Artist Rhys Newman has created a series of birdhouses that can be hung in the same fashion as old shoes draped on wires.

Some inspiration from the pebbles and rocks of Martha’s Vinyard…

Inhabitat points us to an interesting exhibit that just wrapped up at Oakland’s Swarm Gallery. Vaughn Bell and Josh Keyes created a variety of work that examined humanity’s relationship with the natural world.

Detroit is in a very interesting state. It’s simultaneously decomposing, and evolving into a new city. The Sweet Juniper blog has documented some of the evolution of Detroit in a series of photos they call “Feral Houses”. The images show how the yearly summer plant growth overtakes the many abandoned structures around the city, seemingly reclaiming them for nature.
Sweet Juniper explains:
I’ve seen “feral” used to describe dogs, cats, even goats. But I have wondered if it couldn’t also be used to describe certain houses in Detroit. Abandoned houses are really no big deal here. Some estimate that there are as [...]

Sound designer Diego Stocco (whose Music From Sand project we wrote about in March) has created another amazing, nature-based music composition. This time, Stocco played a tree from his backyard as an instrument. Using a combination of specialty microphones and fine acoustical tuning of the tree’s branches, he was able to generate an assortment of unique sounds. Watch and listen to the beautiful “Music From a Tree” in the video below.

Diego Stocco – Music From A Tree from Diego Stocco on Vimeo.

[via Behance]

Innovative sound designer Diego Stocco has created a composition only made out of different sounds produced by grains of sand. Using piezo film transducers, Stocco sampled and mapped out the sand sounds into a series of instruments. Watch the piece take shape below.
Diego Stocco – Music From Sand from Diego Stocco on Vimeo
[via Neatorama]

ArtificialOwl.net is a photographic collection of the abandoned material objects and places in our world. The images are both hauntingly beautiful and a disturbing reminder of wasted possibilities. A wide variety of abandoned subjects are explored, including man-made homages like the Cadillac Ranch. Dormant buildings are shown that are slowly being reclaimed by nature, or being reclaimed as graffitti canvases. Surreal caches of mammoth airplanes and cargo ships also highlight the tail end of the industrial life-cycle. Well worth a browse to understand the magnitude of our throw-away culture.
[via Adfreak]

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Pecha Kucha Daily reports on a very unique project that was presented at the PechaKucha night in Trieste late last year. Portuguese designer Susana Soares uses bees exceptional odor perception as part of a beautiful and strange medical sensing device. It’s a brilliant human-nature collaboration that takes advantage of an untapped naturally occurring phenomenon.
They explain:
Have you ever heard that bees have a phenomenal odor perception? Susana Soares explained to the public of PKN Trieste how the bees can be trained within minutes using Pavlov’s reflex to target a specific odour, and their range of detection includes pheromones, toxins, and disease [...]

The latest edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary will no longer contain a large chunk of nature terms like heron, magpie, otter, acorn, clover, ivy, sycamore, willow and blackberry. Replacing the cut words in the children’s dictionary will be technology terms including Blackberry, blog, MP3 player, voicemail and broadband. Vineeta Gupta from the Oxford University Press says that the decision to remove nature words is due to the reduced presence of nature in children’s lives.
Parent Central reports on the concerns regarding this change:
Canadian wildlife artist and conservationist Robert Bateman, whose Get to Know Program has been inspiring children to go [...]