Like a giant work of long-term land art, a pair of eerily precie circles can be seen over Miyazaki, Japan, made up of cedars planted a half-century ago. As it turns out, though, this was not aesthetic in intent, but scientific: the trees were carefully arrayed to test out a botanical theory.

Specifically, Japan’s Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries secured land in the mid-1970s to create this experimental forest to determine how tree spaces would impact growth speed and height. Trees were planted at ten-degree increments to create ten concentric circles – the closer to the center, the naturally tighter-packed they were, hence the geometry of the results.

And it turns out tree growth is shaped by proximity, so the trees toward the outer rings grew taller, resulting in an overall graduating shape from the lower trees in thee center, which makes the result look even more designed for effect rather than science. The trees were to be cut down after the experiment, but upon seeing the results, officials may preserve them as works at the intersection of art and research.

Unlike The Maze and other classic puzzle books, the Codex Silenda brooks no cheating, forcing readers to solve elaborate puzzles on each page before proceeding to the next.

Somewhere between a choose-your-own-adventure novel, a Chinese puzzle box and a blacksmith puzzle, this five-page volume features dizzyingly complex mechanical puzzles that can only be completed in sequence. In each pair of facing pages, a short story unfolds on one side while a related new puzzle is revealed on the other.

Designed by Brady Whitney, the wooden book is laser-cut and ornately detailed, full of hidden mechanisms worthy of Leonardo Da Vinci – indeed, the story itself is about an apprentice stumbling into the master’s workshop and becoming trapped inside the tome. The laser-burnt edges give the work a hand-crafted but careworn look, like something you might find in a mysterious antique shop, covered in dust.

From the makers: “Codex Silenda is a five page book that features five intricate puzzles. Each page features a unique puzzle that requires the user/reader to unlock the corresponding bolts in order to progress to the next page.” More about its maker: “Brady Whitney is the designer of the operation, the mastermind of the Codex. He originally came up with the idea for his senior thesis research project during his final semester at Iowa State University. Having grown up with a childhood filled with imagination, his passion for design has always been focused on the realm of toys and games, creating the products and ideas he always wished he had as a kid.”

A set of mathematical processes developed for use in crime-fighting and disease-tracking indicates that one already-suspected individual may indeed be the infamous graffiti and installation artist known as Banksy.

The approach of “geographical profiling” is often used to track down repeat offenders, serial criminals whose strikes began to form patterns that can be productively analyzed by experts and run through models by mathematicians.

The findings help paint a picture of probable places of residence and areas of everyday operation, criminal or otherwise, sometimes narrowing the search to an area as small as a few hundred square feet.

Steven Le Comber, a biologist at the the University of London, learned of geographic profiling from Kim Rossmo, a criminologist at Texas State University, growing interested because of potential applications for disease vector studies. The two then began teaming up to find both pathogens and people.

In this case, their modeling shows clusters of activity in London and Bristol based around 140 data points, specifically: sites of known or alleged works by Banksy. Their findings, reported in the Journal of Spatial Science, suggest a handful of addresses in London (a pub, park and residence) all associated with one Robin Gunningham.

Already suspected of being Banksy, Gunningham may yet be a ruse or a plant, but science suggests the individual is very likely connected with the artist, one way or another. As to the question: who is Banksy? We may never really know for sure.

From the abstract: “The pseudonymous artist Banksy is one of the UK’s most successful contemporary artists, but his identity remains a mystery. Here, we use a Dirichlet process mixture (DPM) model of geographic profiling, a mathematical technique developed in criminology and finding increasing application within ecology and epidemiology, to analyse the spatial patterns of Banksy artworks in Bristol and London. The model takes as input the locations of these artworks, and calculates the probability of ‘offender’ residence across the study area. Our analysis highlights areas associated with one prominent candidate (e.g., his home), supporting his identification as Banksy.”

Scientists and alien life seekers alike are all looking to solve the mystery of a distant star, activity around which, according to astronomers including Jason Wright of Penn State University, suggests a “swarm of megastructures” (images via SETI).

While no one has sighted little green men, the phenomenon is perplexing. “Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider, but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilisation to build,” says Wright. The puzzle centers around a series of dimming events around a star to which no conventional scientific explanation (such as dust clouds or passing planets) seems to apply. The star is in the wrong stage of maturity to be flickering as it appears to be without some external factor yet to be discovered.

Wright is not alone, and we may not be either. The anomaly was first spotted by citizen volunteers (Planet Hunters) drafted to look for planets around stars through the Kepler Space Telescope, then subsequently confirmed by observing scientists. “We are looking at [KIC 8462852,  near the Milky Way] with the Allen Telescope Array,” said Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute in Mountain View, California. “We’d never seen anything like this star,” says Tabetha Boyajian, a postdoc at Yale. “It was really weird. We thought it might be bad data or movement on the spacecraft, but everything checked out.”

One of the most fascinating things about this find is that this is all so difficult to visualize. We have no high-resolution imagery that would making the determination of ‘natural’ versus ‘artificial’ easy to make or the problem simpler to understand. Instead, we are left with theories and interpretations of data, which so far imply a non-natural space project that could be anything from an orbital solar array to a space colony under construction or even an outright attempt to reflect light in patterns in order to contact other civilizations. And while there are other possibilities, none of the current nature-centric suggestions hold up to scrutiny as yet. Given the history of such finds, one should expect to be disappointed, but for now the mystery remains a source of excitement for scientists and civilians alike.

Drones have changed the landscape of urban exploration and building infiltration, allowing their navigators access to toxic, irradiated, forbidden and structurally unsound places. These haunting videos illustrate how drones have been used to document inaccessible spaces and find amazing forgotten places.

St. Peter’s Seminary in Cardross, Scotland, is set to be restored thanks to millions in grants and donations, but for now it remains in a remarkably ruined state – crumbling, overgrown and vandalized.  The scenes shot for this film are amazing as they not only fly over and around the building by right through it, passing between levels missing both floors and ceilings that would otherwise be impossible to see in person.

Underdrone combines upside-down footage from the “Lost Places Project,” a world tour including destinations within France, Argentina, Sicily, Greece and China using a DJI Ph2, H3-3D and GoPro3. The inverted perspective adds a layer of eerie vertigo to these spectacular and strange settings.

Drones can also provide the means to uncover new abandonments, discovering long-deserted places that have fallen from maps and have no landmarks pointing the way, as was the case with this abandoned Renaissance Faire. Locate in Fredericksburg, Virginia, it was found thanks to the use of a quadcopter and TBS Discovery with Naza GPS. The remote location is possible to reach, but thanks to ticks in the area may be best enjoyed remotely (or: via remote control).

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Aerial Urbex 7 Difficult Deserted Places Filmed With Drones