Hungarian photographer Balint Alovits scoured the city of Budapest for amazing spiraling staircases for his photo series "Time Machine."

"The inspiration came from my addiction to architecture and abstract forms," explained Alovits to Dezeen. "I've always been fascinated by modern architecture, and also loved the geometrical shapes of art deco and Bauhaus buildings."

Alovits plays with the common representation of time as a never-ending spiral and for this reason named the collection Time Machine.

After forest wildfires in the Maule Region of central Chile had stripped much of the land of vegetation, the task of re-seeding the land fell on a brave trio of border collies.

The dogs were outfitted with special backpacks filled with seeds. When they run around, the backpacks released native seed.

Photo: Martin Bernetti

Heinz (yes, the ketchup company) once ventured into the beverage market in the 1970s. They decided to make a fruit drink and called it "Concentrated Help Fruit Drink."

Don't ask me why.

American artist Lee Downey carved a 46.5-pound skull out of an iron Gibeon meteorite that fell to earth in Namibia, Africa.

Downey said:

Of any material I could think of to fashion an accurate human skull out of, this Gibeon meteorite best embodies the "mystery" most acutely. I call him The Traveler... a true time traveler. Coming in from the asteroid belt, 4 billion years old and counting...crossing over and crystallizing in the pure vacuum of space...then crashing onto the face of earth...collected by tribesmen in Africa, making its way to America, continuing on to Asia...to be meticulously cared for, worked over, lavishly transformed by human hands....into a thing of exquisitely rare beauty.... the architecturally "perfect" form of the brain vessel.

A symbol of death, of eternity, of immortality, of demise and rebirth. This guy has made an amazing journey and it's composed of pure natural symmetry. Nothing neutral about this artifact, it carries huge gravity and spending time with it is oddly humbling."

Photographer Darren Whiteside/Reuters went to the Indonesian island of Java to document a three-day festival where extreme Vespa modders show off their latest creations. Many of them look like they belong in a Mad Max movie!

The Guardians has the story - via Kottke

Smart (and very eco-conscious): picking up trash in the canals of Amsterdam

Smarter: Get someone else to do it for you.

GENIUS: ... and make them pay to do it!

PlasticWhale of The Netherlands organizes "plastic fishing trips" where paying tourists get to collect plastic trash from the canals.

This video clip is 26 years in the making.

The European Southern Observatory (ESO) compiled 26 years of astronomy data from ESO's telescopes to create this amazing video clip.

This zoom video sequence starts with a broad view of the Milky Way. We then dive into the dusty central region to take a much closer look. There lurks a 4-million solar mass black hole, surrounded by a swarm of stars orbiting rapidly. We first see the stars in motion, thanks to 26 years of data from ESO's telescopes. We then see an even closer view of one of the stars, known as S2, passing very close to the black hole in May 2018. The final part shows a simulation of the motions of the stars.

Every year, students from the Musashino Art University in Tokyo and the city of Niigata have collaborated to create fantastic large sculptures made from rice straw. Check out the fantastic photos over at the Wara Art Facebook page. Don't miss the build photos.

Australian software engineer Sarah Spencer hacked an old knitting machine to knit a giant star map out of wool:

Spencer unveiled the fruits of her labors — "Stargazing: a knitted tapestry." The piece features all 88 constellations as seen from Earth, as well as the equatorial line with the zodiac constellations running along it, stars scaled according to their real-life brightness, the Milky Way galaxy, the sun, Earth's moon and all of the planets within our solar system. Spencer made sure to put the planets, sun and moon in specific, strategic positions so that the heavenly bodies indicate a specific date in time.

Jehv Maravilla and Christian Toledo saw a blank wall at their local McDonald's and decided to make a fake poster of themselves and hung it up. Nobody from the restaurant noticed for almost two months!

Good Show Sir is a terrific website that collects terrible sci-fi and fantasy book covers. They've got a few simple rules:

Some of the things to look for in a cover:

1. So much going on it burns your eyes. We want covers with elves, dragons, space ships and large busty women, all on the same glorious cover!

2. Terrible art. Awful… just awful. Crazed monsters that are congenital disorders with no skeletal support, brush strokes that display a hilariously misinformed understanding of anatomical proportions, unreadable and/or multiple horrible fonts, magical light orbs that lack even the most basic digital imaging techniques. That sort of thing.

3. Epic things happening. Look for people doing crazy things, such as holding a staff to a dragons eye, firing a laser pistol with one hand whilst doing stunts on a a hover bike with the other, or summoning interdimensional beasts whilst surrounded by improbably-clad warrior priestesses who are fighting off invisible fairies on top of a mountain made of crystal and sand.

I dare say they succeed! Hours and hours of browsing over at Good Show Sir. You've been warned.

Meet the a.i.r. sofa, an inflatable sofa that IKEA's global design head Marcus Engman described as "one of the biggest mistakes in IKEA's history. An amazing fiasco."

It's such an amazing failure that IKEA actually created the product twice in its history, decades apart:

That idea became the a.i.r. sofa. It solved a conundrum for the company which prided itself on its flat pack products. But the complex design of sofas and chairs meant most were sold to customers full size.

So why not an inflatable sofa, Ikea thought, that would be sold flat and then inflated at home? Once blown up, a material cover could be draped over it to make it seem just like an average sofa.

Find out why the a.i.r. sofa turned out to be a horrible product over at this article by Benedict Brock of News.com

The next time your mom or dad complains that you're being lazy, just tell 'em that it's a good evolutionary strategy.

Turns out, creatures with high basal metabolic rate have higher likelihood of death:

Species of mollusks that are now extinct had higher metabolic rates than the species that exist today, scientists announced in a paper published this week in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Metabolic rates are the amount of energy that organisms need to carry out their daily lives. Luke Strotz, a paleontologist and post-doctoral researcher at the University of Kansas who is lead author of the paper, says that a high basal metabolic rate has already been shown to lead to a higher likelihood of death at the individual level.

Image: Neogene Atlas of Ancient Life / University of Kansas

Taste the rainbow? Dead unicorn cake by naturally.jo looks deliciously wrong!