UK artist Mandy Barker shot this ocean scene out in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. So no, those aren't heretofore undiscovered jellyfish-like creatures. That's all garbage. Pretty, though. Barker seeks to highlight the huge scale of the waste problem through her series "SOUP," of which this photo is a part. 

That red streak is a huge string of cosmic dust, trailing off the Taurus molecular cloud about 450 light-years from Earth. The streak is about 10 light years long and was imaged using the Atacama Pathfinder radio telescope in Chile. 

The Cryoscope Haptic Weathervane, created by Robb Godshaw of Syyn Labs, solves the eternal problem of not knowing exactly how warm it is outside and not wanting to venture out there to actually feel it. What does a degree number mean, anyway? Pah! Numbers! This cube has an Arduino processor inside it that brings the surface of the cube to the precise temperature of the air outside, so you can feel it while not wearing any pants or shoes. 

A paper plate that sits underneath your pizza, allowing you to separate your pizza into slices, each with its own slice-shaped paper plate fragment. It's a Red Dot Design Award winner, for good reason. I wonder how long it will be before pizza companies start to incorporate this sort of design into their packaging.

The Rosette Nebula, chosen as NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day earlier this week, is the perfect Valentine's Day space object, because it's pretty and it sort of looks like a rose. The stars in this nebula are only a few million years old and the wind and radiation they give off shape the "petals" of the rose.  

This chameleon, discovered in Madagascar, is the smallest of its species known to man. It is adorable and we want a hundred of them. The adults grow to 30 millimetres. The animals live in leafy undergrowth in Madagascan forests and are the smallest lizards in the world. 

German photographer Matthias Lenke takes amazing macro shots of various objects, including this snowflake. Snowflakes are often symmetrical with six arms - this occurs because the crystalline structure of a snowflake is six-fold. Snowflakes are unique, because of the tiny variations each one goes through in temperature, environment and air current, though statistically it could be possible for two identical snowflakes to form. 

This incredible propaganda poster for the Soviet space program comes from the period between 1958 and 1963. The Russian phrases on the posters in the collection say things like "Conquer the space!" and "Glory to the Soviet people - the pioneer of space!" and "Socialism is our launching pad." 

Here it is, folks, the first human-humanoid handshake to ever take place in space. Commander of the International Space Station, Daniel Burbank, shakes hands here with NASA's $2.3 million Robonaut (a robot designed to assist humans in space). One small shake for human and humanoid kind...