This is how to get hydrogen and oxygen from water – acidulated water – by using a Grove’s battery and two platinum wires. And “decomposing” the water. Try it at home!
An educational image from Chemistry, by Henry Enfield Roscoe.
SONG: “This Stupid War.” (To download: double right-click & “Save As”)
ARTIST: grant.
SOURCE: Based on “Pesticide exposure linked to brain changes: study”, AFP, via Yahoo!News, 30 Apr 2012, as used in the post “Stupid pesticide lowers your kids’ IQs.”.
ABSTRACT: This song was a response to Bill Corbett’s SongFu prompt, “Write an upbeat, danceable [...]
In 1912, aeronautics was a sport.
And the athletes had to start their engines somehow… so Bosch, now known mostly for their spark plugs, made magnetos. And summoned pilot genies to keep those flying machines in the air.
This bit of science art nouveau was found on archive.org. The same issue has a wonderful
This is what America meant for Claude Auge, who edited Le Larousse pour tous nouveau dictionnaire encyclopedique in 1909.
Eskimos and tapirs.
You can browse through your Larousse at the Open Library.
This is a flatworm. A German flatworm. It may be a distant cousin of the planarians that hypnotized Dutch artist M.C. Escher with their two-dimensional lives and their bizarre ability to learn by eating the brains of the educated.
It’s probably not thinking about that, though. Look into its eyespots. Did you see that?
Found on Wikimedia Commons.
SONG: “Inside the Box.” (To download: double right-click & “Save As”)
ARTIST: grant.
SOURCE: Based on “CEOs and the Candle Problem”, Nature, “A Mad Hemorrhage” blog, 2 Apr 2012, as used in the post “About those CEO bonuses: How financial incentives make us less creative.”.
ABSTRACT: This song was a response to Mike Phirman’s SongFu [...]
This is an image of a transit of Kepler 16. What that means is that, from where we’re sitting, it looks like the 16th planet discovered by the Kepler mission is moving (transiting) in front of the star it orbits. Or, in this case, stars – Kepler 16 has two suns.
The planet, called Kepler-16b, is [...]
Happy blood. April fool blood. Pancreas blood. Turning sweetness to pep blood. Smiling blood.
Very, very enlarged blood.
Image from Wikimedia Commons.
No, McClatchy ain’t making this up. Members of SETI and NASA are using an airship to seek traces of meteorites – and, possibly, alien life:
On Thursday, the scientists flew over the Sierra Nevada foothill region in a chartered zeppelin, hoping to spot craters, burn marks or other signs of falling space particles.
The meteorite did not arrive quietly early [...]
In 1912, aeronautics was a sport.
And the athletes had to start their engines somehow… so Bosch, now known mostly for their spark plugs, made magnetos. And summoned pilot genies to keep those flying machines in the air.
This bit of science art nouveau was found on archive.org. The same issue has a wonderful
AFP goes even farther than that. A common pesticide actually changes the structure of kids’ brains:
The study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences examined New York City pregnant mothers who were tested for exposure to chlorpyrifos, or CPF, which is widely used for pest control in farms and public spaces.
The women in the study, which [...]
PhysOrg says that porn is safer than religion… at least when it comes to online viruses:
Websites with religious or ideological themes were found to have triple the average number of “threats” that those featuring adult content, according to Symantec.
“It is interesting to note that websites hosting adult/pornographic content are not in the top five, but ranked tenth,” Symantec [...]
New Scientist does its best to make nanomaterials sexy… like the new silicon stuff that’s stealing carbon’s limelight:
Patrick Vogt of Berlin’s Technical University in Germany, and colleagues at Aix-Marseille University in France created silicene by condensing silicon vapour onto a silver plate to form a single layer of atoms. They then measured the optical, chemical and electronic properties [...]
The Freakonomics guys look at what it means to be able to make memories from scratch:
Psychologists Andrew Clark, Robert A. Nash, Gabrielle Fincham, and Giuliana Mazzoni conducted a three-stage experiment:
In Session 1 participants imitated simple actions, and in Session 2 they saw doctored video-recordings containing clips that falsely suggested they had performed additional (fake) actions. As in earlier [...]
And it’s a USB! Well, that’s what Science Daily says it’s made of, anyway. It’s formally called a “Xi_b^*” and it’s just been spotted at the Large Hadron Collider:
In the course of proton collisions in the LHC at CERN, physicists Claude Amsler, Vincenzo Chiochia and Ernest Aguiló from the University of Zurich’s Physics Institute managed to detect a baryon [...]
The formal name for this image: LHCb: Event display presented at the EPS-HEP 2011 conference showing a B0s meson decaying into a ?+ and ?- pair.
It’s what happens when a strange beauty particle called B0s, made from a beauty antiquark (b) stuck together with a strange quark (s), falls apart into two muons, one positive and one [...]
PhysOrg calls it “man’s remotest relative,” a living thing that has no branch on the tree of life. Why can’t they just call a shoggoth a shoggoth, man?:
The elusive, single-cell creature evolved about a billion years ago and did not fit in any of the known categories of living organisms — it was not an animal, plant, parasite, [...]
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