Poppies – Popping Up wherever they feel like itExcept in our garden, where no matter how many seeds we sow, they stubbornly refuse to thrive! #WeekUforUp #SCAPE #AlphabetChallenge #Poppy #EastCoastKin #StreetScape #Prestwich #FlowersOnFriday #Flowers #Manchester #WallsOnWednesday #BloomScrolling
Photos by Charles Emerson. All images courtesy of Alex Chinneck Studio
Alex Chinneck reimagines a Georgian townhouse facade into a playful portal for Clerkenwell Design Week 2025.
t takes a real knack for design to make something as hefty and industrial as steel and bricks appear weightless or even playful. But British artist Alex Chinneck (previously) is no stranger to monumental projects that reimagine urban infrastructure and buildings into striking public installations.
As part of London’s Clerkenwell Design Week, Chinneck unveiled “A week at the knees,” a new sculpture in Charterhouse Square that takes its cue from an iconic predecessor. The artist installed the “From the Knees of my Nose to the Belly of my Toes” in 2013 on a dilapidated townhouse in Margate, appearing as though the entire front of the building had simply slid right off. On view through June in London, his new work boasts a frame made from 320 meters of repurposed steel and 7,000 bricks.
“A week at the knees” playfully anthropomorphizes a classic Georgian facade, with its lower two levels rippling over a pathway as if seated in the park with its knees up. London is famous for its green squares and gardens, and Chinneck’s work invites visitors to pass through a unique portal that calls upon the history of its surroundings, complete with downspout and lamps flanking the arched front door. […]
AD | Join me in reading Nautilus by heading to http://joinnautilus.com/drbecky where you can get 15% off a membership to Nautilus, perfect for any science enthusiast. | We only know of one planet in the universe that hosts life: Earth. So when we search for other life out there in the Universe we look for what we know. We look for water, and ozone, and methane, and a whole bunch of carbon containing molecules because we know that those ingredients point to life here on Earth. But what if life out there in the Universe is NOT as we know it, and we’re missing the signs because it doesn’t have the same signatures of Earth-life?! This is a real possibility, and there are astrochemists and astrobiologists out there who are working through all the options of what we think life could be like. So let’s chat about the fundamental biochemistry of life and pick out a few things that could be different to Earth…
Petkowski et al. (2020; silicon as a potential building block for life) –
Petkowski et al. (2025; PNA stable in sulphuric acid) –
Duzdevich et al. (2025; complex structures in sulphuric acid) –
Greaves et al. (2021; phosphine detected in clouds of Venus) –
Madhusudhan et al. (2025; dimethyl sulphide on exoplanet K2-18b) –
00:00 Introduction
02:59 Solvents: if it’s not water like on Earth, what could life use instead?
06:20 Solvents: Liquid carbon dioxide
07:44 Solvents: Liquid sulphur
08:38 Solvents: Liquid sulphuric acid
12:20 Organics: if it’s not carbon based life like on Earth, what could it be instead?
14:55 Organics: Silicon-based life
16:37 Chirality: a mirror image to life on Earth?
18:39 How we’d even find life as we don’t know it
22:02 Bloopers
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👩🏽💻 I’m Dr. Becky Smethurst, an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford (Christ Church). I love making videos about science with an unnatural level of enthusiasm. I like to focus on how we know things, not just what we know. And especially, the things we still don’t know. If you’ve ever wondered about something in space and couldn’t find an answer online – you can ask me! My day job is to do research into how supermassive black holes can affect the galaxies that they live in. In particular, I look at whether the energy output from the disk of material orbiting around a growing supermassive black hole can stop a galaxy from forming stars.
How would you deal with sewage waste pollution? Here in Missoula, the answer was…. poplar trees. Here’s the weird reason that these poplar trees are some of nature’s best cleaners, and why our hometown heroes might not be so awesome for forever.
msamba 