At our offsite, last week, a couple of our writers from Oblivioni’s Italy bureau told us about the then-ongoing Venice Glass Week, which was a spectacular event by any standard. 

We were all especially taken with this piece, a collaboration between by Simone Crestani from Italy and loannis Michalou(di)S from Greece. It’s entitled “S.O.S-Save Our Sky”. 

Billed as an “Art & Science installation,” the piece is made of ethereal silica aerogel, a material that is 99% air. The remaining 1% is composed of silicon dioxide. 

NASA has used ethereal silica aerogel for a number of purposes, most notably for the Mars rover, but most poetically for its 2004 Stardust mission, in which NASA used silica aerogel to capture space dust and particles from a comet. 

Art and science, indeed.