It looks beautiful and elegant — until you imagine someone performing an actual amputation using these tools. Probably with not terribly great anesthetic or antibiotics. What do you think the curved one is for?

We're really digging this 30-second short by Lukas Vojir. The Czech designer wrote, directed, designed, modelled and animated his interstitial in the style of a retrofuturistic newsreel, and everything about it — from the color palette to the ebullient voiceover — is just spot on. The 3D modeling techniques add a…

We all admire the crazy/sexy fashions of Star Trek, Barbarella and Buck Rogers. But the era of Moon landings and space dreams gave rise to tons of amazing fashions. There was spacesuit chic, robot glamour and alien loveliness.

Two years before his death, legendary science and science fiction writer Isaac Asimov kicked off a TV pilot dedicated to exploring the faint and ever-shifting boundary separating science from science fiction. By highlighting advances in science and technology, Asimov sought to prepare viewers for the world of…

New Gelaph is a city that has been abandoned by the future. Once the prospective home of a major spaceport, the city has lost its space industry and gotten instead streets filled with cultists, criminals, and corrupt cops. With no faith left in the system, Mercy St. Clair has become a Trekker, a licensed bounty hunter…

We've examined nineteenth century photographers' obsessions with cats before, but these portraits are a whole other brand of ridiculousness. Behold Monsieur Louis Coulon, born in 1827, the owner of a 3.3-meter-long beard, and the progenitor of the "Hirsute Kitten Cathedral Look." I wonder how his mighty mane smelled?

The people in Landes, in the pre-1900s, had a problem. Their land was swampy and uneven, and they were too poor and too remote for anyone to bother putting in roads. They had to get around someway, and they way they figured out their situation gives me hope for whimsy on other planets.

Science fiction pioneer and futurist Hugo Gernsback was a man who dared to dream big. And making big predictions meant that he was going to whiff huge every now and again.

Back in the mid-1990s, everyone was exceedingly jazzed about the internet. In fact, people were so darn excited that it was impossible to leave the house without being smacked upside the head by such jargon as "electronic mail," "mouse," or "CD-ROM drive!" And nobody was more enamored of the promise of the cyber-frontier…

Pictured here: an ad for a metallic-looking, retro-futuristic "breast washer," circa 1930s, that could easily have been a prop on the set of Fritz Lang's Metropolis.