Victor Enrich is the kind of guy who can’t walk down the street without analyzing and comparing buildings. It’s a huge inspiration for his photography, which features humorous digitally manipulated photos of fantastical structures you’d never find in real life and the occasional measuring system you’ve never considered.
Measure is one such photograph. It features the narrow, wedge-shaped building that houses New York’s Storefront gallery inverted on a replica of the Spanish Pavilion built for the 1937 World’s Fair in Paris. The image, though trippy, isn’t completely nonsensical: It proves the pavilion measures exactly one “storefront,” or 100 feet long.
Read more about Enrich’s project and his take on the concept of measurement.
It didn’t take long for Mona Hanna-Attisha to realize that something was wrong with the water in Flint, Michigan. In April 2014 the city switched its water source, from Lake Huron to the Flint River, in order to save money during the construction of a new Huron pipeline. “Patients’ families were complaining right away,” remembers Hanna-Attisha. “The water was brown. It looked gross, and it tasted gross.”
But it turned out that the most dangerous substance in Flint’s water couldn’t be seen or tasted: lead. Lead exposure can lead to kidney problems and other health issues in adults, but it’s particularly dangerous for young children, whose growing bodies—and brains—absorb more of the chemical. Children exposed to lead often end up with developmental problems that can plague them for the rest of their lives.
MORE. Flint’s High Lead Levels Have Doctors Struggling for Answers
Want to feel fancy with a big, square cube of perfectly clear ice in your glass? We tested the Neat Ice Kit.
For his series I Can Hear the Waves, Niels Stomps photographed the remote and fascinating world of a small community of scientist in Svalbard, an archipelago of eight small islands. The largest, Spitsbergen, is midway between mainland Norway and the North Pole and hospitable enough for human habitation.
Set against a barren yet beautiful backdrop, his images show researchers busily launching weather balloons, taking ice cores and checking on their experiments. They live in a brutal place, but are undaunted. It’s not always clear at first glance what’s happening in each image, but that sense of mystery pushes Stomp’s project into poetic territory.
Check out more photos and read about Niels Stomps’ project.
The people who play sick in Corinne May Botz’s fascinating series Bedside Manner do so for noble reasons: Helping medical students learn how to diagnose patients and hone their bedside manner.
Her strange, almost surreal, portraits and detail shots show actors in medical gowns pretending to suffer from hemorrhaging, confusion, and other things. Medical schools call them standardized patients, and their peculiar performances are crucial in training sharp, thoughtful doctors. Some standardized patients are professional actors, but most have day jobs—teachers, librarians—or are retirees and answered an ad. Each follows a script, and is taught how to convincingly feign symptoms.
Check out more photos and read about Botz’s projects.
Internet Explorer will soon be a thing of the past. For one last bit of nostalgia, read about The Sorry Legacy of Internet Explorer.
In 2009, photographer Brad Temkin heard a story on NPR about a then-new City of Chicago initiative to plant more green rooftops. “I started looking into green roofs, and realized what they were meant to do was fix our folly,” he says. Cities, he explains, are artificial structures built atop the natural world. When those structures start to harm the environment, we try to make things better—not by knocking down the buildings, but by putting more nature on top of them. The idea piqued Temkin’s interest. He has since photographed hundreds of green roofs, across about a dozen cities. A selection of those photos appears in his new book, Rooftop.
Check out more photos and read about Temkin’s project.
According to recent research, the winning Powerball numbers are 86 75 30 … Just kidding. Your odds of winning this week’s record Powerball jackpot are pretty bad. Like one in more than 292 million bad.. But you’re an optimist, right? I say that and you figure I’m telling you there’s a chance. And behind every game of chance is some fascinating math.
Read more about the one-in-292 million odds.
The European refugee crisis isn’t so much a crisis as it is a catastrophe. In Greece the danger has proven massive, particularly off the island of Lesvos, which takes in an average of 2,000 refugees daily.
Every day around Lesvos the Coast Guard must rescue boats that have capsized, run out of fuel, or simply broken down. Which is why the Coast Guard invited a team from Texas A&M University’s Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue to launch a pilot project this week for a very special robot—Emily, the Emergency Integrated Lifesaving Lanyard. Think of Emily as a life preserver melded with a jet ski.
MORE: A Robot Life Preserver Goes to Work in the Greek Refugee Crisis
(Source: Wired)
