Science Art: 1. Papilio Memnon? 2. Pap. Aeneas
Click to embiggen Butterflies of South Asia and Central and South America. Pretty butterflies. Or, as James Duncan and Sir William Jardine called them, Foreign […]
Month: July 2017
Babies’ brain cells add years to mice’s lives.
Nature is absolutely not trying to cause any panic with news that injecting baby brain cells into older mice keep them younger and healthier longer: […]
Does your tunnel come after the white light?
Science Daily investigates the process of dying – or rather, Near-Death Experiences (NDEs). Although people report very similar NDEs across cultures – looking down at […]
50 years ago, Surtsey Island came into being. Now, we’re drilling to find out how.
Nature reports on scientists with big drills in Iceland, trying to find out how it was that Surtsey Island came rising up from the ocean […]
SONG: I Had A Fever
SONG: “I Had A Fever” [Download] . ARTIST: grant. SOURCE:Can Microbes Encourage Altruism?,” Scientific American, 17 Jul 2017, as used in the post “Does kindness […]
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 […]
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 – […]