A genetically weaponized fungus is getting used against malaria.
PhysOrg has a report on a genetically modified fungus that is capable, if released into the wild, of using spider venom to eliminate the mosquitoes […]
Month: May 2019
The Search for Martian Fettuccine
Science Daily has word from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign researchers, who instruct us to look for life on Mars by searching out rock formations […]
Science Art: Heart normal parasternal long axis echocardiography view by Patrick J. Lynch
Click to embiggen This is an image of an image of the heart – or at least an image of heart imaging. An echocardiogram done […]
SONG: Bodiless
SONG: “Bodiless”. ARTIST: grant. SOURCE: Vox, 17 April 2019, “Scientists: We kept pig brains alive 10 hours after death. Bioethicists: ‘Holy shit.’,” as used in […]
Sharks are eating *songbirds*.
Science magazine demonstrates that sharks can and will eat literally anything, up to and including songbirds that live miles inland … but migrate over the […]
A computer beat doctors at diagnosing lung cancer.
The New York Times pits man against machine in a CT-scan interpretation challenge – and the machine won. An AI got fewer false positives and […]
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 […]
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 […]
SONG: Facing North
SONG: “Facing North”. ARTIST: grant. SOURCE: Science News, 18 Mar 2019, “People can sense Earth’s magnetic field, brain waves suggest,” as used in the post […]
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 […]