It’s that time again!  Time to make giant animals out of straw! 

Autumn is a rice harvest season in Japan. Every year, farmers make sure that the leftover rice straw, known as “wara”, does not go to waste. From feeding the cattle to improving the soil, the straw finds its purpose. In particular, Niigata province has a very creative way of using these leftover rice husks by hosting an annual event called “Wara Art Festival”.

See more pictures at DesignYouTrust

Sydney’s annual Vivid festival fills the harbour with barges equipped with powerful projectors that use the buildings ringing the harbour (especially the iconic Sydney Opera House) as geometrically complex screens for projection-mapped lightshows, synchronised to music.

Here’s a video of this year’s gorgeous Sydney Opera House projections, created by Jonathan Zawada and titled “Metamathemagical.”

Website: (vividsydney.com)

https://youtu.be/Kj4524AAZdE

The Wara Art Festival in Japan’s Niigata Prefecture is a showcase for art, but it’s also a harvest festival. Giant sculptures are constructed of rice straw leftover for this year’s rice harvest.

The Wara Art Festival all started in 2006 when the local district reached out to Musashino Art University to seek guidance on transforming their abundant amount of rice straw into art. And in 2008, the very first Wara Art Festival was held. Since then, every year the school sends art students up to Niigata to assist in creating sculptures made out of rice straw. The festivities have ended but the sculptures are on display through October 31, 2017.

In this video, watch students from Musashino Art University build one of the sculptures for 2017.   

Astronauts aboard the @Space_Station captured this amazing image of the Moon’s shadow over the U.S. during #SolarEclipse2017.

Sorry about the ads, was worth it to see this… 

[iframe width=”540″ height=”304″ frameborder=”0″ scrolling=”no” src=http://www.courier-journal.com/videos/embed/103826344]

It will be the first total solar eclipse visible in the continental U.S. in 38 years (last one was in the 1979). The next total solar eclipse visible over the continental U.S. will be on April 8, 2024, which is 7 years away.

A grey-hat hacker going by the name of Stackoverflowin has pwned over 150,000 printers that have been left accessible online. For the past 24 hours, Stackoverflowin has been running an automated script that searches for open printer ports and sends a rogue print job to the target’s device. The script targets IPP (Internet Printing Protocol) ports, LPD (Line Printer Daemon) ports, and port 9100 left open to external connections. From high-end multi-functional printers at corporate headquarters to lowly receipt printers in small town restaurants, all have been affected. The list includes brands such as Afico, Brother, Canon, Epson, HP, Lexmark, Konica Minolta, Oki, and Samsung. The printed out message included recommendations for printer owners to secure their device. The hacker said that people who reached out were very nice and thanked him. The printers apparently spew out an ASCII drawing of a robot, along with the words “stackoverflowin the hacker god has returned. your printer is part of a flaming botnet… For the love of God, please close this port.” The messages sometimes also include a link to a Twitter feed named LMAOstack.

Photographer Joshua Nowicki captured photographs of the St. Joseph lighthouse at the mouth of the St. Joseph River in Michigan and it’s beautifully (and completely) covered in ice. And because the thick icicles that accentuate the lighthouse are angled back from the strong winds, it looks like an alien sculpture that’s frozen in time.

This sort of crazy icy effect happens a lot to various structures when the cold hits but that doesn’t make it not stunning to see. You can see more photos from Nowicki here. They’re absolutely lovely.