Art and science complement each other very nicely in this incredibly cool and simple paper kit to build an articulated horse by James Watt from Clockwork Robotics.  (Any relation to the Steam Engine linkage inventor James Watt?) It may not look all that interesting in the static photo above, but check out this video of the model in motion!

I have seen the future of books, and it is the Kindle. Or maybe Kindle rev. 2 will be anyway.Having witness the repeated failure of several electronic book efforts in the past, I was pessimistic. But now I believe. Amazon's new approach to the electronic book has successfully tackled several of the key barriers that stymied earlier efforts with a very well-executed end-to-end service on top of an aggressive device design. And while there are still a few warts on the Kindle typical of most first-generation consumer electronics products, it is clearly pointing to a very interesting future.As an avid reader with an extensive personal library of fiction, non-fiction, and technical books (as the numerous bookshelves scattered about the house and the 40 boxes of books in my garage will attest) the idea of forgoing the heft and ease of browsing and reference was a daunting one. And yet, I acknowledge having suffered under challenges of managing both the library and the habit, particularly while traveling. I have come to resign myself to allocating at least 10-12 pounds of luggage space to carry the books and magazines necessary to fuel a week-long trip ...

Over the course of the last few months, it turns out that one of the most popular posts here on All the Best Bits was the one entitled: A Snowflake Closeup. So in honor of the season, here is some more on snowflake science.Some folks from Caltech have posted Snowcrystals.com, a great site to learn all things snow related, including a great taxonomy of ice and snow crystals and more snowflake photos than you can shake a candy-cane at.

If you didn't happen to catch this when it was live on television, YouTube has come to the rescue. Check out this amazing Rube-Goldberg machine from a couple-year-old Honda ad:"This Advertisement for the new Honda Accord was shot in real time with no CGI involved in the sequence. It required 606 takes and cost $6 million to shoot and took 3 months to complete.The equipment was so precisely set up that the crew literally had to tip toe around the set for fear of disturbing things, which led to some unexpected problems. "As the day went on, the studio would get hotter," says Steiner. "It meant that the wood would expand and the cog or exhaust that spins around would move slightly faster." These tiny changes made big differences to the precision set-up of the equipment...........The sequence where the tires roll up a slope looks particularly impressive but is very simple. Steiner says that there is a weight in each tire and when the tire is knocked, the weight is displaced and in an attempt to rebalance itself, the tire rolls up the slope."source: steelcitysfinest.com

From NASA:The two spiral galaxies started to interact a few hundred million years ago, making the Antennae galaxies one of the nearest and youngest examples of a pair of colliding galaxies. Nearly half of the faint objects in the Antennae image are young clusters containing tens of thousands of stars. The orange blobs to the left and right of image center are the two cores of the original galaxies and consist mainly of old stars criss-crossed by filaments of dust, which appears brown in the image. The two galaxies are dotted with brilliant blue star-forming regions surrounded by glowing hydrogen gas, appearing in the image in pink.

Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity near the rim of Victoria Crater. Victoria is an impact crater about 800m (half a mile) in diameter at Meridiani Planum near the equator of Mars. Opportunity is the dot at the centre of the zoomed image. (Nasa/JPL/UA)

Wow. More photos and links here.

From NASA: NASA's Mars rover Opportunity reached the rim of "Victoria Crater" in Mars' Meridiani Planum region with a 26-meter (85-foot) drive during the rover's 951st Martian day, or sol (Sept. 26, 2006). After the drive, the rover's navigation camera took the three exposures combined into this view of the crater's interior. This crater has been the mission's long-term destination for the past 21 Earth months. A half mile in the distance one can see about 20 percent of the far side of the crater framed by the rocky cliffs in the foreground to the left and right of the image. The rim of the crater is composed of alternating promontories, rocky points towering approximately 70 meters (230 feet) above the crater floor, and recessed alcoves. The bottom of the crater is covered by sand that has been shaped into ripples by the Martian wind. The position at the end of the sol 951 drive is about six meters from the lip of an alcove called "Duck Bay." The rover team planned a drive for sol 952 ...

Remember the studies back in the nineties about what makes someone's face attractive? Judith Langlois et. al. discovered that the most attractive faces turned out to be the ones that were the average composite of all the faces in a large population study.Images were posted across Newsweek and other trade magazines about how beautiful was really only average. Now web sites have sprung up like Beautycheck with all the details.Left: averaged female face, made of 64 female faces; right: averaged male face, made of 32 male faces.But wait, there's more. In a recently published paper Piotr Winkielman, Jamin Halberstadt, Tedra Fazendeiro, and Steve Catty report that this notion of average beauty simply arises through the fact that the repeated stimulus of a series of patterns presented to the eyes condition a person to recognize the expected average easily, efficiently (in terms of energy) and rapidly, and that the ease in recognition eventually translates from familiar into beautiful. "What you like is a function of what your mind has been trained on," Winkielman said. "A stimulus becomes attractive if it falls into the average of what you've seen and is therefore simple for your brain to process. ...

From The World's Fair at Science blogs, though originally published in Science. The Y chromosome sequenced at last!