Gearfuse Technology, Science, Culture & More

The Space Shuttle Program, which employs five thousand people and comprises more than a quarter of NASA infrastructure, is set to end in early 2011. How to commemorate the program that has defined manned spaceflight for more than thirty years? How about with an astronaut-helmet tea cozy!

Zadie Smith's dissection of The Social Network is smart and illuminating. But when she turns to the broader question of the cultural and human dimensions of social networking, things get complicated.

Electronic musician James Blake covers the Feist song "Limit to Your Love"�I've been haunted by this track for a couple of days, and I've finally figured out why.

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.