The Mini Museum: A Desktop Museum with Dinosaur Fragments, Apollo 11 Spacecraft, the Moon, and More

For the past 35 years designer Hans Fex has been collecting some of the Earth’s most rare historical specimens including a fossil of a palm tree from Antarctica, wrap from a mummy, coal from the Titanic, dinosaur bones, and even a piece of the Apollo 11 command module.

Working with specialists recommended by museum curators, research scientists and university historians, he has now amassed some 33 special objects that he’s broken down into tiny fragments and inserted into translucent resin case he calls the Mini Museum.

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NASA aims to grow flowers and veggies on the moon by 2015

Ever since Google announced that they'd be going to the moon in 2015, NASA has been planning to hitch a ride with the tech giant. The space agency's goal is to stow a few hitchhiking plants aboard the eventual winner of Google's Lunar X Prize and then unload them upon the surface of the moon.
Once upon the lunar surface, these plants, encapsulated in their own little greenhouses, will test whether plants can grow upon the moon. So far NASA is planning on sending basil, turnips and some flowers to the lunar surface in the hopes that they will be capable of surviving the radiation that the moon's thin atmosphere experiences. As seedlings, plants can be just as susceptible to damage from radiation as we are, so you could say that the turnips and flowers will actually function in part as a human analogue.

If the plants thrive on the moon, this could be the very beginning of a lunar terraforming effort that could see gardens and flower beds popping up all over the lunar surface someday. As well as providing a source of food for future lunar colonists, these plants would quite literally bring something of home to those of us who might someday leave Earth for greener pastures.

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Tugboat Printshop Carves and Prints “The Moon”

Back in December Paul Roden and Valerie Lueth over at Tugboat Printshop shared a tantalizing peek at their largest hand-carved relief print ever, The Moon. The print is finally complete and it’s gorgeous. The illustration of the moon was first drawn with a pen onto a piece of 3/4″ birch plywood incorporating various topographical features of the actual moon. After that was carved the stars were carved into the sky on the same piece of wood, but the moon was then cut out with a jigsaw prior to printing.

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