Artist Michael Johansson created a series of life-size, assembly-required objects inspired by the injection-molded toys of the past. Michael Johansson via Design TAXI
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Jerry Gretzinger has spent 50 years making a mosaic of the world with individual tiles. He’s put in 2,600 panels, and the mosaic is more than 2,000 square feet. It’ll be to scale in no time at this rate. You can see a documentary about the process here.

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Emojify is an app that turns your photos into the iPhone expression-shorthand Emoji. It is not what you’d call a “useful” app–unless, that is, you want to dramatically improve classic photos! Like this, once it stops giving you a headache.

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Guerilla street artists Bosso fakata have been wrapping objects in Berlin with plastic as a political commentary about waste. Also about the dangers of leaving your car in public.

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Could a Roomba-like wall-crawling robot be the next Picasso? I guess so! Maybe. No.

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What if the subway was more like a beach? Fun, right? Artist Lori Nix created this diorama to explore further. Ha, just kidding, it’s a haunting look at the world after the apocalypse.

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To keep things light-hearted, here is more apocalypse fare: an idea for a plant-backpack from designer Chiu Chih. Don’t think this is really supposed to work; it’s just symbolic. But, hey, whatever gives you an edge when you’re struggling against other survivors for precious resources.

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In July, NASA asked people to submit photos of themselves waving on the same day the Cassini spacecraft took snapshots of Earth. Recently they collaged some of the photos into this. (Gah, should’ve worn blue.)

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Photographers Carlos Ayesta and Guillaume Bression took photos from inside Japan’s Fukushima prefecture, which was devastated by 2011’s nuclear disaster. The surreal images show businesspeople in bubbles, and objects wrapped in plastic. See more here.

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Culinary scientist Cesar Vega showed that, contrary to popular belief, an egg’s texture isn’t just a function of time, but heat–cooking at 140°F for 300 minutes will produce the same egg as one cooked at 149°F for 15 minutes. Vega used the yolk-filled rheometer you see here to test the texture precisely. You can check out Vega’s work in (the Popular Science approved!) “The Kitchen As Laboratory,” now available for pre-order in paperback.
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