Ross Lovegrove is renowned for beautiful fluid designs, earning him the nickname, Captain Organic. His $140,000 Muon speakers, for KEF were milled from enormous billets of solid aluminum, by an aeronautics manufacturer. A process that took a week.From his bladder molded, composite carbon and glass fiber DNA stair to liquid bioform furniture which is made using the same process used to manufacture body panels for Aston Martin cars, Lovegrove has teamed up with some of the world's most innovative manufacturers to combine design excellence and futuristic materials.

In this kind of space, no one can hear you scream. Anechoic chambers use spiked walls to eliminate echoes, the end result might literally sound dull but the visual effect can be stunning, such as at the enormous anechoic hangar. Vote for your faves.

What are the essential gadgets to carry around every day? The first in a series where various people describe their current or ideal stash. Today its Oobject's turn. Vote to rank our choices.

1927 to 1959 was the golden era of General Motors. This was the period when Harley Earl started as Vice President of the Art and Color Division and gave birth to the modern notion of car design.Earl eschewed the purely engineering driven practicality of Ford to take inspirations from aircraft and space age concepts and add them to cars, turning them into works of art. The designs ranged from the highly futuristic Firebird gas turbine concept vehicles to the wildly successful production Corvette.Like almost all product design and architecture, the stamp of authorship is not clear cut and nor should it be. Many designs that are associated with him were produced by people working under him, but it was Early himself who created the school and he deserves a place alongside Frank Lloyd Wright and Charles and Ray Eames as one of America's most important designers.Vote for your favorite.

As people blow each other to pieces, daily, on the planet below, the silently floating Hubble telescope seems to represent everything great about humankind. Here are our other favorite telescopes.Update: Have been in continuous operation since 1963, the Arecibo project is in danger of closing due to cuts in funding. Jonathan, who is a researcher working at the Arecibo dish has posted a link in the comments to its website where you can donate or voice your support. http://www.arecibo-observatory.org

Flea circuses share one thing in common with combine harvesters. They are something that you hear about lot as a kid but rarely see. Popular since the 1600s till the late 19th Century, there is something fantastically creepy and Victorian about them, since they were cheap entertainment for the poor and the best performers were human fleas. Despite the mythology, flea circuses are real, and some still exist. Here are some pictures and videos to prove it.

From the ground, these inflatable tanks, missile launchers and planes look like children's toys. Yet from the air, these objects are almost indistinguishable from the real thing, complete with accurate thermal signatures over areas such as windows. Think what fun you could have playing havoc with Google Maps and some of these.

The Highline is fashionable in every sense. A park inspired by one in Paris, a combination of Euro chic, treehugging sanctity and hipster industrial grunge.But it sits above ground, shovels people off the streets via stairs which cyclists can't use and leads from nowhere to nowhere. In addition, little money ha been spend on the dark spaces underneath, which could easily negate any benefit provided above.The designers involved are great and there are nice touches, but could it have been better just to have torn it down and created something at street level. Such talk is heresy, but here are 9 reasons why we are disbelievers.

What the list says - a collection of pod shaped enclosures from a health monitoring system, to a tree house, escape module, house, bed and office.

Although crash test dummies are iconic, there are a variety of different types, dating back to the fifties. There are ones for different genders, age, size and more recently, weight, with fatter dummies to represent the growing trend of obesity. There are different ones for cars, trains, planes, motorbikes and even those used for pedestrian impacts. Here are a dozen interesting examples.

Although Apple has recently released a beautifully designed keyboard which hints at what an Apple mini laptop may look like, it is the combination of tactile feedback and screen based keyboards which promises to make significant developments in keyboards in the near future. Here is our list of our favorite keyboards, vote for your faves.

Giant centrifuges are used to test whether fighter pilots or astronauts can deal with extreme G forces, pilots having 3 chances to survive a 15 second 6G test to be able to qualify. Here are some videos of the results of the effects of these tests up to 10G and on a range of suspects from pilots to Iron Maiden's lead singer.

n honor of the Frankfurt Motor Show, record oil prices and the end of Burning Man - we're doing a non car list as a green alternative.Here are the strangest bikes we could find, propelled sideways, backwards, in reverse or by climbing up a ladder. Vote on your faves.

Its strange to think that the now obsolete VCR or VTR has a half century history, from the giant Ampex and RCA machines used in TV stations to the multiple, competing format, consumer cassette players that culminated in the dominant VHS standard.Today you can by a DVD player for the same price as a DVD itself, due to the small number of moving parts and emerging market labor. However, VCRs were always relatively expensive because of their complex mechanisms, latterly involving gimballed rotating heads.In terms of design, aside from the robust utilitarian looking professional models, VCRs were ugly devices from the outside, but complex marvels inside.There are several great sites dealing with VTR history, including the excellent: http://www.totalrewind.org

The fetish aspect of external, insect-like skeletons has made them a staple of science fiction. However, the utility is real, from the incredible Japanese Enryu rescue exoskeleton, which looks like a loader from the Aliens movie, to brain controlled limb enhancers for the para or quadraplegic.

Glove boxes are a staple of apocalyptic movies - chambers where scientists can manipulate dangerous substances through pockets with integral gloves.These are gadgets that everyone can recognize yet few can name. Here are our favorite picks, from radiation shielded plutonium glove boxes at Los Alamos to those aboard the Space Station, a version for welding exotic materials and a Class III device for handling biological or chemical Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Most buildings are built to provide shelter from the natural environment for the maximum period of time. Rocket launch pads are designed to weather the extremely unnatural conditions of exploding kerosene fireballs for a short period of time, which makes them extraordinar.Here are ten that we found worthy of note. The list includes historical ones, such as the moon landing Apollo 11 or its predecessor, Wernher Von Braun’s Nazi V2 on a pad in America rather than Germany to the stunning architecture of the gantries of the twin shuttle pads 39a and 39b at Kennedy Space Center or the desolate surroundings of the Russian Buran Shuttle launch pad, and its surprisingly different design, considering the similarity of the vehicle.

The fact that vinyl is somewhat obsolete is exactly what drives the quixotic ambitions of high end turntable manufacturers to produce ever more extreme engineering solutions to sliding a diamond through a wavy notch and amplifying the wobble.The common ground here is to make a very heavy and rock solid platter and to move the motor as far away from it as possible, to avoid interference. The prices of these things range from under $1000 to a staggering $150,000