The gadgets of yesterday are often turned into the art of today, and this concept is carried out delightfully in the art of Hu Shaoming. He uses technological relics of the early 20th century to show the internal beauty of the objects’ working parts.

“Reconnecting Time” is a series of four objects: a 1910s telephone, a 1920s alarm clock, a 1930s camera, and a 1940s portable film camera. Each has been painstakingly disassembled.

The artist then reconstructed every piece with a stationary zipper. Rather than pulling apart and putting together pieces of the objects, the zippers serve to reveal their inner mechanisms.

Although the zippers don’t move, they connect the antique gadgets with the present day. They allow for a glimpse into the mechanical parts that made each of the items work – a view that we don’t usually get until we deconstruct an object.

According to the artist, the pieces use the zippers as hands to pull the gadgets from the beginning of industrial age into the present. He destroyed their original forms and then carefully pieced them back together to create something that is neither firmly in the past or the present.

The post Persistence of Time: Antique Gadgets Unzipped for Art first appeared on Gajitz.

It looks a little like a piece of a broken plastic toy, but this lovely cerulean object is far more important. John Valley, professor of geoscience at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has confirmed that it is the oldest known fragment of Earth. The piece of zircon was found in a riverbed in Jack Hills, Australia thanks to recent erosion. This tiny gem was determined to be 4.4 billion years old. Valley and the international team of researchers he worked with used atom probe tomography to date the material.

This new technology allows scientists to determine the mass of individual atoms within an object, providing an accurate picture of when the material was formed. The zircon also gave scientists a clearer view of how and when the Earth formed. The crystals were formed some 160 million years after our solar system formed, when our planet had ceased to become a fiery ball of magma and begun to cool enough for the crust to form. According to the team of scientists, these pretty little pieces of rock are like time capsules, cluing us in to just how and when the Earth became habitable.

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