11 of the Weirdest Christmas Images From My New Book

By: Tim Burton

From: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/

Some people want to know why I've got a whole chapter of holiday drawings and paintings in my art book (for what it's worth: "The Art of Tim Burton"). I've always loved the holidays. Maybe it has something to do with growing up in a California suburb, where the only way to tell the passing of seasons was when people broke out the holiday decorations. Christmas has always been one of my favorites. I love the gaudy decorations people strew everywhere and the idea of snow before I ever got to experience it. My other favorite is Halloween, and the combination of the two was where the inspiration for "The Nightmare Before Christmas" came from. Of course anything that I felt a kinship towards came out in my artwork. Here is a sampling of a few of my favorite Christmas pieces that appear in the book.

The Art of Tim Burton

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From "The Art of Tim Burton" from Steeles Publishing (2010)

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Mindblowing Sand Sculptures from Around the World

By Aquil Akhter
From http://www.noupe.com/

Sand sculptures can be very creative and beautiful sources for creativity and imagination. We all have enjoyed our childhood in making sandcastles and sand sculptures on the beaches as our favorite pass time activity, but we never realized that these sandcastles and sculptures can be huge and represent our artistic nature. Let us have a close look at these creative and attractive sand sculptures.

Beautiful Sand Sculptures Photos

Sand Sculpture Festival in Algarve (Fiesa)

King Kong

Life Cycle

Sand Story

Please click here to see the rest of this amazing Gallery

First Spaceport Ever Begins Construction this Friday

By Jesus Diaz

This newly-released image shows the sun rising over Spaceport America. It hasn't been built yet, but construction starts this Friday. It will be the beginning of the real future, the stuff dreams are made of.*

Spaceport America will be the first spaceport in history, and it will host commercial operations by private space travel companies, like Virgin Galactic.



I'm sure that—in a few centuries—this structure will be buried under multiple layers belonging to another huge structure: A giant spaceport—one of many in the world—in which massive spacecrafts will be lifting off and arriving from trips from the Moon, Mars, Titan, and Europa. Or at least, I hope that's what will happen.

If you are around, you can attend the historic groundbreaking ceremony—the first step in its construction—on Friday, June 19, 2009. Check the link for details. [Spaceport America]

* Apparently, the stuff dreams are made of look like vaginas from the air. Rubber vaginas.

See Them While You Can: Endangered Butterfly Gallery

• By Brandon Keim
  

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With so many creatures facing extinction, it’s heartening to read of the Large Blue butterfly’s resurgence.

One of six members of the Maculinea family, it was once found throughout England but had vanished by the early 1970s. That’s when University of Oxford ecologist Jeremy Thomas went to study the island’s last remaining population.

Before Thomas’ work, scientists knew the outlines of Maculinea arion’s fascinating life cycle. After hatching from eggs laid on thyme flowers, the tiny caterpillars fall to the ground and secrete chemicals that make them smell like ants, who promptly mistake them for ant larvae and bring them back to the colony. Under the ants’ protection, the caterpillars spend the next 10 months feasting on real ant larvae, then build cocoons near colony entrances. Two weeks later the butterflies wriggle free, walk out and make a winged getaway.

Thomas found that this chemical trickery worked on only a single species of ant, Myrmica sabuleti, and M. sabuleti was also in trouble. Because well-meaning farmers had stopped grazing their livestock in the butterflies’ habitat and a virus had depleted wild rabbit populations, hillside grasses grew so long that soil temperatures dropped by several degrees, or just enough to become inhospitable to M. sabuleti.

By 1979, the last Large Blue butterfly colony was dead, but Thomas’ observations survived. Conservationists reintroduced grazing animals, cleared the hillsides and imported large blue butterflies from Sweden. As of last year, butterfly populations have returned to pre-decline levels.

Thomas’ original data was published Monday in Science, and provides a welcome respite from tales of conservation woe. Dozens more butterfly species, including the rest of the Maculinea family, are endangered or threatened. A handful are shown in this photo gallery, but most don’t even have a picture on the internet. If they disappear, their beauty could be remembered as nothing more than a disembodied name.

Image: David Simcox

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Never Before Seen Ghostbusters Behind The Scenes Shots

By Meredith Woerner

A glorious collection of Ghostbusters stills and set pics have been released, showing the painstaking care that went into crafting the movie's devil-dogs and ghouls. Plus a few adorable Ray and Venkman moments. Check out the full gallery.

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The official Ghostbusters site has launched, full of games, galleries and Ghostbusters auditions ripe for wasting your day away. But my personal favorite are the photos from on set. Especially the one with Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd taking a break, covered in goo on the steps. I dare you not to get nostalgic for the witty comedy delivery of Venkman past when flipping through the pictures.

If they ruin the next Ghostbusters movie, I may lose all hope for actually funny (that would be fart joke-free) science fiction humor.