PAULA BY DELLA BASS IN “BURBERRY DAYS"

Burberry Days in Long Beach – Photographer Della Bass captures new face Paula in FGR’s latest exclusive shot along the beach. With art direction by Leah Esposito, the dark-haired beauty wears a wardrobe of all Burberry Prorsum coats paired with separates from the likes of Michael Kors, Theyskens’ Theory and Joie styled by Helen Barbieri. Hair stylist Kristi Wilczo and makeup artist Manami Ishikawa create Paula’s windswept tresses and understated beauty.

Spring Nail Color Trend 2013

2013 is considered as the year of nail trend. Fashion would be incomplete without beautiful nails. Nails - if beautifully painted - increase the beauty of hands otherwise pale and dirty nails look unseemly. Nail colors are the hottest accessory this year. If you are in desperate need of change in this spring, the season of colors, why don’t you go with spring nail color trend 2013? You will definitely love it.

Whatever nail color you wear, always keep one thing in mind that you oftenly touch up your nails and they are most prominent part so your nails must be cool and eye catching because perfection is a key with shades. To have perfect nails you can play with different colorful shades this spring. Choose beautiful spring colors. Spring has a lot of shades. There are some idea about spring nail trend and spring nail color trend that you can follow to make your hands pretty and hot.

Fall Collection 2013 by Firdous

Firdous once again adorned fall collection 2013 with embroidery and tassel laces. Theses dresses are the outstanding wears for functions and parties.

again Firdous come back with their latest fashion collection labeled as the “fall collection 2013” Firdous Cloth mill has recently launched their new exclusive and one of their spectacular fall collections this year. The cloth collection has used vibrant colors, intriguing patterns, textures and many other dazzling prints.

A remarkable innovation is seen in the latest collection which explicitly says all about the brand. The wide printed border, bright shades in blues, orange, greens, yellow’s , froze and so forth is beautifully coupled with printed neckline, fully embroided bottoms, textures, patterns and motifs add more into the this desirable fall collection.

The range is too captivating and flaunting to grab the attention of all women out there. With the stunning collection of fully embroided A line shirts dresses with fine thread and cross stitched cut work designs along with straight slacks is beautifully coupled with long dubattas. The colors are aesthetically combined to give dresses an ultimate look. Theses colorful fall collection has a semi-formal appeal and can be worn formally as well on different occasions. 

Nissan Makes a Radical Electric Racer

Nissan is out to reinvent road racing, first with the DeltaWing and then the ZEOD RC. Now it’s taking the lessons learned from both cars and applying them to road. And here’s the kicker: Nissan is actually considering putting it into production.

This is the Nissan Bladeglider, and it’s a spitting image of its race-bound predecessors, with a triangular shape that’s both incredibly aerodynamic and super light thanks to a carbon fiber reinforced body shell.

The front end is just over 3 feet wide, with two skinny tires tucked into the pointed nose and controlled by a Knight Rider-esque steering wheel. There’s seating for three inside the open-air cabin, with the driver’s seat mounted in the middle — à la the McLaren F1 — and sliding laterally towards the Lambo-hinged doors for quick ingress and egress. Two passenger seats aft of the driver complete the ménage à trois, and help contribute to its road-hugging 30:70 front-to-rear weight distribution.

Nissan isn’t saying exactly what’s motivating the Bladeglider, only hinting that in-wheel electric motors will power the rear wheels, manipulating torque on the fly for maximum performance, with power provided by rear-mounted lithium-ion battery packs. The Bladeglider makes its debut at the Tokyo Motor Show this month, and according to Nissan it could “mature into a production car.” Breath held.

              

Eclipse Dash Across the Earth’s Face From Space

There it goes: the shadow of the moon zipping across the continent of Africa. The animation above shows this weekend’s hybrid solar eclipse event from an amazing vantage point, the Meteosat-10 satellite, which tracks weather patterns.

The sequence was put together by climate scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and shared on their CIMSS Satellite Blog. The full-resolution version in all its glory is worth a peek as well. The video below from EUMETSAT, a European weather-monitoring organization, gives another view of the eclipse racing across the Earth from Meteosat-10.

Solar eclipses occur when the moon passes between the Earth and sun, casting a shadow over our planet’s surface. A total solar eclipse happens when the moon is at the right distance to completely block the sun’s light while an annular solar eclipse occurs when the moon is slightly farther than normal from the Earth, making it appear smaller in the sky and unable to entirely obscure the sun. A hybrid eclipse is a rare event that transitions from a total solar eclipse to an annular one, when only a glowing ring of the sun can be seen.

Images: 1) CIMSS, University of Wisconsin – Madison 2) EUMETSAT

Reflective building in Germany Disappears

The ancient landscape was evoked by planting trees and reintroducing wild horses

Jan Bitter

Holzer-Kobler, the Berlin and Zurich-based architectural practice, produced this angular, reflective structure as a homage to an archaeological discovery in Schöningen, in Germany. Near the building, archaeologists found 300,000-year-old wooden spears and skeletons of hunting horses. The local authorities wanted to display them to the public and commissioned the Paläon Research Centre, which was completed in June, to exhibit the artefacts.

"The building is reflective -- we wanted it to almost disappear into the environment, so it mirrors the surrounding meadows, forests and clouds," explains Tristan Kobler, cofounder and partner of Holzer-Kobler. The design is split into two halves by the 17m-high foyer: one side is a lab for scientists to examine finds; the other is a public education centre including galleries, a café and interative lab. "Looking out, you have views to a 3km-long coal mine, the excavation site and Schöningen," says Kobler. "This building is special; it gives each of us a new perspective on early humanity."

A Museum Designed to Be Invisible Until You Look Down

It just so happened that down the road was a decommissioned dry dock that had been out of use since the 1980s– this water-filled hole would be the site for its new building. There was only one problem: because UNESCO the building had to be completely underground. “They wanted to have a spectacular, attractive museum, but UNESCO dictated a building that was completely invisible,” says Bjarke Ingels, head of BIG, the architecture firm that worked on the project.

As you can imagine, this presented a few problems. First, the floor plan for the museum called for 1.5 times more space than the dock’s square footage allowed, which meant the architects had to figure out a way to cram a sprawling museum into a tiny area. More difficult yet was the fact that the building had to be completely hidden. “We weren’t allowed to stick as much as a foot out of the ground because they didn’t want us to interrupt the view of the castle,” Ingels says.

 So how do you build a museum that’s both visually striking and compliant with UNESCO’s strict rules? The easy solution would’ve been to simply cap the dry dock and create a fully underground museum. That, of course, would have severely limited the natural lighting, and the little bit that did make it through would be from skylights–which, according to Danish work code requiring natural sunlight to come from vertical windows, meant the museum staff would need to be housed in a completely different building altogether. “We tried for so long to stuff that poor dock with the museum’s program,” he says.

The design solutions they were coming up with didn’t feel like solutions at all. Instead, they felt like they were dooming a historical landmark to a dark, claustrophobic fate. “We were trying to accommodate this rather impossible brief,” Ingels recalls, “And at some point in the process we got this idea of solving the problem by simply turning the museum inside out.”

This eureka moment lead the design team to create a system of three bridges that act as gallery space and a pathway through the entire museum. It also meant that the structure filled the requirement of being fully underground while simultaneously retaining the dock’s structural integrity and remaining completely open. “The dock is rather majestic,” he says. “By filling it, we would have completely eradicated its heritage. This way we could preserve the dock as a visible part of the museum.”

The three bridges all have different functions, but the main zigzagging path leads visitors towards the entrance. From there, visitors will walk around the main exhibition spaces museum in a loop that follows the natural shape of the dock. All of the main exhibition spaces were actually built into the the perimeter of the dock, sort of acting like a sandwich filling between the old and new walls of the dock. This, says Ingels, prevented the original dock walls from completely collapsing from the pressure of the soil and water pushing against it.

The exhibition loop, roughly 600 feet long, gradually descends, almost imperceptibly, from the entrance around to exhibition spaces and down to a cafe, that sits nearly at the ground level of the dock. This slight slope was not just to provide visitors with an intuitive path through the museum, but also to mimic the actual motion of what it’s like to be on the water. “Because every surface is sloping gently one way or another, you almost get this bouncy feeling of being on a ship,” Ingels explains.

The structure of the building relied on some creative workarounds. For instance, the zigzag bridge you see has an incredibly thin floor so that there would be room underneath for people to walk on the dock floor. A beam was unable to carry the heft of this lengthy bridge (around 100 feet), so only half of the floor is supported by a metal beam, while the other half is supported by an anchor chain that connects the floor to the ceiling. “So in a way the floor you’re walking on is hanging from the ceiling above you,” he explains. This allowed them to shave off 4 or 5 feet.

One of the biggest goals of the building is to respect the heritage of the shipping industry and the dock while still providing visitors with a modern experience. Ingels says that by actually building in architectural elements using shipping materials and methods, he hopes to have achieved that goal. “All of the maritime elements are not theatrical; they’re actually real hardworking technical solutions to real problems,” he says. “You have some of the amazing engineering feats of shipping used to create shipping.”