SONG: “Army Ants”, originally by Tom Waits (To download: double right-click & “Save As”)

ARTIST: grant. Originally by Tom Waits.

SOURCE: This is another penitential cover version – penance for a late original song. It’s about insects. And people. There’s no specific scientific source, although you can see the video to the original song here.

ABSTRACT:
“Army [...]

The SpaceMarauder blog is looking forward to some singular explosions down here on Earth, thanks to the news that the Large Hadron Collider is back online:

Originally slated for an early spring restart, the announcement points to a restart in late September with the first proton collisions to occur about 4 weeks later….

Once the LHC restarts it will [...]

The sextant is an instrument that lets you know where you are by determining the sun’s location in the sky – how far above the horizon and how far north or south in the sky.

Essentially the same instrument has been used to pinpoint the exact locations of stars in the sky, enabling astronomers to create very accurate [...]

SciAm clears up a secret of success that font-freaks already know instinctively. If we’re really going to get things done, you’ve got to tell it to us straight:

Those who had read the exercise instructions in an unadorned, accessible typeface were much more open to the prospect of exercising: they believed that the regimen would take less time and that [...]

I was reading about urban farming lately – growing food in places where normally you’d see multilevel parking garages take root – when a page on Cuba’s successful urban farms led me to some intriguing designs from Columbia University professor Dickson Despommier, especially his uplifting Vertical Farm page:

Vertical farms, many stories high, will be situated in [...]

Researchers studying the McMurdo Sound killer whales may have started something among the orcas:

LiveScience, via Yahoo:One of the whales, probably an adult female, was lolling in front of us. I wanted her to know we were there, so I tossed a snowball out to her. My throw was off: it tapped her on the side, and the dry [...]

Scientists in China and Japan have come up with a new system for getting power from the sun… by building solar panels like butterfly wings:

AZoM, the A to Z of Materials:

Di Zhang and colleagues…turned to the microscopic solar scales on butterfly wings in their search for improvements. Using natural butterfly wings as a mold or template, they… transferred [...]

Click to embiggen vastly

Topographic radar images of two Hawaiian islands. Rainbows in a void.

You can read more about the image at NASA’s gallery.

SONG: “Iguana Rosada” (To download: double right-click & “Save As”)

ARTIST: grant.

SOURCE: “Rare, Storied Pink Iguana Discovered”, Popular Science, 5 Jan 2009, as used in the post “Pink Iguana!”

ABSTRACT:
Subject: More than a week late, another song about Darwin and the Galapagos – and more specifically, another song about things Darwin overlooked. Isopods and polychaetes [...]