British artist Claire Brewster creates beautiful paper cut art out of old maps. She focuses on the natural world—mainly birds and plants.

via Colossal & Job’s Wife

“Years” is a modified record player that analyzes the growth rings on a cross section of a tree and translates the information into ghostly piano music (video). The device was created by German artist Bartholomäus Traubeck.

A tree’s year rings are analysed for their strength, thickness and rate of growth. This data serves as basis for a generative process that outputs piano music based on the year ring data. Those are analyzed for their thickness and growth rate and are then mapped to a scale which is again defined by the overall appeareance of the wood (ranging from dark to light and from strong texture to light texture). The foundation for the music is certainly found in the defined ruleset of programming and hardware setup, but the data acquired from every tree interprets this ruleset very differently.

via Nerdcore & Creative Applications Network

Sheldon Neill and Colin Delehanty created a beautiful time-lapse video of Yosemite National Park as part of their Project Yosemite. The video is set to the song Outro by M83 from their new album Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming.

via Bad Astronomy

In this clip from BBC One’s Earthflight, devil rays in the Sea of Cortez in Mexico leap out of water and perform impressive aerial acrobatics.

via Reddit

It won’t surprise you that we at Laughing Squid like animals with tentacles. Usually that means cephalopods, of course. But the peculiar case of the Star-nosed Mole deserves a mention for its exceptional tentactular protuberances.

The mole’s most distinctive feature is a circle of 22 mobile, pink, fleshy tentacles at the end of the snout, from which they derive their name. These are used to identify food by touch, such as worms, insects and crustaceans.

This 2008 video by Animal Planet gives an extreme closeup of the mole’s eponymous feature. The handy schnoz is more useful than you might think. Its 11-fingered nose-hands provide the mole incredible detail of what’s right… under its nose.

The picNYC table from Haiko Cornelissen Architecten is an indoor aluminum dining table created for urban living spaces that actually grows grass. Owners of this table must hand-cut the tabletop grass to maintain it because “no table grass mower yet exists”. While designed as a concept piece, interested buyers may contact Haiko Cornelissen for more information on purchasing one.

The picNYC table creates a surreal experience of nature in the city that literally transforms dining. Suddenly spilling water becomes a necessity instead of a problem, wine glasses need coasters not to prevent ring stains but to avoid tumbling…

Based on the concept of transposing natural experiences to the apartment, endless alterations are possible with flowers, herbs or even vegetables. Depending on the needs and green thumbs of the owner, the PicNYC table brings various degrees and qualities of the rural experience into the urban residence. As a consequence, the PicNYC table transforms dining into a feast at a new intersection of nature and city.

via Gizmodo and Architizer

photos by Iwan Baan and Alan Tansey

Since 2004, Welsh artist Zander Olsen has been creating beautiful wrapped tree installations in the rural UK for his photo series “Tree, Line.”

This is an ongoing series of constructed photographs rooted in the forest. These works, carried out in Surrey, Hampshire and Wales,involve site specific interventions in the landscape, ‘wrapping’ trees with white material to construct a visual relationship between tree, not-tree and the line of horizon according to the camera’s viewpoint.

via BOOOOOOOM!

TimeScapes, directed by Tom Lowe, is a stunning time-lapse documentary about the scenic beauty of the American Southwest (trailer). The film was shot on Red Epic and Canon still cameras at 4K resolution. TimeScapes is scheduled for release in May, 2012 and can be pre-ordered.

via Discover Magazine

photos via Tom Lowe

Ukrainian photographer Oleg Gordienko captured this beautiful photo series of a heavily forested stretch of train track in Ukraine known as “The Tunnel of Love.”

via Damn Cool Pictures & Gadget Magazine

Dutch jewelry maker Miranda van Dijk of Puur Anders makes Hidden Memories, a collection of leaf-shaped fabric jewelry customized with vintage photographs. There are more designs featured on her site.

My collection Hidden Memories is inspired by the connection between nature and humankind. I print old photographs on cotton or linen fabric and turn them into leaves or flowers. Everything is handmade by me. I’m always working on new pieces and do not work with seasonal collections. All items are one of a kind or in a limited edition.

via Craft

“Over The River” is an upcoming art installation by Christo in which he plans to cover 5.9 miles of a 42 mile stretch of the Arkansas River in Colorado with fabric. The $50 million project was given the go-ahead by Federal regulators on Monday (it is awaiting final approval by local authorities). Pending approval, the project is scheduled for display for two weeks in August, 2014.

Over The River is a two-week temporary work of art by the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude. The project’s plans call for 5.9 miles of silvery, luminous fabric panels to be suspended high above the Arkansas River along a 42-mile stretch of the river between Salida and Cañon City in south-central Colorado. Fabric panels will be suspended at eight distinct areas of the river that were selected by the artists for their aesthetic merits and technical viability.

For more, see Christo discussing his vision for the project and talking with locals about how he came up with the concept.

via The New York Times

images 1 and 3 by Christo and Wolfgang Volz, photo 2 by Wolfgang Volz

Google Maps with Street View has gone off-road to show city parks across the world including The High Line in New York City, a beautiful elevated park in Manhattan’s West Side created out of a reclaimed railway line.

View Larger Map

via Google Blog & The High Line

Ricardo Mohr shot an incredible photo of lightning on top of the ash cloud rising out of the Puyehue-Cordón Caulle volcano in Chile.

via National Geographic & Boing Boing

Baumraum is a German treehouse design firm that makes beautiful custom treehouses. The treehouses range in price from about $25,000 to nearly $200,000, are tree-friendly, and constructed from sustainable materials. They’ve even made a number of treehouse hotels.

Baumraum architect Andreas Wenning has published a book on treehouse construction, Treehouses – Construction and Design Manual.

A treehouse! A promise of adventure for the kids, a retreat for the adults, a romantic hideaway close to nature. These special little dwellings installed up among the trees fire our imagination and rouse our curiosity, bringing back childhood memories, and with them the desire to climb up and enter a magic world amongst the foliage. To be spellbound again, to witness the different sights and sounds up there by day and night and throughout the seasons. To play up there, to work undisturbed, to relax, to daydream…

via Juxtapoz

The short film titled Whale Fall (after life of a whale) illustrates how a whale decomposes (surprisingly, the entire ecological process takes 50-75 years) using lovely puppetry and papercuts. Sharon Shattuck and Flora Lichtman of Sweet Fern Productions directed this film “as a compliment to Radiolab’s ‘Loops’ episode” about whale falls.

I would have learned a lot more about biology if it had been presented this beautifully to me in school.

via Boing Boing

“Landscapes” (Volume 1 and Volume 2) are gorgeous time-lapses of the scenery of the southwestern United States created by Dustin Farrell.

via Doobybrain

The Aurora (Northern/Southern Lights) as seen from The International Space Station orbiting the Earth.

See Previously: Time-Lapse Video Orbiting Earth From The International Space Station

via NASA, reddit & Geekosystem

Anonymous activist artists recently painted a “cut here” scissor graphic on the obsolete 200 foot tall Matilija Dam near Ojai, California. As the LA Times reports, a coalition of environmentalists, surfers, fishermen, and government officials have been working for years to have the dam removed.

via LA Times

photo by unknown

Over 20 cases of accidental ingestion of plastic bag clips have been published. Known complications include small bowel perforation, obstruction, dysphagia, gastrointestinal bleeding and colonic impaction. Preoperative diagnosis of plastic clips lodged in the gastrointestinal tract is frustrated due to radiographic translucency. This occult threat could likely be prevented by the design of gastrointestinally safe, plastic-bag-sealing devices. Presented here is a morphologically based classification of bag clips as a possible guide for determining the most hazardous varieties and to aid further discussions of their impact on health.
[BMJ Case Reports: Lehmer, Ragsdale, Daniel, Hayashi, Kvalstad, 2011]

The full paper is behind the BMJ paywall, but here are some excerpted illustrations:

“Heliotropes” by Michael Langen is a fascinating and beautiful short film about nature and humanity’s shared need to follow the sun, with everything from sunflowers to airline flight paths. The film, which premiered at SXSW 2011, is based on a poem by Brian Christian.

“Heliotropes” offers a glance at how certain patterns repeat themselves at different levels of nature, whether we know it or not. Sunflower seeds and petals are known to follow the Fibonacci sequence, a mathematical formula that makes their structure maximally efficient—but they don’t “know” they’re doing this. Likewise, humans go to such lengths to mathematically optimize flight patterns to maximize profit for airlines, but perhaps we don’t realize that what we are doing, when one stands back and looks at that flight data statistically, is simply trying to stay in the light.

For 18 years, from 1949 to 1967, residents of the Fort Bragg area in Mendocino County used the ocean as their dump, throwing their garbage, even automobiles over the cliffs towering what is now known as Glass Beach but was then called The Dumps. In 1967, the North Coast Water Quality Board and city officials shutdown the area and it wasn’t until 2002 that it was completely cleaned of waste and reopened as a state park. Years of pounding surf created the beautiful and colorful beach of glass that is there today. Collecting the polished glass is not allowed, as it is part of California’s MacKerricher State Park and meant to be enjoyed for generations of future visitors.

via Kuriositas

photos by Matthew Lee High, Jef Poskanzer and Hotash

In what may be the sweetest collaboration for a couple ever, urban knitter Heather Powazek Champ came up with a project that combines her love of knitting with her husband’s love of plants. Heather knits adorable little plant pockets and her husband, Derek Powazek, fills them with soil and live plants. They then distribute them around their homebase of San Francisco in a project they call Plantbombing, which is basically a grown up version of yarn bombing and seed bombing.

Plant-wise, the trick is to plant them with things that are hardy enough to thrive in neglect. So in these photos you can see an Echeveria and an Aeonium – two plants that do quite well unattended in our climate.

The acrylic thread should pick up water from rain and fog, but there’s so little soil in them, I’m not worried about rot. And these particular plants are happy to grow in shallow containers, and fine to go for long periods of drought.

Detailed instructions on how to knit these functional plant pockets for your own plantbombing adventures are available.

photos by Derek Powazek

Korean designers Lily Suh and Zoono of i3lab collaborated to produce this gigantic 5-foot circular Full Moon Odyssey floor mattress pillow.

Astrophotographer Chin Wei Loon shot 2010′s biggest and brightest full moon from Malaysia using a six-inch telescope and a digital astronomy camera. Twenty-six of those images comprise the oversized pillows photorealistic design.

via designboom

Colorado artist Mike Grab balances breathakingly high and precarious stacks of stones, creating mesmerizing natural sculptures he calls “Gravity Glue.” The sculptures are created without the help of glue or other trickery (see this Daily Camera video of Grab building the sculptures in Boulder Creek, in Colorado).

Gravity Glue is a name derived from the nature of balance crossed with the common suspicion many have for the mechanics of the expressive form. More importantly, Gravity Glue is an ongoing satellite project that highlights the artistic, spiritual, and visionary elements of balancing rocks, as experienced by creator Michael Grab. All stone installations seen here employ ONLY balance to remain free standing.

via Boing Boing

photos by Mike Grab

“We Miss You” by Hanna Maria Heidrich is a short, beautifully filmed parable about humanity’s increasing disconnect with the natural world. Heidrich is a film student at Filmakademie Baden- Württemberg in Germany.

via topherchris