Planets scaled to sit on your desk, hold in your hand or collect in jar, these micro-wonders let you collect constellations, moons, even entire solar systems.

Made by the Little Planet Factory in London, these 3D-printed models come with various degrees of detail, from real (raised ridges for Earthen land forms) to speculative (terraformed versions of Mars).

Collectors can choose entire sets and series that work in tandem, illustrating just how big Jupiter is and how small our own Terra can be, or pick individual bodies, like a larger-sized version of the moon.

Their creations get particularly inventive when they enter Russian doll territory, allowing you to select versions inside other versions, like Venus with and without its surrounding gas clouds (open the shell to get the latter).

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In a sandfall, dry sand either falls vertically over suitable drops or cascades down hard slopes, creating stunning visual effects. The process has been described as “dry sandflows cascading down the escarpment face, where the grain concentration decreases dramatically and the streaming component of stress greatly exceeds the collisional component”

Sometimes water enters the mix and makes sand rivers possible too. When it rains in the desert and the water isn’t absorbed quickly, liquid can mix with the top layer of sand … and this wet sand can form moving rivers and waterfalls that you have to see to believe.

Sand generally can’t flow on its own like water as it quickly reaches a stable point where all the sides are at the angle of repose. If you have a very steep bank or sand dune then sand can flow down the side (which can actually be pretty dangerous if you are under it) but it self-limits and stops relatively quickly.

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Taking geothermal energy generation quite literally to the next level, Iceland is drilling a hole to tap into the Earth’s magma, a virtually unlimited potential power source.

The Iceland Deep Drilling Project (IDDP) is drilling 5 kilometers down into the Earth’s crust using its rig named “Thor” in order to reach hot zones between tectonic plates.

Unlike conventional geothermal, their pursuits are taking them to places where 400 to 1000 degrees Celsius can be expected, far hotter than similar approaches.

“People have drilled into hard rock at this depth, but never before into a fluid system like this,” Albert Albertsson of an Icelandic geothermal-energy company involved in the project. Researchers are hoping to find “supercritical steam,” which holds more heat energy than either liquid or gas. A potential 50 megawatts of energy could be generated from this steam, powering up to 50,000 homes. Similar techniques could be employed around the world near young volcanoes and similar subduction zones.

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If necessity is the mother of invention, perhaps luck or experimentation is the father, as this remarkable student-made rechargeable battery discovery illustrates. Doctoral candidate Mya Le Thai at the University of California was playing around in the lab when she found a method to make batteries last for hundreds of years.

A team of researchers at UCI had been experimenting with nanowires for potential use in batteries, these were thin and fragile with a tendency to crack and break down with too many recharges. When Thai coated a set in manganese dioxide and a Plexiglas-like electrolyte gel, suddenly up to tens of thousands of cycles, in some cases even hundreds of thousands, were possible (compared to a few hundred for normal laptop batteries). Instead of batteries being the thing needing replacement, they could suddenly be the thing that outlasts the devices they power.

“She started to cycle these gel capacitors, and that’s when we got the surprise,” said Reginald Penner, chair of the university’s chemistry department. “She said, ‘this thing has been cycling 10,000 cycles and it’s still going.’ She came back a few days later and said ‘it’s been cycling for 30,000 cycles.’ That kept going on for a month. The big picture is that there may be a very simple way to stabilize nanowires of the type that we studied If this turns out to be generally true, it would be a great advance for the community.”

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It looks like a toy some child let fall overboard while on a ship in the ocean, but the Rossia pacifica (known as the stubby squid) is entirely real and the video is here to prove it. Spotted by E/V Nautilus off the coast of California at a depth of nearly 3,000 feet, the strange creature looks surreal, like some manufactured object or painted anime character.

“This species spends life on the seafloor,” say the spotting researchers, “activating a sticky mucus jacket and burrowing into the sediment to camouflage, leaving their eyes poking out to spot prey like shrimp and small fish.” It may not be a Pokemon, but it does stir a certain urge to want to start collecting these exotic critters … or at least start capturing them in close-up, high-resolution, and well-lit videos like the one above.

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