I was originally going to display three or four of the most unique items from Archie McPhee's web store to give you an example of the true weirdness you can find there (vengeful unicorns, remote controlled hopping yodelling lederhosen, bacon bath soap, inflatable toast). But once I started digging deeper to find just the right ones, I realized there was no way I could stick to just a few. My fellow WUvians needed to see all of the zany craziness that McPhee's has to offer. And how can you resist any company whose motto is "Slightly Less Disappointing Than Other Companies". So if you're in need of a last minute gift idea for the weirdo on your list, this is the place for you.
The National Physical Laboratory has been around since the early 1900s and is famous for a number of its creations, such as the first working atomic clock. But never let it be said that it's all work and no play in the lab. Just in time for Christmas, the NPL, located in Middlesex, England, has created the world's smallest snowman. The snowman is not visible to the naked eye, being only one-fifth the width of a human hair. It was created with two tin beads used to calibrate electron microscope astigmatism. The nose is ion beam deposited platinum and the rest of the face was milled using a focused ion beam. All that scientific mumbo-jumbo aside, this tiny snowman is adorable!
Artist Zeger Reyers recently set up this installation at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf in Germany as part of the Eating the Universe exhibit. The kitchen will be rotating until February 2010. Today and Tomorrow
Liu Bolin, a young Chinese artist, has found a unique way to protest the government's decision to close his art studio in 2005. He paints himself to blend into the scenery, like a chameleon. There is no trick photography involved, and he doesn't use photoshop. Instead, he spends about ten hours studying a picture and painting his body so that people don’t even realize he is there until he moves. The Telegraph online has a pretty good gallery showcasing his images, but you can easily find more thanks to Google.
It is surprising to think that less than fifteen years ago we knew of no planets but those in our own solar system. Now astronomers discover them with such frequency that it takes finding a potentially habitable one like Gliese-581d to stir the public’s interest. But a British team at the Isaac Newton Telescope on the Canary Islands may have done something much more amazing than finding another planet in the Milky Way, they believe they may have just detected one in another galaxy. The object orbits a star in the Andromeda galaxy, more than 2.5 million light-years away from Earth, causing that star to wobble. Normally any motion would be invisible at such a distance, but by chance the distant solar system is acting like a lens in front of even more distant stars, and every wobble of the lens is magnified enough to be discernable (Scientific American).
Closer to home, relatively, is the planet is known only as WASP-18b, but if it were ever to be given a proper name it would be “Icarus”, for this is a planet that has flown too close to its sun. WASP-18b is the 375th extrasolar planet discovered by astronomers, and is possibly the most extreme one yet. It is another gas giant like Jupiter, but ten times the size of our neighbourhood giant, yet it orbits its star in less than a day. This 22.5 hour long “year” would mean the planet is so close to its sun, and moving so fast, that tidal forces are almost certainly dragging the planet inwards to its doom. The team from Keele University that discovered WASP-18b, led by Coel Hellier, calculate that realistically the planet probably has less than a million years left (Nature).
Paul Di Filippo
Paul has been paid to put weird ideas into fictional form for over thirty years, in his career as a noted science fiction writer. He has recently begun blogging on many curious topics with three fellow writers at The Inferior 4+1.