St Peter’s Seminary sits in woodland about an hour west of Glasgow, near a village called Cardross. If you like Brutalist architecture, then it’s a beautiful ruin: if not, then perhaps your view isn’t so kind. It’s a historic, religious building: but it’s also a money sink that can’t be […]
UPDATE: In 2019, the Fascination Parlor was hit by storms, and the building didn’t survive. The games have been stored, and hopefully it’ll reopen somewhere at some point! • On Nantasket Beach in the seaside town of Hull, Massachusetts, sits the last play-for-cash Fascination Parlor in the world. It’s a […]
The final episode in this run of the Game Garage gives us a Proper Quiz: complete with all-or-nothing questions and a prize of FIVE THOUSAND PENCE. That’s pence. It’s £50. We didn’t have that big a budget. Edited by Elliot Gough Audio mix by Graham Haerther Directed by Grant Stevens […]
The Forbes Pigment Collection at the Harvard Art Museums is a collection of pigments, binders, and other art materials for researchers to use as standards: so they can tell originals from restorations from forgeries. It’s not open to the public, because it’s a working research library — and because some […]
The Multi-Axes Rotation and Tilt Device (MART) is used for spatial orientation experiments: it’s a chair balanced on a metaphorical knife-edge, powered by precise and fast motors. And my job was to not fall over. More about the Ashton Graybiel Spatial Orientation Laboratory: https://www.brandeis.edu/graybiel/ More about the MART: https://www.brandeis.edu/graybiel/facilities/mart.html More […]
In the Ashton Graybiel Spatial Orientation Laboratory at Brandeis University, there’s the Artificial Gravity Facility: otherwise known as the rotating room. No-one’s invented futuristic gravity plating yet, but if you want to test how humans would cope with artificial gravity, this is the best way. More about the Artificial Gravity […]
When I was a kid, I played the demo version of Need for Speed II a lot. Just the demo: it came free on a CD with a monthly computer magazine. Every detail of that one demo track was stored in my head, long-dormant… until I ended up in Vancouver, […]
Gibbs Farm, in New Zealand, is an enormous private sculpture collection. Its most famous piece is Horizons, by Neil Dawson – and it looks like a cartoon tissue somehow painted onto the landscape. To see it in person, though, will take a bit of effort. Gibbs Farm: http://www.gibbsfarm.org.nz/ 🟥 MORE […]
Kerosene Creek is a natural hot spring near Rotorua, on the North Island of New Zealand. And there have been official warnings for years: don’t put your head under water. It turns out that “brain-eating amoebas”, naegleria fowleri, are a real, if rare, thing. Thank you to Associate Professor Siouxsie […]
At the University of Canterbury, in Christchurch, New Zealand, the team at Mars Bioimaging are using detector equipment originally developed for the Large Hadron Collider, and putting it to a very different use: medical imaging that allows 3D, false-color images inside the human body. Thanks to the Mars Bioimaging team: […]
