Relentless

Edgar Müller’s street artscapes bend all kinds of perspectives.

An apocalyptic abyss opens up on a suburban German street and a shark rips through the pavement of Hong Kong, while the earth splits, leaving a 250 square-metre chasm in Dun Laoghaire, Ireland.



News of the world? Not entirely. The German street artist Edgar Müller has been hard at work in a quest to reshape pedestrian mundanity in his ambitiously grand streetscapes.


The result is both monumental and intricate in the level of detail it achieves. His artwork is expansive and noble and often carries all the stylistic sophistication of a Caravaggio. What he does surpass the masters in, is his artistic generosity and his willingness to let go of his art, once his canvas is reclaimed by commuters.

For more info check Edgar Müller's website.

French free climber Alain Robert defies the odds for a living.

You can throw all kinds of xenophobic jokes at Alain Robert, but you probably can’t throw high enough.

The 47-year old Frenchman has conquered 85 of the world’s tallest buildings, simply by strength of his bare hands and his superhuman resolve. 

In the last 20 years, Alain Robert has free-climbed his way to the top of London’s Lloyd’s building, the Sydney Opera House, and the Empire State Building in New York.

On a normal day, he will often telephone his family once he gets to the top, and his descent would ocasionally be of the conventional, police-escorted kind.

Alain's free-climbing career kicked off at the age of 12 when he forgot the keys to his house and rather than waiting for his parents, he just commenced to climb the exterior of the building. Alain does not use any ropes or harnessing equipment, just a bit of chalk power to absorb perspiration and bags of courage, to propel him.

His brush-ups with the law and the ocassional fall are no deterrent for him - he has suffered an assortment of injuries and stubbornly chooses to  disregard their effects.

Have your say on the order of the universe with Galaxy Zoo.

Back in the 1600's there was one person in charge of the order of cellestial bodies as we know them and that, naturally, was Galileo Galilei. Nowadays things have changed a bit.

Galileo was both a pioneering scientist as well as an inexaustable champion of geocentricism - he lived and died by the power of his conviction. Not only did he maintain the academicaly novel and tricky equillibrium between mathematics, physics and philosophy for his studies - he also led a corageous lifelong battle to defend his beliefs (a prerequisite to being a true scientist back in the 15th century.)

For the select few that have mastered the dynamics of everyday life with a Gallileo-like agility, the prospect of putting some order in the universe should seem like a manageable task. 



For the rest of us, there is Galaxy Zoo. This website gives visitors a unique and quite real opportunity to classify nearly a quarter of a million galaxies by categorizing them, according to their core characteristics.

This helps astronomers narrow down the infinite, and democratizes one of the most exclusive areas of science.
 
A truly collaborative project, that brings an otherwise unthinkably complex idea to the fingertips of ordinary people. 



To have your say, log on to: 
Galaxy Zoo
Have a look at Galileo Galilei’s bio on Wikipedia

The Canadian metal outfit excel at being outsiders.

Rarely are there moments in pop culture when obscurity is as conspicuously celebrated as in the triumphant ‘Anvil! The Story of Anvil.’

The film was screened February 15 at the Sheperds Bush Empire as part of the Secret Cinema series, with a surprise performance by the band, and a guest appearance by Anthrax’s own Scott Ian. 



For the uninitiated, Anvil is a thrash metal band, that has been simmering under the mainstream radar for nearly 28 years, with 17 hard-boiled albums in their repertoire. They hail all the way from Canada - a country that is already a rich source of under-appreciated metal icons like Voivod, Annihilator and Disaster Area. 



The perseverance of a great idea.

A theory that has for 150 years galvanised and moulded popular thought in equal proportions celebrates its father's bicentennial.

200 years old, to the day, Darwin has reportedly admitted that writing The Origin of the Species felt like confessing a murder. Considering the compounded amount of opposition that his work has accumulated, this is probably an understatement.

Controversy notwithstanding, our confession to the 200-year old Darwin is that we find it almost impossible to deny the profound influence he has had on our world.