Like an eternal tattoo, if you plan on getting yourself turned into a record when you die you had best be careful about what track you want to be remembered by — will it be a one-hit wonder or a timeless classic?

Morbid or amazing depending on your point of view, Ask Studio is an offering of British company Andvinyl that involves pressing your cremains into a series of musical discs.

Each record has 24 minutes of audio (12 per side) and a single person’s cremated remains can be turned into up to 30 such discs. You can even pick which body parts become which disc, apparently (though how they separate those out in the cremation process is probably up to you).

Music is not the only option, either — the user supplies the sound, so it can be a song or simply a message to a family member, spouse, friend or other loved one. Labels feature the name, birth and death dates of the deceased. Album artwork can also be customized.

You can even have them shipped to vinyl stores for resale if you’re into that sort of thing (and if the participating shop is game to sell human remains). It’s not cheap (a few thousand dollars) but neither is burial! Pets welcome as well (Pet Cemetery soundtrack, perhaps?).

The post Spin Me Right Round: Company Presses Cremated Ashes into Playable Vinyl Records first appeared on Gajitz.

Fanzines were the key pre-digital mode for sharing knowledge and love about sci-fi across space and time, and now the University of Iowa Libraries is beginning to make thousands of them digital.

Their plan is to start with the James L. “Rusty” Hevelin Collection, which contains thousands of volumes, spans decades and features elaborately hand-illustrated titles and hand-drawn artwork.

The library acquired the collection after the author and artist passed. His work covers sci-fi culture dating back to 1941 and the first ever science fiction convention. These zines not only helped fans, but they also assisted aspiring authors.

From Hyperallergic: “Fanzines like the Futurian War Digest from the 1940s made in Leeds, England, and The Phantagraph published in the 1930s and 40s in New York were DIY materials imagined for a growing sci-fi community and often distributed by hand.”

“They also provided an accessible platform for writers including Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, and Arthur C. Clark who would go from fanzines to the icons of the genre.” In many cases, the earliest work of these greats rests only in zines, not in books, and would be lost if only their novels and published short story collections remained.

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Not to be outdone by NASA’s series of exoplanet travel posters, SpaceX has revealed a similarly-styled series of designs to promote interest in making it to Mars (and ultimately colonizing the planet if Elon Musk has his way).

First stop: Valles Marineris, a seriously grand canyon spanning thousands of miles on the surface of the red planet and extending down to 3 miles in its deepest valleys. It may even have been formed by running water in the ancient past.

And then there is Olympus Mons, the tallest peak in our solar system standing three times higher than Mount Everest. The jury is still out on whether it is volcanic, but perhaps a group of scientifically interested Martian tourists could settle the debate either way.

Finally, we have Phobos and Deimos, moons of Mars each smaller than our own lunar sphere. Deformed by their proximity to the planet, these are not the rounded moon shapes we are used to. They also may end up making sense as a first place to settle around Mars as a set of transit hubs.

The post Marketing Mars: Retrofuturistic Travel Posters from SpaceX first appeared on Gajitz.

Illustrated in retro-futuristic style and inspired by classic Works Progress Administration designs, this set of faux-vintage travel poster prints is brought to you by NASA’s Exoplanet Travel Bureau. Explore possible destinations with their “Eyes on Exoplanets” tool then check flight times with their “Interstellar Trip Planner.” In an effort to highlight just how stellar their discoveries via the Kepler telescope really are, NASA produced this series along with a compelling sales pitch for each planet – of course, actually landing on (or even getting near) some of these would be a bit tricky.

Twice as big in volume as the Earth, HD 40307g straddles the line between “Super-Earth” and “mini-Neptune” and scientists aren’t sure if it has a rocky surface or one that’s buried beneath thick layers of gas and ice. One thing is certain though: at eight time the Earth’s mass, its gravitational pull is much, much stronger.

Like Luke Skywalker’s planet “Tatooine” in Star Wars, Kepler-16b orbits a pair of stars. Depicted here as a terrestrial planet, Kepler-16b might also be a gas giant like Saturn. Prospects for life on this unusual world aren’t good, as it has a temperature similar to that of dry ice. But the discovery indicates that the movie’s iconic double-sunset is anything but science fiction.

Kepler-186f is the first Earth-size planet discovered in the potentially ‘habitable zone’ around another star, where liquid water could exist on the planet’s surface. Its star is much cooler and redder than our Sun. If plant life does exist on a planet like Kepler-186f, its photosynthesis could have been influenced by the star’s red-wavelength photons, making for a color palette that’s very different than the greens on Earth. This discovery was made by Kepler, NASA’s planet hunting telescope.

The post Cosmic Tourism: NASA Travel Posters for Real Exoplanets first appeared on Gajitz.

What will the remains of our current civilization look like to future generations? The objects that we carelessly discard today will be tomorrow’s relics. Artist Victor Sonna takes those future relics and turns them into a sort of retro-futuristic (or perhaps futuristic-retro?) mix of aged components and future reuse.

(all images via: Designboom)

Sonna collects old, rusted industrial items that are no longer useful for their original intended purposes and turns them into fascinating bikes. The latest in his “Future Nostalgia” collection is a bike called Ipsum.

Ipsum is composed of an old rake, various bits of aged tools, and other industrial odds and ends. Each element shows its age with a unique patina of rust, flaked paint, and dents.

The artist describes his work as being inspired by the strength of destruction. He uses imperfect objects to create beautiful and unconventional works that question our very idea of what can be called beautiful.

Ipsum and the other bikes in the series are welded together to make them stable and feature functional wheels, pedals and chains so they should be rideable. Imagine how much waste could be kept out of landfills if every discarded object was suddenly seen for its inherent value rather than its past life as a no-longer-useful item.

The post Aged Industrial Parts Become a Retro-Style Sculptural Bike first appeared on Gajitz.