If you’re one of history’s greatest electrical inventors, it is only suitable to have stationery that’s equal to your stature.

The central image is of the unfinished Wardenclyffe Tower; other inventions pictured include the oscillation transformer, steam-and-gas turbine and a telautomaton (that is, a remote-controlled device; this one is a boat).

Found via (where else?)

UC Berkley has me hankering for some shut-eye… for my brain’s sake:

In the recent UC Berkeley sleep study, 39 healthy young adults were divided into two groups — nap and no-nap. At noon, all the participants were subjected to a rigorous learning task intended to tax the hippocampus, a region of the brain that helps store fact-based memories. Both [...]

NPR has introduced me to the Medea Principle; just as the Gaia Principle states that a planet can be thought of as a single living organism, this idea states that the single biggest threat to life on other planets…is life:

Drawing on a detailed study of the geological record [University of Washington paleontologist Peter] Ward argues that rather than James [...]

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

ARTIST: grant.

SOURCE: “Body of Sea Urchin is One Big Eye,” LiveScience , 28 Dec 2009, as used in the post “Spiny eyes. With legs and mouths.”

ABSTRACT: Floating down. How strange it must be to see always all around you, to be able [...]

The Wall Street Journal reveals the lengths to which modern corporations go to make hot soup seem even homier:

Campbell began dissecting its condensed-soup marketing that summer, around when executives had started considering how to refresh the product line.

Researchers interviewed about 40 people at their homes and later in grocery stores. The team also clipped small video cameras to [...]

This is the plant that produces those memory-enhancing extracts you see in the health food aisle of the drug store – the one that long-lived Chinese monks reputedly tended for thousands of years, brought from Japan to Europe by Dutch traders. It grew in Triassic forests when the dinosaurs were young. Whether or not it actually helps fight age-related memory [...]

New Scientist takes a closer look at the squiggly bits around some famous cave paintings – shapes that might just be some of the world’s oldest written messages:

While some scholars like Clottes had recorded the presence of cave signs at individual sites, Genevieve von Petzinger, then a student at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada, was [...]

So Science Daily says – and they don’t seem to be making this up – that scientists are stopping malaria by transplanting mosquitoes’ noses into frog eggs and fruit flies:

The mosquito’s “nose” is centered in its antennae, which are filled with nerve cells covered with special “odorant receptors” that react to different chemical compounds. The insect ORs are comparable [...]

You’ve got to read this story.