London-based designer Sophie de Oliveira Barata creates some of the most jaw-droppingly awesome prosthetics we’ve ever seen.

Sophie comes from an art background, with a first class honours degree at London Arts University where she studied Special Effects prosthetics for film and T.V. She then went on to work for 8 years, as a sculptor making realistic looking, bespoke prosthetics for amputees at one of the leading prosthetic providers. She worked in all areas sculpting fingers, toes, partial feet , partial hands, bespoke liners and leg and arm covers for amputees. In her spare time she made more experimental art work in this medium, before setting up her own studio.

Known as The Alternative Limb Project, Sophie works as a specialist consultant with other prosthetists and produces both artificial limbs that look completely realistic as well as limbs created using imaginative ideas provided by the clients themselves. “She can interpret your ideas and create a unique design that will reflect your interests and personality.”

As you can see here, Sophie’s work is truly astonishing. As well as being completely functional prostheses, these amazing limbs are also unique works of art.

Each of her designs offer a sense of individuality, allowing the customer to express their personality through their synthetic appendages. The artist says, “Having an alternative limb is about claiming control and saying ‘I’m an individual and this reflects who I am.’”

Visit The Alternative Limb Project website to learn more about Sophie’s awesome work and check out more of her creations.

[via My Modern Metropolis]

These awesome images of the Earth’s Sun were recently captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. They reveal the occurrence of a beautiful solar prominence - an incredibly large and bright loop of red hot plasma created as a solar flare erupted.

A burst of solar material leaps off the left side of the sun in what’s known as a prominence eruption. This image combines three images from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory captured on May 3, 2013, at 1:45 pm EDT, just as an M5.7 class solar flare from the same region was subsiding. The images include light from the 131-, 171- and 304-angstrom wavelengths. Credit: NASA/SDO/AIA

According to experts, this is “another sign the sun is ‘waking up’ as it approaches its 11 year solar maximum, which is due later this year.” 

[via Geeks Are Sexy, Dailymail.co.uk, and NASA]

It’s Natural Wonders Day on Geyser of Awesome!

Russian DeviantARTist tauart uses makeup, body paint, and bottomless wells of creativity to transform beautiful women into awesome alien creatures.

“The otherworldly makeup and body paint applied by the crafty artist transforms everything from hair and skin color to skin shape and texture. These unrecognizable femme fatales are no longer from this earth, but vixen visitors mesmerizing the population with their intriguingly colorful veneer.”

Visit tauart’s DeviantART gallery to view more of his amazing work.

[via Design Taxi and My Modern Metropolis]

A Hungarian artist who goes by the name Babukatorium spent three months creating this awesomely intricate piece of guerilla knitting aka yarnbombing. The colouful crocheted piece is composed of 247 round spiderwebs in 13 colours. It took the artist three days to affix her beautiful creation to this tree, which is located somewhere in Veszprém, Hungary.

Babukatorium was inspired to create the piece after watching a performance of Shakespeare’s play A Midsummer Night’s Dream:

She said: ‘I’m obsessed with spiderwebs and rainbows and so when I saw this tree after the performance I thought it would be perfect for yarnbombing.

‘I used a lot of yarn and attached it with rainbow ribbons. At the end I was exhausted and surprised because I didn’t think I would be able to complete it. I was also surprised because people love it, and come to visit the tree just to see the work.’

To view more work by Babukatorium, check out her Flickr page and Etsy shop. She’s also here on Tumblr.

[via Dark Roasted Blend and Dailymail.co.uk]

Art + Science = Awesome

These are miniature paintings created in petri dishes and they’re part of a year-long project by San Francisco-based artist Klari Reis entitled Daily Dish 2013.

“Every single day in 2013 San Francisco-based artist Klari Reis is creating an abstract painting inside the confines of the humble petri dish, a cylindrical container used by biologists to culture the growth of cells and algae, something the paintings seem to directly resemble.”

Some of the pieces look like fantastic planets or galaxies. They’re each so beautiful and different from each other and it’s only the beginning of March, so we’ve still got nearly 9 months of daily petri dish paintings to enjoy. 

[via Colossal]

Science + Art = Awesome

We’ve seen adorable plush microbes and we remember making models of  microbes out of candy as school projects, but this is the first time we’ve ever seen the nasty little buggers exquisitely rendered in blown glass.

These beautiful hand-blown glass sculptures are the work of UK-based artist Luke Jerram, who has produced an entire series depicting microbes that cause different infectious diseases entitled Glass Microbiology. Here you see E. coli, HIV, Malaria, Swine Flu, and Enterovirus 71.

“Made to contemplate the global impact of each disease, the artworks were created as alternative representations of viruses to the artificially coloured imagery we receive through the media. In fact, viruses have no colour as they are smaller than the wavelength of light. By extracting the colour from the imagery and creating jewel like beautiful sculptures in glass, a complex tension has arisen between the artworks’ beauty and what they represent.”

Click here to watch a brief video in which Luke Jerram describes his beautiful glass microbes.

[via Enpundit]

Check out this fancy silver butter knife! It’s not just a beautiful object meant to spread something tasty on your toast. It’s also a flintlock pistol. Most likely created by a gifted gunsmith named F.X. Richter, this is an elegantly no-nonsense way to defend your breakfast from people wielding our telescoping sporks and forks.

[via Neatorama]

Botany, also known as plant biology, is the science of plant life. It began with early human efforts to identify edible, medicinal and poisonous plants, making it one of the oldest branches of science. Nowadays, botanists study about 400,000 species of living organisms. Pretty awesome stuff.

We’ve seen insects that look like plants (stick insects, leaf bugs, and orchid mantises for example), but did you know that some plants look like insects?

Orchids are particularly well known for this sort of beautiful deception. Darwin studied them extensively. It’s all about attracting insects in effort to distribute pollen. Some orchids looks like bees, some look like flies, some wasps. Each flower approximates the size, shape and colour of a different local insect. There are even orchids that imitate the reproductive pheromones of female insects in order to entice amorous male insects who inadvertently collect and distribute pollen while actually attempting to mate with the tricksy flowers. That’s right, just in case you needed reminding: nature is awesome.

Read more about these fascinating plants on the blog for the Houston Museum of Natural Science.

[via The Presurfer and the Houston Museum of Natural Science]

Zoology is the branch of biology that relates to the animal kingdom, including the structure, embryology, evolution, classification, habits, and distribution of all animals, both living and extinct.

Japanese artist Iori Tomita transforms the scientific technique of preserving and dyeing organisms into an awesome art form with a breathtaking series entitled New World Transparent Specimens.

Tomita’s creation process is both painstaking and time-consuming. After first preserving the animals in formaldehyde, he then removes the scales and skin. Next he soaks the creatures in a stain that dyes the cartilage blue. Tomita uses a digestive enzyme called trypsin, along with a host of other chemicals, to break down the proteins and muscles, halting the process just at the moment they become transparent. The bones are stained with red dye, and the specimen is preserved in a jar of glycerin. From start to finish, the entire production takes about five months to a year.

“People may look at my specimens as an academic material, a piece of art, or even an entrance to philosophy,” says Tomita. “There is no limitation to how you interpret their meaning. I hope you will find my work as a ‘lens’ to project a new image, a new world that you’ve never seen before.”

Visit My Modern Metropolis and Iori Tomita’s website to view more images of his awesome work.