Journey to the Centre of the Earth in a Rubber Dinghy

Deep beneath the earth’s surface, in mountain tunnels, Antarctic ice, and abandoned zinc and gold mines, physicists search for the elusive ‘ghost particle’ known as neutrino. Spat out of supernovas, colliding galaxies, and the Big Bang itself, about 100 trillion of these ghostly subatomic entities careen through our bodies at nearly the speed of light every…

Today I’m Shopping for Vintage Star Finders

There are countless applications that we can download on our smartphone these days to identify the constellations, but I’m not so much searching for the stars right now as I’m searching for inspiration– design inspiration. And these vintage Star and Planet Finders I found in abundance on the internet today, provide a whole lot of that. This…

Nasa Astronauts and Soviet Cosmonauts are having a Yard Sale

To celebrate the 47th anniversary of the first time man landed on the moon, astronauts, cosmonauts and rocket engineers of the great space race are having a giant yard sale next month– also known as the Bonhams annual Space History Auction. Even if I wasn’t the type of kid that went to space camp and I…

Play Shopkeeper in Paris for a Day

When I was a little girl, I used to play ‘shop’. I set up my own make-shift retail space, carefully displaying my own clothes and toys around my bedroom and for hours on end I happily traded with imaginary customers. I borrowed the coloured bills from our Monopoly game and used a real receipt-printing calculator…

Photos taken by the Mars Robot are Way Better than Our Holiday Snaps

NASA’s red planet robot, a rover called “Opportunity”, has spent the last 12 Years vacationing on Mars. Since his landing in 2004, he’s taken over 200,000 photographs of various Martian landscapes, craters, meteorites, unusual rock formations and even evidence of past water activity. In celebration of its twelve year holiday roaming an alien planet, which by…

The Moon Ballet: One Giant (graceful) Leap for Mankind

It’s too bad Neil Armstrong didn’t break into dance and literally take a giant (graceful) leap for mankind rather than one small step for man. Luckily for us however, there is the Moon Ballet. I dug up this curious little gem from the LIFE archives, photographed in 1950 by Allan Grant on what any sci-fi film…

10 Reasons why Vintage Hollywood Sci-Fi is still So Good

I spent the majority of my day today digging through vintage science fiction groups on Flickr, (as you do) and found a very cool archive of images from a time that seemed to have just a little bit more imagination and creativity. And because making random lists is one of my favourite things to do,…

Declassified! US Airforce’s 1950s Flying Saucers

So remember that time a bunch of aliens crash landed into the desert somewhere in Nevada, a.k.a Studio 54 Area 51 (always get those two mixed up) … well it turns out the U.S. government actually went and plagiarized the aliens’ quirky style of air travel in the 1950s (not very successfully). Recently declassified records…