Tea Leaves LA

“Spitzer captured the range of activities happening in this violent cloud of stellar birth. We have evidence that the massive stars are triggering the birth of new ones in the dark filaments, in addition to the pillars, but we still have more work to do.”
                                  —Joseph Hora
                                 Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope has captured a new view of an area in our galaxy called Cygnus X. It is the most active area for star formation in the Milky Way.

The lower left and right boxes on the bottom image show brand new stars, which show up as red dots due to the heat they emit that burns up the surrounding dust cloud. The lower right box also shows a luminous blue variable, visible as a blue dot within the red orb.

Primate Uprising Update:

Meet Kanzi. He’s a bonobo, a species in the Great Ape family that was previously known as the pygmy chimpanzee. Scientists who study primates know that apes and chimpanzees often use twigs and leaves for tools, but Kanzi is going one step further into “human” territory.

He can make a fire. He gathers kindling, breaks it up, strikes a match, then cooks some food over the open flame.

They’ve mastered fire, ladies and gentlemen. Prepare to walk out your front door one day to see cigarette-smoking chimps driving cars down your street. It’s coming.

Disney Princesses have become a popular subject for photographers who want to reveal the ugly horrors of our society, specifically consumer-driven, Disneyfied pop culture. Re-imagining the squeaky clean, inherently sexist Disney princesses and putting them in grotesque or morbid portraits seems to be a photography trend that isn’t losing steam anytime soon.

Parisian photographer Thomas Czarnecki released a series called “From Enchantment to Down”, depicting the princesses as captured, passed out or just down on their luck.

An artist in Belgium named Bruno Vilela has a similar series, Dead Princesses, that shows princesses after a homicidal demise.

Dina Goldstein’s “Fallen Princesses” series was a huge hit on the Internet by giving the princesses problems faced by the modern female (watching your weight, plastic surgery pressures, loneliness, etc). 

The Literacy Foundation used photos of sickly, hospital-ridden fairytale heroes to promote reading.

Miwa Yanagi’s “Fairytales” are easily the creepiest. The ghoulish black and white photos are a macabre throwback to the original Grimm fairytales.

Graphic designer Vahram Muratyan has turned his online travel journal into a book that celebrates the culture of two of the most exciting cities on Earth, New York and Paris. He uses basic graphics and clever taglines to compare and contrast the differences between the cities.

Click here to see more prints.

It’s Stuff Like This That Will Cause the Rise of the Apes

Scientists at the Oregon National Primate Research Center have created the world’s first chimeric monkeys. Three healthy rhesus monkeys were born recently, each created by “gluing” embryonic stem cells from several different genome types together. The cells didn’t fuse —as scientists predicted would happen, based on chimeric mice experiments— but instead worked together to form a normal, healthy monkey fetus.

The experiment provides valuable insight into the limitations of stem cell therapy, especially methods that could eventually be used on humans. Even so, the “success” of producing genetically-altered monkeys sets a dangerous precedent for the human race’s stance on bioethics. Should we continue playing God by creating hybrid monkeys? Altering the genes of mice is one thing, but messing with our closest relatives might not be the best idea.

If the primates do rise up, I hope they like reading about themselves on Tumblr. I really want to make it clear that I’m against manipulating and creating hybrid primates, and I’m totally on their side. Go Team Primate.

The Antichrist Will Come, according to the Family International

Everyone’s favorite hippie-loving, child-abusing cult, the Family International (formerly known as the Children of God), have some REALLY amazing music videos to spread their message across the globe. And by ‘amazing’, I mean ‘batshit crazy’.

I have no idea when the Family made this video, or how successful it was in educating the masses about the impending evil of Satan, who will rise to power and create a New World Order. I only know that the end result is funny as hell.

Warning: there’s some bad special fx around 1:40, when a man morphs into the demonic entity known as the ANTICHRIST. It’s pretty scary…

The European Southern Observatory recently captured the sharpest image of the Omega Nebula ever taken from the ground.

The Omega Nebula is one of the most well-known stellar nurseries, a birthplace for stars which are visible in the new image.

The first drawing of the nebula was by John Herschel in 1833.