Photo: Carlos Eguiguren - via Platforma Arquitectura
This minimalist, handrail-less spiral staircase by renowned Chilen architect Cazú Zegers is one of 10 amazing staircases that really take it to the next level.
The post opens our new blog, Homes & Hues, which focuses on featuring the best in architecture, home design and interior design. Take a look - we hope you like our new venture! (Mobile version coming soon!)
More from Homes & Hues:
Sure you love beer, but do you love it enough to, say, run into a burning house to save some?
Meet Walter Serpit, world's biggest beer lover, as reported by WTVM9 in Columbus, Georgia:
Six adults and two young children were inside watching television when the room began filling with smoke. After the children were rescued and everyone made it outside safely, a man who walks with a cane went back in the burning house to retrieve something he left behind.
"I told them to get the kids out and everything, and me myself, being an alcoholic, I was trying to get my beer out," said Walter Serpit, "I went back into the house like a dummy and the door shut on me because this back draft was about to kill me."
Serpit managed to save several cans of beer and he escaped the home without getting burned.
I think I know how he celebrated his survival. Read the whole story (with video clip) over at WTVM - via Arbroath
Here's the cutest depiction of the Water Cycle you'll see today, courtesy of Nick Seluk of The Awkward Yeti.
Water what? You know, the water cycle you learn in elementary school: how the sun heats up and evaporates water in the ocean and seas, then the water condenses into clouds and then rains back to earth, and so on and so on.
You can probably imagine why the water cycle is important, but have you given a thought as to how big this process is? Like, for example, how much water evaporates from the ocean every year anyhow? Try 92 quadrillion gallons. That's 92,000,000,000,000,000.
Image: Maria Lujan - via Behance and indulg
Maria Lujan thinks big in life ... and in death. In this artwork series titled "The Knife," Lujan collaborated with Wolfgang Krug to create a series of playfully gruesome crime scenes featuring a giant knife made from cardboard, complete with red flowing blood and "victims."
Man, artwork just kills me sometimes, though this one looks fun enough that I'd like to take a stab at it.
We are what we eat - via Jorge Tabanera's Behance
page
It needs more bacon!
Spanish illustration Jorge Tabanera of Gatotonto created this playful illustration to remind us that we are what we eat, and that's okay because fried chicken, cheese, bacon, cake and fries and other delicacies look good both in print and on our waistlines. Yum!
Sweet Love - via Jorge Tabanera's Behance page
Take a look at his website or Behance profile for his project details.
Photographer Shane Black had a comfy job, but the dream of traveling across the United States to capture the majestic beauty of America's most beautiful spots had always been in the back of his mind.
One day, Black was joking with his friends about the trip, but the as the idea got more serious, they all committed to leaving their jobs to travel for two months. Black and his friends set off on a 13,000 mile (~20,900 km) journey in a trusty old Dodge Caravan (with no cruise control, no less!) and visited 32 states and 13 national parks.
The result is this breathtaking video clip titled Adventure Is Calling, composed of over 10,000 photographs, that you simply must see in full screen:
LOCATIONS
00:00 - Badlands National Park, South Dakota
00:16 - Yosemite National Park, California
00:26 - Zion National Park, Utah
00:37 - Mount Rainier National Park, Washington
00:44 - Crater Lake National Park, Oregon
01:06 - Monument Valley National Park, Arizona
01:20 - Marysville, Ohio
01:31 - Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming
01:58 - Central Florida
02:03 - Flagstaff, Arizona
02:09 - Bruneau Dunes State Park, Idaho
02:13 - Holbrook, Arizona
02:21 - Marysville, Ohio
02:25 - Monument Valley, Arizona
02:29 - Texas
02:32 - Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming
02:36 - Bandon Beach, Oregon
02:39 - White Sands National Monument, New Mexico
02:43 - Big Sur, California
02:46 - Santa Barbara, California
02:53 - Crater Lake National Park, Oregon
03:26 - Bruneau Dunes State Park, Oregon
03:51 - Zion National Park, Utah
04:03 - Yosemite National Park, California
04:19 - Zion National Park, Utah
04:34 - Monument Valley National Park, Arizona
04:46 - Yosemite National Park, California
Black taught photography workshops during the day and spent the night photographing time-lapses of the gorgeous night's skies. Read more about Black's journey over at National Geographic's StarStruck blog.
Image: Ashlee Rowe
The sting of the venomous bark scorpion is painful, and thus serves as a deterrent to the arachnid's predators. But it seems to have the opposite effect on grasshopper mice - not only did the mice not feel pain, the venom actually works as painkiller to them.
Michigan State University researcher Ashlee Rowe, pointed out that the scorpion's venom can be quite dangerous. "This venom kills other mamals of similar size," Rowe said, "The grasshopper mouse has developed the evolutionary equivalent of martial arts to use the scorpions' greatest strength against them."
To test whether the grasshopper mice felt pain from the toxin, the scientists injected small amounts of scorpion venom or nontoxic saline solution in the mice’s paws. Surprisingly, the mice licked their paws (a typical toxin response) much less when injected with the scorpion toxin than when injected with a nontoxic saline solution.
“This seemed completely ridiculous,” says Harold Zakon, UT Austin professor of neuroscience. “One would think that the venom would at least cause a little more pain than the saline solution. This would mean that perhaps the toxin plays a role as an analgesic. This seemed very far out, but we wanted to test it anyway.”
Rowe and Zakon found that the grasshopper mice has a mutation in its sodium channels in the pain neurons. Instead of signalling pain, binding of the venom to that sodium channel actually blocks the pain neuron.
Watch as the repeated stings of the bark scorpion do not faze the grasshopper mouse one bit:
How did Halloween come into being? And when did we start dressing up and going trick and treating anyhow?
Today I Found Out's newest YouTube clip explains it all:
The practice of wearing costumes or masks during this sort of end of Autumn celebration probably comes from a Celtic New Year’s Samhain tradition.
During Samhain, young men impersonated evil spirits by dressing up in white costumes with blackened faces or masks. It was believed that during the transition from one year to the next, the realms of the living and the dead would overlap, allowing the dead as well as evil spirits to roam the Earth. By dressing up as spirits, hopefully the real evil spirits would leave you alone, rather than rip out your entrails or otherwise harass you.
Watch the clip or go to Today I Found Out on the Origin of Halloween and Trick or Treating - Thanks Daven!
While fatal car crashes are on the decline, fatalities due to accidents involving cell phones - including talking on the phone and texting while driving - are on the rise. In fact, texting while driving is now the leading cause of death for crashes involving teenage drivers.
Forty seven out of 50 states in the United States have now banned texting and driving, with a wide range of fines. Mother Jones magazine has put together a map of how much it will cost you if you got caught, depending on the state. The fines range from $20 for first time offender in California (the fines go up for subsequent offenses) to a whopping $10,000 (and up to a year in prison) in Alaska.
Some states (Montana, Arizona and South Dakota), however, do not have any legislation banning texting and driving, whereas others impose the ban only on new drivers (like Texas, for example). In Florida and Ohio, drivers can be fined for texting but cannot be pulled over unless they break other laws first (like speeding, for example).
John posted about the story of how Ashlee Owens rode her horse to the DMV to get her driver's license back - and that was hard to top, but I think I've found a mode of transportation that's even stranger. Behold, a hipster riding a camel in Södermalm, Sweden.
What can I say, dromedaries rule (even if it's an ad campaign for a comedy show making fun of hipsters. Heck, the camel even has his own Facebook page.)
Your Halloween costume may be cool, but it's not Nicholas Cage cool. Like the actor once said about his movie Face/Off, "Without tooting my own horn - I think it's a masterpiece." We wholeheartedly agree, Nick.
Imgur user RubberDogTurdsGIFS (what a name) uploaded these photos of what is probably one of the strangest Halloween costumes we'll see this year. Behold, the Nicholas Cage themed Morphsuits.
You can't put that bunny of awesomeness back in the box!
More Halloween Costumes over at our Halloween Blog
Image: The Aeroacoustics of a Steam Kettle, The Physics of Fluids
Fresh from solving the mystery of why coffee rings form, physicists were eager to tackle life's next big question - one that has been puzzling scientists for over 100 years - namely, how does the tea kettle whistle?
In a basic sense, the reason why a tea kettle whistle when the water inside it reaches boiling temperatures, is obvious (it's the steam, duh!) But the physical source of the noise and the specific reason for the whistling sound had been unknown - until now.
Cambridge physicists Ross Henrywood and Anurag Agarwal made a series of simplified kettle whistles in a rig, then tested them by forcing air through them at various speeds and recording the sound they made. Here's what they found about how the tea kettle whistles:
Their results showed that, above a particular flow speed, the sound itself is produced by small vortices – regions of swirling flow – which at certain frequencies can produce noise.
As steam comes up the kettle’s spout, it meets a hole at the start of the whistle, which is much narrower than the spout itself. This contracts the flow of steam as it enters the whistle and creates a jet of steam passing through it. The steam jet is naturally unstable, like the jet of water from a garden hose that starts to break into droplets after it has travelled a certain distance. As a result, by the time it reaches the end of the whistle, the jet of steam is no longer a pure column, but slightly disturbed.
These instabilities cannot escape perfectly from the whistle and as they hit the second whistle wall, they form a small pressure pulse. This pulse causes the steam to form vortices as it exits the whistle. These vortices produce sound waves, creating the comforting noise that heralds a forthcoming cup of tea.
Well, that's neat, you may say, but what's the big deal about figuring that out? Henrywood explained that the whistling effect is actually quite common and figuring out how the sound is made is the first step toward getting rid of it. "The effect we have identified can actually happen in all sorts of situations - anything where the structure containing a flow of air is similar to that of a kettle whistle."
"Pipes inside a building are one classic example and similar effects are seen inside damaged vehicle exhaust systems. Once we know where the whistle is coming from, and what’s making it happen, we can potentially get rid of it," he added.
Inspired by the creative works of Adele Enersen, Anna Eftimie and Anne Geddes, freelance artist and mother-of-three Queenie Liao imagines the dream of her child Wengenn. In her album Wengenn in Wonderland, Liao composed more than 100 creative photos of her then-three-month-old son.
Liao's imagination seems boundless - she's dressed up her sleeping son using readily available things in her home - to create the various themes of the photos. Liao said to Bored Panda, "Every day just before Wengenn's nap, I would imagine him being the main character in one of my favorite episodes, and 'paint' a background setting with plain clothes, stuffed animals, and other common household materials, just like how an artist would with her paint brushes."
Liao has published a book in Taiwan titled "sleepy Baby" that provided step-by-step details of how some of her pictures were taken, and is working on the English-version of the book.
A nail shop in Los Angeles is putting the "man" back in manicure. The HAMMER AND NAILS (hah! Get it?), which will open in November 2013, is unlike any other nail salon. The macho man cave decor with big, manly leather chairs should tell you one thing straight: this is a nail shop for guys.
Screenwriter Michael Elliot (who wrote the 2010 romcom Just Write, starring Queen Latifah and Common) got the idea when he went to a nail salon in LA and struck up a conversation with the only other guy there. "It was just clear that we both felt uncomfortable, and we talked about how uncomfortable this is. I asked a lot of my other guy friends about their experiences and realized I wasn’t alone,” Elliot told Cheryl Wischhover of Fashionista. “I have always hated going to get a mani just because of that feeling of walking in the door and it seems like all the women kind of look at you like, ‘What are you doing here?’ and it’s just awful.”
How did the saying go again? Oh, yeah: "I don't always get a mani pedi, but when I do ..."
Elliot has got an ambitious goal: he wanted the average American man to be his customers, and to make manicures for dudes as common as haircuts. "There’s this misconception that only metrosexual men would get a mani or pedi, or only gay men,” Elliot said. “I want to make nail care as common as getting a haircut and I feel like creating the right environment is key to that."
We'll see if he can, ahem, nail it soon. Thanks Travis!
Can't we all just get a long? Illustrator Scott Campbell (AKA Scott C.) of Pyramid Car shows how all of us can come together and live in harmony in his series The Great Showdowns.
"Since the beginning of time, there has been struggle," Campbell wrote in his blog, "The epic clash of being against being. Tyrannosaurus Rex vs. Triceratops. Giant Squid vs. the Sperm Whale. The Circle vs. the Square." So he decided to chronicle some of the greatest confrontations ... the greatest showdowns, in movie history. Except, instead of anger and violence, Scott depicted these encounters with smiles and cuteness.
The Verge asked Scott why he depicted the characters as happy, even though they are antagonists in the movies. Scott replied, "I suppose that brings them all onto the same level no matter how terrifying or sad the conflict in the film actually is. I like [it] when people are feeling pleased. They all look pleased as if they were all enjoying each other's company at a party and reminiscing on great moments together."
And on that note, here are some neat examples of Campbell's The Great Showdowns. See if you recognize the characters and the movies that inspired them:
