Science Art: The “Johnson” Bucket Excavator, from American journal of railway appliances, 1886.
Click to embiggen A triumph of engineering. It moves earth! Using “the bucket principle”! As found in The Linda Hall Library.
Month: January 2016
Science Art: Anyone Can Quantum, by IQIM Caltech
This is far funnier and more exciting than it has any right to be. Stephen Hawking playing chess over a computer with Paul Rudd. For […]
Google can beat a human at go.
The Japanese strategy game, Nature reports, is the latest battlefield on which artificial intelligence has defeated human experts: The best human players of chess, draughts […]
Awfullest science headline of the month: “The aliens are silent because they’re dead.”
Science Daily clinches it – not because of inaccuracy, but because of the sheer despair in considering that we’re not hearing anyone in our galaxy […]
Jeff Bezos launches and lands the same rocket twice in a row.
Popular Mechanics celebrates a milestone for corporate spaceflight: The rocket once again passed through the Karman Line, a distance 100 kilometers (or 62 miles) above […]
Science Art: PIA18353: Janus and Tethys by Cassini (NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute)
Click to embiggen A big moon and a little moon, orbiting Saturn. Moons like Tethys (660 miles or 1,062 kilometers across) are large enough that […]
Nervous people walk to the left.
Science Daily reveals the unbalancing news that if you’re worried, you’re more likely to veer leftward while walking: New research led by Dr Mario Weick […]
Not exactly Nibiru, but… Planet Nine?
Nature surveys the growing body of evidence of *something* very big orbiting at the fringes of the solar system: “If I read this paper out […]
Wireless brain implants that melt away.
The Guardian gives my inner paranoid schizophrenic ever more powerful wings to soar with news of a brain-monitoring implant that tracks your nerve impulses for […]
Beyond “We can all agree on cheese”: Higher pizza-cutting mathematics.
New Scientist delves into the advanced mapping of pizza slicing for *everyone’s* preferences: Most of us divide a pizza using straight cuts that all meet […]
Science Art: Rhombic Dodecahedron, Figs. 44 and 45 from “Crystalline Forms,” G.F. Richardson, 1842
Click to embiggen This is a detail of a page from Geology for Beginners, comprising a familiar explanation of geology, and its associate sciences, an […]
A really, really big black hole.
Science Daily reports that Japanese observers have just found the second-largest black hole in the Milky Way – by looking at clouds of gas: Astronomers […]
Like Google Glass, but invisible.
Wired reveals a pair of smart glasses that don’t look any different than any other pair of prescription frames – wearable computers just the way […]
Needed: a silent sea sanctuary.
Science Direct has a copy of the study recommending a soundproofed sanctuary for dolphins and other sonar-using marine life: Many marine organisms, from invertebrates to […]
Is this safe? We know how how to turn off our sense of danger now.
Science Daily reports on the discovery of the brain circuit that recognizes danger: Researchers at Columbia University’s Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute and […]