The American Museum of Natural History revisits “Cosmic Zoom”, starting at the Himalayas and moving outward (and, as far as we can see, backwards in time – through older and older sources of light) to the afterglow of the Big Bang, then back again. The visualization of man-made satellites around Earth at around 1:30 is especially lovely.

Yeah, so did you know your skin can hear? And that, LiveScience says, isn’t all. There’s also some kind of subtle sense that operates through our sweat glands:

“Curiously, our conventional tests with sensitive instruments revealed that all their skin sensation was severely impaired, including their response to different temperatures and mechanical contact,” said study researcher Dr. David Bowsher, [...]

Discovery gets deep in its musing about a cetacean mystery. The songs of the blue whale have been getting progressively lower in pitch:

In some cases, the pitch of their songs has dropped by more than 30 percent. Frustrated researchers cannot yet explain why.

“It’s a worldwide phenomenon,” said Mark McDonald, an ocean acoustician and independent researcher in [...]

Wired featured a wonderful piece of homemade cybernetics (and one that could subtly changing the world) – the homemade book scanner:

For nearly two years, Daniel Reetz dreamed of a book scanner that could crunch textbooks and spit out digital files….

So over three days, and for about $300, he lashed together two lights, two Canon Powershot A590 cameras, a few [...]

Chasing the links for that Levitin interview yesterday, I found this call for volunteers in a musical experiment:

MacCullum’s computer program creates a randomly generated pair of “Adam and Eve” “songs”–brief loops of sound. They mutate, recombine and reproduce to form a base population of 100 descendants.

Participants act as the force of natural selection by listening to the songs and [...]

Unlike all of the other selections cut-n-pasted here, this one I typed in by hand; that’s how much I wanted to share it. It’s from Tape Op, the free audio recordists’ magazine that you should already be reading. The Nov/Dec issue features a great interview with Dr. Daniel Levitin, a neurological researcher, musician and audio engineer who [...]

Behold a crepuscular rodent. In this case, I suppose, a fractional crepuscular rodent. (That means they like going out at dusk and dawn… creatures of what photographers call “the magic hour.”)

I suppose most people know Chinchillidae for their fur. Like guinea pigs, they were originally used by humans in South America, only for coats rather than barbecues. [...]

Science Daily reveals research that proves reading lessons really do create new brain cells in children:

Carnegie Mellon University scientists Timothy Keller and Marcel Just have uncovered the first evidence that intensive instruction to improve reading skills in young children causes the brain to physically rewire itself, creating new white matter that improves communication within the brain.

As the researchers [...]

That’s what DARPA launched to test new ways to use the internet – and social media specifically, the Guardian says – to solve problems rapidly (and to locate targets, I’m guessing). Find the balloons, get a prize. Unsurprisingly, M.I.T. won the game in a matter of hours:

The winning team has not explained precisely how they came to discover [...]