The Disciples: James Mollison’s Portraits of Music Subcultures:

From Madonna to Marilyn Manson, or how to worship at the secular altar of pop culture.

From photographer James Mollison, whom you might remember from his poignant series on where children sleep, comes Disciples — a visual study of musical subcultures, reminiscent of the Exactitudes project. Between 2004 and 2007, Mollison travelled across Europe and the U.S. with a mobile photography studio, which he parked in front of music concerts, taking individual portraits of fans outside the respective band’s gig. He then composited the portraits into lineups of eight to ten fans, creating a single pseudo-panoramic image. Disciples gathers 62 of these fascinating images, featuring more than 500 individual portraits that capture the spirit and tribalism of comtemporary music culture, from death metal to Lady Gaga.

Madonna

The Cure

Bjork

Oasis

Kiss

Dolly Parton

50 Cent

Puff Daddy

Sex Pistols

Spice Girls

Jennifer Lopez

Casualties

George Michael

Rod Stewart

Manson

Missy Elliot

Morrisey

An entertaining study of pop culture and its subcultural micro-cults, Disciples offers a curious look at one of our era’s most pervasive secular religions and one of the last remaining social unifiers of our time.

via Quipsologies; images courtesy of James Mollison via Laboite Verte

Mouthy ceramic sculptures:

Sculptor Ronit Baranga’s ceramic pieces sport sensual mouths and walking fingers, something between Clive Barker and Giger, and beautiful.

(via Street Anatomy)

[Really, really really epic. -egg]

At Moscow’s Alternative Hair Show, hairstyles you would never be able to pull off:

Above and below: models at the Alternative Hair Show in Moscow’s Kremlin, September 28, 2011. (REUTERS/Denis Sinyakov)

How To: Use vinegar to diagnose cervical cancer:

In developing countries, a new, inexpensive treatment allows nurses to spot pre-cancerous lesions on a woman’s cervix and remove them—without needing a medical lab, and without surgery. It has huge implications for women’s health, because cervical cancer kills 250,000 women every year.

In fact, before pap smears became commonplace, cervical cancer killed more American women than any other sort of cancer. But in places where the pap smear isn’t practical, this new technique can help. From the New York Times:

Nurses using the new procedure, developed by experts at the Johns Hopkins medical school in the 1990s and endorsed last year by the World Health Organization, brush vinegar on a woman’s cervix. It makes precancerous spots turn white. They can then be immediately frozen off with a metal probe cooled by a tank of carbon dioxide, available from any Coca-Cola bottling plant.

… Dr. Bandit Chumworathayi, a gynecologist at Khon Kaen University who helped run the first Thai study of VIA/cryo, explains that vinegar highlights the tumors because they have more DNA, and thus more protein and less water, than other tissue.

It reveals pre-tumors with more accuracy than a typical Pap smear. But it also has more false positives — spots that turn pale but are not malignant. As a result, some women get unnecessary cryotherapy. But freezing is about 90 percent effective, and the main side effect is a burning sensation that fades in a day or two. By contrast, biopsies, the old method, can cause bleeding.

Obama: Trick the Bridesmaid:

[Video Link] “Let’s creep in the frozen aisle and think one thought: trick the bridesmaid to get her to take it off.” I appreciate the work Bad Lip-Reading does to make politician’s speeches bearable.

[Weird.]

[This is pretty genius. I harbor a secret desire to attend. Anyone? -egg]

(Warren Ellis)

MIT research on “printing” buildings:
MIT News Office posted a survey of the fascinating research at the university, and by alum, on an array of 3D printing technologies and applications.

Another variant underway now is a system being developed by Neri Oxman PhD ’10, the Media Lab’s Sony Corporation Career Development Assistant Professor of Media Arts and Sciences, and her graduate student Steven Keating for “printing” concrete. Their ultimate aim: printing a complete structure, even a whole building.

Why do that, instead of the tried-and-true method of casting concrete in wooden forms that dates from the heyday of the Roman Empire? In part, Oxman explains, because it opens up new possibilities in both form and function. Not only would it be possible to create fanciful, organic-looking shapes that would be difficult or impossible using molds, but the technique could also allow the properties of the concrete itself to vary continuously, producing structures that are both lighter and stronger than conventional concrete.

To illustrate this, Keating uses the example of a palm tree compared to a typical structural column. In a concrete column, the properties of the material are constant, resulting in a very heavy structure. But a palm tree’s trunk varies: denser at the outside and lighter toward the center. As part of his thesis research, he has already made sections of concrete with the same kind of variations of density.

“Nature always uses graded materials,” Keating says. Bone, for example, consists of “a hard, dense outer shell, and an interior of spongy material. It gives you a high strength-to-weight ratio. You don’t see that in man-made materials.” Not yet, at least.

“Printing off the paper“