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Is this Sunday Things late - or exceptionally early? You decide. I still have four minutes left of Monday. So there!

In media news, go see Upstream Colour, from the creator of Primer. People claim it's inscrutable and overly mysterious; I found it fantastic and pretty straightforward to follow. Probably because I've already been fascinated by slightly-spoilery stuff on Wikipedia.

Stalin's Rope Roads - the mining town of Chiatura, Georgia (no, not that one) is laced together with elderly, Soviet-era cablecars. Lovely.

The Cold War Bunker That Offered Subterranean Suburbia Below Las Vegas - like something straight out of Fallout, this bunker would allow its occupants to live out the apocalypse in style. The British approach was far less luxurious.

Rocket Shop - eat your heart out, Kerbal Space Program - Copenhagen Suborbitals is here, and making their own spacesuits. I've yet to decide if this inexpensive suborbital space programme is amazing or terrifying. Possibly both. via phuzz

Bonus Analogue Video corner:

• Scan Processor Studies - whatever a 'Rutt-Etra Scan Processor' is, I want one.
• Synaesthesia - 'a Grass Valley video switcher console with input from a studio camera aimed at a monitor' - again, I don't think it's supposed to do that...

Been busy simulating US border control, thanks to the glorious Papers, Please. Anyhow. Sunday things!

Use of location (relative direction and distance) information by jumping spiders (Araneae, Salticidae, Phidippus) during movement toward prey and other sighted objectives (PDF) - in other words, a huge paper on quite how clever jumping spiders are, and how they might be using their decidedly nifty visual systems. Their prey-following abilities seem distinctly reminiscent of computer game NPC AI for a start. BBC News Online recently claimed jumping spiders' "adjustable silk tension" could provide "biological inspiration" for future manoeuvrable robot design'. Oh yeah.

How to put on a space suit - great footage of Russian Orlan spacesuit training. I love the wood panelled corridors and the Soviet-era instrument panels. Star City!

Remember the NAR Lunar Flying Unit from last week? Yeah, I built it in Kerbal Space Program. Ridiculously dangerous, but I managed to fly it 50km-plus across the Mün before safely landing near to another lander. Wahey! I've been getting pretty good at landing things up there...

Bonus Death and Gravity corner:

• Gravity - "I've Got You" - small, terrifying smidgen of Alfonso Cuarón's upcoming space-o-matic film. May be considered vaguely spoilery.
• Gravity - "Detached" - more space! It probably says something that I discovered the existence of these new videos via an ESA blog.

SPAAAAAACE!

What might have been: Visiting Mars and Venus with Apollo-era hardware - expecting a wave of public enthusiasm following the Apollo landings, NASA began thinking about manned missions to Venus and Mars. Never getting beyond the theoretical stages, these long-term missions would have observed the planets from orbit - never actually landing. (In the case of Venus, that's just as well.) Instead, we got robotic exploration of almost the entire Solar System. A worthy trade?

Beyond Apollo - speaking of imagined space missions, this long-running blog is full of weird and wonderful things that never happened. How did I never see this before? It's great!

Europa Report - people claim this is a science fiction film with a degree of actual science in it. Anyone want to, erm, report back? I may have to watch it.

Bonus Demonstrating How Fantastic Unmanned Spaceflight Is corner:

• Space Odyssey: Voyage To The Planets - part one of an amusingly outlandish BBC docu-drama about a manned mission to the solar system. Almost all of it. How much delta-V would that involve?
• Space Odyssey: Voyage to the Planets - part two! Spoilers: the medic dies of cancer. Something else a robot wouldn't have done.

A quick selection this week:

The Art of 3D Print Failure - Flickr group chronicling 3D printers' less successful attempts, with some peculiarly baroque geometry.

Martian Terrain Tutorial - fellow Valve Britisher Tristan Reidford converts some Martian terrain models into something more accessible to high-end 3D software. See also: my Seattle LIDAR experimenterings.

The Glamour of Spaceflight - whizzing through photos from this NASA account, I spotted this particularly mundane example of spaceflight's impact. At least try to smile, people!

Bonus Misusing Scientific Imaging Hardware corner:

• All Eyes on ISON - so, there's a newly found comet approaching the sun that, with luck, could well be the comet of the century. But it's hard to see from the Earth right now, so monitoring its activity is tricky. Good news: there's the stunning HiRISE camera (see above) orbiting Mars. Of a design really not suited for distant astronomical observations...

Links! On Sunday!

12 Reasons Pyrosomes Are My New Favorite Terrifying Sea Creatures - giant coordinated colonies of tiny invertebrates. The next step up from multicellular creatures? The colony pictured above is a small one...

Apollo 16: Nothing so Hidden - documentary on Apollo 16. Humans were getting the hang of landing on the moon, the incredible almost becoming routine... Ignore the blithering idiot hoax-fanatics in the comments. Actually, ignore all YouTube comments ever!

The Ekranoplans Showcase - Dark Roasted Blend on everyone's favourite Soviet ground-effect vehicles.

Bonus Curiosity Mars Science Laboratory corner:

• Curiosity's first year on Mars: Where's the science? - short version: they're just getting started.