This isn’t actually a discovery. It’s something you can do at home. All you need is bismuth, a pot and a stove and you can grow your own crystalline rainbow skyscrapers:

The Amazing Rust blog:

The distinctive, ‘hoppered’, shape of a Bismuth crystal results from a higher growth rate around its outer edges than on its inside face. The higher [...]

If they could do this with cats, a million TV watchers would pay $1,000 each. MSNBC reports on a fish with a see-through head:

The barreleye (Macropinna microstoma) is adapted for life in a pitch-black environment of the deep sea , where sunlight does not reach. They use their ultra-sensitive tubular eyes to search for the faint silhouettes of prey [...]

PhysOrg, ready for a day on the beach, reports that nanotech engineers have created waterproof sand. They expect to use it to make the world’s deserts bloom. The stuff is just like ordinary sand, but if you put a layer of it down in a field, it’ll hold water like a pond:

As DIME engineer Fahd Mohammad Saeed Hareb explains, [...]

SONG: “Mama Never Taught Me” (To download: double right-click & “Save As”)

ARTIST: grant.

SOURCE: “Can experiences be passed on to offspring? “, New Scientist, 9 Feb 2009, as used in the post “Teach ‘em young. If not earlier.”

ABSTRACT:
Well, songs about mama are kind of a staple of a certain set of musical genres. What [...]

WebMD, usually a reassuring site filled with comforting medical knowledge, shares the recent finding that a common blood pressure drug is not actually erasing our memories, but just kind of getting inside our heads anyway:

In their study, 60 undergraduate students aged 18 to 28 viewed fear-related images on a computer and learned to link pictures of spiders [...]

Click to embiggen vastly

This was what space was going to be in 1988. All acrylic paints and spindly legs.

You can read more about the Autonomous Lander of Project Pathfinder at NASA’s Human Spaceflight gallery.

New Scientist educates us about a new study suggesting that pregnant moms’ mental workouts can affect their unborn kids’ brains:

Larry Feig at Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston and his colleagues bred “knockout” mice that lacked a gene called Ras-GRF-2, causing them to have a memory defect….

Before they reached adolescence, the team kept these knockout mice [...]

Pogue’s Posts‘ recent look at the latest TED talks underlines one particular presentation that seems pretty interesting. It’s by a fellow named Kamal Meattle who’s experimenting with the way potted plants increase health and productivity:

We have tried and tested these plants for 15 years at Paharpur Business Centre and Software Technology Incubator Park (PBC™ – STIP) [...]

Or at least you can be, if MSNBC and the Soft Matter journal are to be believed. They’re publishing research that shows how cotton candy can be used to rebuild our bodies:

First, you pour a thick liquid chemical over a wad of cotton candy. Let the liquid solidify into a chunk, and put that in warm water [...]