Francisco Toledo, the celebrated Mexican artist and cultural philanthropist who drew on his indigenous pre-Colombian heritage to create striking works suffused with shamanistic animal imagery, died on Thursday. He was 79. Mr. Toledo was regarded by many as Mexico’s greatest living artist, one who could trace his lineage to the Zapotecs, who flourished before the 16th-century Spanish conquests in what is now the southern state of Oaxaca, his native region. His paintings, drawings, prints, collages, tapestries and ceramics were largely inspired by that heritage.
Snow and ice sculpture in Harbin dates back to Manchu times, but the first organized show was held in 1963, and the annual festival itself only started in 1985. Since then, the festival has grown into a massive event, bringing in over a million tourists from all over the world every winter. Harbin is well known for its beautiful ice and snow sculptures in winter and its Russian legacy and still plays an important part in Sino-Russian trade today.
Artist Simon Beck must really love the cold weather! Using snow as his playground he wears raquettes (snowshoes) and creates awesome artworks. If you jaw has not dropped yet, just think of it this way. He literally works 5-9 hours a day walking in order to create his pieces. Along the frozen lakes of Savoie, France, he spends days mapping out the ideas.
Scientists in the United States claim to have created the world’s first living robots using stem cells from frog embryos. The tiny hybrids, designed on a supercomputer at the University of Vermont (UVM) and then assembled by biologists at Tufts University, are “entirely new life-forms” known as xenobots. “These are novel living machines,” said Joshua Bongard, a computer scientist and robotics expert at the UVM who co-led the research. “They’re neither a traditional robot nor a known species of animal. It’s a new class of artefact: a living, programmable organism.”
