Link About It: This Week’s Picks

Self-driving cars, Cuba's lung cancer vaccine, Einstein's handwriting as a font and more in our weekly look around the web

1. Cornell Renames Institute After Carl Sagan Cornell University’s Institute for Pale Blue Dots is being renamed the Carl Sagan Institute: The Pale Blue Dot and Beyond in honor of the late astrophysicist and former Cornell faculty member. After Sagan’s wife and collaborator Ann Druyan visited the science center to give a speech, she was inspired by the innovative work being done and proposed the …

Mad Max: Fury Road’s Incredible Cars

When production designer Colin Gibson was hired to design the cars for Mad Max: Fury Road, director George Miller told him, “Make it cool or I’ll kill you.” Instead of making them just look cool, Gibson made sure all of the machines were fully functional and completely bad-ass. To create each of the 88 mechanical monsters, Gibson and his crew scoured junkyards across Australia for …

Microcars at the Jesada Technik Museum

Southeast Asia's largest collection of microcars

While traveling through Thailand, we discovered the Jesada Technik Museum in a small town outside of Bangkok. Home to over 500 vehicles including double-decker buses, airplanes, helicopters and scooters, the museum’s most unique attraction is the vast collection of microcars. Also known as “bubble cars,” these refrigerator-sized automobiles were built small due to limitations in materials and resources in Europe following World War II. The …