From the sizzling pages of The American Naturalist on May 1, 1889, comes Francis H. Herrick’s fascinating study of an egg that developed inside another egg.
Florida beekeepers, know your enemy.
This is a galaxy named M83, which is usually a faint smudge in the constellation Hydra. Up close, however, Hubble Space Telescope was able to see that it’s “ablaze with star formation.”
The image is also cool for another reason:
This image is being used to support a citizen science project titled STAR DATE: M83. [...]
This is the face of the man who was ROBBED by the third episode of Cosmos. Planetary motion? Elliptical orbits? Not Newton’s ideas – this guy’s.
And the story of how he figured them out is pretty darn interesting. See, Kepler was a divinity student with a really fascinating theology….
This image comes from The Illustrated Magazine of [...]
SONG: “Starter Home.” (To download: double right-click & “Save As”)
ARTIST: grant.
SOURCE: Based on “Home Tweet Home: High-Tech Solutions for House and Apartment,” New York Times, 7 March 2014, as used in the post “This home really speaks to me. Over the internet…”
ABSTRACT: I recorded most of the music – the backing tracks, everything [...]
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This is an old photograph taken through the largest refracting telescope (no mirrors, just a really big lens) in the world, the Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin.
Edwin Hubble, Albert Einstein and Carl Sagan all looked at the sky through the observatory’s huge lenses. This image was taken sometime before 1919, when it appeared in National Geographic [...]
Nature is sharing a fun little recipe for whipping up the super-material graphene in a kitchen blender:
In Nature Materials, a team led by [Jonathan] Coleman [at Trinity College, Dublin,] (and funded by the UK-based firm Thomas Swan) describe how they took a high-power (400-watt) kitchen blender and added half a litre of water, 10–25 millilitres of detergent and [...]
Nature has published an article about a cave insect that combines the words “marathon sex session” with “the female’s spiky penis”:
In desolate caves throughout Brazil live insects that copulate for days, the female’s penetrating erectile organ sticking fast in a reluctant male’s genital chamber until he offers a gift of nutritious semen. Neotrogla seems to be unique among species [...]
Universe Today celebrates a Goldilocks discovery. The Kepler mission has found a planet just the right size and in just the right place to have life on it:
The newly-confirmed extrasolar planet has been dubbed Kepler-186f. It is the fifth and outermost planet discovered orbiting the red dwarf star Kepler-186, located 490 light-years away. Kepler-186f completes one orbit around [...]
Science magazine turns on yet another way electromagnetism can alter the way we think and remember – by switching on vivid visual hallucinations:
A 22-year-old male was receiving deep brain stimulation to isolate where his daily seizures originated. His disorder appeared after he caught West Nile virus at the age of 10 and subsequently suffered from brain inflammation. His [...]
Nature reveals how parents who live through something horrible can have children who inherit depression and anxiety – biologically, through their RNA – from traumas they never personally experienced:
A study published this week in Nature Neuroscience finds that stress in early life alters the production of small RNAs, called microRNAs, in the sperm of mice (K. Gapp et al. [...]
Science Daily has the skinny on how we might wind up using fast-growing, high-density tobacco to save the planet from global warming – by creating bioethanol:
In the course of the research, which has been echoed by the journal Molecular Breeding, tobacco plants of the Virginia Gold and Havana commercial cultivars have been grown. The plants were genetically modified to [...]
Florida beekeepers, know your enemy.
The Verge explains how a Danger Mouse and The Shins’ James Mercer have joined forces to make some pretty good music… and to save us all from an epic, planet-destroying cataclysm:
…Broken Bells will donate $1 from every ticket sold for their upcoming tour to help protect its fans from asteroids. The band is looking to accomplish this by [...]
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