bellykids, with have some ridiculously brilliant news – The Bill Murray colouring book. Thrill Murray, as the book will be called, is aimed at “the young, old, middle aged, bored, hyped or mildly interested” giving all and sundry the chance to bring to life the man, the [...]
• Abandoned by Richard Allenby-Pratt
  
  Photographer Richard Allenby-Pratt has produced an interesting photography project examining what would happen to the Middle East’s oil boom if unlimited renewable energy became a reality. The result, in Pratt’s eyes is the wholesale abandonment of these cities in the desert. “By the end of 2017 Dubai was effectively deserted. Many of the wealthy locals [...]
• Composer portraits by Sergio Albiac
  
  Barcelona-based visual artist Sergio Albiac takes the written musical compositions of famous classical composers and constructs portraits of each corresponding symphonist out of them. The result is an intriguing series of meta-portraits of these men, from Beethoven to Tchaikovsky, whose brilliant work literally makes them who they are. Additionally, Albiac embeds each musical visionary’s signature [...]
• Souvenir Optical Illusions by Michael Hughes
  
  Photographer and tourist Michael Hughes creates wonderful optical illusions by placing cheap souvenirs in front of famous landmarks. Michael, who works as a freelance photographer in Germany, has discovered the technique back in 1998 when he held up a postcard he bought for his daughter on the tourist platform at the Lorelei cliffs next to [...]
• Sarcastic Slogans by Mobstr
  
  For any urban dweller, graffiti is a part of the everyday. Some of it is inspiring, but most of the times, it’s all a bit pants. But, UK-based Mobstr puts up simple sentences that were designed to make you think. Though minimalist in nature, they’re often loaded with meaning or, at least, come with a [...]
• Apple’s Clothing Line From The ‘80s
  
  Before Apple decided that minimal was best, it experimented freely with the concept of stretching the brand beyond its IT domain. So, in 1986, it produced its own clothing line. We’re really not kidding. The pics you’re about to see were all pulled from a catalogue from that year. Cue rush to eBay to make [...]
• Symmetry by Everynone
  
  The 2012 Vimeo Awards totally happened this week in New York City. They celebrated the world’s best videos, did some crazy stuff with technology, stared slack-jawed at Reggie Watts and Beardyman, and sang “Happy Birthday” to a dude named Daniel. The Grand Prize Winner of the event was this beautiful video by Everynone – we’ve [...]
• How to kiss, circa 1942
  
  Ah, yesteryear, always so eager to help. In a LIFE Magazine article released in 1942, the editors thought it would be a good idea to show, once and for all, the proper way to kiss somebody. So, they released these handy diagrams, with descriptions below, illustrating the do’s and don’ts of light petting. Click the [...]
• Hirotoshi Ito Rock Sculptures
  
  While running the family masonry business which crafts tombstones, memorials and religious statuary, Hirotoshi Ito has been creating and exhibiting his own stone art in Japan and abroad in hopes to promote the value of stones as an art medium. For his personal works, he use various kinds of stones ranging from granite and marble [...]
• Trailer: Line of Sight
  
  Line Of Sight is a rare view into underground bicycle messenger racing which has become a global phenomenon. For over a decade Lucas Brunelle has been riding with the fastest, most skilled urban cyclists around the world while capturing all the action with his customized helmet cameras to bring you along for the ride. This [...]
• ‘Skyspace’ by James Turrell
  
  The highly anticipated skyspace by famed American artist James Turrell does not open to the public until June 14, but Rice students, faculty and staff got a sneak preview May 5 during an exclusive Cinco de Mayo celebration for the Rice community. Click the pic to see more. Click here to watch a video on [...]
• Wow Grass in York Minster
  
  The collective Wow! Grass! has transformed the cathedral of York Minster – built in the fourteenth century – by covering it with grass. Over 900 guests enjoyed dinner and on grass in the heart of the iconic building to celebrate the Queen’s Jubilee of the Queen of England. Click the pic to see more.  
• Shades of Change by Marin Dearie
  
  Shades of Change is a project by Marin Dearie, an artist and designer living in New Orleans. Her concept is simple, tracking the changes of everyday objects, or in Michael Jackon’s case, his skin colour. The result is a simple, but beautiful colour array explaining the transition from one colour to the next. Click the [...]
• A Book of Beards by Justin James Muir
  
  This beautiful tome dedicated to man and the hair on his chin is for a good cause. The man you see above has cancer, and his friend – author Justin James Muir -  is trying to help raise money because he doesn’t have insurance. In America, that’s a death sentence. “A friend of mine was [...]
• Sand Sculpture Backdrops by JOOheng Tan
  
  World champion sand sculptor JOOheng Tan was recently asked by ad agency Lowe in Singapore to help create these impressive backdrops for an OMO washing detergent ad campaign. In an age when something like this could have been created digitally, they asked Tan to physically build three 18-ton sand sculptures to be used as backdrops [...]
• Writing Without Words: Visualizing Jack Kerouac’s On The Road
  
  London-based artist Stefanie Posavec has a gift for words. Or for the lack thereof, to be exact. Her latest project, Writing Without Words, explores the literary world when its most important building blocks are removed by visually representing text. The project uses Jack Kerouac’s iconic On The Road and takes a number of different approaches [...]
• The Secret Life of Toys
  
  Argentinian photographer Marcos Minuchin started his series The Secret Life of Toys in 2007 as a photography class project, but kept the project going after a lot of positive feedback. His Recession Army series seems especially relevant these days. According to Minuchin, one of the perks of working with toys is that they work long [...]
• World Wonders Project
  
  From the archaeological areas of Pompeii to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial, Google’s World Wonders Project aims to bring to life the wonders of the modern and ancient world. Together with partners including UNESCO, the World Monument Fund and Cyark, the World Wonders Project is preserving the world heritage sites for future generations. Click the pic [...]
• The man who lives in a plane
  
  Bruce Campbell doesn’t just love planes, he lives inside of one. After purchasing a a Boeing 727-200 for $100,000, he placed it in his backyard, otherwise known as the middle of the woods in Oregon. Campbell’s startup costs were actually quite considerable. He paid $17,000 to move the plane from an airport to a staging [...]
• Celebrity Impersonators and their Asian Doppelgängers
  
  For his project titled All Look Same, San Francisco-based photographer Howard Cao photographed celebrity impersonators in Las Vegas and then had Sugar Digital do some post-processing magic to transform their race. The result is a series of images that is meant to ask the question, “Would celebrities be as interesting to American culture if they [...]
• Carved Book Landscapes by Guy Laramee
  
  Artist Guy Laramee (previously) has recently completed a number of new sculptural works where he transforms thick tomes into incredible topographical features including mountains, caves, volcanoes, and even water. Many of the works are part of a new project titled Guan Yin, a series of work dedicated to the forces that enable individuals to endure [...]
• The Childhood Homes of 20 Famous Authors
  
  Famous authors: They’re just like us. Or at least they used to be. Recently, on a whim, we started investigating the childhood homes of some legendary authors, and their early homes are just as varied as their writing styles, from cottages to apartments to antebellum townhouses. It’s rather fascinating to peer at some of our [...]
• On set and behind-the-scenes
  
  Here’s a very cool collection of set photos from various different movies we love that will change the way you see these scenes. I will warn you, these photos kind of do take the magic out of the movies, but it’s still interesting to see how they filmed some of these shots! Click the pic [...]
• Underwater Photography by Sarah Lee
  
  Sarah Lee is a bit of a veteran of the surfing scene – at the ripe old age of 21. She’s been working for surfing blog Alison’s Adventures capturing the life of model and surfer Alison Teal at sea for a while now. Her latest work captures the delicate interplay between man and the sea [...]
• The Uncropped Versions of Iconic Photos
  
  Perspective is everything in photos. The subtle manipulation and cropping of a picture can completely change the impact and message of what’s in the frame. Here are some uncropped (or “unzoomed”) versions of iconic photographs that show more context than their famous cropped counterparts. It’s interesting to see what photographers and photo editors chose to [...]
• Room Portraits by Menno Aden
  
  German photographer Menno Aden has shot a series of Berlin interiors through a camera installed on the ceiling of various rooms. The resulting images lay out space in symmetrical compositions that look like assemblages stripped off any kind of objectivity. Via his website, “The views into private homes and secret retreats bring up associations of [...]
• Africa’s Big Game by Nick Brandt
  
  Nick Brandt used to live life in the fast lane. As a music video director, Brandt worked with such talents as Jewel, Moby, and — most famously — Michael Jackson, but nowadays he spends much of his time just waiting, which means waiting for the right moment to snap a picture. While directing the video [...]
• Listen Here by Nicola Hume
  
  Listen Here is a design concept for a service that would allow locals to share the sounds of their hometown with visitors (video). Locals place special wireless microphones at their favorite spots. Visitors can then listen in at a public kiosk, find the nicest sounding spot on a map, and go find it. The concept [...]
• The man who volunteered for Auschwitz
  
  Captain Witold Pilecki, who had the distinction of being the only known person to smuggle into Auschwitz, so he could report back to the Allies about the conditions there.  They didn’t listen.  They thought he was exaggerating. Since 1989, Poles, too, have been learning about him, thanks to a 2006 movie, The Death of Witold [...]
• Georgian Etchings of the Female Form
  
  A trio of delightful (?) etchings, all copyright of the British Museum, to remind us that fashion has been tampering with the ‘natural shape’ of women for hundreds of years. Rarely has the exaggerated female form been so dramatically illustrated as in the late 1780′s and early 1790′s. In the first etching, entitled Female Whimsicalities, [...]
• The Sound of Prometheus
  
  The SoundWorks Collection talks with the sound team of Director Ridley Scott’s latest science fiction film “Prometheus” including Supervising Sound Editors Mark Stoeckinger and Victor Ennis, Sound Re-recording Mixers Ron Bartlett and Doug Hemphill, Sound Designers Ann Scibelli and Alan Rankin, and Sound Effects Researcher Charlie Campagna. Ridley Scott, director of ‘Alien’ and ‘Blade Runner,’ [...]
• Famous Altered Images
  
  As long as there have been photos there has been touching up. From airbrushing to cropping, pictures of famous people and events have been altered to make them appear differently than reality. Here’s a look at some of the more famous examples of pre-Photoshop photo editing. One of the most famous pictures of President Abraham [...]
• Audience by Mehdi Benkler
  
  Jumping into mud at a festival is a commitment – you’re basically guaranteeing three days of whole-body trench-foot, but, people do it, proving it can be done, and done well. Swiss photographer Mehdi Benkler knows about commitment at festivals, in that he defies the modern world and only uses film, never digital. That’s right, metres [...]
• Shuttles Sail to Their New Homes
  
  After NASA shut down the Space Shuttle Program, the remaining shuttles and replicas were divided among several cities, as museum displays. Over the past few weeks, two shuttles that never flew to space were transported by barge to their new homes. The Enterprise was sailed up the Hudson River to its new position aboard the [...]
• The Coiffure Project by Glenford Nunez
  
  The Coiffure Project by Glenford Nunez is a photo series that examines those who like to keep their hair au naturel. Focusing mainly on Afro-Caribbean women, Nunez highlights the myriad forms the hair on our head takes. Glenford Nunez, founder and photographer of TYP Photography Studio in Baltimore Maryland, brings natural hair to the forefront [...]
• Your Beautiful Eyes by Suren Manvelyan
  
  Have you ever looked at your eyes up close? Well, now you can get closer than ever before. Photographer Suren Manvelyan has captured lots of shots of people’s pupils up close to reveal the startling complexity, and to tap into people’s fears of giant eyeballs following them where ever they go. Click the pic to [...]
• Dirty Dishes
  
  Sometime in 2010 Dirty Dishes had the slightly silly idea of using cheeky pictures from a few decades ago and putting them on dinner plates. And so, having done lots of research, talked to lots of people and received loads of positive feedback, they wondered if it really was so silly after all and Dirty [...]
• Joseph Stalin’s deadly railway to nowhere
  
  In the Russian Arctic lies buried an unfinished railway built by prisoners of Stalin’s gulags. For decades no-one talked about it. But one woman is now telling the story of the thousands who suffered there – and there is talk of bringing back to life the abandoned railway itself. Click the pic to read more.
• Tumblr of the day: Questionableadvice
  
  Advertisements have been shaping societal values for centuries. They offer advice for how to best “fit in” to the mainstream culture. As our values change, not always for the better, it is fun to look back on the messages that people took to heart before our time. The featured Tumblr this week is called QuestionableAdvice [...]
• For Those Who Suffer We Ride
  
  Did you cycle to work this morning? You’ll appreciate this then. This video of cyclists giving their all has been slowed down to 1,000 frames per second to capture the agony, the ecstacy, and the, er, bodily fluids during cycling. The film is part of a charity raising money to help fight Leukaeimia. Here’s some [...]
• Hide and seek Toddler POV
  
  Filmmaker Daniel Brace strapped a GoPro to a helmet on his 2-year-old daughter’s head and proceeded to play a lively game of hide-and-seek. The video really requires no more introduction than that, except maybe to say that if this doesn’t make your heart melt, we don’t know what will. Click the pic to watch the [...]
• A Butterfly’s Eye View by Eiji Watanabe
  
  Japanese artist Eiji Watanabe literally frees thousands of the delicate animals from the constraints of field guides in this project entitled A Butterfly’s Eye View. The artist cuts each butterfly from book illustrations and gives them new life by delicately pinning each one to walls and ceilings. Swarms of all kinds of butterfly species fill [...]
• A city’s secret rivers by Steve Duncan
  
  Self-titled “urban-historian and photographer” Steve Duncan has a powerful fascination with all things subterranean – particularly in cities. “I try to peel back the layers of a city to see what’s underneath,” he says. “From the tops of bridges to the depths of sewer tunnels, these explorations of the urban environment help me puzzle together [...]
• Lumen by Akos Major
  
  It’s June, what better time to release a photo series on snow-capped landscapes. The simplicity of Hungarian photographer Akos Major’s work and more specifically his series Lumen where snow laced landscapes are shot so beautifully it makes us wish for more of those snow-capped spells. I’ve seen these type of landscapes before in photography but [...]
• Swiss Fallout Bunkers by Leo Fabrizio
  
  For over four years, photographer Leo Fabrizio has developed a photographic documentary work on Swiss fortified constructions – bunkers. Each element of these photographs has a relation with Switzerland and particularly the mountain landscape that is an inherent part of its identity. The bunkers are a integral part of a finely developed popular defense military [...]
• Still by Akos Major
  
  Filled with landscapes that would look right at home in a Terrence Malick film, Akos Major’s Still series is the perfect visual antidote to a busy, stress-filled day at work. Gazing at these beautiful, moody images, which he shot at various locations in France, Austria, and Hungary, is almost like stepping into a church or [...]
• A Brief History of Video Games
  
  An abridged history of video games in under three minutes. Made using only sounds, music and video from the video games themselves. Produced for Polygon.com by Reverse Enginears featuring P Sus. Click the pic to watch the vid.
• Finger Paintings by Judith Braun
  
  We’ve all had a bash at using our fingers to paint with – it most of our first year at primary school, if we remember rightly. The second year involved carving shapes into potatoes. But, artist Judith Braun has turned this primitive form of painting into art. Talented painter draws beautiful landscapes and symmetrical artworks [...]
• Photographing Star Trails From Space, At 17,000 MPH
  
  As the ISS circles Earth at roughly 17,000 miles per hour, Flight Engineer Don Pettit takes 30-second exposures with a stock digital camera, then stacks those exposures into single frames that capture 10-15 minutes on the ISS. The rotation is fast enough for long exposures to blur the earth into gilded landing strip beneath a [...]
• Objects & Installations by Liliana Porter
  
  Many artists have jumped on the micro bandwagon. Here at Apowl, we’ve picked up on a few examples of the last few months – see our ideas section for more – but none have been as prolific as Liliana Porter. Her works, featuring tiny figures engaging in seemingly mundane activities, on a micro scale have [...]
• Before and after hospital dental procedure portraits by Andy Brown
  
  With his unlimited access to patients in an exodontia (tooth extraction) unit of the Sheffield Children’s Hospital, Andy Brown has created a series of dual portraits. The first is taken in the waiting room before the procedure, the youngsters’ faces the very definition of bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and then in the recovery room, immediately after [...]
• Deep-fried gadgets by Henry Hargreaves
  
  Deep Fried Gadgets does exactly what the title suggests in that he has literally deep fried some popular gadgets like an iPad, Gameboy, laptop and MP3 player. The photos are bold, detailed and crisp like the greasy wires he’s fried dripping onto paper bags and kitchen towel. It’s a jarring sight to see the golden [...]
• Soviet bus stops by Christopher Herwig
  
  World press photographer and enthusiast of the curiously mundane Christopher Herwig struck gold when he came across the bus stops in parts of the world previously designated as part of the Soviet Union. That term conjures images of terrifying car park-like blocks and grey, intimidating statues of fists – constructions that don’t really bear any [...]
• Tweets from Space
  
  For most people, posting pictures on Twitter is a pretty bland affair. Not for Japanese aeronautical engineer and astronaut Soichi Noguchi. While based on the International Space Station, he has been using his Twitter to share images of his space travels with the rest of us here back on Earth. His pics are going to [...]
• Drinks under the microscope
  
  Photographer and beverage enthusiast William LeGoullon decided to explore his love of the liquids on a microscopic level, and these fascinating photos of your favourite beverages are the result. Pictured above is the beautiful, leaf-like structure of beer, and William’s series includes the other four most consumed beverages- tea, coffee, wine and cola. It’s like [...]
• Famous Objects from Classic Movies
  
  So you think you know your film iconography? Step right up, step right up. One of our favourite digital design guys, Ji Lee, has created a quiz site where you have to guess the film the object derived from. Click the pic to have a go.
• You Are Not Banksy: Street Art Turns Real-Life
  
  If you enjoy Banksy’s work (if not, seek help), then you may be interested in British photographer Nick Stern’s new series, entitled “You Are Not Banksy.” The project sees Stern meticulously recreating a handful of Banksy’s masterpieces using real-life models and photographing their mimicking poses. The results are extraordinary. Stern himself is a fan of [...]
• Video Game Inspired Movie Posters by Ron Guyatt
  
  Games and gaming have steadily been muscling in on the movie market thanks to vast improvements in graphics, gameplay, and of course, budget. Graphic design Ron Guyatt, from Toronto has taken this to the next logical conclusion, with an awesome series of games titles depicted in cinematic posters. All your favourites are there; Tetris, Zelda, [...]
• The Honey Hunters of Nepal
  
  When we think of honey, we don’t think of scaling a cliff with giant bees to get it. These images tell the photographic story, shot by Eric Valli, of the Himalayan Gurung men of Nepal harvesting honey. But this isn’t a story about harvesting honey. The Himalayan honey bee, or Apis dorsal laborious is the [...]
• Inside London’s Brothels by Jasper White
  
  We recently discovered the fantastic photographic work of Jasper White, based in London he works as both an editorial and commercial photographer. In fact, he’s worked with the UK Post Office through the folks at Virgin Mobile, and not hard to see why his work is so heavily in demand, such is his eye of [...]
• 200 Years of Stunning and Strange Presidential Campaign Posters
  
  The intersection of propaganda and creative culture has always been a centerpiece of political communication, from the branding of totalitarian regimes to the design legacy of the Works Progress Administration to Soviet animated propaganda. Now, from The Library of Congress—America’s most centralized collective memory—and Quirk Books comes Presidential Campaign Posters: Two Hundred Years of Election [...]
• Your Facebook Photo Is Shaped by National Culture
  
  Our profile pictures can be very different, but two social scientists noticed some patterns.  Compared with people in, say, Taiwan, we Americans show ourselves looming larger in the frame, and smiling more broadly. This matters, say Chih-Mao Huang of the University of Illinois and Denise Park of the University of Texas at Dallas. They’ve now [...]
• The Wordless Web
  
  Have you ever wondered what the web would look like without any of the text in it? Artist Ji Lee decided to find out by building a website that does just that: gut any webpage of words, leaving you with just the barebones of what makes up a site visually. It’s surprisingly beautiful. “No text [...]
• Gregory Colbert: Ashes and Snow
  
  Canadian filmmaker and photographer Gregory Colbert captures the beautiful, uninhibited relationship between man and wildlife. He took a ten-year hiatus from exhibiting any work to travel the world, exploring the vast and natural landscapes of exotic lands including India, Burma, Sri Lanka, Kenya, Egypt, and Antarctica. On his journey, he discovered and documented the exquisite [...]
• I am a camera
  
  Luke Evans and Josh Lake are in the final first year of the BA Graphic Design & Photography at Kingston University. For their final major project they “wanted to bring our insides out” they say. “So we ate 35mm photographic film slides and let our bodies do the rest.” Both students ate pieces of 35mm [...]
• Japan by Charlie Kirk
  
  Photographer Charlie Kirk has spent a lot of time in Japan capturing the faces and lives of the people who live and work there. His amazing black and white photo series on the islands gives the country a timeless feel while still being unmistakably modern. Click the pic to see more.
• The ‘Freaks’ of Coney Island
  
  Although the first “freak show” at Coney Island opened in 1880, the golden age of the village’s side shows began in 1904 when Samuel W. Gumpertz opened Lilliputia, an entire miniature city scaled for its dwarf and midget inhabitants. Lilliputia became such a popular tourist attraction at Dreamland, Gumpertz spend many years afterwards finding and [...]
• First-person horror game from a two-year-old’s PoV
  
  Krillbrite Studio offers a preview of “Among the Sleep,” a first-person horror game viewed from the point of view of a toddling two-year-old: Among The Sleep invites you into the mind and body of a two year old child. After being put to bed one evening, mysterious things start to happen. Being played in first [...]
• New York City by Ernst Haas, 1960s
  
  Ernst Haas is an Austrian photographer who began shooting colour film in it’s infancy. The photographs posted here were taken in New York state during the late 1950′s and 1960′s. Check out Ernst’s website for a massive and downright impressive collection of film street photography and early Hollywood portraits. Enjoy!
• A Mesmerizing Shantytown Where The Shacks Double As Musical Instruments
  
  The Music Box is the brainchild of Brooklyn street artist Swoon, who collaborated with artists and musicians to turn salvaged materials into a miniature shantytown on the banks of the Mississippi, where each house doubles as a makeshift musical instrument. There is a Singing House in which a harmonic drone synthesizer is tuned to the [...]
• Bill Murray: The ESQ+A
  
                Esquire got some time with one of our favourite actors, and probably everyone who reads this blog, Bill Murray. But unlike most interviews with star focusing on this star quality, Esquire’s man gets behind Murray’s past, his reticence to fame and more. Click the pic to read it [...]
• The Museum of Endangered Sounds
  
  The Museum of Endangered Sounds was created by Brendan Chilcutt. The site archives a few sounds that might have you nostalgically playing them over and over again. There’s everything from the sound of dialing a rotary telephone to the sound of a floppy drive chugging away. If nothing else, listening to the sound of a [...]
• WORDS by Everynone
  
  The folks over at Everynone just released a new addition to their series of shorts in collaboration with NPR & WNYC’s Radiolab — an evocative interpretation of communication which explores the role that language plays in our perception and understanding of the world: WORDS. As a “bonus video” to reflect Radiolab’s recent subject matter of [...]
• A Girl and Her Room: Portraits of Teenage Girls’ Inner Worlds Through Their Bedroom Interiors
  
  In A Girl and Her Room, photographer Rania Matar takes this direction of curiosity a step further and explores the inner lives of teenage girls through the interiors of their bedrooms. From upperclass mansions to displaced person camps to college dorm rooms, and just about every bedroom variety in between, Matar’s tender yet powerful portraits [...]
• Where could it be? Tracking Vintage Album Art in NYC
  
  The birthplace of some of the greatest music of all time, New York City is where many artists got their starts in all different genres of music from jazz to punk rock and everything in between and also the place many of them chose for their album art photos. Real Estate Agent by day, Bob [...]
• Wes Anderson Bingo
  
  Much has been written about director Wes Anderson’s many stylistic signatures. In fact, spotting them has become something of a sport among both fans and detractors. So why not make it an actual game that you can play with friends? We give you Wes Anderson Bingo. How do you play? It’s simpler than Whack-Bat. Just [...]
• Patternity
  
  We’re all for websites lending a helping hand to creatives everywhere – heck, that’s the reason we do what we do! Another such gem lurking in the halls of the t’internet is Patternity. This wonderful website trawls the web and elsewhere looking for visual patterns so help designers, artists, anybody to create new and wonderful [...]
• Retro Sci-fi magazine covers
  
  We just discovered these fantastic retro magazine covers from a popular sci-magazine from the 50s and 1960s. Our favourite postulates the year when man’s physicality no longer counts when it comes to getting the ladies. If you’re wondering when that is, try 2060. Click the pic to see more.
• London 2012: Olympic Park in pictures
  
  The finishing touches to the stadium are taking place now that the final test events at the park are over. Where in the stadium will the cauldron be placed and lit from the torch now travelling the UK? All will become clear when Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony marks the start of the Games on the [...]
• Vintage Automobile crashes
  
  The automobile gave individuals a means of traversing great distances quickly and easily, but that convenience sometimes came at a dangerous price. These photographs hit home just how fragile early cars were, and will make you want to thank an automotive engineer. The Boston Public Library collected these accident photos from the 1920s and 1930s, [...]
• THE WORLD’S LARGEST STOCKPILE OF WOOD
  
  According to Gizmodo, this massive stockpile was the result of a huge category 1 hurricane that hit Sweden and Denmark on January 8, 2005. The name of the hurricane was Gudrun and it blew at sustained speeds of 78.3 mph (126 km/h) and gusts up to 102.5 mph (165 km/h). Not only did this natural [...]
• The Google Dictionary
  
  Created by artists Felix Heyes and Ben West, Google – “a 1240 page behemoth of JPGs, GIFs and PNGs in alphabetical order,” as described by Creative Applications, is the kind of book that every geek should have on his or her coffee table. It’s a compilation of every single Google Image result for every word [...]
• The History of Tattoos
  
  A tattoo: would you? According to recent research the answer is very possibly, yes. One fifth of contemporary British adults have at some point been ‘inked’. Once considered the preserve of a variety of subcultures – criminals, sailors, prostitutes, bikers – tattooing is now mainstream. Samantha Cameron has one (a discreet dolphin below the ankle), [...]
• Sight Without Eyes
  
  Young documentary film maker Scott Svare has made a beautiful short documentary on his friend Stephen Browman about what life is like being blind. This film received the award for the best documentary, and the best video in the festival at the EDU Minnesota high school film fest. It’s really beautiful work. Click the pic [...]
• Happy Birthday, Maru.
  
  Maru, the Japanese celebrity cut has just turned five today – although the video says he’s only turned four. To celebrate, Maru’s secretive owners have posted a highlights reel of the kitteh’s best bits from the past few years. Click the pic to cackle uncontrollably at your screen.
• Vintage ventriloquism portraits were incredibly unnerving
  
  It’s hard for me to imagine a time when people didn’t find ventriloquist dummies to be downright terrifying, and these pictures prove they were the stuff of nightmares well before Rod Serling turned them into cold blooded killers on the Twilight Zone. These old timey portraits of ventriloquists and their dummies come from the Vintage [...]
• Why People Cheat and Lie
  
  We tend to think that people are either honest or dishonest. In the age of Bernie Madoff and Mark McGwire, James Frey and John Edwards, we like to believe that most people are virtuous, but a few bad apples spoil the bunch. If this were true, society might easily remedy its problems with cheating and [...]
• Literary Greats In Their Bathing Suits
  
  Truman Capote (over there on the right), 1949 We don’t know about you, but now that it’s officially summertime, we want to spend as much time in our bathing suits as humanly possible, and so, it seems, did many of our favorite writers. After all, even the moodiest of authors needs a little sunshine now [...]
• London Blackout, February 1944
  
  Today, Piccadilly Circus in London is a never ending hub of activity and light. But during the Second World War, it was a very different place all together. As part of Britain’s defense strategy, London turned its lights out to prevent German bombers from navigating their way round the city via its famous landmarks. These [...]
• Golden Gate Bridge 75th anniversary posters
  
  On May 27 San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge celebrates its 75th anniversary. Working with the Golden Gate National Parks Conservatory, agency Goodby Silverstein & Partners has created a suitably grand poster campaign… The photographs of the bridge that provide the source material for the posters were taken by GSP’s own Rich Silverstein and agency photographer [...]
• 60s Celebrity Photos Found In A Closet
  
  Jack Robinson shot celebrity portraits for Vogue in the 1960s and later took up a career in stained-glass. After he passed in 1997, never-before-seen prints of a forgotten 17-year career in photography were found buried in his closet. Click the pic to see these amazing pictures.
• Mo‘ynaq – Graveyard of Ships in the Desert
  
  Many have visited an abandoned city and wondered what catastrophic event could have caused such an exodus from a metropolis once so evidently thriving. Yet these cities are usually hundreds if not thousands of years old, the everyday clamour and cry of civilization just an echo. Visit Mo’ynaq in Uzbekistan, however, and you can see [...]
• The Perfection of the Paper Clip
  
  The paper clip is something of a fetish object in design circles. Its spare, machined aesthetic and its inexpensive ubiquity landed it a spot in MoMA’s 2004 show Humble Masterpieces. This was a pedestal too high for design critic Michael Bierut, who responded with an essay called “To Hell with the Simple Paper Clip.” He [...]
• A Space Suit Ballet
  
  The Apollo program considered many spacesuit designs, including some covered in plates of hard plastic, before settling on one design. This video by SciFri cleverly edits videos of astronauts testing the range of motion in different hard suit designs so that they appear to dance. Of the suit he wore on the moon, Neil Armstrong [...]
• Andy Samberg’s Harvard Commencement Address
  
  Earlier this week, Saturday Night Live’s Andy Samberg headed to Harvard College, where he jokingly hoped to earn an honorary degree. Instead, the comedian was on campus to deliver a speech and even a kiss to a lucky or unlucky student, depending on how that dude feels about the experience. The speech itself was simply [...]
• Tea Time with Alan Rickman
  
  You think you know intensity? You haven’t seen anything yet until you watch great British actor Alan Rickman get his brew on in slow motion. Prepare to be moved. The film is from the project, Portraits in Dramatic Time by David Michalek. Click the pic to watch the video.
• Urban Oasis by Richard Vantielcke
  
  Richard Vantielcke’s “Urban Oasis” is a series of photographs documenting the fluorescent-lit grocery stores immersed in the darkness of the Parisian night. Speaking about the series, Richard says, “I always enjoyed these grocery stores open late at night, first of all because they often saved the life of a starving photographer, then because they all [...]
• Gonzo: A Graphic Biography of Hunter S. Thompson
  
  The past few years have given us some stellar graphic nonfiction, lending the comic book genre to “grown-up” storytelling ranging from photojournalism to media history to biography. Gonzo: A Graphic Biography of Hunter S. Thompson offers exactly what it says on the tin, and does so brilliantly — an uncommon biography of legendary iconoclastic author [...]
• Street Life by Anna Delany
  
  Dividing her time between New Zealand and New York, Anna Delany experiences the world around her through a lens, documenting the subtleties of everyday life. Her exploration of gritty street life exposes insights into humanity; recording our stories and documenting the seconds of our lives. Her images capture both fleeting moments in time and the [...]
• Jellyfish Lake
  
  Jellyfish, those floating bags of tentacles, have a tendency to bring out an irrational fear of the deep for most people. However, over on Flickr, Kozyndan’s recent expedition to a body of water encircled by land – but still connected to the sea – shows a hapless snorkeler swimming through thousands of jellyfish, seemingly without [...]
• Salt made from tears
  
  We all know that our tears contain high amounts of salt – and other nutrients too,  but that’s not important right now. So it seems completely logical then that the Hoxton Street Monster Store has bottled our tears and is now selling them as a commodity. Salt Made From Tears combines centuries-old craft with the [...]
• Nevada Ghosts: Rare Photos From an A-Bomb Test
  
  In the spring of 1955, as the Cold War intensified and the arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union escalated at a shocking pace, America — as it had many times before — detonated an atomic weapon in the Nevada desert. The test was not especially noteworthy. The weapon’s “yield” was not [...]
• American Civil War Heroes by Manuel Birnbacher
  
  Manuel Birnbacher’s practice is a curious amalgam of smart, contemporary graphic design and strangely compulsive art-like-work (see the throbbing rock on his homepage). A portfolio like this is an open and well-spoken answer to some nasally voiced questions about the parameters of applied design and when it turns into “art” or Art or art. What [...]
• Evolution of Animation Film Posters from 1937 to Present
  
  From Walt Disney’s first ever production (and still one of the most popular) ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs‘ back in 1937, to classics such as ‘Snoopy, Come Home!‘ in the early 1970′s, and of course the modern day whoppers such as ‘How To Train Your Dragon‘ released earlier this year. There’s something here for [...]
• Tumblr of the Day: Pen & Ink
  
  Another gem of a Tumblr today for you Tumblr lovers. Pen & Ink is a wonderful new blog by Rumpus managing editor Isaac Fitzgerald and artist Wendy MacNaughton that tells the stories behind tattoos with the use of beautiful illustrations and hand lettering. User submitted tattoos and stories are currently being accepted for use on [...]
• Blueseed – the offshore startup community
  
  Have you wanted to share your ideas and grow them in an environment not hindered by difficult visa procedures and US immigration? Welcome to Blueseed, Silicon Valleys visa-free offshore startup community. A place for entrepreneurs of any nationality, Blueseed offers an environment where visionaries can collaborate and grow their startup until it receives funding and [...]
• Inside Halden, the most humane prison in the world
  
  Halden prison smells of freshly brewed coffee. It hits you in the workshop areas, lingers in the games rooms and in the communal apartment-style areas where prisoners live together in groups of eight. This much coffee makes you hungry, so a couple of hours after lunch the guards on Unit A (a quiet, separated wing [...]
• The difference between ‘you’re’ and ‘your’
  
  It is said that we are the generation who was never taught grammar, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we’re incapable of learning it. One of the biggest bug bears of YouTube rapper Mac Lethal is the difference between ‘your’ and ‘you’re’. So, he decided to make a song about it. If only school was more [...]
• Shark Riders
  
  If you’ve yet to experience the brilliance of GoPro’s camera range, allow us to be the first to introduce you. To highlight the portable camera’s capabilities, the team hire the world’s greatest adrenaline seekers, strap them with cameras and send them on their merry way. The most recent edition is this stunning underwater footage of [...]
• Tumblr of the day: Ca$hCats
  
  Our Tumblr of the day series is back! Yay! To kick things off we’ve got a bit of a gem for you – Ca$hCats. In true Tumblr of the day form, the name says it all: pictures of kittehs LOLing around with loads of money. Submissions, we’ve been told, are very welcome. Click the pic [...]
• Abandoned Worlds
  
  Over on Buzzfeed, one of the staffers put together a beautiful photo series on abandoned towns and cities across the world, to highlight the release of film, Chernobyl Diaries. We’re less interested in plugging some movie that no one will go and see, and more fascinated by the stunning photos and destinations that have been [...]
• Sign Language
  
  One of our favourite books sitting in Apowl HQ is Margoiles’ “Roadside America”, an ode to the amazing creativity small businesses put into developing street signs to attract customers. We’ve just spotted this beautiful photo series by Shakes The Clown over on Flickr further illustrating our point: these retro signs are a work of art [...]
• Deconstructed Food by Raw Color
  
  Get ready for the most aesthetically delicious, minimalist towers of food you’ve ever seen. Inspired by British artist and Turner Prize winner Martin Creed’s makeover of London’s famous Sketch restaurant, Dutch design duo Raw Color deconstructed and posed some of the menu’s signature items like so: A lobster tail balanced on a coconut balanced on [...]
• Vintage Vegas: Rare Photos of a Desert Boomtown
  
  Of all the major destination towns in the U.S., Las Vegas might be the most perfectly, unashamedly transparent. No other city in North America, after all — and perhaps no other city in the world — has for so long been so identified with one pursuit: namely, the heart-pounding, more-often-than-not-futile hunt for the improbable, near [...]
• Body Landscapes by Spencer Tunick
  
  Since 1994, he has organized over 75 temporary site-specific installations in the United States and abroad. Tunick’s installations encompass dozens, hundreds or thousands of volunteers; and his photographs are records of these events. Click the pic to see more.
• Recreating the clothes from James Bond
  
  To help celebrate the Golden Anniversary of the Bond films, the Barbican in London is hosting an exhibition entitled, “Designing 007: Fifty Years of Bond Style”. However, most of the clothes made for the first actor, Sean Connery, have long disappeared, and so EON, the film’s producers, have approached Anthony Sinclair to request faithful reproductions [...]
• 10 Uninhabited Islands and Why Nobody Lives on Them
  
  There are still many abandoned and uninhabited islands around the world. Why isn’t there anyone living on them? After all, 270 people live on Tristan de Cunha, which is 2430 kilometers from the next inhabited island! The reasons islands remain uninhabited are financial, political, environmental, or religious -or a combination of those reasons. Click the [...]
• A Report from a Distant Planet
  
  After months of negotiation, the Associated Press opened a bureau in North Korea on Jan. 16, making it the first respected Western news organization to have a full-time presence in the Hermit Kingdom. Since that time, the Associated Press (AP) has filed around 20 stories with contributions from its journalists in Pyongyang. In December, AP’s [...]
• The Bodybuilder’s Guide To Getting Rid Of “Computer Back”
  
  Over at The Awl, they’ve all been complaining about “Computer Back” that horrible condition that develops when sat hunched over a laptop for too long. Looking for a remedy, one of their contributors discovered that a body-building forum had the answers – and they’ve presented it all for you over there. Click the pic to [...]
• 8-Bit Radiohead
  
  We’re all fans of anything 8-Bit here at APOWL, so when we heard composer Quinton Song had given two classic Radiohead albums the 8-Bit treatment, we were tres-excited. Click the pic to listen to OK Computer in full, and click here to have a listen to Kid A
• A history of the Cannes Film Festival poster
  
  Since we’re in the midst of the 65th Festival de Cannes whose official poster features the legendary Marilyn Monroe, one of our favourite blogs ifitshipitshere thought it’d be nice to take a look at every single poster to date since the film festival’s inception in 1946. See how the design and typography trends of the [...]
• Life Under the Sea, by David Doubilet
  
  Photographer David Doubilet has compiled an absolutely stunning array of photos highlighting life below the waves. As a child, Doubilet began snorkeling and figured out ways to photograph in water without ruining his camera. Although these initial photographs did not turn out as well as he had probably hoped, he has since mastered his skills [...]
• The Cave People of China
  
  More than 30 million Chinese people live in caves, many of them in Shaanxi province where the Loess plateau, with its distinctive cliffs of yellow, porous soil, makes digging easy and cave dwelling a reasonable option. Each of the province’s caves, yaodong, in Chinese, typically has a long vaulted room dug into the side of [...]
• The Glass Bottom Penthouse
  
  Guadalajara-based studio Hernandez Silva Arquitectos has recently designed the new interior of a penthouse situated on top of a 70′s Mexican colonial building in Guadalajara, Jalisco, México. Its glass floor bathroom set atop an unused 15 storey lift shaft has become an internet sensation. Some commenters said that “this bathroom will literally scare the shit [...]
• Scultped Faces, by Isaac Cordal
  
  Of all the kitchen utensils at your disposal in the kitchen, the sieve wouldn’t have been the first we’d have chosen to create art. But that hasn’t stopped Spanish artist Isaac Cordal from sculptnig faces onto metal cooking strainers, which subsequently cast beautiful, strange, and intriguing shadows. Click the pic to see more.
• Typewriter Exotica
  
  Back in the 1920s, the new class of office worker was getting to grips with the humdrum of life behind a desk. But, there were more risque ways of hacking out your daily correspondence. On How to Be a Retronaut, an invigorating, 1910s-1920s gallery of winsome, partially unclothed lasses posed with typewriters. They’re ganked from [...]
• Private Dreams and Public Nightmares
  
  From 1957, “Private Dreams and Public Nightmares,” an incredibly weird and fantastic BBC sound experiment by writer Frederick Bradnum, pioneering electronic music composer Daphne Oram, and producer Donald McWhinnie. Oram went on to co-found the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, the massively influential sound effects and music studio. From McWhinnie’s narration introducing the piece: This programme is [...]
• A history of Cannes’ most stylish attendees
  
  When you think of the Cannes Film Festival, perhaps you remember that time last year when Ryan Gosling showed up in what can only be described as evening pajamas. Or the year Borat showed up in a Mankini (really, no photo necessary). It’s hit or miss, especially when it comes to men’s wear, as Hollywood’s [...]
• Photo Essay – Eames House, 1950
  
  An extensive photo collection of iconic designers Charles and Ray Eames in their new California home can be found in the LIFE image archives hosted by Google. The photographs above and below were all shot by veteran LIFE magazine photographer Peter Stackpole for a short print feature entitled A Designer’s Home of His Own: Charles [...]
• Bohemian Paris Of To-Day by William Chambers Morrow and Edouard Cucuel
  
  Late 19th century Paris was a swinging place, with nightclubs that promised to send your spirit straight to heaven, leave you lingering in a drunken limbo, or help you sin your way into the depths of hell. These clubs provided theatrical ambiance, astoundingly detailed architecture and a never ending array of alcoholic beverages, and they [...]
• The world’s oldest desert
  
  The Namib is a coastal desert in southern Africa. The name Namib is of Nama origin and means “vast place”. According to the broadest definition, the Namib stretches for more than 2,000 kilometres (1,200 mi) along the Atlantic coasts of Angola, Namibia, and South Africa, extending southward from the Carunjamba River in Angola, through Namibia [...]
• Aerial by Sachigusa Yasuda
  
  The Tokyo-born, New York-based artist seeks out the top story of skyscrapers around the world, captures them, and re-forms them. Although the idea is poetic, the technique is more meticulous; some of the composite photos thread 300 shots together. Yet the result, a seamless kaleidoscopic explosion of skyscrapers, is both dazzling and dizzying. The 360-views [...]
• Canadian Oil Sands
  
  After being refused a mine tour and any type of access to a mining site or equipment, Business Insider rented a plane that photographer Robert Johnson used to see everything the mines on his own. Restricted to flying no lower than 1,000 feet above the ground, he spent nearly two hours leaning out the window [...]
• Battle of the Video Games
  
  Remember Games Master with Dominic Diamond? We think we have the original source of inspiration. The Battle of the Video Games is essentially, watching celebrities play computer games at a time when the height of computer sophistication was Ms Pac-Man. While set on a cheap-looking soundstage, the show was well-funded enough to have three (!) [...]
• Østersøen” by Ödland
  
  We love a good music video here at Apowl, and when we saw Odland’s unbelievably beautiful Ostersoen, we had to put it up on the website. The entire vid is made using stop-animation of intricately designed paper objects. You have to watch it. Click the pic to watch it – we recommend full screen.
• US Military Demonstrates Experimental Flying Platform (1955)
  
  This 1955 newsreel clip from British Pathé shows a demonstration flight of the Hiller Flying Platform, an experimental manned hover craft then in development by the US Army and Navy. The military ultimately ruled the platform impractical and it never entered service. Click the pic to watch the vid.
• Strange Cat Facts Infographic
  
  It was only a matter of time before someone from t’internet came up with this infographic highlighting some of the more unusual aspects of the internet’s favourite pet. Did you know 10 per cent of a cat’s skeleton is in its tail? No? Well, you need to be clicking the pic to take a look [...]
• A Brief History of John Baldessari by Tom Waits
  
  John Baldessari, hailing from National City in San Diego, California, is an internationally acclaimed conceptual artist that has been been practicing from the mid twentieth century to the present. With over 200 solo shows and nearly 1,000 group shows, Baldessari’s work is well known and frequently exhibited to say the least. This wonderful short film [...]
• Gemini – The Outtakes
  
  For any followers of Apowl.com, you’ll know we’re all big fans of space exploration, and photos that ensue. We were delighted to find these outtakes from the Gemini space missions over at 607 Visual – which, in turn belong to Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center offer up a strange, but unique approach to space exploration [...]
• Off the Grid, Americans Living Outside Mainstream Society
  
  There are growing number of people who have decided to live light on the earth to not be a part of problem anymore. Photographer Eric Valli spent the last few years with four such individuals striving for harmony with nature in the most pristine corners of United States. Click the pic to see this beautiful [...]
• Embroidered X-Rays by Matthew Cox
  
  We’re not sure where artist Matthew Cox is getting all of his X-Rays from – can you buy them second hand? – but we do know is, the results of his most recent art project, are strangely alluring. Taking images shot under medical conditions, he adds his own more human touch to the images via [...]
• Phineas Gage’s connectome
  
  Anyone who has studied psychology or neuroscience will be familiar with the incredible case of Phineas Gage, the railroad worker who had a metre-long iron rod propelled straight through his head at high speed in an explosion. Gage famously survived this horrific accident, but underwent dramatic personality changes afterwards. In recent years researchers reconstructed his [...]
• Lego Art – a PBS documentary
  
  LEGO blocks are one of the most beloved toys in the world, playing a role in many a person’s childhood. But for some creators, LEGO has evolved from toy to art form. In this episode, we talk to three LEGO artists who have made beautiful mosaics, amazing stop-motion videos, thoughtful sculptures, and have turned these [...]
• The sounds of Aronofsky
  
  Darren Aronofsky is one of Hollywood’s most visceral directors. His ability to convey emotions along with soundscapes and textures of people going about their daily business can be seen in films like Black Swan and The Wrestler. So it seems to make perfect sense then for Youtuber Kogonada to make a mash up of all [...]
• The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals by Charles Darwin
  
  Charles Darwin liked to freak out his friends—for science. Guests visiting the famed naturalist in 1868 were shown a set of “ghoulish” photos of a guy being prodded in the face with an electrical current. Darwin then asked his guests-cum-guinea pigs to describe the emotion displayed in each photo. Was the subject happy? Sorrowful? Cheeky? [...]
• Vintage New York City
  
  The New York City Municipal Archives just released a database of over 870,000 photos from its collection of more than 2.2 million images of New York throughout the 20th century. Their subjects include daily life, construction, crime, city business, aerial photographs, and more. I spent hours lost in these amazing photos, and gathered this group [...]
• The Lost Marilyn Nudes
  
  It was the assignment of an ambitious young photographer’s dreams: capturing Hollywood’s sexiest star for Look magazine in 1960. Lawrence Schiller’s chemistry with Marilyn Monroe seemed promising, and their professional relationship deepened when he photographed her on the set of her final, never-finished movie, Something’s Got to Give. The breathtaking nude shots from that shoot, [...]
• Vintage photos of exotic pets
  
  Exotic Pets started becoming a common thing for the middle and upper class in the late 1800s to the 1970s. It seems that many people in the entertainment industry had a fascination with exotic animals and had to have one of their own. It makes a bold statement about their character and says something about [...]
• 20th Century Mongolia
  
  When photographer Stefan Passe visited Mongolia in 1913, the country had only recently declared its independence from China in the wake of the collapse of the Qing Dynasty. It would take years for the idea of its autonomy to really take hold; meanwhile, the area came under Soviet protection, and in turn, political influence, before [...]
• Britain’s Most Photogenic Face?
  
  Florence Colgate has been dubbed “Britain’s Most Beautiful Face,” and there’s science backing the claim up. The winner of a Britain-wide beauty contest sponsored by Lorraine Cosmetics, Colgate has mathematically perfect looks, according to statistics reported by the Daily Mail. Not only is the 18-year-old’s visage perfectly symmetrical, but she has the “optimum ratio” between [...]
• Infographic: When The Lights Go Out, The World Eats Junk
  
  This amazing infographic shows 24 hours of eating habits around the world. Built by Massive Health, it’s an aggregation of 7.68 million self-reported food ratings over a five-month period. It’s a simple, effective heat map that shows, while cultures may all have their own version of junk food, we all manage to dig it up [...]
• Vinyl Trick Shots
  
  So, you’ve got all this vinyl lying around, what do you do with it? Well, a bunch of hipsters have come up with a new way of staying entertained the analogue way, vinyl trick shots. The game is simple, use the environment, floor, ceiling, each other to get your vinyl onto the turn table in [...]
• Drug Doubles: What Actors Actually Toke, Smoke and Snort on Camera
  
  Movie sets are drug-free environments, at least in theory. Even if an actor is playing a tie-dye-wearing burnout whose best friend is a honey-bear bong, puffing the real thing is strictly verboten. (We’ll refrain from speculating about what happens in the trailer.) So what do actors actually toke—or snort or shoot or huff—on camera? Over [...]
• Maurice Sendak’s Unreleased Drawings
  
  Over at the Kenneth Tyler’s printmakers, they have obtained a super rare collection of initial drawings of the late Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are. The inventory of rare proofs, collected here as the project’s intaglio ghosts, was signed in 2002, and the prints divided three-ways between Sendak, to the National Gallery of Australia’s [...]
• Mad Men Floor Plan by Brandi Roberts
  
  Over at Fab.com Brandi Roberts has created a detailed floorplan of the hit TV series Mad Men. Here’s what she had to say:  “This is the 22nd floor and features Bert Cooper and Duck Phillips’ offices. Also on this floor is Harry Crane’s second office along with offices for Ken Cosgrove and Sal Romano. This [...]
• Wonderland Arcade, Kansas City, MO – 1968
  
  Rewind back to the late 1960’s, before the arrival of video games with their flashing screenings and wide range of  monotone bleeps & blips and you’ll find that arcade halls were an entirely different proposition. Not a Pac-Man in sight, just literally dozens pinball machines, pop gun stands, photobooths, recording devices, games of skill and [...]
• Animals that saw me by Ed Panar
  
  Roaming the natural and urban world with a camera for over 16 years, often alone, on foot, keeping a low profile, Ed Panar has repeatedly been caught in the act of photography—not by other people, but by a random assortment of familiar animals: cows, cats, frogs, dogs, turtles, deer, geese…you name it. The animal sees [...]
• IN THE U.S. NATIONAL PARKS AT NIGHT BY QT LUONG
  
  The United States has 58 protected areas known as national parks, which are operated by the National Park Service, an agency of the Department of the Interior. National parks must be established by an act of the United States Congress. The first national park, Yellowstone, was signed into law by President Ulysses S. Grant in [...]
• LOOKING UP: PARIS’S SPLENDID CEILINGS
  
  Window-shopping, trying not to crash into fellow pedestrians and dodging the infamous ‘crottes de chien’ means that many tourists in Paris keep their gaze fixed firmly at ground level. They’re missing out. Some of the city’s hidden glories are lurking in plain sight for those willing to crane their necks, from the glorious cupolas in [...]
• Pin Art by Philip Karlberg
  
  Swedish photographer Philip Karlberg used clever lighting and carefully arranged wooden pins to create a series of unique celebrity portraits for Plaza Magazine.  ”A couple of months ago I came up with an idea I have had in mind for years” he says, “I just didn’t know what I could use it for. But then [...]
• The Making of a Leica M9-P ‘Edition Hermes’
  
  German camera maker Leica recently announced it was doing another collaboration with luxury clothing brand Hermes. The two have just released this beautiful behind-the-scenes video of just how much work goes into making a camera worth over £20,000. Click the pic to watch the vid.
• Highline Sensation
  
  Pierre Chauffour decided for this first video experience, he would try highlining. The death defying sport involves tight-rope walking across huge expanses, typically between rocks, and very high up. This isn’t the easiest thing to watch, but it is very beautiful. Click the pic to watch the video.
• How a bicycle is made
  
  The British Council has dug out this lovely video of how a Raleigh bicycle is made. The narrative is based around a father and son looking for a new bike – at a factory, not a shop – and an engineer taking them through it. The clipped English and constant references to “special coatings” is [...]
• Apple’s 1984 Ghostbusters Spoof
  
  In 1984 Apple produced “Blue Busters”, a video spoof of Ghostbusters that goes after IBM (which had the nickname “Big Blue”). The video was shown at Apple’s 1984 worldwide sales staff meeting in Hawaii and features cameos by both Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. The video is from the archives of former Apple employee Craig [...]
• Stanely Kubrick’s Photography work for LIFE Magazine
  
  Before Stanely Kubrick began his foray into the art of making and director movies, he became professional photographer at the early age of 16 when he started to work for LIFE magazine. As you’re about to see from this rare and private series from his own personal photography collection – he always had the eye [...]
• Freezing, by Boryana Katsarova
  
  Bulgarian photographer Boryana Katsarova’s brilliant Freezing series of weather-beaten commuters is a perfect fit for a wet and gloomy May. Taken during a bitter cold snap in her native Sofia, the pictures reveal the blurred faces inside the machines designed to keep us out of the cold. Click the pic to see more.    
• Tokya Hotaru Festival
  
  As part of the recent Tokyo Hotaru Festival, 100,000 illuminated blue LEDs were released in the Sumida River. The massive installation of solar-powered spheres was meant to mimic a swarm of fireflies that twisted and bobbed along the river by moonlight. For those of you worried about pollution or safety, the lights were later caught [...]
• World’s largest image of earth
  
  Eclipsing NASA’s updated “Blue Marble” shot, which is a composite of many satellite images, this image is a single-shot taken from 22,369 miles away by Russian weather satellite Elektro-L No.1. The colors on the 121-megapixel photo are quite different from the ones on NASA’s photos of Earth. To capture the image, the satellite combines visible [...]
• Kim Jong Phil by Phillip Toledano
  
  Phillip Toledano’s Kim John Phil project, replaces dictators including Kim Il Sung, Laurent Kabilla and Saddam Hussein in pre-existing art with images of himself. The project’s aim is to reveal the psychological mechanisms required to pursue something so elusive, so ambiguous. He used that being an artist is a great deal like being a dictator. [...]
• They Live Underwater by Sofie Olsen
  
  Threatened by the onslaught of contemporary Thai culture and devastated by the tsunami of 2004, the Moken people’s lives removed from society and symbiotic with their surroundings, are rapidly changing. Formerly spending up to nine months at sea some are now settled on the Surin islands, in villages provided by the Thai government. The community [...]
• Cafe Neko – the ‘Cat Cafe’
  
  Cat ‘Luca’ sleeps in his basket as a waitress serves some food to customers in Vienna’s first cat cafe May 7, 2012. After three years of negotiations with city officials over hygiene issues, Austria opened its first cat cafe last Friday. ‘Cafe Neko’, “Neko” meaning cat in Japanese, was opened by Vienna resident Takako Ishimitsu, [...]
• How to survive a robot uprising
  
  Forget the zombie apocalypse – the real threat is an imminent Robopocalypse, a robot uprising! That’s why epipheo interviewed Daniel H. Wilson to find out exactly how to survive a robot uprising. Daniel is the world’s foremost authority on the subject and NY Times bestselling author of the book, “Robopocalypse.” Click the pic to watch [...]
• Kirby Chambliss Epic Flight
  
  Today’s full screen essential is pretty bloody amazing. Two time Red Bull Air Race World Champion Kirby Chambliss takes us on an epic flight over the beautiful landscapes of Arizona, with most of the camera work handled by the amazing GoPro Hero2 cameras. Click the pic to go big.
• Adam MCA Yauch Supercut
  
  To commemorate the tragic death of Adam “MCA” Yauch, one of the founding members of The Beastie Boys, YouTuber ahnmin posted a supercut video that features his opening lines from every Beastie Boys song. A fitting tribute. Click the pic to watch.
• Uniform by Herlinde Koelbl
  
  For her latest project, Dutch photographer Herlinde Koelbl took portraits of people from a variety of professions both in and out of uniform. A priest, a clown, a chimney sweep, a geisha — see them donning full occupational ensemble and then dressed down, without pilot badges, chef hats, swinging crucifixes, and all other accessories projecting [...]
• Living Grass Walls by Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey
  
  British artists Heather Ackroyd & Dan Harvey recently transformed a landmark church in South East London by completely covering its interior in a layer of living grass. Known as Dilston Grove, the church-come-art-gallery in Southwark Park, now features a lush green interior that will continue to grow as time goes on. The grassy wallpaper is [...]
• Teenage Wasteland: Japanese Youth in Revolt, 1964
  
  In 1964, LIFE photographer Michael Rougier and correspondent Robert Morse spent time documenting one Japanese generation’s age of revolt, and came away with an astonishingly intimate, frequently unsettling portrait of teenagers hurtling wilfully toward oblivion. In Rougier’s photographs — pictures that seem to breathe, at once, a reckless energy and an acute despair — we [...]
• The Pink Congo by Richard Mosse
  
  What you’re about to see is not an illusion. The innovative (and as we’re about to find out) equally daring photographer Richard Mosse captured these starling images from the war torn territory of the Congo in Africa. Deep in the jungle war zone Mosse opted to use a rare (and now discontinued) military surveillance technique [...]
• How Famous Companies got their names
  
  Over at StockLogos they’ve trawled through the world’s biggest companies to provide you with fascinating explanations of how big name brands got their names. Did you know Jeff Bezos simply wanted his company to begin with the later ‘A’ and so settled on Amazon after looking through the dictionary? Brilliant. Click the pic to see [...]
• A real-life Robinson Crusoe
  
  We’ve just discovered an amazing story of a man who has lived alone for 50 years on a tiny island. 86-year-old Brendon Grimshaw has lived alone on an island he bought in the Seychelles in 1962. In that time he’s dedicate his life to introducing trees and 120 giant tortoises back to the island. Click [...]
• Dark Side of the Lens
  
  This past Friday, Vimeo announced the finalists for its 2012 Awards. This year, the site added an action sports category, with 12 shorts contending to win the award. There are movies representing a variety of sports and locations, from surfing Ireland (“Dark Side of the Lens”) to climbing California (“On Assignment”) to skateboarding Afghanistan (“Skateistan”). [...]
• Google Antipodes
  
  Remember that favourite childhood question: if you could dig a hole so deep in your backyard that you would end up on the other side of the world, where would you be? Australia? China? One Google Maps-based website figures out where you would end up, if such a thing were possible. It turns out that [...]
• Instagram Socialmatic Camera
  
  Is Instagram about to bring out its own hardware? Probably not. This camera is a concept produced by ADR-Studio and combines a Polaroid camera with stunning design both in hardware and software. Click the pic to see more pics “Instagram Socialmatic Camera”.  
• Data + Design Project Chinese Graphic Design from the 1920′s and 1930′s
  
  This gorgeous collection of vintage Chinese graphic designs from the 1920′s and 1930′s comes from a new book Chinese Graphic Design in the Twentieth Century by Scott Minick and Jiao Ping. Lu Xun, who introduced modern woodblock techniques to China, influenced many of the design artists at the time. Click the pic to see more.
• Fetch by Carli Davidson
  
  Award-winning photographer and experienced animal trainer Carli Davidson is back with a brand new series called “Fetch” that explores the movement of dogs. In these fantastically fun photos, Davidson wanted to show how dogs’ “play and prey” instincts emerge when they attempt to fetch objects in mid-air. “It’s amazing to watch the predator come out [...]
• X-Ray Fashion by Nick Veasey
  
  X-Ray photographer Nick Veasey has been snapping the world using an x-ray machine for a few years now. He’s shot flowers, plants, men, machines, and toys. But, his latest work has turned to the world of fashion. Picking iconic and instantly recognisable pieces of clothing, he reveals the emptiness within, while simultaneously highlighting the beauty [...]
• The Mirco world made big
  
  Over at one of our regular faves, MyModernMet, they’ve worked with Canon to highlight the beauty of the tiny world around us with this collection of macro photographer. German photographer Heinz Maier, aka Cymaii, has mastered the technique of capturing the minute details of flowing and splashing liquids, a combination of macro and high speed [...]
• Mugshots from the 1920s
  
  The Historic Houses Trust in Australia has produced a beautiful collection of vintage mugshots of criminals, or those implicated in crime from the 1920s. Many of these intriguing photographs are also accompanied by a description of the person and the crime(s) they have committed. For example, the image above of Mr. William Stanley Moore was [...]
• Gil Elvgren’s vintage pinups
  
  Gil Elvgren was one of the best pin-up artists in the history of American Illustration. From the mid 1930′s through 1972, Elvgren produced over five hundred paintings of beautiful girls and women. Almost all of these works are oil on canvas, and fully developed finished works of art. Elvgren continually surpassed himself, always improving in [...]

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