Triptych #15

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"As One" by Makoto Yabuki

AS ONE from makoto yabuki on Vimeo.

(Thanks: Beautiful/Decay.)

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Attention, audiophiles!

Did you know that Aldous Huxley's dystopian classic "Brave New World" is available on LP, narrated by the author? Neither did I. Better yet, you can download it for free.

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Link-dump #22 (space edition)

Mystery Space "Ribbon" Found at Solar System's Edge

Nuclear-Powered Robot Ship Could Sail Seas of Titan

Stunning photo: Earth and Jupiter in the same shot

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Tube twins

Michael Garrett sighted this example of the "tube-girl" meme at this amazing gallery*.

While a purist might argue that the structure encapsulating the twins is too wide to qualify as a genuine tube, I would argue that the presence of two women justifies the unusual proportions.

*Be sure not to miss the weaponized lobster.

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Tube-girl sighting!

I found this while browsing Golden Age Comic Book Stories' collection of Andre Norton covers.





For more, click here, here and here.

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"The Lady Who Fell to Earth"

Kinga Rajzak stars as a fetching ufonaut in this amusing "Vogue" editorial.

Discerning ufophiles will no doubt note that Rajzak appears to be a garden-variety "Nordic," while fellow models Masha Telna and Lily Cole show every indication of being hybridized "Grays."

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The entomological art of Cornelia Hesse-Honegger

Cornelia Hesse-Honegger, scientific illustrator and science artist, was born in 1944 in Zurich, Switzerland. For 25 years she worked as a scientific illustrator for the scientific department of the Natural History Museum at the University of Zurich. Since the catastrophe of Chernobyl in 1986, she has collected, studied and painted morphologically disturbed insects, which she finds in the fallout areas of Chernobyl as well as near nuclear installations.

See more of Hesse-Honegger's painstaking illustrations here.

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Skeletons in the planetary closet

Chemical Archive

As the world's glaciers melt, they've begun to release an archive of banned industrial substances back into the environment, chemicals that have been locked, frozen, inside the glacial ice for up to thirty years.

[. . .]

The idea of a poisonous atmospheric archive being unintentionally released -- on a global scale -- makes me wonder what sorts of news reports we might read in several thousand years' time, when carbon tombs start to leak their quarantined contents back into the atmosphere. The buried skies of an industrial era, put to pharaonic rest beneath the earth's surface, will make their operatic reappearance in future human history.

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The Knife

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That strange feeling is your head spinning.

Is The Large Hadron Collider Being Sabotaged from the Future?

The quest to observe the Higgs boson has certainly been plagued by its share of troubles, from the cancellation of the Superconducting Supercollider in 1993 to the Large Hadron Collider's streak of technical troubles. In fact, the projects have suffered such bad luck that Holger Bech Nielsen of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto wonder if it isn't bad luck at all, but future influences rippling back to sabotage them. In papers like "Test of Effect From Future in Large Hadron Collider: a Proposal" and "Search for Future Influence From LHC," they put forth the notion that observing the Higgs boson would be such an abhorrent event that the future is actually trying to prevent it from happening.

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Rise of the tumorbots

I like it when bots take on organic traits, and the blob above is as good an example as any I've seen lately -- with the possible exception of this Cronenbergian mass . . .

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Link-dump #21

"UFO halo" in the sky baffles Muscovites

New fears for species extinctions

Are you asleep? Exploring the mind's twilight zone

Ice confirmed on an asteroid

Exquisite Bodies at the Wellcome Collection

Russia plots return to Venus

Can Life Survive Deep Space? Let's Send It There!

Robots & Starships: Unique Playgrounds From The 70's

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I'm snot making this up.

Gross Sea Mucus Blobs on the Rise

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Behind the scenes at the Singularity Summit

You should have seen Kurzweil. That dude can 'bot with the best of them.

(Tip of the hat to Dangerous Minds.)

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I don't have an iPhone . . .

. . . but if I did, there's a fair chance I'd have this app.





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I think it's about time for another dubious UFO video around here.

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You want one, don't you?

Get it here.

(Thanks to @servanti.)

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The existential implications of ufology

Greg Bishop has written a wonderfully thought-provoking piece on the UFO inquiry titled "UFOs As Agents Of Deconstruction." Here's a brief excerpt:

Ostensibly, the UFO question is whether a non-human source is causing sightings, abductions, radar returns and flying saucer religions, but the intricacies of the problem impinge on so many other areas that we redefine them as well. Examples include reported physics of UFO movement, the question of cultural antecedents and perhaps how our society decides what is acceptable as serious study. That last one may be the most deconstructive effect of all. Changes in our mindset, and not any so-called "answers" may be the real reason behind the whole thing, or at least the most meaningful. There may indeed be "knowledge gained without awareness."

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This is more like it.

Trips to Mars in 39 Days

Using traditional chemical rockets, a trip to Mars -- at quickest -- lasts 6 months. But a new rocket tested successfully last week could potentially cut down travel time to the Red Planet to just 39 days. The Ad Astra Rocket Company tested a plasma rocket called the VASIMR VX-200 engine, which ran at 201 kilowatts in a vacuum chamber, passing the 200-kilowatt mark for the first time. "It's the most powerful plasma rocket in the world right now," says Franklin Chang-Diaz, former NASA astronaut and CEO of Ad Astra.

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