Amateurs find a nearby star by looking through pro astronomers’ old data.
There’s a thing in Australia called “noodling,” where hobbyists look through opal mine spoil piles and find overlooked bits of precious stones. Syfy Wire has […]
Science
Roomba inventor creates an anti-invasive-fish robot.
Fast Company unveils the new robots unleashed by Colin Angle, the man behind the Roomba, after he was challenged by a dive instructor in Bermuda. […]
You could (probably) outrun a T. rex.
Newsweek, reporting on a study in PeerJ, demonstrates how one of the scariest dinosaurs of all was really kinda slow and clumsy: In a study […]
Does kindness come from germs? Are the better angels of our nature really a contagious infection?
Scientific American takes a cold, calculating look at research into the origins of our behavior. Just like parasites can spur suicidal behavior in certain hosts […]
Science Art: Torpille Moderne/Torpille Ancienne from Dreadnought ou submersible by Olivier Guihéneuc, 1916
Click to embiggen Two torpedoes, modern (as of 1916) and ancient. That’s about the limit of my French. The book is about naval warfare, and […]
Geneticists record a short film on DNA. No, literally ON the DNA.
Popular Science explains what it takes to encode a short movie using CRISPR gene-editing technology: Using the gene editing technique CRISPR, they encoded a series […]
Tomato plants can defend themselves – by turning caterpillars into cannibals.
Nature is decidedly unappetizing in its discussion of how vegetables turn attackers against each other: Integrative biologist John Orrock and his colleagues at the University […]
Figuring out cyberbullying and online harassment. It’s harder than you’d think.
New Scientist takes a hard look at the realities of online harassment – how complicated it is to identify, why it’s increasing, and what can […]
Science Art: Dinotherium, by Heinrich Harder,1916.
Click to embiggen This is a fairly speculative reconstruction of an elephant-relative we really only know from footprints (or so says Wikimedia Commons, who are […]
Recreating deadly diseases with mail-order DNA: Here’s how.
Science reports on a group of researchers who recreated an extinct cousin of smallpox – one of the deadliest and most-weaponized diseases on Earth – […]
Protons aren’t as heavy as we thought.
New Scientist looks closely at a tiny change with some big ramifications: A fresh attempt to pin down its mass, with three times the precision […]
Australian birds beat their own drums.
New Scientist gets down with the drum circles of the male palm cockatoos – birds that make their own drumsticks to beat out sexy rhythms: […]
The Skull Cults of Göbekli Tepe
Science News brings some pretty pulpy-sounding history into the present day with the discovery that a group in the world’s oldest city was carving skulls […]
Science Art: The Edison Multipolar Dynamo, 1894
Click to embiggen A big electric machine, as pictured in The United States of America. A study of the American Commonwealth, its natural resources, people, […]
Neanderthal dentistry
PhysOrg has one more thing Neanderthals had that we have too – dental care: A discovery of multiple toothpick grooves on teeth and signs of […]