baubotanik

An architect and gardener in Nagold, a town south of Stuttgart, finding inspiration in the gentle, patient coaxing of bonsai trees and topiary cultivating, has grown a series of towers that fuse a minimum of man-made construction materials with living branches. These creations won’t be supplanting traditional building for human habitation but could also prove very suitable sanctuaries for other fauna and the extensive research that went into their design will surely inspire others.  You can read more about tree-houses here, here and here.

who ever heard of a snozzberry?

Via Messy Nessy Chic’s latest virtual lost-and-found, we discover that there is a museum that exclusively curates discarded and retrieved shopping lists. The collection is approaching four thousand pieces of ephemera and shows that we are not alone in standing at the check-out line with non-sequitur items, not always being able to retrieve the proper name for something and that penmanship and spelling can be tough things.

bespin cloud city

As part of a brilliant series about colonising the Solar System (responsibly and not in manner that might threaten native life forms), Universe Today looks at some of the proposed platforms for human settlement on Venus, which don’t make our Doppelganger out to be Evil Twin, failed Earth it is in our imaginations. Conditions on the surface are pretty inhospitable, nonetheless, but one clever plan from NASA would see colonies floating in dirigibles high above the Venusian clouds, High Altitude Venus Operational Concept (HAVOC), that would mine the sky for chemical elements. Be sure to check out the whole article and more stories about space exploration at the link up top.

pudding lane

Rather incongruously, Londoners commemorated the anniversary of the Great Fire of 1666 (the three hundred-fiftieth anniversary of this fire that engulfed eighty percent of the city fell over the weekend) by setting alight a wooden model of the seventeenth century skyline—designed by one of the merry arsonists of Burning Man fame.
After the devastation, the mostly timber urban core was rebuilt with the signature grey Portland limestone, but the social and economic disruption must have endured for generations and surely many who lost family and fortune never recovered. The event included a street fair with food and burn treatments from the time.