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Today in "Things I Didn't Know" news: The latest cartoon from TED-Ed traces the origins and evolution of one of the strangest art forms I've ever heard of -- gyotaku, the art of making ink prints on rice paper using fish. Initially conceived as a way for Japanese fishermen to brag on the size of a catch while still throwing the fish back, gyotaku became popular in the courts of the Edo period, though its fortunes have since waned, presumably because there is only so much one can do with with a fish, artistically speaking.

Etsy user Harshness has a pretty great set of prints up at his online store, treating a wide array of nerdy subjects -- X-Men, Game of Thrones, and Star Wars are all represented heavily -- with minimalist aesthetics and inspiration from vintage travel, film and propaganda posters. His latest project is a series of ten prints paying homage to weaponry from across the worlds of fantasy, science fiction, comic books and cartoons, and we think they're pretty enough to share with you. Especially this original phaser, and the amazing Mjolnir print that you'll have to check out the rest of the gallery to see.

The old idiom states that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder." Which D&D gamers know isn't true at all -- beholders are hardly beautiful, and will negate your magic with their central eye, then zap you with their eyestalk rays. A new study of art through the ages suggests that a more accurate adage might be "beauty is in eye contact with the beholder." Research shows that what we find beautiful -- or at least engaging -- are works of art that look back at us. Of course, we still wouldn't recommend staring for very long into the eyes of Vigo, the Scourge of Carpathia.

It's never been easy to make one's living as an artist, but these days it seems like getting your signal through all of the background noise can be even more difficult. British artist Tomas Georgeson has come up with an intriguing way of promoting his latest gallery show, reasoning that if you can't get people excited to come to your show, maybe you can just bribe them instead. To that end, Georgeson has hidden a check for the sum total of his life savings somewhere in the gallery and declared that the person who finds it gets to keep it.

What's a man to do when he finds himself with nearly half a ton of spare cattle feces and a few hours on his hands? If you're Siberian cattle farmer Mikhail Bopposov, the answer is clear -- craft, mold, and sculpt that dung into a cobra-shaped pooh statue to entertain the children in your village during the long Siberian winter. You read that right -- while it would be a  bizarre and troubling religious icon pretty much anywhere else on the planet, in Siberia, a 900-pound-snake hewn from frozen cow dung counts as a toy, verifying that Siberia is exactly the place that we all think it is.

No need to bring in the FBI or Mel Gibson, because these intricate, crop circle-like patterns in the snow weren't left behind by aliens with a knack for artistic design. British artist and competitive orienteer Simon Beck has been making these trampled snow art pieces since 2004 at the Les Arcs ski resort in France. Relying on computer mapping and the years of orienteering skills under his belt, Beck is able to create precise geometric patterns in the snow based on his projections and local landmarks in the area. And the only tools that Beck uses when out in the field is the pair of snowshoes on his own two feet. Too bad the only thing we do with snow is throw rock salt on it which, last time we checked, is an unappreciated art form.

Yellow Scream, by South Korean artist Kim Beom, is perhaps the strangest thing we've come across in a good long while. The documentary lasts for around half an hour, and features a rather unique form of art instruction. See, the man in the video screams as if he were in pain as he carefully strokes the yellow paint on the canvas. Already, the Internet is abuzz over his "happy little screams." There's really no words that do this justice, but hit the jump to check out a version that's just the screams.

Think you know art better than a caveman? It might be time to think again -- at least in one arena. A recent analysis of nearly 1,000 pieces of cave paintings and modern artwork suggests that Paleolithic humans had a better eyes than modern artists when it came to capturing the complex movement of four-legged animals. Modern artists, the study claims, have yet to reach this same level of artistic prowess and continue to struggle with the ambulatory sequence of most earthbound mammals. If you haven't yet, this may be the point where you write the art school you attended looking for a refund.

In response to the Museum of Modern Art's new video game exhibit, Team Coco has decided to show us what some famous paintings would look like if they starred some of our favorite video game characters. Turns out, they look awesome. A lot of them are funny, but we'd be careful about laughing at Master Chief's Mother, since she's probably got a Needler underneath that frock.

To all those people who scoff at video games and see them as nothing but wastes of time and a way to lose brain cells, here's some well-deserved egg on your face: By March 2013, The Museum of Modern Art is planning to present a gallery showcasing select video games that have left an indelible mark on popular culture in addition to other qualities that make them artistic pieces in their own right. At last, someone out there has discerning taste!

Of all the games that have come and gone on smartphones, Angry Birds continues to be the front-runner for the platform's most successful franchise. That's painfully obvious, considering there's even a Star Wars version out there. In general, casual gaming has never been as hot as it is right now, and artist Evan Roth knows it. As a way of commenting on the new ways in which we interact with our slew of gadgets, Roth's created an art installation that visualizes the gestures used to beat every level of Angry Birds out of ink and paper.

It's a known fact that artists have painted over previous works in order to reuse canvases. This has even included borrowed canvases, meaning that one artist would be painting over the work of another. This is typically one of those minute details that gets glossed over in the case of lesser artists, but the fact that Pablo Picasso painted his Woman Ironing over an earlier work has been a point of interest since it was discovered in the eighties. Thanks to a fresh batch of infrared images, the hidden work can be viewed in greater detail than ever.

The Japanese are having a hard time getting younger generations to take up the ancient, traditional art of calligraphy, probably because of the lack of loud noises and shiny things involved in spending years of your life learning to make a brush stroke just so. So instead, they're working to preserve the art form by teaching it to robots, because robots cannot get bored and have to do what you tell them. For now.

It's pretty clear that we here at Geekosystem have a thing for Adventure Time. It's not an observation; it's fact. There's something about Pendleton Ward's creation that's oddly endearing while being strangely hilarious. We even interviewed the man. So when a 4.5 foot statue of Finn, made out of over 4,000 wooden cubes, goes on sale, it's something that interests us. Etsy user Evan Henry has crafted what is certainly the heftiest Adventure Time work to date, and it'll only run you $950.

Alright everybody, it's time to just hang it up as a species -- computers are just better than us. In addition to all the complex calculations in math and science machines can do, they are also now just as good at art criticism as us. Computer scientists at Lawrence Technological University in Michigan decided to test the notion that machines are incapable of recognizing art. Turns out, we can consider that one thoroughly debunked.