Across the street men carry trees away in their arms, and the last leaves fall from them like water.
Adolf Hitler suffered from uncontrollable flatulence. Intestinal gas, ironically. Against this, his doctor gave him special Anti-Gas pills, and every morning a cocktail containing vitamins, testosterone, amphetamines, liver extracts, laxatives, sedatives, atropine, glucose and opiates - with a bit of cocaine for the eyes. Read the full funny story here.
Maybe a little late, for the problem at the Berghof, but scientists designed a mouse that cannot smell fear anymore - it has to learn it the hard way.
Here you can find the beautiful drawings of Ernst Haeckel. They digitized his monumental book “Kunstformen der Natur” (Artforms of nature). A vast amount of stupendously detailed drawings of plants and animals, some of which you will never have seen before.
A brain like a rainbow. Scientists modied the neurons of mice with genes for fluorescent proteins that originally come from jellyfish. When you now slice the brain, it looks like a Pollock.
When I went to the hairdresser I skimmed through their new-techniques book, which inspired the girl in the painting. But there is more to it: When men see blond women, they get stupider.
Anti-war protesters in Washington and New York are now spied on by small, dragonfly-like robotic insects with cameras.
In India a girl that looks like the god Shiva, with four legs and four arms undergoes surgery, successfully. I was moved by the way she looks on one of the pictures: so deeply puzzled about her condition, her incarnation.
In Georgia the police now looks like Mickey Mouse. Aesthetics in the age of terror part 436. But where is the cat?
Students build a balloon and let it rise almost into space - with great pictures and videos.
The Yellowstone chaldera, a magma reservoir of the size of Los Angeles that sits under the Yellowstone Park, rose 9 inches in the last three years. If it would erupt, it would destroy large parts of the U.S. Imagining such an event triggers our ever escalating desire for catastrophe.
Much in the same way, its always delightful and gratifying to watch an intricate piece of technology dissolve to dust. See this Phantom jet crashing into a wall. In a crash like this ashes turns to ashes. A way of humanizing technology.
And over our heads comet 17P/Holmes expands, becomes the largest object in the solar system, and glimmers faintly in the night sky (see Hubble images here) .
Garrett Lisi, an impoverished surfer dude comes up with an “Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything”(link to the paper). A theory that attempts to unify quantum mechanics and relativity. The beauty of it lies in the fact that it is based on E8 an intricate eight-dimensional mathematical pattern that’s only fully understood by mathematicians this year. If written out in print, it would cover an area the size of Manhattan.
All his life Arnold Odermatt was a police photographer who documented traffic accidents in the Swiss canton of Niwalden. His delicately composed photos have a wonderful calmness and unique atmosphere. Some crashed cars look like they were kissing, or a wounded doll. The tenderness of crash. Only after his retirement his photos were discovered by the art world.
And finally, some beautiful photographs of deserted Chinese factories.
And here is the video of the painting with a bit of music I did the other day.