Scientific American takes a page from the Acme corporation and introduces the world’s first battery in an aerosol can:

The paint-on battery, like all lithium ion batteries, consists of five layers: a positive current collector, a cathode that attracts positively charged ions, an ion-conducting separator, an anode to attract negative ions, and a negative current collector. For each layer, the [...]

LiveScience reports on the second Mayan text ever discovered that refers to the famous end of the Mayan calendar. They didn’t think the world was going to end then – just that there’d be a heck of a celebration:

“This text talks about ancient political history rather than prophecy,” Marcello Canuto, the director of Tulane University Middle America Research Institute, [...]

The aptly named ExtremeTech BLOWS THE LID off connection speeds with the HEAD-SPINNING news that American and Israeli researchers have sent 2.5 terabits of data per second through the airwaves:

These twisted signals use orbital angular momentum (OAM) to cram much more data into a single stream. In current state-of-the-art transmission protocols (WiFi, LTE, COFDM), we only modulate the spin [...]

Remember the Flame Challenge? Alan Alda’s quest to find someone who can explain at an elementary-school level what a flame is? Well, an American quantum optics student studying in Europe has won with a charming short video (that ends with a metal ballad):

What is a Flame from Ben Ames on Vimeo.

Ben writes: “I [...]

Click to embiggen

We’ve featured prehistoric illustrator Charles L. Knight on these pages before.

While he’s best known for his dinosaur portraiture, here he moved a little forward in time and, using the best science of his day, imagined what life was like in the Mousterian culture of what he would have called Homo neanderthalensis. Nowadays, we’re [...]

SONG: “Tired (A Neanderthal Complains).” (To download: double right-click & “Save As”)

ARTIST: grant.

SOURCE: Based on “Neanderthals may have been first human species to create cave paintings”, Guardian, 14 June 2012, as used in the post “Neanderthals made beautiful things.”.

ABSTRACT: I love a waltz. This was written in response to the latest SongFu2012 [...]

Graphene, as we all now know, is the latest strange form of carbon to wow material scientists with its unusual properties. Well, New Scientist shows that graphene is even stranger than we thought, turning regular old electricity into ultra-focused plasmons:

When light hits some materials in just the right way, ripples of electrons called plasmons appear on the surface. These [...]

But do they need supervision? Discover reports on the the rare humans who can see colors the rest of us can’t:

Living among us are people with four cones, who might experience a range of colors invisible to the rest. It’s possible these so-called tetrachromats see a hundred million colors, with each familiar hue fracturing into a hundred more subtle [...]

Science News examines one system for making music – by taking noise and using thumbs-up or thumbs-down votes to refine it:

Inspired in part by long-running experiments probing the evolution of bacteria, computational biologist Bob MacCallum and colleagues decided to see if pleasant music could evolve from a cacophonous mess when human listeners acted as the force of natural [...]