The Brook is a tiny home in Rosebrook, Australia. The 27-square meter home was designed by Small Not Tiny, and incorporates hidden storage compartments, multifunctional furniture, and expanding frames to make the place liveable regardless of its size. In addition to its features, the tiny home was designed to be a passive house with a fully off-grid solar panel system: 

Designed to be a passive home, The Brook hosts a fully off-grid solar panel system on its roof stocked with batteries and a backup generator to ensure a constant flow of power when needed. The roof itself also expands in height on a telescopic frame. During the transportation of The Brook, height parameters margined the home to a height of five meters. Once transported and situated into place, telescopic framing had the uppermost walls fold in so the roof could expand before locking the walls back into place, creating a lofty sleeping area and high ceilings.

The loftiness inside The Brook was inspired by New York-style apartments, bringing expansive glazed glass windows and an industrial aesthetic with a mid-century modern flair to Australia’s regional setting. Throughout the home, recycled brass elements and metal mesh shelving add to the home’s rustic energy and multipurpose outfittings. Copper and ply louvers border the perimeter of the home on both floors and pivot doors provide access to the home’s south and west sides to offer plenty of fresh air and cross-ventilation.

It’s time to update those travel bucket lists! Outdoor sports and outdoor shoe specialists Zalando conducted research on the world’s most Instagrammable hiking routes. From analysing nearly five million Instagram hashtags from the world’s most famous hiking trails, they were able to produce a list of the world’s top 20 most picturesque routes. Amateur Photographer has more details: 

Heather Morning, Mountain Safety Advisor with Mountaineering Scotland, says:  “The dramatic landscapes, wildlife and flora, ease of access (particularly on the West Highland Way), human history and unrivalled right to roam laws make Scotland a top place to visit.

“There has been a massive increase in the numbers of people enjoying the Scottish mountains and countryside, as would be expected with Covid-19 and the associated difficulties travelling abroad. The rise of the ‘staycation’ is certainly very evident. When lockdown was lifted last summer, Scottish Mountain Rescue saw a 35% increase in the number of call-outs, compared to the same period in the previous year.

“When hiking, it’s important to be respectful and considerate to others and the environment. Solid preparation is also vital. We’ve just launched an initiative called ‘Sofa 2 Summit’, which is a free online resource for those who are new to the hills. It’s a great place for people to start when planning their adventures.”

Check the full list here! 

Image credit: Vero Gnz /Unsplash 

YouTuber Paulogia Live asked the Question, "If every copy of Star Wars was destroyed, could we recreate A New Hope from non-Lucasfilm projects?" And then he answered the question himself, by editing together a shorter but comprehensive version of Star Wars Episode One: A New Hope using parodies, tributes, and cultural references found in movies, TV shows, YouTube videos, ads, and other media that are not from Lucasfilm. The effect is somewhat like Star Wars Uncut, except you'll recognize most of the clips used here.  -via Boing Boing

The East London Group is a band of artists composed of mostly self-taught, working-class, part-time painters. The members of the association came to John Cooper’s classes at London’s Bethnal Green and Mile End during the 1920s and 1930s. These artists depicted different melancholic scenes in Mile End, Clerkenwell, and other areas in London: 

[...] Comparisons can also be made with two other urban-inspired London groups: the earlier Camden Town Group and the contemporaneous Euston Road School—some of whose prominent figures, including Walter Sickert and William Coldstream, made the journey east to lecture to Cooper’s classes and became members themselves.

The East London Group made its mark with an exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1928 and its ascent was rapid, with artists finding their work increasingly sought after, both by national collections and private buyers at exhibitions in the West End. The group’s high point was arguably the participation of Hawthorne and Walter Steggles in the 1936 Venice Biennale.

Cooper died in 1943 during the Second World War and the East London Group’s upward trajectory was rapidly curtailed, to the point that they practically vanished from the art world’s collective memory. “To be blunt, after the war, the world was moving into the jet age, the space age, electronic age,” says Alan Waltham, the curator of a new exhibition about the Steggles brothers and the East London Group at the Beecroft Art Gallery in Southend-on-Sea. “Most likely what the group were doing pre-war looked decidedly old hat. Whatever you’re doing has to appear to be relevant, otherwise people will move on.” 

Image credit: The Art Newspaper 

Long ago, four mysterious beings, who were both male and female, sailed from Tahiti to Hawaii and brought the art of healing with them. They were named Kapuni, Kinohi, Kahaloa, and Kapaemahu. The Hawaiians erected four great boulders in their honor at Waikiki, which are still there. Their story is told in this beautiful animated short by Hinaleimoana Wong-Kalu featured in the 2021 PBS Short Film Festival. Read more about the film at The Kid Should See This.

The Earth looks stunning! A new photograph from European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Thomas Pesquet  shows our beloved planet wrapped in its atmosphere, and surrounded by a background of glittering stars. Honestly, it’s like an artwork that came to life! Pesquet managed to capture the night side of Earth from the Cupola of the International Space Station (ISS):

"A few night pictures from the Cupola: sometimes star lights battle it out with city lights for who's the brightest and more beautiful," Pesquet wrote on Flickr. "I'm just lucky to get to be the judge."

The glowing atmosphere, not mentioned by Pesquet, is also astonishing. It's called nightglow, and it's created by natural processes.

Earth's sky is never completely dark, not even at night, and not even once you've extracted light pollution, starlight, and diffuse sunlight. The molecules in the atmosphere are constantly undergoing various processes, which causes them to faintly glow across a range of wavelengths.

Nightglow, which appears at night, occurs when molecules and particles broken apart during the day by solar radiation (a process called photoionization) recombine, releasing their excess energy in the form of photons. On Earth, this occurs in layers – the blue-green layer at the outer edge is oxygen and nitrogen.

At a lower altitude, the red-gold layer is called the sodium layer. This is where meteors break apart, releasing sodium into the atmosphere. Photoionization and recombination of sodium atoms then produces a distinctive golden glow.

Image credit: ESA/NASA-T. Pesquet

This sport is called Polish Dragon Boat Racing. It's the aquatic equivalent of tug-of-war. Sometimes rowers are in the same boat, pulling in opposite directions. In other competitions, there are two boats separated by a towline. This video from 2015 shows two highly trained teams throwing themselves completely into the task.

-via Super Punch

Since 2015, Egypt has been busy building a new, planned city to replace Cairo as the nation's capital. The first buildings may be completed in 2022, but the first phase of moving the government in won't begin until 2030. The unnamed city is designed to be clean, efficient, sustainable, and will have plenty of room to grow into the future.

The goal of this new city, which is currently going by the placeholder name “New Administrative Capital (NAC)” is to relieve the congestion of Cairo, one of the world’s most crowded cities, with a “smart traffic” system, as well as solve many of its other problems. It already has a park twice the size of New York’s Central Park and the new capital has also committed to “allocate 15 square metres of green space per inhabitant (the project is being sold as a green initiative to tackle pollution). Its downtown is to have skyscrapers, including the Oblisco Capitale, designed in the form of a Pharaonic obelisk at a height of 1,000 metres (3,300 ft), becoming the tallest in the world; and the Iconic Tower, which will be the tallest tower in Africa. The city will also have artificial lakes, about 2,000 educational institutions, a technology and innovation park, 663 hospitals and clinics, 1,250 mosques and churches, a 90,000-seat stadium, 40,000 hotel rooms, a major theme park four times the size of Disneyland and 90 square kilometers of solar energy farms. They have also built the 2nd biggest mosque in the world (after the one in Mecca) and the biggest church in the middle East.

While Egypt as a whole is embracing the new city, there are still some questions to be resolved. How much influence will the financiers have, specifically the Egyptian military and foreign investors? And what will happen to Cairo's poor? Read about the new Egyptian capital city at Messy Nessy Chic.

(Image credit: Youssef Abdelwahab)

There’s absolutely no harm in jumping from one art style to another. Renowned abstract painter Wassily Kandinsky proves that one painter can jump from realism to vibrant abstraction and have both of his artworks from those two different styles look great. Kandinsky started his art career with a variety of landscapes that mostly present German and Russian landscapes. The artist made a sudden change with his 1903 work The Blue Rider, as Open Culture details: 

Kandinsky made dramatic change come with 1903’s The Blue Rider (above). The presence of the titular figure made for an obvious difference from so many of the images he’d created over the previous half-decade; a shift in its very perception of reality made for a less obvious one.

This is not the world as we normally see it, and Kandinsky’s track record of highly representative paintings tells us that he must deliberately have chosen to paint it it that way. With fellow artists like August Macke, Franz Marc, Albert Bloch, and Gabriele Münter, he went on to form the Blue Rider Group, whose publications argued for abstract art’s capability to attain great spiritual heights, especially through color.

Image credit: wikimedia commons

Well, that’s a new way to reuse plastic bottles! Outdoor dining spaces are more prevalent around the world because of the pandemic. Outside Peaches Kitchen & Bar in Brooklyn, New York, one can spot some unique outdoor dining cabins which are made out of interlocking plastic bottles. The bottles, called Friendship Bottles are used for these spaces: 

Called Friendship Bottles, the building blocks of these dining cabins are a specially designed type of container that is intended to bring a practical second life to plastic bottles. Notched and flanged with connectable forms, the bottles are LEGO-like plastic bricks that can be reused as building materials after their initial use as liquid containers.

Currently in the prototype stage, Friendship Bottles are a new approach to the plastic bottle. Produced by a factory in Toronto, the bottles are made like typical plastic products, but with a physical shape and strength that allows them to be upcycled into buildings and other structures.

It’s an idea that’s been bubbling in the beverage industry for decades. In the 1960s, the beermaker Heineken developed an interlocking and stackable glass beer bottle that was intended to be reused as a building material post-consumption, but the concept never made it to market.

Image credit: Jody Kivort/Friendship Products LLC

These tiny landscapes are amazing! Meet the Kei Truck, a tiny vehicle used in Japan for construction and agriculture. Now, the truck is also turned into a canvas for gardening contests! The Kei Truck Garden Contest is an annual event sponsored by the Japan Federation of Landscape Contractors in which contractors from Japan spend hours transforming Kei Trucks into wonderful and intricate mini gardens. 

Image via The Colossal 

Don’t worry, it's merely an artistic interpretation of a religious figure being hit by a meteorite, not an actual pope who survived after being struck by a celestial object. This installation, titled La Nona Hora, is Maurizio Cattelan’s most controversial work-- which comes as no surprise. The sculpture depicts Pope John Paul II moments after being knocked over by an errant meteorite. It seems comedic and cartoonish at first glance, too. However, the subject matter of the artwork is actually complex and ambiguous at the same time: 

[...] Initially, the artist tackled the subject of Pope John Paul II in a very different manner: more serious, less slapstick. “In the beginning, he was supposed to be standing, with the crucifix in his hands,” Cattelan toldSculpture magazine in 2005. “When it was finished and I stood in front of it, I felt as if something was missing, that the piece was not complete. What it needed was very simple: It lacked drama and the capacity to convey the feeling of being in front of something extraordinary and powerful. It didn’t have the sense of failure and defeat.”

[...]

Melanie Holcomb, a curator in the department of Medieval Art and the Cloisters at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “I’m not ready to definitively label the piece sacrilegious,” said Holcomb. “It’s an ambiguous work to be sure, harboring elements of humor, cruelty, and irreverence, but one can also read it as paying tribute to the power of forces and institutions larger than ourselves. There is of course the awesome power of the meteor, but I’m also struck by how the Pope and the cross he carries have survived undamaged. His face remains serene, his torso is square and the cross, unbent. In the medieval world, a miraculously preserved body was a sure indicator of saintliness.”

image credit: Chesnot/Getty Images

Writer Hillary Kelly comments, "This is how you do it." Agreed. None of this nonsense about 'Let's stay friends and prolong the agony.' End a relationship with finality and move on, as demonstrated by Helene Schjerfbeck, a Finnish painter who died in 1946.

We learn this lesson thanks to Jennifer Higgie, who arrived at this research dead end while writing The Mirror and the Palette: Rebellion, Revolution, and Resilience: Five Hundred Years of Women's Self Portraits.

-via Lawrence Everett

The colonial guns of the British Empire terrified and subdued cultures around the globe. The same happened when Samuel Wallis landed in Tahiti, the first European to sail there. His show of force subdued the Tahitians who did not want to be claimed by Britain, but it had a different effect on an ambitious young man named Mai. Although wounded, Mai could only think of how useful those guns could be in reclaiming his home island from invaders from Bora Bora. It was a long journey from that day to sitting for the above portrait in England.

The portrait’s subject—Mai, or Ma‘i—was the first South Seas Islander ever to visit England. He arrived from Tahiti in 1774, as part of the second voyage of the celebrated navigator James Cook, and stayed in Great Britain for two years. It was a cross-hemispheric anthropological experiment that in many ways succeeded, but one that was also tinged with tragedy. In London, Mai became a sensation, a star of the press, the darling of the intelligentsia, the subject of poems, books, musical plays—and a curiosity that some of the country’s finest artists sought to paint. It’s doubtful whether any other non-European figure had inspired English portraitists to put so much oil on canvas. Indeed, few Indigenous persons had ever been so widely or vividly described, analyzed and documented by European society.

But the man immortalized on canvas was not quite the man who posed for Joshua Reynolds’ 1775 or 1776 portrait. Back in Tahiti, a society with a highly stratified system of social classes, Mai was a manahune, a commoner, powerless and impoverished. There was nothing regal or patrician about Mai; he was a nobody who happened to hitch an epic ride to England, a regular guy who went on a most excellent adventure—all of which makes his story even more spectacular.

Somehow, the young man who hitched a ride to England became royalty by the time he arrived, and Mai was smart enough to avoid correcting those assumptions. Read Mai's story at Smithsonian.

Nissin's iconic Cup Noodle dried ramen turns 50 this month. To celebrate, Nissin is selling sodas flavored like its most famous ramen flavors. Sora News 24 describes the how these ramen flavors translate into sweet soda:

As the names suggest, each flavour reproduces the flavour of its corresponding Cup Noodle, only in carbonated drink form. The Cup Noodle Soda is said to be a ginger ale-style soda that contains the aroma of salty sauce and pepper, while the Cup Noodle Seafood Soda uses a cream soda-style base with a “hidden” hint of seafood. The Cup Noodle Curry Soda is a cola-style soda finished with curry spices, and the Cup Noodle Chili Tomato Soda is a tomato-style soda with a refreshing tingle that gently stimulates the taste buds.

Question: should the ramen be paired with the corresponding soda, or should one mix them up?

Photo: Cup Noodle