Italian design studio Carnovsky unveiled this concept wallpaper, overprinted with differently-colored complimentary patterns that can be selectively displayed by shining red, green, or blue light on the surface. I think they should add a special super-secret UV-reactive layer, too. [Thanks, Billy Baque!]
In the late 19th century, when biologists and botanists from Harvard were sailing all over the world taking specimens of every living creature they could find and sending them back home for study, a very serious problem arose in the accurate preservation of those specimens. There was no refrigeration and no practical color photography, and fresh plant and animal specimens rapidly decayed into colorless blobs of mush in jars full of alcohol or formalin. So then-director of the Harvard Botanical museum George L. Goodale commissioned German father-and-son glass artists Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka to create photorealistic replicas of fresh specimens in solid glass. The Blaschkas would go on to spend the next 50 years creating more than 3,000 such models, which are still on display at Harvard today. It’s a thing not to be missed in your time on this Earth.
Tobias Muthesius of Paris, France sent in this installation by French interactive designers Lab212 designed for Morocco’s FICAM animation festival. It was hard for me to scrounge up technical details but it looks like an Arduino and XBee were involved.
Aw, man, this is almost too good to be true: Makers Market seller John Doffing, of Philadelphia, PA, has scored a license to reprint every card in Topps’ famous 1962 trading card series Mars Attacks. John’s company, LTL Prints, has a novel full-color print-on-demand process using environmentally friendly inks, at 1440 dpi, on a 10 mil self-adhesive “fabric paper” substrate that can be removed and repositioned over and over again. He’ll sell you any card in the series at your choice of six sizes ranging from one foot to six feet on the long edge, with prices starting at $15. He’s also selling complete sets at a steep discount over the per-print price.
Inspired by a woodpecker, Natalie Duckett made this Alarming Clock to help signal when you should wake up and go to sleep
Based in Sydney, Australia, the talented crafter behind Morphologica is currently finishing up a PhD in neuroscience. Inspired by the beauty of science, offerings include the DNA piece shown above as well as dendrites, neurons, and fancy, scrolling “Geek” and “Nerd” necklaces.
In response to Collin’s DIY iPad stylus video, I-Wei created his own version that’s even simpler to build, using a metal-tipped mechanical lead holder as the conductive barrel (and the same type of conducting foam for the nib). I love that he was able to repurpose his favorite (all-metal) lead holder that he hadn’t used […]
