The Guild of Scientific Troubadours

SONG: “Frozen Atmospheres”.

ARTIST: grant.

SOURCE:Record-shattering 2.7-million-year-old ice core reveals start of the ice ages,” Science, 15 Aug 2017, as used in the post “2.7 million-year-old ice shatters records, reveals ancient atmospheres – and ice ages.”

ABSTRACT:
I kinda knew I would be writing about this when I read the story. I just had that image of tiny bubbles trapped under compressed ice for an unimaginable span of time – effervescence stopped in its tracks, lightness un…

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Fans of Roderick on the Line may recognize these as living metaphors for modern marketing offers. But they’re invading the Great Lakes (literally) where they grow to adulthood and (literally) drain the blood of native fish.

On the other hand (not literally), aww! Cute baby animals!

According to the US Geological Survey, where I found this image, the slower they grow, they more likely these lampreys are to be male. No word on how that’ll help control their population….

This is a diagram of how a solar eclipse works, or at least how they thought one worked in the 14th century. It might be one of the very first illustrations of its kind. As explained by the book’s description in archive.org:

This book, which contains Sacro Bosco’s influential, 13th-century astronomy tract, along with works by Peurbach and Regiomontanus, is notable for its color illustrations. In particular, this edition, issued by Erhard Ratdolt in 1485, is considered to be the first …

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The Malibu Painter, who probably painted this, was not active in California’s surf culture, but in Egypt around the time the first Christians started showing up. They were still making mummies, but they were part of the Roman Empire.

Archaeologists believe portraits like these were painted while the subjects were alive, displayed in their homes, then slipped into the wrappings of their mummified bodies after their death. They don’t know the name of the painters, but thin…

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Butterflies of South Asia and Central and South America.

Pretty butterflies. Or, as James Duncan and Sir William Jardine called them, Foreign Butterflies.

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SONG: “I Had A Fever”.

ARTIST: grant.

SOURCE:Can Microbes Encourage Altruism?,” Scientific American, 17 Jul 2017, as used in the post “Does kindness come from germs? Are the better angels of our nature really a contagious infection?”

ABSTRACT:
This was another one of those nightmare zero-budget scenarios, where the charger for my 12-year-old laptop stopped working, so I quickly tried to record things on the 15-year-old computer we use as a TV streaming box (with Ubuntu) and, that ba…