Sci art

This concept art from the Shuttle Program’s early days depicts two spacecraft and what looks like an early vision of an orbital outpost. This illustration comes from the archives of the San Diego Air & Space Museum, where you’ll find lots of “ideas that never flew…but might have led to other successful aircraft!” Contact the…

The Art on These Endangered Species Stamps Is Incredible

Since 1993, the United Nations has worked to increase global awareness of endangered species through a special set of commemorative postal stamps released each year. This year’s set was released today, and features an array of 12 beautifully drawn endangered marine animals. The US stamps include: Hippocampus denise (Denise’s pygmy seahorse) Rhincodon typus (Whale shark)…

A Sculpture Shows a City’s Mood By Translating Tweets Into Colored Goo

Monolitt is an Oslo art exhibit created by Norwegian artists Syver Lauritzsen and Eirik Haugen Murvoll. The waist-high object identifies the emotions in tweets, matches the emotion to a predetermined color, and oozes that color in paint out of the top. It’s like city-wide techno-mood ring. Only cooler than that description. In the artists’ video,…

This Is How You Make Art from Microscopic Forms

The arrangement of diatoms into tiny works of art goes back to the Victorian era, but Klaus Kemp has made that old form into a more complex modern one. And now Matthew Killip has made a short film with Kemp showing how he does it. Diatoms are single-cell algae with hard shells that make the…

5 X-Rays That Reveal The Craziest Things Pets Have Ever Swallowed

Veterinarians see some crazy things come through their office doors. But perhaps the most entertaining – at least in cases where the animals come out just fine – show up on x-rays. Owners bring their pets in because they’re acting weird or not eating, and then you find out that Fluffy swallowed an alien. Whoops.…

Vintage Shark Illustrations Are Jaw-Droppingly Gorgeous

The Biodiversity Heritage Library works to make biodiversity-related literature freely available to the world. They’ve got thousands of image libraries to peruse, but one of the richest is their collection of shark illustrations, with more than 370 pages. Here are a few of our favorites. We’re not quite certain just what species some of these…

Photographer Celebrates 40 Years of Making Dioramas Seem Real

Photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto first visited the American Museum of Natural History in 1974 and has returned four times since to add to his “Dioramas” series of photos. With his skill, Sugimoto makes the exhibits appear like nature shots. On his website, Sugimoto explains how he was first inspired by AMNH’s animal displays: Upon first arriving…

Artist Proves that Sound Waves Are Everywhere

There are all kinds of ways to make art of sound waves, but Anna Marineko takes them to a whole new level. In her Nature Sound Form Wave series, the artist shows the visual blending into the audio by juxtaposing the waves against photos and matching the color palettes exactly. [via My Modern Met] http://www.mymodernmet.com/profiles/blogs/anna-marinenko-nature-sound-form-wave

Behold The Most Charmingly Inaccurate Infographic on Sloths

Not a single thing on this graphic is true, but that actually makes it somehow more charming and awesome. Cory Loftis is a Visual Development Artist at Walt Disney Animation Studios, but in his free time he draws other things and posts them on his most excellent tumblr. There are plenty more delightful drawings to…

What Does A Drop Of Water Look Like After Being Shot With A Bullet?

Dutch photographer Alexander Augusteijn uses a high-speed camera to capture the instant after a bullet slices a drop of water, showing the physical break between the top of the droplet and the rest. The challenge of Augusteijn’s photographs is not just in properly lighting and capturing the image; it’s also in ensuring the bullet meets…

Vintage Public Health Posters Show Just How Creepy The 20th Century Was

Last week, we marveled at the unnerving Chinese health posters from 1933 that showed the human body as a kind of bizarre factory. But those aren’t the only weird and somewhat horrifying health posters out there. Here are a dozen or so more vintage public health posters. Posters by Pearl Turner for Michigan Department of…

Retro Educational Posters Reimagine The Human Body As A Factory

This 1933 Chinese health education poster analogizes the human body to an industrial factory, one in a series of images designed to help viewers better understand their own physiology. The US National Library of Medicine has a great collection of these strikingly illustrated posters, as well as a second set of posters from 1951. Even…

Know Your (Blue-Footed, Red-Footed, And Masked) Boobies

If you are going to tell jokes about the members of the Sulidae family of birds known as boobies, you should at least be able to tell them apart. After ornithological artist Jada Fitch shared her Tits of the World poster, many of you clamored for a second print featuring these diving birds. Fitch has…

A South American sea nettle floats ethereally in this captivating image by photographer Randy Wilder. It is one of the many species featured in the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s ongoing “Jellies Experience” exhibit. “We grew [the sea nettles] behind the scenes from tiny ephyrae (babies),” writes the aquarium on its tumblr, “and are the first aquarium…

What Do You See In This Quantum Mechanics Class’ Chalkboard?

According to artist Alejandro Guijarro and his Momentum project, what you end up doing is just seeing a graphic of line and color. But some people are definitely going to use what knowledge they have to try to figure out the subject of the lecture that day. Guijarro spent three years going into classrooms right…

Cross-Stitched Microbes Let You Hang Your Favorite Germs on the Wall

If you admire the spiral of syphilis or the spidery shape of the T-4 bacteriophage, then these cross-stitched microbes are looking for a spot on your living room wall. Alicia Watkins has dozens of embroidered germs—from gangrene to gonorrhea—for sale at her Etsy shop so that you can proudly display your favorite viruses and bacteria.…

An epic look at early humans

We love this stately museum poster. These early humans look like they could be our ancestors Homo erectus, or maybe Homo habilis. It’s a reminder that our species is always changing, but one thing stays the same: We always look awesome when posed with wild elephants. Paleoartist Mauricio Antón writes that the images are intended…

Artist makes gorgeous sculptures in collaboration with bees

Winnipeg artist Aganetha Dyck is fascinated by the power of small animals, and over a decade ago she set out to create art with the help of a bee hive. Working with bee keepers, she set up a special apiary where bees could build their honeycombs on top of dolls and other objects. The results…

A portrait of Steve Jobs made entirely out of e-waste

It seems fitting that the man whose company produced tons of e-waste should be immortalized in this way. San Francisco collage artist Jason Mecier built this incredible portrait of Apple founder Steve Jobs out of 20 pounds of discarded phones, memory sticks, boards, and more. Apple products like iPhones and iPods make up an enormous…

Forensic artist “reconstructs” face of Crystal Head skull vodka bottles

If the Crystal Head Vodka bottles were modeled on a real skull, what would the person have looked like when he or she was alive? A forensic artist has used facial reconstruction techniques to sculpt a face that could belong to the vodka bottle. Nigel Cockerton, who received a Masters in Forensic and Medical Art…