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This is Dragon Lake, a body of very cold water near the city of Bratsk. It’s a reservoir, like Arizona’s Lake Powell, formed by the damming of a river, in this case, the Angara River. Over time, all those intricate white crackles will soften and fade as the lake makes itself comfortable in its banks. But [...]

ScienceBlogs (and the Orlando Sentinel) are not sounding very pleased about Obama’s proposed budget for NASA:

As a final frying pan upside the head, you might require that NASA maintain the most expensive and least useful boondoggle of manned spaceflight – the International Space Station. You might do so even knowing that shortly the Space Shuttle program is being [...]

I’ve just received word that the Guild of Scientific Troubadours has a brief walk-in part in the latest novel being drafted by this fine author. It’s an early draft, so who knows what will happen, but thus far dancing robots, monocles and several songs from this very site have been mentioned.

David Barnett, the Guild salutes you!

The Mars rover has been officially abandoned.

The Tech Herald:
However, although the Mars rover has now been written off in terms of fulfilling its core purpose of exploring the Red Planet’s inhospitable surface, NASA still hopes to utilise the vehicle’s limited mobility in order to adjust the angle of its solar panels and help it survive the coming Martian winter.

SciAm puts us back in our place with the revelation from our DNA that humans used to be rarer than mountain gorillas:

[A]ccording to scientists from the University of Utah, about a million years ago our ancestors numbered fewer than 20,000. The estimate appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

…One particular transposon first appeared about [...]

Neurologists get Sonic Youth. That’s what I think after reading Jonah Lehrer’s ScienceBlogs entry about the way music works in the brain:

The experiment was more compelling. The scientists measured the brain waves of a twenty subjects while they listened to various hymns. It turned out that unexpected notes – pitches that violated the previous melodic pattern – [...]

Ernst Haeckel, comparing natural forms for his “Beauty-album of Nature.” If you haven’t seen Proteus yet, you really should – as well as telling the story of Haeckel’s life, David Labrun turns Haeckel’s many drawings of radiolarians into animated flashes of beautiful things evolving into a multitude of new shapes.

This image was found via ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive, [...]

Between playing on Wednesday and moving into a new house, there hasn’t been any time for writing and recording – so the 23rd will go by without a new song.

It will arrive soon, along with a penitential cover.

Thanks for understanding.

NPR takes a look at the scrum that happens when sperm team up to reach their ultimate goal:

Fisher wondered whether sperm from two different male mice would cooperate indiscriminately or tend to clump with sperm from the same mouse.

…

Fisher doesn’t know how sperm know whom to buddy up to and whom to snub. All she knows is that they [...]