Wired UK has assembled images from J Henry Fair’s book The Day After Tomorrow into a chilling slideshow: In Focus: The blue planet’s toxic new colors. Check it out to learn more about the locations pictured and the toxins that are contaminating our environment.

About the book:

The Day After Tomorrow takes readers on a journey to bear witness to the environmental destruction that is currently plaguing our planet; from a forest in West Virginia devastated by mountaintop removal mining, to a region in Florida left in ruins by the phosphate mining industry, J Henry Fair presents hard evidence that our unchecked consumerism is leading the way in the destruction of our planet, one natural resource at a time.

Primarily through the use of aerial photography, Fair captures spellbinding vistas of pools of toxic hog waste, streams of paper mill runoff, and the remains of hollowed-out mountains. These environmental abstractions lure the viewer in with unique asymmetrical shapes and striking colors; however, fascination quickly turns to horror, as the viewer realizes what lurks beneath the surface of the image.

Just in time for the current election season, The Library Of Congress has published Presidential Campaign Posters: Two Hundred Years of Election Art, a fantastic collection of 100 ready-to-frame political campaign posters from the annals of American history. 

Felice Frankel is a photographer and a research scientist in the Center for Materials Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She puts both areas of expertise to use in her work for books like No Small Matter, On the Surface of Things and Envisioning Science that bridge the divide between art and science. 

Images from the new book A Glorious Enterprise: The Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia and the Making of American Science by Robert McCracken Peck and Patricia Tyson Stroud with photographs by Rosamond Purcell. 

About the book:

Founded in 1812, the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia stands today as the oldest natural history museum in the Western hemisphere. Early expeditions organized at the Academy were of central importance to the exploration of America’s western wilderness, and the plant and animal specimens that were brought back formed the foundation of a collection that today contains some eighteen million items. What began as a small gathering of devoted amateurs has grown into a vibrant international center for scientific education and research.

A Glorious Enterprise, the first complete history of the Academy, tells the story of the brilliant and passionate men and women who endeavored to acquire and disseminate knowledge of the natural world. Thomas Jefferson, John James Audubon, Robert Peary, Ernest Hemingway, and James Bond are just a few of the colorful Academy associates profiled in this lively narrative. Naturalist and historian Robert McCracken Peck and historical biographer Patricia Tyson Stroud take readers behind the scenes of the Academy, recounting the signal moments and achievements that shaped its first two hundred years—from its landmark discoveries in North America and around the world, through the construction of its famed dioramas in the 1930s, to the pioneering work of Academy scientists in water pollution and conservation long before these were topics of popular concern. The book is richly illustrated throughout with hundreds of archival images and stunningly original works by acclaimed photographer Rosamond Purcell that cast specimens from the Academy’s collections in a new light.

Malcolm Gladwell’s bestselling books The Tipping Point, Blink and Outliers were already remarkable for introducing the social sciences to a much larger audience, now they’re remarkable for their design.  

Malcolm Gladwell: Collected was designed by Paul Sahre and features illustrations by Brian Rea.

Michael Pollen’s Food Rules is now illustrated!

Radioactive is a book as extraordinary as its subject: Marie Curie. 

To stay true to Curie’s spirit and legacy, [Lauren] Redniss rendered her poetic artwork in an early-20th-century image printing process called cyanotype, critical to the discovery of both X-rays and radioactivity itself — a cameraless photographic technique in which paper is coated with light-sensitive chemicals. Once exposed to the sun’s UV rays, this chemically-treated paper turns a deep blue color. The text in the book is a unique typeface Redniss designed using the title pages of 18th- and 19th-century manuscripts from the New York Public Library archive. She named it Eusapia LR, for the croquet-playing, sexually ravenous Italian Spiritualist medium whose séances the Curies used to attend. The book’s cover is printed in glow-in-the-dark ink.

To read more and to watch Redniss’s TEDx talk click here.