Science Art: Skylab Artist Concept, 1972
Click to embiggen A house in space, with a big carport. Spaceport. You get the idea. From NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center: This illustration Skylab […]
Science
Weird water might exist across the universe – as a supersolid.
Wired reveals a new way to look at the stuff life relies on – and gives a reason why it could be a lot more […]
Unearthing a secret chamber beneath Nero’s palace.
LiveScience reports on archaeologists excavating Emperor Nero’s “golden house” – his sprawling, palatial complex underneath hills near the Colosseum – who stumbled upon a vault […]
Geneticists discover what makes grocery-store tomatoes inferior (so now they can fix it).
Discover takes us into the geneticists’ kitchen, where they’ve isolated the gene that makes fresh tomatoes taste good – that’s missing from 93% of store-bought […]
Bat-winged dinosaur bemuses paleontologists
We thought we were pretty clear on how dinosaurs gradually evolved into birds, developing longer fingers, stronger feathers, and all the rest of that. Now, […]
Science Art: Plate XIV (Cosmarium species from Desmids of the United States….
Single-celled algae, magnified 500 times. They float in ponds and stream banks. I found them in the Biodiversity Heritage Library, in the Rev. Francis Wolle’s […]
Virgin Galactic is heading to New Mexico (at last).
The Las Cruces Sun News reports that, after years of planning, Richard Branson has finally announced that his space-tourism company is moving all operations from […]
If you played with Pokemon as a kid, your adult brain is noticeably different: You’ve created a Pokemon brain region.
The Verge reports on a study (from Nature Human Behavior) that demonstrates that collecting all those pocket-monsters creates lasting physical changes in your brain: …Researchers […]
Melting permafrost is doubling greenhouse warming from the tundra.
Nature reports on a vicious cycle that’s making things uncomfortable in the Arctic – a release of gases from melting permafrost that’s literally collapsing, freeing […]
Science Art: Rufus Porter’s “Travelling Balloon,” later renamed the “aeroport,” from Mechanics magazine, Nov. 8, 1834
This airship is a kind of ancestor of the blimp or dirigible, designed by 19th-century American artist and inventor Rufus Porter, who’s perhaps best remembered […]
There are a lot of viruses in the Arctic ice – and they can show us where carbon is sinking.
Science News has a novel way to map out potential climate change – by tracking where new viruses are showing up in the ocean: Water […]
Eye in the sky will see how carbon really moves (which should make climate science better).
Nature shares details on NASA’s new International Space Station project – a device that can see CO2 in ways that most satellites can’t: The US$110-million […]
Science Art: Perspective Cutaway View of a Rotary Hammering Sample Acquisition Section (Fig. 5) from NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS) 20150003208
Click to embiggen A way NASA plans to get core samples from Mars, the Jovian moon Europa, and beyond – a drill designed to cut […]
A study of BS-ing finds the greatest exaggerators: boys from wealthy backgrounds.
The (not generally scientific, but…) Washington Post shares an elegantly constructed social science experiment that measures a person’s likelihood to bluff their way to success […]
Your tongue can smell.
Science Daily reveals the existence of olfactory receptors – the nerves that give us a sense of smell – located on our tongues: “Our research […]