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Another gorgeous old book illustration from Old Book Illustrations, this one from a Belgian natural history text. It’s a beached sperm whale, Physalus cylindricus, nowadays known as Physeter macrocephalus.

It’s an oddly sympathetic portrait to have come out 25 years after Moby-Dick was first published (and nearly 20 years before it was rediscovered by the literary [...]

Covered this as a concept before here, but PhysOrg is reporting that a town in France is making step-powered pavement a reality:

Authorities in Toulouse in the south-west of France are considering a proposal to install “pavement power” technology that would use the energy provided by pedestrians to generate electricity to run the street lamps. A trial section [...]

Discovery News makes me curious, again, about the future of American space travel:

President Obama is reviving the capsule component of the scuttled Constellation program and setting a time frame for development of a new heavy-lift booster intended to take astronauts beyond Earth’s orbit for the first time since the Apollo moon missions ended in 1972.

I guess we’ll see what’s [...]

The Vancouver Sun unearths the story of a possible Assyrian source for the Hebrew covenant:

The tablet, dating to about 670 BC, is a treaty between the powerful Assyrian king and his weaker vassal states, written in a highly formulaic language very similar in form and style to the story of Abraham’s covenant with God in the Hebrew Bible, [...]

New Scientist hypes a pretty cool discovery about gene-swapping bacteria changing sushi-eaters’ digestion:

Genes regularly shuttle between different bacteria, offering each other new traits such as drug resistance. But this is the first time a gut bacterium has been found to have got new genes from its host’s food. In theory, Japanese people with the porphyranase enzyme can [...]

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

ARTIST: grant. Originally by Robyn Hitchcock.

SOURCE: This is a penitential cover. There’s no specific scientific source. It’s from this album. I never really thought of it as a rarity, but it seems to be impossible to find an mp3 or YouTube video of it. It [...]

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Moses Harris was an entomologist in Britain at about the time the American colonies started that unpleasantness with tea stamps and flintlock rifles.

As well as studying insects, he was also an engraver. Maybe that explains why he had a thing for the way color worked – how sea green was related to [...]

BBC shares the cute story of the discovery of what could be our greatest grandparents, the oldest members of the genus Homo:

The site was found by the team thanks to the “virtual globe” software Google Earth, which allowed the group to map and visualise the most promising fossil grounds in the World Heritage Site.

The first discovery of A. sediba [...]

Explorers in the Philippines have, New Scientist reports, just discovered a cousin of the fearsome Komodo dragon that eats fruit:

Measuring 2 metres long, Varanus bitatawa is covered in bright yellow spots and eats fruit….

“The discovery of a highly distinctive new species of monitor lizard from heavily populated and highly deforested Luzon island comes as an unprecedented surprise,” says Rafe [...]