Here’s your latest time-waster – a super-simple site with a bunch of black and white photos of cats bouncing around in seemingly random ways. As they lose velocity, you can click to throw them back up in the air. Way friendlier than those angry birds.

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Jackie Hoysted is an Irish-born artist who has been living in the US for fifteen years and working in a number of different media, including encaustic and ceramics. Over the past year, she has concentrated on painting, with stunning results. Her show in early 2012 at Washington, DC’s Gallery 555, called Girls – Nice Doesn’t Cut It, introduced art lovers to a tough bunch of young women. The show of large-scale portraits depicted determined-looking, serious women, many named after legendary heroines. As Hoysted told the Huffington Post: ‘I feel that girls are brought up to be nice and liked and that holds them back from being the most successful people they can be’.

An upcoming show of Hoysted’s work at Pittsburgh’s BoxHeart Gallery consists of some of the paintings from Girls, along with other works on paper. These pieces combine minimalist backgrounds with an almost expressionist style to the faces in order to focus on the facial expressions, which ‘exude mental strength’. Hoysted’s exhibit, Minimally Charged, runs from October 30 – November 24, 2012 at the BoxHeart Gallery.

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It’s meant for little kids, but this website, based on a little white rabbit drawn by a Dutch artist in 1955, has a lot to recommend it to design junkies and other grownups. Miffy the bunny was first drawn by Dutch artist Dick Bruna in 1955. He refined his design over the years, but Miffy (or Nijntje as she is known in the Netherlands) has looked the same since 1963.

Bruna’s extremely minimalist design and use of bright color and simple shapes make his work instantly recognizable. One of the great pleasures of Miffy is seeing how this very simple design can be adapted to show action and emotion. Miffy lacks a mouth and can only communicate her feelings by blinking and crying. Try it sometime, it’s not easy! If you need a break from Assassin’s Creed, the slow, simple games on Miffy are just the thing to lower your pulse rate. Try counting apples as they fall from a tree or click on Miffy and her friends “hiding” behind trees. Well done.

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Mobilia Gallery in Cambridge, MA, invited dozens of artists to rethink a humble household item: the teapot. While some produced lovely variations in traditional ceramics, quite a few thought way outside the, uh, pot. Louise Hill’s Upsidedownsized is a topsy-turvy brick house complete with furniture, lights and a tire swing. Wesley Fleming’s Mantis Tea Time captures some graceful insects in glass. Gerard Ferrari created a highly untraditional Robotic Bug with Claws, while Liz Alpert-Fay went more conceptual with a wire-mesh teapot complete with embroidered spill. The exhibit continues until November 15.

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We all like to imagine we’re the hero of our own legend, right? This fun tumblr updates the old classics – some in as short as a single sentence – with details that make them relevant for today. A taste: ‘The ugly duckling read obscure works of literature in other languages and listened to indie music even the guys in the record store had never heard of. If I’m not going to be prettier than anyone, she thought, I’m at least going to be better than them’.

‘The tortoise and the hare met for coffee. They each casually mentioned their recent successes, secretly hoping to appear better than the other. As they walked their separate ways home it hit them at the same time: There never was a race. There is no destination. There is no winner’.

‘Thumbelina never got much bigger but she did get her own reality TV show, so that’s cool’.

A big bonus: gorgeous illustrations from old editions of children’s tales.

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Lots of people take meth and other amphetamines, and quite a few know how to make them. But oddly enough, nobody knows exactly how amphetamines work. This gap in knowledge makes it hard to understand and treat the large and growing problem of amphetamine addiction. The scarcity and slow pace of funding for research compounds the difficulty.

Dr. Ethan Perlstein of Princeton University came up with a novel project designed to try to kill two birds with the one stone. He calls it Crowdsourcing Discovery, and he is using all the media channels he can – Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, blogging, Youtube – to take his idea to a large audience.

On his RocketHub crowdfunding page, Perlstein lays out the idea: ‘For this project, we’ll determine where both amphetamine and methamphetamine accumulate within the brain cells of lab mice treated with those drugs. That’s Step One in a gradual process of determining how these drugs actually work in a complex organism like us’. All data from the experiments will be uploaded to the data-sharing site Figshare, and the results will be published in an open-access journal, as well as posted to the project website. Donors to the project can claim rewards such as beers with the researchers in New York and invitations to brainstorming sessions. (No, you don’t get any meth.) Perlstein and his colleagues are hopeful that people will be intrigued and inspired by this unique opportunity to be a part of cutting-edge scientific research.

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Humans can tell instinctively whether other people are ill or embarrassed by observing their skin – whether it’s displaying a greenish pallor or a rosy blush. Doctors and scientists can notice more subtle effects caused by variations in the oxygenation of the blood. n innovative startup has now translated that knowledge into special filtered glasses called O2Amps that may have applications ranging from medicine to law enforcement to dating.

The glasses, produced by 2AI Labs, are based on the research of neuroscientist Mark Changizi. He writes, ‘The technology comes out of my research while at Caltech on the evolution of color vision in primates, where I provided evidence that color vision evolved to sense oxygenation modulations in the hemoglobin under the skin. Once we understand the connection between our color vision and blood physiology, it’s possible to build filters that further amplify our perception of the blood and the signals it provides’. 2AI is currently producing three different models of O2Amps aimed at medical professionals:

* a vein-finder, or oxygenation-isolator, that amplifies perception of oxygenation modulations under the skin, which could help medical workers improve the accuracy of needle-sticks, among other benefits;

* a trauma-detector, or hemoglobin-concentration-isolator, that amplifies perception of hemoglobin concentrations under the skin, with potential applications for sports and medicine

* a general clinical enhancer, or oxygenation-amplifier, that combines the best features of the first two.

However, Changizi notes that ‘because color vision evolved for everyday wear, so to speak, one of our largest markets is for everyday-wear sunglasses, to enhance one’s perception of the emotion, mood and health signals we evolved to detect with our color vision. For example, typical sunglasses shade the world but also end up shading one’s connections to other people; this is exemplified by the way people tip up their sunglasses to get a better look at someone. Our technology shades the world but not the social; for the O2Amps, one sees other people better by keeping them on, rather than tipping them up’. Sounds like the closest thing to real-life x-ray specs. Get yours first, before other people start seeing right through you.

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Let us now praise photoshop, tumblr and people with free time and strange imaginations. The One Tiny Hand tumblr tweaks photos of celebs so they appear to have one normal sized hand and one ridiculously tiny one, an effect which is disturbingly hilarious, or maybe hilariously disturbing. Jeff Wysaski of the Pleated Jeans blog takes some famous people and some innocent creatures and “corgifies” them. All are peculiar. Korgye West is a classic.

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Belgian artist Wim Delvoye created these unique sculptures by hand-carving elaborate floral and geometric patterns into used tires. Delvoye’s whimsical work merges the rugged with the rococo. For example, in his cement mixer, which might look right at home in Versailles. These pieces contrast sharply with his with his colorful, SimCity inspired website, which encourages visitors to wander among his many artistic pursuits.

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If an apple a day does keep the doctor away, you’ll want to remember to eat that apple. This whimsical pillbox by woodworker Art Drauglis can help. Looks just like grandma’s, only much larger and more beautiful in natural osage and ash woods. Drauglis says you can really use it to hold your meds, but he suggests ‘apples, chocolate truffles or small liquor bottles’ as more appealing alternatives.

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Artist KaiTrees keeps a low profile online, so not many people know about his incredible sculptures of trees, made of wires twisted together and then painstakingly pulled back apart. He posts some pictures of his work on Deviant Art and has a few available for sale at ArtFire It’s worth zooming in close to see the incredible level of detail.

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Shing Yin Khor (aka Sawdust Bear) describes herself as ‘a sculptor and illustrator inspired by monsters, tentacles, mediocre science fiction movies, bikes, Dungeons and Dragons, and really adorable cats’. Some of her sculpted characters appear in Marlowe the Monster, a webcomic about a lumpy, multi-eyed monster who goes on bad dates and suffers from social anxiety, which he soothes by eating cake.

Marlowe is also the star of Khor’s first book, Marlowe the Monster Volume 1. Khor, a Californian who shows her work at San Diego ComicCon and other geeky venues, is currently creating a new line of rather anxious creatures called larms and scaleybugs which will be featured at a November show in Albuquerque, NM.

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If your sense of humour runs to the existential and bleak, you’ll love Screenshots of Despair, a tumblr featuring those moments when our electronic devices convey horrible truths. Its creator says that ‘it’s as much about the gap between people and machines as it is about isolation’. He also notes that ‘this blog was practically meant for the Random button’.

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I’m a painter and collage artist whose work is inspired by science, especially biology. After years of creating colorful riffs on mitosis, brain cells, bacteria and other microscopic marvels, I decided to branch out.

With the help of a fabric-savvy friend, I recently launched a line of gorgeous, semi-transparent silk scarves based some of my most popular paintings (including Blue Mitosis, which recently graced the cover of a prestigious scientific journal. They’re a great gift or accessory for any biologist or doctor, but they also stand alone as abstract patterns. Nobody needs to know that those pretty circles on your scarf are petri dishes full of pathogens unless you want them to. You can buy them at my Etsy shop and follow me on twitter @artologica to be the first to know when new scarves and paintings are released. 

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Jennifer Gardy, PhD, is a serious scholar with a serious job as a university professor and the head of a major research lab. She also has the most adorable, least pretentious personal website ever. Despite her busy schedule, she also finds time to head up the (entirely fictitious) Kitten Microbiome Project, to which I had the honor of contributing some artwork, and has recently written a children’s picture book on microbiology.

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Matthew Parker, a DC-based artist who makes stunning collages of photographs, was bored with schlepping his work to art festivals in a van and setting up a tent to sell them.

Eager for a more nimble and environmentally-friendly alternative, he researched his options, looking at what vendors in other countries used to transport and display their wares. Having considered and rejected a rickshaw, he settled on a cargo bike, and developed his own design for an Art Trike. He found a company, Haley Trikes of Philadelphia, willing to collaborate on the design and manufacture of the trike. The ArtTrike’s cargo area is ingeniously designed to become an instant display, allowing Parker to stage a show pretty much anywhere in the city.

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Javelin Chi, a chemist who now works as a research technologist, started crocheting in graduate school to relieve the stress of lab work. She eventually turned her hobby into a professional sideline, selling her crocheted molecules on her Etsy shop, Prim and Plush, and at craft shows. 

Says Chi, “Combining my two passions for science, mainly organic chemistry, and crochet was just a natural thing for me to do. I had just started trying out the craft of amigurumi and immediately wanted to start making molecules.” She says her best customers are grad students, teachers and professors, and her most popular designs are ethanol and the three phases of water.

Check out caffeine, a large (13 by 11 inch) structure made of cotton yarn over wooden dowels in the Japanese technique called amigurumi. The combination of deep browns and creamy white give it the invigorating jolt of a grande latte. 

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San Francisco-area geeks may have thought they were dreaming last week when they looked up at the sky and saw… Pi (3.14159265385…). Five skywriting planes took to the skies above the Bay Area on Sptember 11 to create the world’s largest ephemeral art installation —  the first 1,000 digits of the infinite sequence of pi. The hour-long, 150-mile flight, naturally named “Pi in the Sky” was dreamed up by San Francisco artist ISHKY with the support of Pizone, a group that uses pi to educate and engage students and the public to become more interested in math and science.

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