The photographs by the Russian artist Anton Jankovoy are as diverse as his travels are many. Fascinated by nature, especially in Asia, it delivers stunning portraits and landscapes with sometimes surreal colors. Magnificent work to be discovered in images in the following.
“The F-type is as quick as the Mud River is brown. Zero to 60 takes 3.6 seconds. With no wheelspin from the 295/30ZR-20 Pirelli P Zeros, acceleration is as forceful as floodwater.”
via: Car and Driver
You probably know that you can’t tickle yourself. And although you might be able to tickle a total stranger, your brain also strongly discourages you from doing something so socially awkward. These facts offer insight into tickling’s evolutionary purpose, says Robert R. Provine, a neuroscientist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and the author of the book Laughter: A Scientific Investigation. Tickling, he says, is partly a mechanism for social bonding between close companions and helps forge relationships between family members and friends.
Laughter in response to tickling kicks in during the first few months of life. “It’s one of the first forms of communication between babies and their caregivers,” Provine says. Parents learn to tickle a baby only as long as she laughs in response. When the baby starts fussing instead, they stop. The face-to-face activity also opens the door for other interactions.
Children enthusiastically tickle one another, which some scientists say not only inspires peer bonding but might help hone reflexes and self- defense skills. In 1984 psychiatrist Donald Black of the University of Iowa noted that many ticklish parts of the body, such as the neck and the ribs, are also the most vulnerable in combat. He inferred that children learn to protect those parts during tickle fights, a relatively safe activity.
Tickling while horsing around may have also given rise to laughter itself. “The ‘ha ha’ of human laughter almost certainly evolved from the ‘pant pant’ of rough-and-tumble human play,” says Provine, who bases that conclusion on observations of panting among tickle-battling apes such as chimpanzees and orangutans.
In adulthood, tickling trails off around the age of 40. At that point, the fun stops; for reasons unknown, tickling seems to be mainly for the young.
This article originally appeared in the January 2011 issue of Popular Science magazine.
via: Popular Science
Each year we experience our normal seasons of hot and cold. Winter brings snow to many of us, and in summer, often blazing hot temperatures and beach days. John Nelson has given us a new vision of this familiar cycle in the form of a simple GIF… but the result is mesmerizing for its profound demonstration of these cycles upon our lives and the world processes it clearly illustrates.
Nelson, who is more often associated with extremely complex visualizations of weather patterns, used cloudless imagery from the NASA Visible Earth team. He took their flat graphics showing each month of the year and wrapped them around a spherical globe. Then he added some effects like coloration, atmospheric haze, and month information… and that’s about it.
What we see as a result, is seriously hypnotizing. The Earth’s seasonal heartbeat on display as never before. The northern hemisphere’s massive snowpack as it rolls into winter and the vegetation of the world drying and greening as the seasons pass.
Nelson calls his animation The Breathing Earth, and it’s a very apt title. Each year as these cycles progress the CO2 levels of the Earth similarly go up and down. This is because the Earth’s vegetation is not equally influenced by winter and summer cycles happening simultaneously in the northern and southern hemispheres. As a result, the north’s vegetation filters far more CO2 and produces far more oxygen in the summer, and during the long, snowy winter this is significantly less. In contrast, the southern hemisphere has little snow, many thick jungles, and provides much of the world’s valuable air filtration. This can be clearly seen on CO2 level graphs.
via: Visual News
Artist Michael Aaron Williams has been working on a beautiful series of portraits painted with coffee on found sheets of used ledger paper that dates back to the 1920s and 30s. This is just a small collection of his current work, you can see more in this gallery on Facebook.
via: Colossal
Last week, New Zealand’s Civil Aviation Authority granted the company permission to conduct piloted tests of the one-person flying machine. Before this, most tests have been done with dummies via remote control.
via: NPR
In his project, “Until the Kingdom Comes,” Simen Johan creates and photographs animals living in harsh, confused, and climate-disrupted landscapes. His work, on display through Feb. 17 at David Winton Bell Gallery, in Providence, R.I., is a magnificent display of these shifting environments.*
Johan’s skill lies in creating images of a perhaps-not-so-mythical future world where creatures are depicted in the wrong environment, and beasts that shouldn’t coexist do just that. These tremendous images certainly have a footing in the tradition of naturalists such as John James Audubon. Johan’s work, which has contemporary counterparts in artists like Walton Ford, presents an alternative to the traditional view of the natural world in which the influence of humanity’s excesses is sensed, if not immediately seen.
Johan, who began his continuing project in 2006, explained his process via email. He crafts his fantastical images mostly by photographing “animals that live in zoos, on farms, or on nature preserves,” but he occasionally relies on creatures that have been taxidermied in museum dioramas or found as road kill. “I then situate them in settings that I have photographed elsewhere.” He prefers photographing live animals and says, “When you create images as large as I do, up to 10 feet, you’re limited to what you can do digitally. Taxidermy looks dead and if you tweak too much, you’ll end up with Michael Jackson.”
Talking about his project, Johan writes, “When working on an image, I strive to create tension and confuse the boundaries between opposing forces, such as the familiar and the otherworldly, the natural and the artificial, the amusing and the eerie. I often feel like I am attempting to reconcile the irreconcilable as I explore the paradoxical nature of existence, its simultaneous abundance of beauty and horror. For example, in one of my photographs, two moose in combat are set upon by a flock of tropical parakeets behaving at once ravenous and playful. The overlapping ecosystems—northern moose, tropical birds, and signs of human civilization in the desert valley below—evoke a world where human intervention has caused ecological disarray.” The result is work that is both imaginative, thought-provoking, and more than a little foreboding about what our world could look like someday.
All photographs © Simen Johan and courtesy of Yossi Milo Gallery, New York City.
via: Slate
Released in 2006 (but only surfacing online now) is the mini documentary titled ‘You Rang, Mr. Addams?‘ which tells the fascinating tale of Charles Addams, the twisted creator behind the creepy and wildly loved Addams Family characters.
It tells the story of the dilapidated houses that littered his walk home from school and which served as the inspiration for the iconic Addams Family house, through to rather strange penchant for having picnics in the cemetery with his wife.
In short, it’s an illuminating insight into the man so few us truly know about, but who’s work and mischief-making has enchanted and captured the imagination of millions around the world.
via: So Bad So Good
David “Meggs” Hooke is an Australian artist who graduated from university with a Bachelor of Design, and soon after became recognized for stencils and poster art on the streets of Melbourne. These days he is commissioned by companies and organizations from all around the world to paint his murals, and has had solo exhibitions in many cities including Sydney, London and Los Angeles. He has also collaborated with brands such as Nike, New Balance and Burton & Endeavor Snowboards.
Meggs X Endeavor Mural
Rone X Meggs Mural
Lion of Venice
Lone Roses Mural
Pow Wow Hawaii
Fintan Magee is an Australian street artist who uses his art to address Australian issues such as homelessness, the environment, waste and consumption. His art is recognizable through it’s sheer size and style, often incorporating cardboard boxes, balloons, teddy bears and other imagery, apparently inspired by children’s books.
Banksy is a pseudonymous England-based graffiti artist, political activist, film director, and painter. His satirical street art and subversive epigrams combine dark humour with graffiti done in a distinctive stencilling technique. Probably not one of the best artists in the world, Banksy is undoubtedly one of the more well-known street artists, and his work is still considered to be vandalism in the UK.
Patch Whisky is an American street-artist, his bio is very concise, and here it is, word-for-word: “Straight out of the woods of West Virginia with a degree from the Art Institute of Pittsburgh. His work has been featured in numerous pubications including Juxtapoz Magazine and The New York Times. Patch’s studio is currently based in Charleston SC.”
Abingdon VA – William King Museum
Charleston SC
Miami FL
Anderson SC
Miami FL
Oriol Freixa, aka Uri Green is a Spanish street-artist with a degree in Fine Arts. Since 2000 he has worked professionally in the field of graphic and plastic arts (murals, graffiti, drawing, sculpture, etc). He is also involved in music and has been featured on many albums.
C.E.I.P. Sant Jordi
Noe Cars – Barcelona
Parking a Comunidad de Vecinos
Electricitat Simon
Porsche Mode – Bristol
SmugOne is a photo-realistic street-artist from Glasgow, Scotland.
Glasgow
Cambridge
Glasgow
Brighton
The Incredible
Miles “Mac” MacGregor was born in Los Angeles began painting graffiti in the mid ’90s when his main focus became the life-like rendering of human faces and figures. In 1999 he began to paint portraits of his friends in public spaces throughout the American southwest, both legally and illegally. This led to being commissioned to paint murals across the US as well as in Mexico, Denmark, Singapore, Germany and the UK, to name but a few.
Miracle
Of Our Youth (Chato)
La Reina de Thai Town
Justice
Ave Maria
Eoin is an Irish street-artist who creates art mainly in areas of decay. Many of these pieces are never seen in person, so a photograph attempts to capture the atmosphere in which the piece existed. “What drives me is the small glimmer of light that is sometimes so far out of reach. My aim is to bring people to that solemn, positive moment, when we reflect and dream.”
Roa is a Belgian street-artist who creates black and white animal portraits on walls in cities all over the world, in varying degrees of decay.
Galoya – The Gambia
Vienna – Rabbit
Torino – La Fabrica
Santander
Vienna
via: Onextrapixel
Photographer: Dimitrios Kontizas / Athletes: Hubert Schober, Kedley Oliveti / Location: Zakynthos, Greece(© Dimitrios Kontizas/Red Bull Illume) 
The top 250 finalists have just been selected in the 3rd edition of the Red Bull Illume Image Quest photo competition. The contest invites photographers to submit images of the world of action and adventure sports in one of 10 categories, including Energy, Illumination, Sequence, and Experimental (where digital manipulation is allowed). This year the competition received more than 28,000 entries by 6,417 photographers from 124 countries. At the end of August, the top 50 finalists will be invited to attend a ceremony in Hong Kong, where the winners will be unveiled
S.O.M.F 