fastcompany:

Plastics like styrofoam currently take up between 25%-30% of our landfill space, and a single cubic foot of styrofoam has the same energy content as about one and a half liters of gasoline. 

College pals Eben Bayer and Gavin McIntyre established Ecovative, which grows cost-effective alternatives to plastic insulation and packaging. While they were students at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Bayer and McIntyre experimented with mycelium, the network of vegetative filaments in mushrooms, and realized that it could be used to form incredibly strong bonds. Essentially, the substance functions like a glue that you can grow and use to form agricultural byproducts like plant stalks and seed husks into natural alternatives to styrofoam packaging and insulation. 

art21:

“I’m not trying to spell out a story. I still think you feel the painting, and the reason you read the mark is because you also feel the mark.”
—Julie Mehretu

Julie Mehretu, our current 100 Artists featured artist, is seen here in her Berlin studio working on the painting Middle Grey (2007–2009), one work in a suite of seven paintings commissioned by the Deutsche Guggenheim as part of the exhibition Julie Mehretu: Grey Area.

This scene is featured in the Art in the Twenty-First Century Season 5 episode, Systems (2009).

WATCH: Julie Mehretu in Systems [available in the U.S. only] | Additional videos

IMAGES: Production stills from the Art in the Twenty-First Century Season 5 episode, Systems, 2009. © Art21, Inc. 2009.

(via blackcontemporaryart)

artchipel:

Judith Braun (USA) - Fingering (detail)

New York-based artist Judith Braun has been working on her simple but beautiful series “Fingerings”, an ongoing project in which she uses walls as canvases to explore liberating, improvised strokes with her bare hands. While Braun creates the amazing floral and cosmic patterns, she also freely expresses herself with gestures and movements recorded in carbon – without creating waste and excess. (source: Zilla Mag & Inhabitat)

[more Judith Braun]

ianbrooks:

Science and Space Posters by Ron Guyatt

Part of a series for spacevidcast.com to help inspire and spread the Good Word of Science! Prints available at etsy.

Artist: Tumblr / Website / Facebook

(via itsfullofstars)

theatlantic:

See More Photos From Our In Focus Gallery of Tornado Damage in Moore, Oklahoma

[Images: AP, Getty, Reuters]