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From tUnE-yArDs in Paris to Carnval in Madeira, there are plenty of good reasons to make the best of this short month.

This weekend's highlights include an outdoor exhibition in São Paulo, a Dutch design special in Eindhoven and a re-release of a Hollywood classic.

A look back on our reporting of the past week's highs and lows in finance.

The congressional inquiry into the collapse of MF Global and its misuse of customer money is set to intensify next week, when a House committee hears testimony from the top executives once responsible for monitoring risk at the brokerage firm.

The bank is shutting its equity principal strategies desk, which made trades using the firm's own capital, the firm announced in an internal memo. Most of the desk's employees will leave Citigroup after Feb. 6.

The protestors of Occupy W.E.F., short for World Economic Forum, framed the big issues of the day with the same high-minded conviction as the experts in the Davos conference center.

With a name like that, you might expect this SUV to be all black. And though that's not really the name — in fact, it doesn't even have a name... Visit Uncrate for the full post.

Waving your limbs around wildly while virtually dancing to Justin Bieber: Embarrassing. Doing the same thing while virtually hacking away at a Sith Lord: Pretty damn cool. Such is the... Visit Uncrate for the full post.

West Egg Cafe 1100 Howell Mill Road Atlanta, GA 30318 (404) 872-3973

My friend Paula and her cute daughter Ellie took time out to take me around town when I was visiting Atlanta late last year.  First stop was West Egg Cafe.  I’m always drawn to places such as this – good food, cool people, with an easy going vibe…  My Southern style brunch was perfect!

Filed under: [EAT], [TRAVEL] to places

It might look like a rendering — in fact, it probably is — but given the founders' bike-racing backgrounds, we have no doubt it will become reality soon enough. The... Visit Uncrate for the full post.

We're happy to announce that Y Combinator has recruited Geoff Ralston as our newest partner.

I've known Geoff for 13 years.  The company he founded, Four11, was acquired by Yahoo just before Viaweb was. Their product, RocketMail, became Yahoo Mail.  Geoff was in engineering at Yahoo before running a business unit and eventually becoming Chief Product Officer.More recently he was CEO of Lala, which was acquired by Apple in 2009.  He's a perfect match for YC because he's smart and energetic, and yet informal and a super nice guy.  He's also a founding partner at Imagine K12, the educational technology incubator,  where he's going to continue being a full partner with our enthusiastic support.

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The news and views that kept us amused this week, including: a homeless student who wins science honors, a cheerleader turned scientist and this question: Is there social media life after death?

Minecraft has long been compared as a digital version of the LEGO building blocks, but now that comparison is one step closer to becoming a reality. The idea of creating the blocks came up through LEGO CUUSOO, a sort of official crowdsourcing idea generator for new LEGO sets. Through LEGO CUUSOO, LEGO fans can submit new ideas, and if the project gains the support of 10,000 people, it will become a reality if passed by the LEGO jury.

This week the project passed the LEGO jury review, and is now sent to the design and development process. The blog post says that this process can take time, but more details are soon to come.

The following images are just fan concepts, but I'm sure LEGO has plans to make your own physical voxel worlds filled with creepers, diamonds, and crafting tables.

Roche said on Friday that it had begun its unsolicited tender offer of $44.50 a share in cash for the shares of Illumina.

“Wouter van Buuren is not only a photographer, he is also an acrobat.” That’s how one art gallery describes, perhaps too mildly, the 39-year-old Dutch photographer who scales utility poles, tip-toes across bridges, and climbs out the windows of skyscrapers to capture breathtaking vistas of cities and rural landscapes from the top of the man-made world.

Van Buuren then takes the photographs and stitches them together to create dizzying “total landscapes”--sphere-shaped panoramas that imitate a satellite’s view of the earth. He doesn’t use Photoshop. Instead, for each landscape, he painstakingly lays out 100 photos or more, trusting to his own patience and steady hands (traits you’d hope for in a guy who defies death for a living).

“I started to make the total landscapes in the Netherlands when I was climbing electricity pylons,” he tells Co.Design. “I was stunned by the beauty of the landscape I thought I knew so well. From above the mundane seemed more divine. So I continued to do this and extended this to cranes, bridges and buildings and other countries all over the world.”

To date, van Buuren has snapped pictures on everything from a construction crane in Rotterdam to a skyscraper in Shanghai to a famous bridge in New York. The most dangerous place he’s ever shot? "A ladder outside a high-rise building on the 55th floor," he says. "Because I didn’t bring a security belt, I had to tightly grip my hands on the small roof platform. …It’s funny how you can get used to heights. After a while I have no problem walking over the edge without any security, as long as there’s no wind."

Our favorite photographs are the ones where he puts himself in the composition. We catch a glimpse of his foot dangling out over here or his hand gripping the crane for dear life over there--evidence of the acrobat hard at work.

[Images courtesy of Wouter van Buuren; hat tip to Notcot]

Despite being misunderstood by sci-fi nerds the world over, Davos - the one in Switzerland - is proceeding at a brisk, impressive clip this week.

The vice president of research at the Private Equity Growth Capital Council contends that the research on private equity is exhaustive and conclusive.

France's largest bank is looking to sell up to $11 billion of loans to oil and gas companies in an effort to reduce its loan book in the United States, according to people briefed on the matter.

The New York Global Group has helped bring Chinese companies public in the United States through reverse mergers, or buying the shell of defunct American companies that had been publicly listed.