Picós are enormous, hand-painted sound systems from Colombia’s Caribbean coast. Built from stacked speakers and amplifiers, each has its own name, visual identity and devoted following. Their fronts are painted with fluorescent animals, spaceships, warriors and whatever else might adequately announce several thousand watts.
Pen & Pixel was a Houston design studio that gave Southern rap its preferred reality: one in which everything was chrome, flaming, diamond-covered and slightly larger than Earth. Founded by brothers Shawn and Aaron Brauch in 1992, the studio produced thousands of album covers for labels including No Limit and Cash Money.
SLABs are heavily customized cars that emerged from Houston’s Black neighbourhoods in the 1980s. The name is often expanded as “Slow, Loud and Bangin’,” which also serves as instructions. Usually built from large American sedans, they feature candy paint, whitewall tyres, elaborate trunks and wire wheels called swangas, whose spokes extend sideways into traffic.
King’s lomatia is a sterile shrub hidden in the wilderness of south-west Tasmania. With three sets of chromosomes, it cannot produce viable seed. Instead, it survives by cloning itself: old stems fall over, take root and rise again. Fossilised leaves suggest this cycle has continued for at least 43,600 years.
The Dornier Do X was a three-storey flying boat built in 1929, then the largest aircraft in the world. Its twelve engines sat in pairs above the wing and were controlled by an engineer, who received instructions from the pilots through a ship-style engine telegraph. Inside were sleeping berths, a dining room and a lounge. On one demonstration flight it carried 169 people, including nine stowaways, setting a record that lasted twenty years. The Do X later flew from Germany to New York, though fires, repairs and repeated stops stretched the journey to nearly ten months. It crossed the Atlantic successfully, provided nobody was in a hurry.
The Bennie Railplane was a propeller-driven train suspended above an ordinary railway. Scottish inventor George Bennie imagined fast passengers travelling overhead while slow freight continued underneath. In 1930, he demonstrated a single Art Deco carriage on a 130-metre track near Glasgow, propelled by enormous blades at either end. Bennie claimed a full-sized system could reach 120 miles per hour, and proposed routes across Britain and beyond. None found funding. He went bankrupt in 1937, and his only Railplane remained beside the tracks until it was scrapped in 1956. For twenty-six years, the future rusted in a field.
The club-winged manakin is a small bird from the cloud forests of Colombia and Ecuador. To attract females, the male produces a clear, ringing note—not with his voice, but by playing his wings. One feather is ridged like a comb, while another acts as a pick, scraping across it as the wings shake more than 100 times per second. Even his wing bones have become unusually solid to withstand the performance. The bird is less a singer than a musical instrument that flies.
Wood’s cycad was discovered in South Africa’s oNgoye Forest in 1895 as a single clump of male plants. No other wild specimen—and no female—has ever been found. The original clump was gradually removed, while its offsets were propagated in botanical gardens worldwide. Because cycads have separate male and female plants, the species cannot reproduce naturally. Encephalartos woodii survives not as a population, but as one male plant copied many times.
The Villa Garzoni garden in Tuscany, climbs a hillside so steeply that it resembles stage scenery more than landscape.
John C. Lilly was an American physician and neuroscientist who developed the first modern isolation tank in 1954 to study a mind deprived of external stimulation. He later established a partially flooded laboratory in the Virgin Islands, where NASA-supported researchers attempted to teach dolphins spoken English. Lilly believed communication with another species might prepare humanity for contact with extraterrestrial intelligence. His later investigations became increasingly cosmic, including reported contact with an organization he called the Earth Coincidence Control Office. The isolation tank survived as a wellness device. The dolphin-English programme did not.