Of Trees, Tenderness, and the Moon – the stunning vintage woodblock prints of Japanese artist Hasui Kawase.

The story of the world’s first planetarium design and the forgotten 18th-century visionary whose futuristic homage to Newton dared generations to reimagine the poetry of public spaces, the architecture of shadow, and the relationship between nature and human creativity.

Step into Dorothy Lathrop’s dreamscapes – haunting 100-year-old illustrations of fairy-poems by the woman who became the first to win the Caldecott Medal, the Nobel Prize of illustration.

Stunning celestial art from the 1750 book that first described the spiral shape of the Milky Way and dared imagine the existence of galaxies beyond our own.

The Snail with the Right Heart — a love story, a science story, a story about the poetry of existence, about time and chance, genetics and gender, life and death, evolution and infinity, about not mistaking difference for defect, about recognizing diversity as nature’s wellspring of resilience and beauty.

“Where is my cyanometer,” Thoreau exclaimed in his journal on a blue-skied spring day, referring to the curious device invented by the Swiss scientist Horace-Bénédict de Saussure a century earlier to measure the blueness of the sky. 

Here are some of the most beautiful meditations on blue from 200 years of literature, including Thoreau, Goethe, Toni Morrison, Rachel Carson, Virginia Woolf, Rebecca Solnit, Georgia O'Keeffe, and other titans of the world in words.

The Lost Spells – from author Robert Macfarlane and artist Jackie Morris, a rewilding of the human heart in a lyrical illustrated invocation of nature. 

Trailer for His Own Life – Ric Burns’s fantastic documentary about the visionary neurologist and poetic soul Oliver Sacks, he of uncommon insight into everything from the psychological pillars of creativity to the physiological healing power of nature, and above all about love, lunacy, and a life fully lived. 

Stunning paintings of butterflies by two Australian teenage sisters, from an era when women had no formal artistic or scientific opportunity, which sparked one of the most heartening triumphs of conservation and rewilding a century after their death. Meet Harriet and Helena Scott.

75 years ago today, the Atomic Bomb. And then, The Bomb and the General – Umberto Eco’s extraordinary vintage semiotic children’s book drawing on this catastrophe of human nature to reflect on peace and environmental wakefulness

Vintage science face masks, featuring centuries-old astronomical art and natural history illustration, benefiting The Nature Conservancy and the endeavor to build NYC’s most democratic temple of cosmic perspective – the city’s first public observatory. 

On Bloomsday, rare and stunning illustrations for Ulysses by Italian artist Mimmo Paladino. 

100 years ago, the German polar researcher, geophysicist, and climate scientist Alfred Wegener coined the word Pangea to describe the ancient supercontinent that formed 335 million years ago as part of his revolutionary theory of continental drift, for which he was derided for decades before it became the pillar of our geologic understanding of our own planet. 

Italian artist and architect Massimo Pietrobon performs a terrestrial spacetime warp to map modern-day country territories onto the supercontinent 175 million years after it began breaking up – a pleasantly disquieting reminder that we live in a world of ephemeral realities, imaginary and negotiated, mapped onto a physical world that is just as ephemeral on the appropriate timescale. 

(via Kottke)

Stunning 19th-century illustrations of otherworldly marine creatures from the world’s first scientific effort to bring public awareness and awe to the Great Barrier Reef.