The Guild of Scientific Troubadours

^{Click to embiggen}

A photo with maybe a little optimism.

From NASA’s Image of the Day gallery description:

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the company’s Crew Dragon spacecraft launched from Launch Complex 39A on NASA’s SpaceX Demo-2 mission to the International Space Station with NASA astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley onboard, at 3:22 p.m. EDT on Saturday, May 30, 2020, at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The Demo-2 mission is the first launch with astronauts of the…

Popular Science makes some of the most terrifying creatures of prehistory even more terrifying with reconstructed evidence that flesh-eating dinosaurs got hungry enough to eat each other’s bones:

The researchers also found that fossils collected from the Mygatt-Moore Quarry, which lies near the border between Colorado and Utah and dates back to around 150 million years ago, bore an unusually high number of bite marks. This may mean that Allosaurus and its neighbors were living under diffic…

^{Click to embiggen}

Prince Albert I of Monaco was really into marine life, and used the royal yacht as a scientific research vessel.

Here, from the description on The Artful Gene’s tumblog:

Illustrations from the voyages on the yacht of prince Albert I of Monaco (1848-1922). Albert was a keen oceanographer and owned four different research ships, which he used for his expeditions to survey the waters of the world. The prince would bring scientists on board and travel with them collectin…

SONG: “In the Ring”.

ARTIST: grant.

SOURCE: Scientific American, 4 May 2020, “A Shiny Snack Bag’s Reflections Can Reconstruct the Room around It,” as used in the post “How your snack bags can give you away.”

ABSTRACT:
I really like the music to this song, especially the way the two electric guitars talk to each other during the solo/outro. This is actually the third (maybe fourth) piece of music I tried for this month’s song. At one point, it was going to be spoken word about bat res…

^{Click to embiggen vastly}
From the “Scientific Illustration” collection on Wikimedia Commons, where this image of trilobites and prehistoric shellfish has the following in-depth description:

The Devonian period is often considered to be the “Age of Fish” due to appearance of the first ray-finned and lobe-finned bony fish, but this illustration focuses on the diversity of marine organisms such as trilobites and brachiopods, even though most of them became extinct at the end of the Devonian pe…

^{Click to embiggen}

Ja’far ibn Muḥammad Abū Ma’shar wrote a book – and published it in Venice. It was the place to be, and to see the sky, in the 1500s. He was famous. A star of stars.

Image from the British Museum.