The Chronicle of Higher Education is watching closely as a tenured Stanford professor leaves his secure job to teach at an online startup:

Sebastian Thrun, a professor of computer science at Stanford, revealed today that he has departed the institution to found Udacity, a start-up offering low-cost online classes.

…

Mr. Thrun told the crowd his move was motivated in [...]

I never thought that within my lifetime, we’d be planning – as PopSci reports – to send flying robots to find aliens on Saturn’s moons:

Physicist Jason Barnes has designed a robotic aircraft that could cruise the methane skies of Saturn’s moon Titan almost indefinitely, beaming data and images back to Earth and terminating with extreme prejudice any terrorist [...]

Click to embiggen

This early ’60s vision of the future (in all likelihood, right now) was painted by visual futurist Syd Mead, who worked in industrial design as well as making films like Blade Runner, Aliens and Tron look like tomorrow.

I found it on Professor Michael Stoll’s Flickr account, where he describes how he found it:

Sometimes students [...]

National Geographic ruins the illusion that maybe larks and mockingbirds might be safe from shark attacks. Nope. Songbirds are being found in tiger sharks’ stomachs:

Marcus Drymon, of Dauphin Island Sea Lab, has been studying fish off the Alabama coast since 2006. During a routine sampling in 2009, he pulled a tiger shark onto the deck of his boat [...]

Science Daily tries to figure out what the Greek gorilla or Austrian orangutan were really like:

To date scientists have assumed that great apes went extinct in Europe at least 9 million years ago because of changing climatic and environmental conditions. Under the direction of Nikolai Spassov from the National Museum of Natural Science in Sofia, Bulgaria, the molar [...]

SOPA and PIPA probably seem like good ideas at first glance, but they aren’t.

They really aren’t.

The Independent goes way back, digging up the history of the diva of the pharaohs:

It is the only tomb of a woman not related to the ancient Egyptian royal families ever found there, said Mansour Boraiq, the top government official for the antiquities ministry in the city of Luxor,
…
The singer’s name, Nehmes Bastet, means she was believed to be [...]

Discovery savors the very faint aroma of a 1,300-year-old Mayan tobacco flask – the first physical evidence that Mayans used super-strong tobacco:

None of the nicotine by-products associated with the smoking of tobacco was detected, likely ruling out the use of the vessel as an ashtray.

“The tobacco found in that container was probably not used for smoking. It was [...]

Image from Wikimedia Commons.

These symbols show steps in various chemical processes – the things you can do to change substances. Well, the things chemical engineers can do, one step leading into the next.

The symbols represent:

fan/stirrer, pneumatic line, pneumatic line vertical, measurement, simple heat exchanger
simple heat exchanger vertical, alternative heat exchanger, alternative heat exchanger, fixed-sheet heat exchanger, [...]