Pfft. Ink. How mundane, right? Thankfully design studio Today Designers had the innovative/totally bizarre idea to collect 20 sailors’ tales and print them in squid ink. “It smells, stinks and reeks,” the designers told Dezeen. “We are talking about a penetrating fishy smell here, caused by the squid ink with which the book is printed.” Awesome.
Small World
Another year, another wonderful Nikon Small World Competition, showcasing the best in microscopic photography. This year’s winner was Wim van Egmond, who took top honors for this shot of the plankton Chaetoceros debilis.
Ready For A Close-Up
Speaking of great up-close photography, a new book called Animal Earth collects some of the finest examples of insect and animal pics. Here’s a very nice-looking cynipid wasp from Tomas Rak.
Kinkade Wars
Have you ever wondered what would happen if Star Wars characters invaded the world of pastoral painter Thomas Kinkade? Probably not, because that would be an odd thing to wonder about. Yet here we are.
Skull Chapel
Yep, this is a chapel made out of bones. Thousands of real human bones from wars and plagues. It is in Poland, if you must know how to go visit or something.
Test Flight
NASA Instagrammed this shot of a balloon carrying instruments for the HyperSpectral Imager for Climate Science, which will eventually give researchers a better understanding of climate change. The balloon carried the instruments 122,000 feet in the air, well beyond the atmosphere. Testing up there gives scientists an idea of how the instruments will behave when they’re even higher above the earth.
Dragon BMW
This dragonized BMW showed up at the China Import and Export Fair and, understandably, turned a few heads. Apparently that white part is yak bone.
Paper Dissections
Artist Lisa Nilsson makes totally insane “anatomical cross-sections” like this–except, phew, out of paper. Check out more at Co.Design.
Robot Urns
In the future, will we visit a gigantic machine that delivers an urn of our loved one when we call their name? Well, that’s the idea Austrian designers Marta Piaseczynska and Rangel Karaivanov came up with.
