Nature’s beauty can originate from the most unlikely places. Take leech cocoons, the sacks in which leeches lay their eggs. They have an incredible solid-foam surface, as the image below shows:

Jerry McNamara’s Day By Day is a short documentary that focuses its lens on artist George Rocha of Iris Skateboards in San Francisco. Rocha takes stacks of old, unrideable skateboard decks, glues them together, grinds ‘em up, and then transforms them into functional objects like furniture, tables, tap handles, and,…

To my eye, the clouds that airplane wings make on takeoff and landing look like some cool ass force field—like, a stealth shroud that envelopes the airplane as its flying around. Reality is less fun though, because the clouds that are rolling over the wings of the airplane are caused by the lift forces that let our…

Sara Preciado made a lovely video that places scenes from La La Land right next to other scenes from musicals and movies that La La Land was obviously referencing. It’s fun to watch (and I say that as a person who doesn’t really get into musicals) because it reminds you of all the peppiness and cheeriness that musical…

There are actually 5 different Hill Valleys in the Back to the Future series. 1985 gets two versions, the one where they start off and the alternate Biff-ruled version, there’s the throwback 1995 one, the awesomely futuristic 2015 version, and the old western 1885. Which one is your favorite? Trick question, it better…

London’s Heathrow Airport is one of the busiest airports in the world, so it’s no surprise that if you look up in the sky during the morning rush, you’ll see a line of airplanes swarming around, patiently waiting to land on its runways. This video from TopFelya shows 30 minutes of morning arrivals and there’s a plane…

Shrek is a good and fun movie for kids because it follows a fun ogre with goofy sidekicks all through Shrek’s journey to find love. Shrek is a great and fantastically funny for adults because it never stops skewering the classic movies we once watched as kids.

Fossils don’t exactly come clean and ready to be displayed in museums. Which, duh, of course. They’re a mess because they’ve been in the ground for thousands and thousands of years. So it’s on the job for fossil preparators like Nathan Ong at the Natural History Museum of Utah to clean up the vertebrae of dinosaurs…

The US one dollar bill is still old school. In fact, it has the oldest design of all US currency being produced today. So that means it doesn’t have the flashy tech, or the colorful hues, or the wild looks that have leaked into the redesigns of the more valuable banknotes. But that doesn’t mean it hasn’t changed. Just…

Here’s a nice little portrait of artist Alan Williams and how he turns random metal parts like the keys of a typewriter or a bicycle pedal into these intricately designed sculptures of animals. It’s definitely cool to see him work and transform recycled man-made machine parts into creatures that exist in nature…

When you win a championship as a professional athlete, you get a ring. But it’s not a normal ring meant for normal humans with normal fingers. No, championship rings are enormously gaudy boulders with, like, a million diamonds set in a very specific way because it represents winning or something. The excess is…

When you can’t rely on a computer to improve (or fake) a movie scene, you gotta improvise. And back in the days of silent films, filmmakers were really, really good at coming up with creative ways to cook up special effects. It was a master class of using specific camera angles, splicing together shots, using glass…

Meet Wilfrid Wood. He’s an artist who specializes in sculpting heads and figures that are never boring because they go far beyond the safe and traditional look many of us are used to seeing. Wood’s sculptures are often wacky, definitely fun, and always wildly expressive, like he’s managed to capture a person’s very…

I always enjoy watching Pranay Patwardhan’s short animation summaries of the previous year because I can’t wait to see what event happens to morph into what animation next. It’s not a comprehensive look back at what happened (I mean, it wraps up in under a minute), and let’s move the heck on already, but you…

Now this is some fun times. The Backyard Scientist strapped a kitchen knife to some homemade sugar rockets, put it on a track sprayed with graphite lubricant so it could murdercut things while zooming down at 150MPH, and then put various sliceable items on the other end to reach their imminent doom (for our infinite…

Wenting Zhu mixed together paint, alcohol, water, soda, and ink remover in weird combinations, stuck them under a microscope, and ended up with awesomely mesmerizing effects. Sometimes it’s beautiful and feels like you’re watching a kaleidoscope take focus, or seeing a star burst in a distant galaxy. Other times it…

It shouldn’t exactly be a surprise that a stump grinder would be so good at, well, grinding away tree stumps, but this Arborwolf Pro 75ss Stump Grinder just freaking inhales them in any situation.