Science Art: Lower Bagshot Clays, Nr. Wareham, 1868
An image from an 1868 book, On the Disposition of Iron in Variegated Strata, which was the subject of a collection in the Public Domain […]
Science
Air pollution can leave soot inside pregnant mothers’ placentas.
Science News shares a small but disturbing Belgian study that found solid particles of air pollutants around developing babies in the womb: Samples of placenta […]
EPA approves a fungicide distributed *by bees*.
Growing Produce has a story that strikes me as super weird, about the first-ever commercial fungicide designed to be carried onto crops by bees: The […]
CDC report: One in 16 US women were forced into having sex for the first time
TW, as they say. New Scientist has some hard numbers on some difficult truths, offering data on just how many women lost their virginity in […]
Science Art: From Theosophia Practica, by Johann Georg Gichtel, 1696
Click to embiggen A secret body around our visible body, from the 1600s. A subtle anatomy. Planetary correspondences. This is where we get the idea […]
Billionaire Bigelow’s Big Balloon – inflatable space station is open for visitors.
Space.com has photos and background on B333, an expandable and expansive zero-gravity habitat for the next generation of space explorers. Bottom line is it’s pretty […]
I don’t know, how *do* you make Saturn Yellow?
LA Times plunges into a chemical and artistic riddle – how can we restore fading Day-Glo paintings when the formula for Saturn Yellow remains a […]
What breathes sulfur, eats fool’s gold and could show us where life came from?
The Independent puzzles over a biological riddle – a strange microbe that doesn’t need oxygen or sunlight to get by. Instead, it thrives deep underground […]
India’s moon lander went silent minutes before landing.
Nature mourns the apparent loss of India’s first lunar lander, which stopped transmitting as it descended to the Moon’s south pole: Mission control at the […]
Science Art: Sunset in the Eye of a Hurricane
Click to embiggen Well, I made it through Dorian just fine this week. Some islands less than 100 miles to the east didn’t. This is […]
Geologists explore a lost continent hidden under Southern Europe.
Science reveals the Atlantis-like story of Greater Adria, a continent the size of Greenland that vanished 140 million years ago, not under the sea but […]
How a social network can be gerrymandered – and how that can affect our decision-making (and real-life voting).
Nature has a fascinating piece of research (with great graphics, so please click through) on how exactly public opinions can be molded by a few […]
Science Art: Trigla Hirundo, Lin., from Gemeinnüzzige Naturgeschichte des Thierreichs (A Natural History of the Animal Kingdom)
Click to embiggen It’s not a flying fish, but something called a “sapphirine gurnard,” which is unusual not because it flies, but because it walks […]
A remarkably tidy asteroid.
Science News describes how the MASCOT asteroid lander has found the near-Earth asteroid Ryugu oddly devoid of dust: The asteroid, thought to have formed from […]
An algorithm to sniff out fake news, linguistically.
The Conversation looks at a way that Fatemeh Torabi Asr, a computational linguistics researcher at Simon Fraser University, has devised to use computers to instantaneously […]