SONG: “Jaekelopterus!” (To download: right-click & “Save As”)

ARTIST: grant. Dui, shi wo. (Oui, c’est moi.)

SOURCE: ““Giant Claw Points to Monster Sea Scorpion”, New Scientist, 21 Nov 07, as mentioned in the post “BIG Bug,” 28 Nov 2007.

ABSTRACT: I suppose that if you were to tell people, “Hey, I’m putting together a website! [...]

At the very center of this giant, staring eye is a white dwarf star. It’s located about 700 light-years away in the constellation Aquarius.

The image was taken by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope infrared array camera. You can read more about it here.

Found via Barbelith. More on the film is available at palebluefilms.com.

Good Yule, fellow dot-fractions. Stay warm during this longest night.

This is my favorite kind of science – a guy figuring out things in his back yard.

Retired construction worker W.T. “Wally” Wallington thinks he’s discovered the secret of Stonehenge by coming up with a technique to move multi-ton stone blocks using sticks, pebbles and gravity.

You can read more about his mechanical experiments at TheForgottenTechnology.com. Chances are, [...]

It’s nice to see this idea is still being kicked around – and taken more seriously now that oil prices are rising so dramatically. It wouldn’t take that much, the folks at inventorspot.com and the National Security Space Office are saying, to get all the electricity the planet needs using space-based solar cells:

One of the biggest technical challenges [...]

PopSci reports on why one man thinks the petroleum industry wants him dead. Frank Pringle has figured out a way to turn plastics back into oil and natural gas:

Petroleum is composed of strings of hydrocarbon molecules. When microwaves hit the tire, they crack the molecular chains and break it into its component parts: carbon black (an [...]

Welcome to interstellar space. Nature reports that Voyager 2 has left the solar system. And, as NASA emphasizes, it did so while discovering our solar system is a little bit squished. From Nature:

On 30 August, NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft — which has been sailing through space since 1977 — crossed the ‘termination shock’, the boundary between [...]

Israeli researchers believe they’ve found a genetic basis for generosity, according to PhysOrg.com:

Through an online task involving making a choice whether or not to give away money, the researchers found that those who chose to give away some or all of their money differed genetically from those involved in the exercise who chose not to give [...]

Click for larger image
Submitted by Jean Lapointe to the annual micrography contest of the International Conference on Electron, Ion, and Photon Beam Technology and Nanofabrication (EIPBN).