Theo Jansen's Beasts

Made with pipes, wood, wing-like sails and plastic bottles Jansen creations move on the beach powered by wind. Slowly evolving in each "generation" some more complex creations store energy by compressing air in plastic bottles, detect when they entered water and walk away from it and one even anchor itself in the

According to his website:

Since 1990 I have been occupied creating new forms of life.

Not Pollen or seeds but plastic yellow tubes are used as the basic material of this new nature. I make skeletons that are able to walk on the wind, so they don't have to eat.

Over time, these skeletons have become increasingly better at surviving elements such as storm and water and eventually I want to put these animals out in herds on the beaches, so they will live their own lives.

Click for a couple of videos

Angels are Weird

The modern image of angels are cute little children with feathered wings or handsome men/woman with wings too. But their original description ranges from beings with 4 wings and 4 faces with the whole body covered with eyes (including the wings) to "wheels within wheels," the rims of which are covered in eyes.
For more freakish angels

Triassic Monster Octopus Makes Self Portrait With His Victim

“Charles Camp puzzled over these fossils in the 1950s,” said McMenamin. “In his papers he keeps referring to how peculiar this site is. We agree, it is peculiar.”

“It became very clear that something very odd was going on there,” said McMenamin. “It was a very odd configuration of bones.”

First of all, the different degrees of etching on the bones suggested that the shonisaurs were not all killed and buried at the same time. It also looked like the bones had been purposefully rearranged. That it got him thinking about a particular modern predator that is known for just this sort of intelligent manipulation of bones.

“Modern octopus will do this,” McMenamin said. What if there was an ancient, very large sort of octopus, like the kraken of mythology. “I think that these things were captured by the kraken and taken to the midden and the cephalopod would take them apart.”

In the fossil bed, some of the shonisaur vertebral disks are arranged in curious linear patterns with almost geometric regularity, McMenamin explained.The proposed Triassic kraken, which could have been the most intelligent invertebrate ever, arranged the vertebral discs in double line patterns, with individual pieces nesting in a fitted fashion as if they were part of a puzzle.
Even more creepy: The arranged vertebrae resemble the pattern of sucker discs on a cephalopod tentacle, with each vertebra strongly resembling a coleoid sucker. In other words, the vertebral disc “pavement” seen at the state park may represent the earliest known self portrait.

Franken Fran: dark comedy, horror and bio-sci-fi

Weird? Check! Peculiar? Check! Astonishing? Check! Add gruesome and shocking to the list!

Fran is a girl created by the genius Dr. Naomitsu Madaraki. While her training is still incomplete, her skills range from resurrection, body augumentation to aesthetic surgery. All that with a naive and often emotive mentality who believes that a life should be saved no matter the cost, something that often turns out to be worse than death itself.

Japan Discusses Plans to Build "Backup Tokyo"

First they build life-size giant robots, now they plan to build a backup Tokyo. I guess they know something that we don't.

An October meeting of high-ranking Japanese politicians showed how fearful they are of a similar quake hitting Tokyo. The parliament members birthed the idea of creating a backup Tokyo – what they referred to as a “substitute capital.” “The idea of being able to have a back-up, a spare battery for the functions of the nation, isn’t this a really good idea?” Hajime Ishii, a member of Japan’s ruling Democratic Party, asked as he unveiled the plan.