The Guild of Scientific Troubadours

SONG: “One of Our Submarines” (penitential cover)

ARTIST: grant.

SOURCE: This has no scientific source; it’s a penitential cover for being late for the June song. It’s originally by Thomas Dolby.

ABSTRACT: I just can’t escape the 1980s, I guess.

I never liked dance music, as a kid, except when I liked dance music. By which I mean I didn’t really like songs that were meant to be danced to for the fact of their danciness – dance and clubs and jollity were basically anathema. But certa…

Almost a crescent. A moon of the late 1800s.

An astronomical drawing from the French-born Harvard researcher who, as an entomologist (as well as an astronomer), unleashed the horribly invasive gypsy moth on North America’s unsuspecting forests. He was trying to make silk. Oops.

From The Public Domain Review collection Trouvelot Astronomical Drawings, 1882.

How a young person can launch “any number of air balloons” without the risk of setting the neighbors’ corn ricks on fire – by using a gas stove with a chimney like this one.

I wonder how hard this would be to do nowadays. Looks like fun.

From The Boy’s Playbook of Science, published in 1869 and preserved on archive.org.

SONG: “Upside Down”.

ARTIST: grant.

SOURCE: Nature, 12 June 2018, “Africa’s majestic baobab trees are mysteriously dying”, as used in the post “The baobabs are dying”.

ABSTRACT:

I suppose it helps if you know that baobabs are also called “upside down trees.” (Is that common knowledge? I honestly don’t know.) The idea here is that, yes, looking at them, you feel a little dwarfed by them but also a little disoriented because they look like their roots are reaching up and their heads ar…

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Though it looks like postmodern architecture (Eero Saarinen, maybe?), this is actually inside your salad.

It’s a helical granum of a thylakoid stack, the part inside a plant cell – inside a chloroplast – where photosynthesis takes place. A thylakoid membrane forms a package inside which one thylakoid disk is stacked on top of another. The stack is called a granum. Some of them, like this one, make a kind of spring-like spiral… so not only do leaves fall in fall, but at…

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It’s hot here. Spent all day at a swim meet. Non-competitors not allowed in pool. There’s a chain now that makes ice cream using frozen nitrogen. Science art is a theme there. Ice cream tastes like ice cream. In the corner of the wall, there’s a tiny robot saying a secret message in binary. I couldn’t translate it. It’s kind of blurry in this snapshot.

The decor is delightful, though.