In America, the Thanksgiving holiday starts today (more or less). To celebrate, The Guild of Scientific Troubadours will be reveling in the gorgeous sounds of the theremin. Come, listen with us!

This beautiful performance really needs no words. The “matryomin” is a theremin built into a matryoshka doll. Russian hands-free electronic instrument plus Russian nesting dolly. Makes sense, I suppose.

You [...]

If Einstein was around today, he’d probably surf, too.

There’s a piece in the Telegraph (based, apparently, on a New Scientist clip) about Dr. A. Garrett Lisi, an “impoverished surfer” who looked hard at a pretty geometrical shape (called “E8″) and realized it could possibly be used as a map for everything. He might just have solved the

Popular Science has named the nanosolar powersheet the “Best of What’s New 2007,” and for good reason. Instead of using big glass frames to generate electricity at an average cost of $3 per watt, this flexible stuff can be shipped in rolls and costs 30 cents per watt. Their secret? Photovoltaic ink. It’s like printer toner that turns light into [...]

People nowadays look at Jules Verne as one of the forefathers of science fiction, anticipating amazing technological developments like swift, giant submarines and capsules landing on the moon. But an old New Scientist article discusses his little-known work peering into the future of society. In 1863, he wrote a novella about life in Paris one hundred years later. It [...]

A frilled dinosaur found in Montana, as imagined by science illustrator Mariana Ruiz Villarreal.

Sometimes, you just can’t win.

You’d expect a country that’s embracing electric bicycles as an alternative to cars to be lauded as an environmental savior. But scale – scale has a way of undoing our best intentions. So, when40 million Chinese pick up battery-powered bikes, people (like the writers at LiveScience) just have to ask – “So where [...]

Microbiologists have come up with a dirty new weapon in the war on MRSA, according to reports in Scientific American and Science News. The flesh-eating germs might not succumb to antibiotics, but they get knocked out by clay:

For centuries the French have used such green clays, rich in iron, for healing wounds. And the clays have [...]

Science News recently had a report on Michael Worobey’s work tracking AIDS.

The common conception of this disease is that it struck America in the 1980s, bringing the Sexy Seventies to a screeching halt and making it not only acceptable but necessary to show commercials for condoms on network television. Lives were at stake, after all.

What Worobey [...]

The Interesting Thing of the Day blog presents an interesting solution to a problem that’s deeper than most people realize. The problem is all the batteries powering our cell phones, cameras, palmtops, mp3 players and whatever else. They’re loaded with toxic chemicals (some of which are also rare enough to trigger warfare in some countries), and they just [...]