Artist Olafur Eliasson has an exhibit about glaciers called Your Waste of Time at MoMA PS1 in New York City. But the exhibit isn’t just about glaciers — it’s also made of glaciers. Eliasson broke chunks off Icelandic glaciers and flew them to Queens, which I guess is OK if the point of the exhibit is to make a point about “time that is measured in thousands of years rather than mere decades,” as MoMA says, but is kind of ironic if he’s trying to make any kind of statement about preserving glaciers.

You don’t have to be a genius to be wondering, “Now how does a glacier stay glacier-like in an art museum?” And the answer to that question is “extreme and costly refrigeration.” Between that and the flight from Iceland, isn’t he being kind of mean to the glacier and the environment at the same time? It’s a reasonable question. But Eliasson has been into glaciers as part of his work for a long time, so, presumably, he cares about them. So perhaps what he is doing here is making you feel sorry for those little glacier pieces so that you then think about the big glacier they broke off of, melting away in Iceland? Only he knows. And, since he’s the sort of artist who has no qualms about putting a bunch of glaciers in an artificially cold room and saying, “Hey, this is art, deal with it,” we suspect he won’t tell.

Back in 1897, a structure called the California Cycleway came very close to beautiful existence. The elevated structure would have provided a smooth, flat, uninterrupted ride for the nine miles from Pasadena to downtown. (You can see a Google map of the proposed route here.) Man, bike infrastructure proposals were so much better when bikes were the only game in town.

The California Cycleway was the brainchild of one Horace Dobbins, a wealthy man and cycling fan, who at the time was in good company. Cycling was very cool in 1897. People with money were into it. Los Angeles had only 500,000 inhabitants, and 30,000 cycled. The upkeep was going to come from a toll — 10 cents one way, 15 cents if you did a round trip — which was a lot more back then but nothing compared to the cost of gas.

Actually a mile or so of the Cycleway did get built — that’s what you see in the photo. Here’s a more detailed description, from the blog 90042, of the Cycleway’s proposed route:

The California Cycleway was an elevated wooden bicycle highway that was designed to go from Hotel Green in Pasadena down the Arroyo, past Highland Park and into Downtown Los Angeles, ending at the Plaza on Olvera Street. Part of the design was to be a completely uninterrupted path by bridging over obstacles like creeks, roads, train tracks, and maintain only the slightest of grades (no more than 3%) over the 9 miles of smooth wooden track over an elevation of 600 feet. The entire project would have cost an estimated $187,500 at the time, and included a casino called, “Merlemount” to be placed midway in Arroyo Seco Park.

So do I really need to tell you the end of the story? I don’t want to give it away, but the words “car” and “and then they built the Arroyo Seco Parkway” figure prominently.

A team of scientists at Harvard have discovered how to make crazy, beautiful, very tightly controlled shapes that are so tiny they’re invisible to the naked eye. Just by making simple changes in the environment in which salt and silicon crystals grow, they’ve made gardens of flower-like structures. Wim Noorduin, a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University, grew a variety of these “flowers,” recently featured in the journal Science.

The process starts with a solution of salt and and silicon. By altering the acidity, alkalinity, and temperature of the solution, Noorduin discovered he could make his structures grow outward or inward. In other words, he could control the way the petals on his flowers are furled or unfurled. The thickness of the flowers’ petals is determined by how much carbon dioxide is introduced to the compounds. Combining various steps allowed him tighter control to manipulate the shape. He once created an entire field of these flowers on a penny, picturesquely planted along the base of the Lincoln Memorial. Noorduin, who is Dutch, also grew a tulip, because Dutch people are obsessed with tulips, even microscopic ones.

To be clear, Harvard’s main goal here was not to make teeny tiny beautiful flowers. That was just something that sort of happened as the researchers went about the very serious business of making “industrial applications.” The reason the flowers are significant is they demonstrate how precisely scientists can control shapes, even at this scale. But I bet a lot of people will just settle for the flowers.

Clothing retailers don’t have it easy. It’s very hard to keep up with what’s in style. And what’s in style now? Fracking! Which means flame-retardant clothing for when shit gets out of hand.

Last year in the United States, sales of flame-retardant clothing rose from $1.5 billion to $1.6 billion. By 2017, sales for protective clothing are expected to reach $2.3 billion. To this end, companies like Carhartt and Cabela’s are sending people out into the field to check out what’s new in the world of flame-retardant clothes. They’re looking to make stuff that’s hard to set on fire, but also, well, cute. Which is to say that although the motivation is safety, workers also want clothing that they can perhaps wear outside of the job site. So manufacturers are looking to make clothing that does the job but is lighter and cooler than the usual flame-retardant clothing.

The reason for this fashion trend? An abundance of fires, not just at fracking sites but at drilling sites and refineries. It’s a hazardous world, and you can’t just wear a T-shirt and jeans to work at a place where there’s stuff that catches on fire. I suppose you could move the country towards a less mortally dangerous fuel source, but I dunno, that sounds hard.

Now, of course, just as America started wearing Levi’s even though they were originally made for gold miners, will we start wearing flame-retardant clothing just for fun? Will we wear it, like, to clubs and stuff? Not only am I betting yes, I am betting that Chris Brown will tweet about his flame-retardant jeans before the end of 2014. Anyone willing to take that bet?

Back in March we told you about a polar bear who had been orphaned in Alaska when its mother was shot by a hunter. We invited (well, ordered) you to watch it play which, even two months later, remains an experience of acute adorableness. Now we have some good news about this polar bear, little Kali: He has found a permanent home. That home will be at the Buffalo Zoo, where he’ll share digs with another polar bear named Luna.

Kali and Luna, who was born in November, will be introduced to each other slowly. Here’s the process, from AP reporter Carolyn Thompson:

A few hours after Kali’s arrival, the cubs were in adjacent dens, able to smell and hear each other but prevented by a solid barrier from visual and physical contact. The next step will be to replace the barrier with mesh.

“Then they can have some limited physical contact, visual contact,” zoo president Donna Fernandes said. “If that goes well and they’re spending lots of time near each other by the mesh barrier and showing interest, then we can gradually open it up a little bit, give them room for a paw to go through.

“If they’re not swiping at each other and it looks good, we’ll open the door a little bit more, a little bit more, until they get a full physical introduction,” Fernandes said at a press conference as Luna, behind a glass partition, dove over and over into a pond, pounced on a toy ark and ball, and wrestled with shrubbery.

Yeah, you can’t just like, toss two polar bears into a cage and expect them to start playing nice. But surely the people at the Buffalo Zoo know what they’re doing. And how wonderful it will be to see more photos of these soon-to-be polar besties as they bond.

We knew we’d been doing some damage to the planet, but we didn’t realize we’d been making it bleed.

OK, fine, blood isn’t really seeping out of that glacier in the photo above. What is seeping out from this red waterfall, discovered in the Taylor Glacier in Antarctica’s McMurdo Dry Valley, in 1911, is in fact the run-off from a microbe-filled lake deep beneath the surface of the glacier. The run-off seeps out through a fissure in the glacier, and it is red not because the poor microbes are bleeding, but because it comes from a very iron-rich environment.

The very existence of the lake is proof that life can exist in very crazy conditions (inside a glacier, with no access to oxygen, light, or warmth) and also provides an interesting look at life that’s more than 2 million years old, as that is when this ecosystem was sealed away. It is also proof that this planet is host to some crazy looking stuff. More photos here.

Do you feel like your doctors and your more annoying friends are always telling you to drink more water? Well, they’re just trying to help. Water is so important for your health! Sadly, water tastes like, well, water. And since Americans eat like 100 pounds of sugar a year, the taste of water just isn’t good enough for us. Even though we are very lucky to have fresh water, we don’t get too excited about it — 20 percent of people say they just don’t like how it tastes (i.e., watery). What we do get excited about are artificially flavored, sugar-free water products.

This does not mean stuff like Vitamin Water, by the way. That has calories, which are almost as gross as water. It means new stuff, like a no-cal Vitamin Water spin-off called Fruitwater. And Mio, which is some tasty stuff you can squirt into water. (YUM.) And Dasani Drops. One of the selling points on the additives, according to the Wall Street Journal, is that they are “simpler to carry in a purse.” OK, next time I tell you I’ve purchased something because it’s “simpler to carry in a purse” please take me out back and shoot me.

Luckily, most Americans remain what the same article refers to as “water purists.” But the number of people who want water with flair is growing — hey wow, so is the likelihood of global apocalypse! Coincidence?

Artist Matt Hope calls the concept bicycle he’s inventing “a weird provocative object” with a “Chinese fighter pilot breathing thingy.” We call it a bike that, as the rider pedals, powers a purifier that feeds the rider more breathable air. 

Hope lives in Beijing, a city where the air is far from clean, and he saw a lot of people wearing masks and biking, which struck him as kind of a bummer, because when you wear a mask you can’t breathe very well. So he set about making this rather crazy-looking but also useful bike. It is made out of a lot of tubes and a fan and a home air filter. In this video, Hope, who has a sort of soothing British accent, describes how he put it together.

One design problem: The thing uses 5,000 volts of electricity. “If you ride it in the rain, you could potentially kill yourself,” he says. He adds that “in theory” it works. Hm. I might try it. In the desert. In August.

So Dunkin’ Donuts and Jack In the Box both have waffle sandwiches, and lot of fancier places are getting all upscale with the waffle as well. Waffles are kind of the bacon of carbohydrates. And so, it is not terribly surprising that Taco Bell would join in with its own waffle experience, which is a “taco” consisting of an egg and sausage inside a waffle.

In place of hot sauce, the breakfast waffle taco comes with syrup, if you are one of those people who thinks syrup on eggs is OK. I am not, but I ate an entire jar of mayonnaise this weekend, so I don’t judge. Except for that tiny part of me that thinks just because I like mayonnaise doesn’t give license to Taco Bell to mess around with food DNA until it produces a waffle taco, and somehow (this is maybe the scariest part) doing so in a way that allows it to make a profit even though it’s selling it for $0.89. Like, what is that sausage made out of that it cost it so little to purchase wholesale and then sell to us?

Anyway. You’ll just maybe have to go get one and decide for yourself if you are excited or terrified about this or both. I am on my way now. Hold the syrup please. (But do you have any mayonnaise?)

How would you like it if every single room in your house was an exercise station? You think that would suck? Well, maybe it would create a lot of unpleasant pressure to be working out and make you feel like a big loser all the time, but then again, maybe it would make exercising so convenient that the habit would just fold seamlessly into your life. And then, what if your workout was generating the power you needed to cook, clean, and entertain yourself? Would that be enough to make it a really solid habit? Or just an even more giant pain in the ass?

Whether this house is your worst nightmare or biggest fantasy, it now exists. Or anyway, it theoretically exists — the designers have built a model on the roof of an architecture center in Brussels. It contains — or, rather, will theoretically contain?– an arm-workout bureau, a spinning kitchen, and a triceps greenhouse. What does that mean? Well. Here is a video of people working out in this house that may explain better than well, an explanation.

The best thing about this house, IMHO, is that it is named the “JF-Kit House,” and the JF is for Jane Fonda — a pioneer in both physical fitness and the kind of leftist politics that often go hand in hand with preferring your energy to be generated by leg lifts instead of fossil fuel.

The artist’s statement imagines “the ideal citizen as an individual who can satisfy all her domestic energy needs through her own bodily exercise.” This seems to straddle a fine line between “possibly a reasonable idea” and “WTF are you talking about?” As with all these projects that are more utopian than reality, and frankly don’t really have the nuts-and-bolts portion worked out at this point, i.e. don’t actually work, the jury is out on whether JF-Kit House is something the world needs, or needs to ignore.