Perhaps the most useful�and certainly the most whimsical�pick on Time�s list of the 50 Best Inventions of 2010, Sugru is a moldable, self-adhesive, self-curing silicone elastomer. That doesn�t sound whimsical? Then you haven�t watched the video yet.

The Red Planet has been the object of science fiction, paranoia, and fakery. And with numerous spacecraft now beaming back publicly-available images from our neighboring planet, Martian fantasizing is a growth industry. This film is one of the most convincing, and it isn't even from Mars. Video after the jump.

Jonathan Safran Foer's new book, The Tree of Codes, has a marvelous title. But the real marvel begins when you turn the cover to find that the story is literally carved out of another work�namely, The Street of Crocodiles, the 1934 cycle of short stories by martyred Polish writer Bruno Schulz. There's a gadget angle to all this, but you'll have to follow the jump for it.

Not too long ago, this pylon appeared unheralded in my too-quaint neighborhood of tiny, turn-of-the-last-century brick and stucco houses in Boston. It's not the Bunker Hill Monument. But what is it?

A great series of videos made by the chemistry department at the University of Nottingham in England�one for each of the elements in the periodic table, 118 in all. It's full of insights�and it will have you wondering about the activation energy of professor Martyn Poliakoff's hair.

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!

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.

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."