L'Inconnue de las Seine

At the end of the 19th century, the body of a young girl was pulled from the Seine. She appeared healthy and there were no marks of violence on her, so it was assumed she had drowned herself. The custom in those days was to put unidentified bodies on display in the window at the Paris morgue, and the public were invited to come by to view them in the hope that somebody might recognized one of the corpses. Nobody did. But a morgue worker was so impressed by her beauty that he made a plaster cast of her face.

Word of her beauty spread. Many copies of the cast were produced, and it caught the public imagination. Although her identity was never discovered, Camus, Rilke, and Nabokov were three of at least a dozen writers who wrote her or her mask into their novels, plays, and short stories. It became fashionable to have a cast of her face, presumably to hang on the wall, stare at, and sigh romantically about the cruelty of life and the mysteriousness of her smile. According to one critic, "a whole generation of German girls modeled their looks on her." Another says, "The Inconnue became the erotic ideal of the period, as Bardot was for the 1950s."If the face looks familiar, perhaps you have taken a First Aid course. A commonly-used CPR teaching dummy, "Rescue Annie" (also called "CPR Annie" and "Resusci Anne"), was developed in 1958 using her face as the model.

source: a death a day

see also mythbusters: snopes

Brain Art

The Museum of Scientifically Accurate Fabric Brain Art exhibits the world's largest collection of anatomically correct fabric brain art, inspired by research from neuroscience, dissection and neuroeconomics. Their current exhibition features three quilts with functional images from PET and fMRI scanning, a knitted brain, and two fabric pieces interpreting single neuron recording.

"Building a brain with yarn and knitting needles turns out to follow many of the same pathways as actual brain development," says artist Karen Norberg.

A Stitch in Time

Chirugi, a Greek word that translates to 'suture' also meaning 'hand-work' is a series of art work created by Lindsay Obermeyer who says

"The voice speaking in my work is female. The embroiderer has practiced the traditional stitches of darning, but educates herself in the craft of surgery. She studies medical manuals. She records the patterns she sees under the microscope. She has no patience for sentimental hearts and flowers, but finds beauty in the body's interior landscape."

Leucocyte 2 2004, bead embroidery, 18" diameter

Brum brumm

Sky Writing

Lisa Rienermann, a german student, decided to look up and found letters in the sky, created by the negative space in between buildings. The project is called Type the Sky, found here.

Ultimate Trainspotter

A blogger who documents details you never realised you wanted to know about the London Underground. Strangely compelling reading... I liked the flash mob story.
Take a peek here.

Wunderkammer

Engravings of shells from The Ambonese Curiosity Cabinet

The admiration of shells was elaborated on during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries when, the beautiful object became an exotic treasure to be placed in the fashionable ‘cabinet of curios.’ These cabinets of curiosities had pride of place in every aristocratic home from Holland to France and housed everything from coins and antiquities to exotic corals, plants and shells, This blending of art, artifice and natural objects encouraged a focus on ‘wonder’ rather than any systematic or scientific interest. Only as recently as the second half of the seventeenth century was the curiosity and desire for shells married with scientific study.