Space station

If you would have shown this picture to people 50 years ago, they might have imagined it to be one of those promised 21th century space stations encircling some alien planet in deep space. And then you wake up and find out it is an indoor beach in eastern Germany, where tourist are seeking to overcome their autumn melancholia.

See also: Tropical Dome.

Neck space

Since we don’t need to be able to move our heads anymore these days we might as well use the unused space between our head and our shoulders. That’s what designer Francesca Lanzavecchia thought (or she broke her neck recently) and came up with these wonderful solutions to the problem. Order them here

Car tech makes reality look like a game

Tech company Fuijtsu released a new way to look around you while driving a car. Following the old fashioned neck turning and mirroring this tech has cameras around the vehicle to create a game-like live video of you driving the car. Makes me think of that outer-body experience I have from time to time. I wonder what this technology will do to car design since you don’t longer need the whole glass thing. Read more »

Related: Avatar Machine - Need for Speed

Human animal hybrid

This peculiar, half-human creature could be your cousin. No really; it is a sculpture by Patricia Piccinini entitled The Young Family, which, in turn, is part of a larger installation called We Are Family. Piccinini’s sculptures are an daunting visualization of the ongoing fusing between the ‘made’ and the ‘born’.

Shopping for deer

Gary Barwin – unsurprisingly from Canada – created this image in response to this weeks peculiar image. The good man even went on and wrote a little poem with it. Yes dear readers, consider this open season to send us your visual responses to our posts.

Hunters

Created by Banksy. Peculiar image of the week.

See also: Join the Neolithic Revolution.

Google tracks flue spread via sick searchers

This Tuesday, search giant Google released an experimental tool that tracks the intensity and movement of the influenza virus across the United States by monitoring the number of times that people search the Web using terms related to the disease.

The tool, known as Google Flu Trends, makes use of the fact that, before they go to the doctor’s office, many people will search for information about what ails them. Using aggregate data on the number of searches for terms such as “flu” and “flu symptoms,” software engineers from Google and researchers from the Center for Disease Control (CDC) found a strong link between these searches and reports from doctors of flu outbreaks a week to 10 days later.

Via Techreview.

Augmented Reality Girlfriend

Using the special cube, stick, and web camera, ARis will appear and move around in the monitor of your PC. When you touch her by the AR Stick, she shows various reactions. You can also change her clothes and give her some presents.

or have her eaten by Godzilla…

Press [CTRL] [S] to save the environment

The people at Preem.se – the Swedish organization responsible for this advertisement – must think this is the way to promote environmental protection with a younger generation of people (nerds?), for whom the digital realm is their first nature.

Press [CTRL] [S] to save the environment. And when things go utterly wrong, you can always press [CTRL] [Z] to undo your actions. No?

See also: Fake XP grass, Global Warming Ready Campaign, Image of Nature, Hurricane$ Approaching. Thanks Johan.

Soil Lamp

The design of Marieke Staps used free and environment-friendly energy to create light. The metabolism of biological living produces enough electricity to burn the LED. The only thing the lamp needs is mud and water. The mud is spread out into multiple warrants. These warrants also consist of copper and zinc to conduct the electricity. The more warrants there are placed the more power will be produced.