This week’s gallery features underground park concepts in the Lower East Side, stolen drones in Iran, a portrait made of memories, a possible Earth 2.0, and more. (More, in this case, includes the highly-trained martial arts gecko you see above.)
Click to launch the gallery.
Future of Delancey
After the wild success of Manhattan’s High Line park, more ideas of how to use New York City’s noble, unused or decrepit spaces have popped up. This is one of our favorites: beneath the Lower East Side lies an unused trolley station, which Dan Barasch and James Ramsey propose could be the site of a completely crazy futuristic underground park. Read more at Treehugger.
Kung Fu Gecko
Indonesian photographer Shikhei Goh made an entire series about geckos (his own pets–these are not professionals, people) in badass poses. Check out the gallery over at io9.
Asteroid or Planet?
NASA’s Dawn spacecraft captured this shot of the interior of the asteroid Vesta. It’s interesting to us because its composition is more like a planet than any asteroid we’ve ever seen. The coloration is, of course, artificial, showing the different layers of rock. Read more here.
Drone Construction Workers
Why not build buildings with drones? These little guys were programmed to build a tower out of styrofoam blocks. If the idea can scale up, it could completely change architecture and construction. Read more at FRAC Centre.
All the Crashes
This map shows the frequency of auto crashes throughout the UK, from 1999 to 2010–more than two million crashes. Read more here.
Wildest Bridge
This bridge concept is intended to connect two parts of Wuxi Xidong Park in Jiangsu province, China. Underneath, it’d create a sort of artificial island, from which visitors would be able to get views of the entire area.
Grand Central Apple
On the morning of December 9th, a very ordinary thing happened: A new store in an international consumer electronics retail chain opened. There were no newly announced products to sell, no special deals, no giveaways. And yet, when that store is the new Apple store in New York’s Grand Central Station, people go freaking nuts. Look at the hundreds of red-shirted Apple employees up on the mezzanine! Imagine how much you would hate your life if you were just trying to commute into Manhattan this morning! Good lord, people.
Long Jump
Here’s a terrifying thought for New Yorkers or other residents of roach-infested areas. Saltoblattella montistabularis, a South African variety of cockroach, also goes by another name: the leaproach. That’s because it can jump about 48 times its own body length. (Pause for shudder.) Check out a brief video of its grasshopper-like leap here.
Stolen Beast
This might not seem like such an amazing image. It’s the US’s RQ-170 drone, sure. A very impressive stealth drone, nicknamed “The Beast of Kandahar.” But we’ve seen better pictures. Only, whoops: this one’s in Iran. Because the Iranians somehow hacked the thing out of the air, and then bragged about it at a press conference. Read more here.
Earth 2.0?
Earlier this week, the Kepler team confirmed the finding of a whopping 1,094 new worlds, including the first Earth-like planet in a habitable zone, named Kepler-22b. We’ve only got a vague idea of what it might look like–it’s about 600 light-years away–but science artist Ron Miller did up some concepts showing what it might look like. See more of his work here.
Videoportrait
A traditional portrait tries to capture more than the single frame of its subject at that time and place, but that’s a pretty daunting task. Sergio Albiac, a Spanish artist, came up with a way to “paint” by using videos of his life–painting with his memories. The end product is actually a video, which you should watch; it’s oddly mesmerizing.
