The NY Times has a bunch of photos by Seth Casteel of babies undergoing infant survival swim training.

Zoe was being introduced to "self-rescue," in which babies are taught to hold their breath underwater, kick their feet, turn over to float on their backs and rest until help arrives.

The self-rescue idea is pretty amazing. You take kids who can't talk and can barely walk and teach them how to float on their backs. I didn't really believe it until I saw it:

Bonus summer PSA: drowning doesn't look like drowning.

Speaking of WWI, the landscape of the Western Front in Europe still shows the scars from the war 100 years on.

In this video from the Washington Post, several members of the Washington Ballet demonstrate their most challenging moves. The points of peak action were shot with a high speed camera resulting in some impressive slow motion footage as each dancer seems to completely defy physics. (via Laughing Squid, The Kid Should See This)

Trying to compress the history of Earth into a single book is an especially daunting task, the difficulty is compounded when the book you’re writing is the size of a nickel and is limited to just a few pages. Oh, and it needs lots of pictures. Lucky for us, illustrator Evan Lorenzen was up to the task and identified a few pivitol moments in history which he turned into this extremely tiny hand-bound book. You can see more of his miniature books over on his Tumblr. (via F*ck Yeah Book Arts)

Courtesy Galerie L.J.

Courtesy Galerie L.J.

Courtesy Arrested Motion

Courtesy Arrested Motion

Courtesy Arrested Motion

Courtesy Arrested Motion

Courtesy Arrested Motion

As part of a new body of sculptural work, artist Jessica Harrison has created a series of delicate porcelain figurines depicting idealized women in ball gowns, with one glaring difference from the collectibles found in your grandmother’s curio: each sculpture is covered neck to wrist in ornate sailor tattoos. This juxtaposition is not unfamiliar territory for Harrison who has created other, much more macabre figures, in the past. The Scotland-based artst recently completed a practice-led PhD funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, where she researched the relationship between interior and exterior spaces of the body, an area of study that is directly reflected in her artwork. Via her artist statement:

Harrison proposes a multi-directional and pervasive model of skin as a space in which body and world mingle. Working with this moving space between artist/maker and viewer, she draws on the active body in both making and interpreting sculpture to unravel imaginative touch and proprioceptive sensation in sculptural practice. In this way, Harrison re-describes the body in sculpture through the skin, offering an alternative way of thinking about the body beyond a binary tradition of inside and outside.

The pieces shown above, along with several others, will be on view at Galerie L.J. as part of her first solo show in Paris titled FLASH, beginning May 15, 2014. (via Arrested Motion I Need a Guide, This Isn’t Happiness)