Gearfuse Technology, Science, Culture & More

Artist Jude Buffum has created a series of portraits of beloved Nintendo characters (like Gesso, above) in the form of butcher�s diagrams�bringing together his love of gaming and meat.

The British Library is the original deposit library: as with the Library of Congress in the United States, publishers are required to deposit copies of works distributed under their imprint. Now, according to a report in The Independent, the British Library is considering extending the 350-year-old idea of the deposit library from books to video games, creating a permanent record of the gaming industry in Britain.

It's getting pretty plush up there. Yesterday, NASA released this image of Expedition 25 commander Doug Wheelock in the "cupola," a bay window installed on the Earth-facing side of the International Space Station in February 2010.

Digital filmmaker Fran�ois Vautier installed an ant colony in his scanner and scanned it every week for five years. The movie he made of the results is fairly astonishing. It's high-tech ruin porn at insect scale.

So, this video's got it all: off-the-grid filesharing, subcontinental slum-techno-chic, secret police in steampunk plague helmets, and a plot that remixes District 9 and Children of Men.

Artist and technologist Aram Bartholl is mortaring USB drives into brick walls and curbstones throughout New York City and inviting people to use them to share files. His "Dead Drops" project offers a glimpse of a utopian, DIY darknet in RL.

It's sumptuous and elegant. But what is it�a puzzle or game? A clockwork cribbage player? A static electricity generator? Answer after the jump.

Pluto's loss of planetary status seemed to have been sealed by the 2006 discovery of a batch of similarly-sized planet-like objects in the same orbital neighborhood�one of which, later named Eris, was thought to be larger than erstwhile ninth planet. According to new findings, however, Pluto's diameter is larger than that of its more massive neigbhor. For now, Pluto gains in status as the largest of these so-called dwarf planets. Whether this will be enough to secure a record contract remains to be seen.

Some "products dive even deeper," says Joshua Glenn, "down to the cellular level�where a shampoo's ionic, nanorobotic, or I-don't-know-whatic technology causes the cells within a single strand of hair to oscillate through rejuvenating vibrational motions."

Hotshoe, or hot shoes? Brandon Bloch stretches the product comparison to the breaking point, with predictably funny results. Video after the jump.