Dancing is better than repetitive exercise for keeping elderly brains fit.
PLOS ONE has an interesting look at brain plasticity – that is, your ability to learn new things, change the way you do things, and […]
Month: July 2020
Scientists have woken up 100-million-year-old microbes.
BBC is not intimidating us all with news that researchers with the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology have treated a colony of dormant […]
A brittle star’s whole body is an eye.
Scientific American looks at how these starfish relatives don’t need eyes to see: And yet now there appears to be something far stranger about the […]
Hygiene theater: All the hand sanitizer in the world is kinda beside the point.
The Atlantic looks at the problem with the way public responses to the pandemic have evolved into rituals that look “disinfecting” but really aren’t nearly […]
Science Art: A section through the cochlea in the line of its axis, 1910.
Click to embiggen An inner ear, dear, from The human body; an account of its structure and activities and the conditions of its healthy working, […]
No song yet
Words are hard. It’s everything but words. Soon, soon.
Betelgeuse, the cannibal.
“Bad Astronomer” Phil Plait, over at SyFy.com, explains a new study that demonstrates how the red giant Betelgeuse might have gotten so big – by […]
New COVID hypothesis: not bat meat, but bat mines.
Guano mining is a real thing, and a really fascinating thing. And sometimes a really dangerous thing, too. The Bioscience Resource Project revisits the case […]
Science Art: Mechanische Maschinen und Automaten 49, from Bellicorum instrumentorum liber cum …, 1420-1430
This is something I first assumed was a very early typewriter or printing press, from the Bavarian State Library’s copy of Bellicorum instrumentorum liber cum […]
Help track satellites (for astronomers worried that they’re starting to block out the stars.)
Satellite Streak Watcher is a project on the AnecData citizen science site that asks anyone with a cell phone to take a picture of the […]
There are campfires on the Sun.
Science Daily shares some of the discoveries from the first images of the Solar Orbiter mission – including the presence of “mini-flares” that astronomers have […]
Radio telescopes have spotted four very strange… things.
LiveScience has more on the entirely new, bright-edged circular objects, the so-called “odd radio circles” or ORCs that astronomers are struggling to figure out: In […]
Science Art: From Here, a number of broken gifts for the carpenters and lovers…., by Lorenz Stöer, 1567.
Click to embiggen The title here is the best I could render from the middle German “Hier Inn etliche zerbrochne Gebew, den Schreinern in eingelegter […]
LSD use is rising among older folks – and it’s probably because people are looking for a way out. Even if it’s way out.
Scientific American analyzes the rise in LSD use and finds that it’s probably an attempt to lighten up – or at least get a new […]
Turning the virus into a videogame.
Ireland’s RTÉ Brainstorm reveals how researchers are turning ordinary personal computers into a virus-killing supercomputer and recruiting gamers to solve puzzles that figure out COVID-19 […]