(Roughly) Daily

Grand Lisboa Hotel; Macau: With a solid resemblance to the I Dream of Jeannie lamp, this flashy structure can at least be admired for its campiness. As if it weren't flashy enough as is, the exterior actually lights up with over one million colorful LED lights.

As vacation season passes its mid-way point, it’s time to check in with the folks at VirtualTourist, and their “3rd Annual World’s Ugliest Buildings List“…

Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but then again, so is ugliness and the members and editors of travel website VirtualTourist.com have some very strong opinions about buildings that fall into the latter category. With this in mind the site has announced its 3rd Annual List of the World’s Top 10 Ugliest Buildings and asked Mark Baez, A.I.A. and Principal Project Designer at Venice, California-based M Designs to comment on the final list. Of one particularly unsightly choice Baez asked “An exercise in geometry in dire need of an exorcism?”

More at VirtualTourist.  [TotH to Presurfer]

As we make sure that we have big enough memory cards for our cameras, we might recall that it was on this date in 1978 that Louise Joy Brown, the world’s first “test tube baby”– the first baby to be conceived via in vitro fertilization (IVF)– was born at Oldham and District General Hospital in Manchester, England.   By 2006, IVF accounted for 41,343 births (54,656 infants) in the United States, just over 1% of total US births.  Robert G. Edwards, the doctor who developed the treatment, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology (Medicine) in 2010.

A microscopic view of sperm implantation during in vitro fertilization (source)