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Norwegian encyclopedists behold African artifacts.

Found in a very special category on Wikimedia Commons.

And if you’d like to listen, it’s archived over yonder, or if you’d like to download, try this link here.

The excellently edited voice of your guildmaster appears at around the 15:00 mark.

It’s hard to imagine the Mercury Seven swapping SuperPokes, but today’s space agency is a different kind of organization. Maybe.

You can find out yourself by checking out the many, many links on NASA’s social networking page.

The Mars Phoenix Twitter account was only a small step onto a strange, new world….

So I just back from recording a segment for In the Loop, a show from Minnesota Public Radio where it is now unspeakably cold.

We talked about science, not music, but hopefully managed to inspire a few listeners regardless. Between my awkward pauses and strange mouth noises, of course.

I’ll post the podcast when it’s up; the show airs [...]

The BBC has a fun piece on the fellow most English speakers might not recognize, even though he’s the guy who invented the scientific method:

For, without doubt, another great physicist, who is worthy of ranking up alongside Newton, is a scientist born in AD 965 in what is now Iraq who went by the name of al-Hassan [...]

New Scientist uncorks the peculiar way passion affects our scents, by blanketing would-be competitors with the smell of love:

In a series of trials, each woman was asked to pick out their lover’s or a friend’s T-shirt from three garments, two of which had been worn by strangers. The women’s scores on the Passionate Love Scale made no difference [...]

The BBC has video up of romancing mosquitoes creating their high, keening love songs:

Males and females each have their own characteristic flight tone – which they create by beating their wings.

But when scientists from Cornell University listened in on a male Aedes aegypti pursuing his mate, they were surprised to hear a new kind of “music” playing.

…

The amorous couple [...]

This seems natural to me, but also seems like the kind of thing that drives more literally minded thinkers out of their heads. A University of Rochester neuroscientist has just found that our unconscious minds make the optimum decision every time:

PhysOrg reports:
“We’ve been developing and strengthening this hypothesis for years—how the brain represents probability distributions,” says Pouget. “We knew [...]

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Taken at the Lockheed facility, the image shows “the optical metering truss and secondary baffle.”

And important-looking people in orange jumpsuits, evidently there to calibrate the space lasers.

(Found on Wikimedia Commons.)